Writing in a Genre

I've just finished John Robert Marlow's novel Nano, which was published almost two years ago. It kept me reading, and when I had to put it down I looked forward to picking it up again. But it's a stupid book.

Some of the novel's flaws are forgivable. Science fiction in general is a hybrid of romance and Menippean satire; in romance, people are larger than life, and exciting things happen to them. In Menippean satire, the object of the satire is the intellectual/scholar, and the plot can stop dead while the scholar rants on about his subject.

That certainly happens here; one minute the hero is fighting for his life and the next he's debating the ethics of nanotechnology for page after page with the damsel in distress he's rescued.

The problem is that the exciting things are corny. Marlow even has a body fall out of a closet, for heaven's sake. And the scholarly digressions aren't that scholarly. They feel like filler, a way of justifying tons of research.

This is one of the big issues in writing in a well-defined genre like SF or heroic fantasy or detective stories. We've all read earlier examples, and we accept the conventions of the genre. Then, when the author rings some changes on those conventions, we sit up and pay attention.

Within SF itself we have dozens of sub-genres, and nanotech is far from the latest of them. I used nanotech in Gryphon, written in the late 1980s, and plenty of others have helped to define the genre since then.

Anyone writing in such a genre must walk a fine line between plagiarism and parody. If you love your genre's conventions too much, you just imitate your favourite writers and wonder why you can't get published. If you see those conventions as preposterous, you can laugh at them, but then you spoil the fun for your readers (as Cervantes spoiled the fun for all the folks who loved reading chivalric romances).

The trick is to recognize why these particular conventions appeal to readers, and then to push the conventions to reveal something implicit in them that other writers haven't understood.

The theme of all SF and fantasy is power, and the nanotech genre is just another way to explore the theme. Bilbo has the One Ring, and Marlow's people have nanites that do whatever they're programmed to do. Power always promises a shift to a better order of existence, though it often breaks that promise. In the case of nanotech, it's been understood since Drexler's first book that human society would be transformed by such a technology. It's also been understand that the transformation could be disastrous.

In Gryphon I assumed that the early adopters of nanotech (obtained by interstellar communication with more advanced civilizations) would grossly abuse it, and practically wipe out the human race. My story is set in the aftermath, when maybe three million people are left in the whole solar system, and almost all of them live by themselves. They get into other people's presence mostly for sex or combat, and then go back to comfortable reclusiveness. The story deals with how such a ragingly individualist, libertarian society could learn to cooperate against an alien threat.

Marlow's story is well this side of such a situation, and has to do with staying alive long enough to achieve the Singularity (a kind of high-tech Rapture or withering-away of the state, take your pick). His solution is the imposition of a totalitarian Utopia by the first two people to reach the Singularity. They don't trust governments (or anyone else) with all that power, so they keep it for themselves.

Of course I've been thinking about similar issues in Henderson's Tenants. It's a nanotech novel too, so it's in the genre and shares the conventions. Like Marlow, I've got a Wikkid Gummint out to suppress (or obtain) a Threatening New Technology. I've got a clever nanotechnologist who's lost his career and who's about to lose his life.

But I'm exploring all kinds of implications that Marlow doesn't go near. I'm trying to show a world that's scared of nanotech even though it uses nanotech in scores of ways...but it hasn't led to either a Singularity or to grey goo. Computers were going to give us huge problems filling up all our leisure time, remember? Instead they're working us into early graves. I'm betting nanotech will offer the same kind of letdown.

And why would people be untrustworthy if nanotech really could grant them enormous power? Because (says I) they are slaves to their own impulses and drives, subconscious forces evolved over millions of years. Those drives have evolved because, in the short term of a life of twenty or thirty years, they sometimes confer survival value. Like idiot children with loaded pistols, we'd bang away at one another without realizing what we were risking.

So Mike Henderson is going to have to wrestle his inner demons for control, and he'll realize that they—not his nanobots—are the real enemy. Even the Wikkid Gummint guys don't understand what drives them to be so Wikkid. They think they're doing awful things for wonderful reasons: national security, the superiority of democratic nations over tyrannies, and so on.

One of the problems in Marlow's book is that it's clearly written to be a movie full of big dumb special effects, so right there it runs into genre problems: as a genre, film SF is simply different from print SF. They have different priorities and appeal to different parts of our minds. That's why War of the Worlds is so good as a novel and so awful as a movie. Michael Crichton's laughable Prey is another example of a novel designed to be something else.

And here is a fatal problem: Print SF tries to get us to think about scientific ideas that the author has dramatized for us so that we can grasp them better. An idea like nanotech is an important one, and deserves careful thought. If it's going to be used simply as a pretext for blowing up San Francisco, the message is that watching stuff blow up is far more important and interesting than understanding nanotech. All the mini-lectures on nanotech are just padding, and of course they'd end up cut from the screenplay.

(Okay, I confess: In Gryphon I blew up Los Angeles. But Gryphon is a parody of a space opera, an attack on space opera conventions.)

Will my novel be better than Marlow's? Gee, I hope so. But I'm glad he wrote Nano, because every book within a genre helps to define and modify that genre's conventions. The books that follow it are part of a conversation that goes on for years, often centuries. Whether we agree with what others have said in our genre, or reject them, all we really ask of them is that they make us think. And Marlow has done that for me.

Comments

[karina]

Dont be ragging on PREY. I reaaly enjoyed that novel, k?