![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
So there we were, writer Karen Miller and I, waiting in the Melbourne airport to board a plane to Sydney in the wake of AussieCon4. Our plane had arrived and the passengers from the incoming flight were disembarking. We were checking out the people, and while I consider myself an equal opportunity checker-outer, if my gaze strayed more to the male contingent of "the people" then so be it.
As one young man walked past, Karen remarked that she felt each person has a "body type" s/he finds at root most appealing*, and that that particular man was an example of hers. She wanted to know what mine was, and besides immediately thinking of actor Idris Elba (and, of course, of my beloved husband), I didn’t really have an answer that satisfied me.
In fact, being one to dwell on this sort of thing, I have been thinking about that question off and on in the two months since. First I decided it wasn’t the body type, it was the shoulders. In the end I decided it wasn’t either of those; it was "physicality."
I’m not suggesting here that body type or other physiological characteristics are like sub-genres, or that we aren’t all physically inhabiting our bodies (unless you know something I don’t.) I am suggesting that variety and diversity and differing tastes are good things.
For me, the SFF field is like the iconic video "It’s Raining Men."
Hallelujah!
Epic Fantasy, Military SF, new Gritty, Consolatory Fantasy with Unicorns, Zombies with a side of anything, Dystopia, Sparkling Vampires or Cruel Ones, Literary, Paranomal and Romantic Fantasy, Space Opera, SFF with a Mystery Crossover, Mundane SF, YA, Historical Fantasy, New and Old Weird, Cyber or Steampunk, and etc, you name it:
I am an equal opportunity ogler.
I love to read novels, and I love that people are writing stuff in ways I would never write it. I don’t need to read stuff that is exactly what I would write, or that fulfills my parameters for what I want my own work to do. I can do that already. I do it.
And I’m not much for telling other people what to do (my children can stop laughing now), by which I mean, I’m not that much into prescriptions beyond the pharmaceutical kind.
I admit the sub-genres don’t all meet my taste equally. I find more stories to my liking in some than in others. Some grate quickly. Others hit my sweet spot with ease. There are politicized issues throughout the field that make my head to explode, or that make me all warm and fuzzy with possibility and excitement. Or both, in the same sub-genre perhaps. Sometimes even in the same work.
Because I can find you an example that is doing something interesting, and one that is as cliched as balloon bread. I can find a book that hammers down the tropes of any given sub-genre in a way guaranteed to repel me, and one that hauls me in with the greatest of squee.
That’s why I don’t like drawing too many assumptions about the whole based on a few specimens or on secondhand knowledge, or even (maybe especially) based mostly on my own personal preferences. I don’t know what is going on across the entire range of any given sub-genre, even one like epic fantasy in which my feet are most firmly dug (and my apologies to Joe Abercrombie as I have not yet read one of his novels, oh, and you too, dude, you know who you are).
Furthermore, whatever my complaints about the tropes involved in any one of them, I am pretty sure I can find examples of works which examine or subvert those tropes, or which simply deal with them at face value in a competent** way. Or which just plain suck.
I do know that what didn’t work for me may work for others, and vice versa.
I do know that I value the people bringing to light and voice a greater diversity in perspective in our field, in whatever sub-genre(s) they may work.
Because here’s the thing. No matter what, someone I know and/or read is working in one of the many and wildly divergent tracks of the great umbrella of Speculative Fiction, which I define in its most inclusive sense. And there are a lot of writers out there I trust to be doing their best to bring their vision in their most authentic way to me, the reader. I don’t care what aesthetic it dresses itself in or what weapon it uses (or if it feels obliged to use weapons at all) or what tropes and landscapes it reveals.
It’s all about the physicality, people. When I read fiction that feels for me like it really inhabits the story it is telling, and in a way that catches my eye and my heart, I’m there all the way.
* I’m paraphrasing based on my memory of the conversation. Karen may remember it differently, and if she does, I hope she will correct me.
Also, I personally am speaking here at the heterosexual, cisgendered female place on that particular axis.
** competent used here in the way that means "properly or well qualified" rather than merely "adequate to the purpose."
P.S. By "physicality" I think I mean "athletic."
As one young man walked past, Karen remarked that she felt each person has a "body type" s/he finds at root most appealing*, and that that particular man was an example of hers. She wanted to know what mine was, and besides immediately thinking of actor Idris Elba (and, of course, of my beloved husband), I didn’t really have an answer that satisfied me.
In fact, being one to dwell on this sort of thing, I have been thinking about that question off and on in the two months since. First I decided it wasn’t the body type, it was the shoulders. In the end I decided it wasn’t either of those; it was "physicality."
I’m not suggesting here that body type or other physiological characteristics are like sub-genres, or that we aren’t all physically inhabiting our bodies (unless you know something I don’t.) I am suggesting that variety and diversity and differing tastes are good things.
For me, the SFF field is like the iconic video "It’s Raining Men."
Hallelujah!
Epic Fantasy, Military SF, new Gritty, Consolatory Fantasy with Unicorns, Zombies with a side of anything, Dystopia, Sparkling Vampires or Cruel Ones, Literary, Paranomal and Romantic Fantasy, Space Opera, SFF with a Mystery Crossover, Mundane SF, YA, Historical Fantasy, New and Old Weird, Cyber or Steampunk, and etc, you name it:
I am an equal opportunity ogler.
I love to read novels, and I love that people are writing stuff in ways I would never write it. I don’t need to read stuff that is exactly what I would write, or that fulfills my parameters for what I want my own work to do. I can do that already. I do it.
And I’m not much for telling other people what to do (my children can stop laughing now), by which I mean, I’m not that much into prescriptions beyond the pharmaceutical kind.
I admit the sub-genres don’t all meet my taste equally. I find more stories to my liking in some than in others. Some grate quickly. Others hit my sweet spot with ease. There are politicized issues throughout the field that make my head to explode, or that make me all warm and fuzzy with possibility and excitement. Or both, in the same sub-genre perhaps. Sometimes even in the same work.
Because I can find you an example that is doing something interesting, and one that is as cliched as balloon bread. I can find a book that hammers down the tropes of any given sub-genre in a way guaranteed to repel me, and one that hauls me in with the greatest of squee.
That’s why I don’t like drawing too many assumptions about the whole based on a few specimens or on secondhand knowledge, or even (maybe especially) based mostly on my own personal preferences. I don’t know what is going on across the entire range of any given sub-genre, even one like epic fantasy in which my feet are most firmly dug (and my apologies to Joe Abercrombie as I have not yet read one of his novels, oh, and you too, dude, you know who you are).
Furthermore, whatever my complaints about the tropes involved in any one of them, I am pretty sure I can find examples of works which examine or subvert those tropes, or which simply deal with them at face value in a competent** way. Or which just plain suck.
I do know that what didn’t work for me may work for others, and vice versa.
I do know that I value the people bringing to light and voice a greater diversity in perspective in our field, in whatever sub-genre(s) they may work.
Because here’s the thing. No matter what, someone I know and/or read is working in one of the many and wildly divergent tracks of the great umbrella of Speculative Fiction, which I define in its most inclusive sense. And there are a lot of writers out there I trust to be doing their best to bring their vision in their most authentic way to me, the reader. I don’t care what aesthetic it dresses itself in or what weapon it uses (or if it feels obliged to use weapons at all) or what tropes and landscapes it reveals.
It’s all about the physicality, people. When I read fiction that feels for me like it really inhabits the story it is telling, and in a way that catches my eye and my heart, I’m there all the way.
* I’m paraphrasing based on my memory of the conversation. Karen may remember it differently, and if she does, I hope she will correct me.
Also, I personally am speaking here at the heterosexual, cisgendered female place on that particular axis.
** competent used here in the way that means "properly or well qualified" rather than merely "adequate to the purpose."
P.S. By "physicality" I think I mean "athletic."
