The Vorkosigan Companion - Lillian Stewart Carl [26]
My personal definition of a genre is, "Any group of works in close conversation with each other." As readers, we tend to encounter only the polished result of that uproar, as the book alone appears in our hand and the context drops away. Classics are particularly at risk of seeming to have been hung in air, having escaped the death of their original surround. But the reading context matters, since the ground changes the figure.
I've long imagined the sort of SF critics who claim "We want to see writers stretch the boundaries of the genre!" taking one look at my work and crying, "No, but not like that!" (I suspect they really want to see SF link upward to genres of higher status, like mainstream, and not, say, sideways to mystery, or worse, downward to romance.) Within the Vorkosigan series, I've played with romance, coming-of-age, mystery, military fiction, Golden Age engineering, thriller, and satire, for starters—SF is a very malleable genre, rather like whichever blood type is the universal receiver (AB, if I remember correctly), able to accept transfusions from all sources. How many genres can I fit in one series? Well, let's see . . .
LSC: Ah yes, romance. Girl stuff. When we were kids we'd knit little sweaters for our Barbie dolls and also build spaceships for them to pilot. I don't think many little boys knitted sweaters for their G.I. Joe action figures.
LMB: Poor deprived tykes, missing out on all that small muscle development and pattern-recognition practice. . . . I have noticed, over time, the allergy of many SF readers—male and female, mark you well—to romance; not just lack of interest, an "I don't care for that" response, the way I feel about horror as a genre, but genuine, almost hysterical hostility, which I shorthand as, "Girl germs! Girl germs! Run away!" In my view, nobody gets that heated up over a mere book. They get that heated up because, on some level, their identity or status seems threatened. Why should a reading choice do that?
And then there's the parallel reaction to SF by many romance and mainstream readers. "Ick!" would probably be the politest shorthand. Whatever underlying identity thing is going on, it runs both ways. Why do these women (and men) reject (in an almost medical-organ-transplant sense) SF?
Status-based arguments about ejecting the abject would seem to fall down, here—except that these women don't see SF readers and writers as having status. They see us as geeky dweebs stuck in permanent adolescence. At a book fair once, I talked to one such woman about this perception thing—to her, it was as though SF were some sort of disease vector for social dweebishness, and if you read that stuff, you'd turn into one of them, spontaneously sprouting rubber Spock ears and Nintendo thumbs through some sort of Lamarckian devolution. This is a war with two sides. And SF doesn't actually have any manifest destiny to win it. Indeed, in many—most—cases, in an SF story, the woman's traditional agenda is either totally ignored, or clearly loses, which may be something else that's putting off all those women readers.
LSC: So why is there a literary gender/genre war? What does this systematic put-down of the romance genre really mean?
LMB: You'd think males would line up to applaud a genre that works so hard to interest women in men—after all, wouldn't the relentless celebration of heterosexual relationships seem to increase their chances of getting laid? And yet, it is not so. . . .
In my view, the key to the romance/women's fiction genre is, the woman's agenda wins. Her situation, her personal responsibilities, her life, her needs, and above all her emotions, are made central to the reader's attention. (And if there is anything in the world more thoroughly diminutized and dismissed than women's emotions, I can't think of it right now.) In the end, she gets what she wants, or needs—a committed guy who will stick around to help raise children. In short, in the course of the plot the hero, however much a rake he is initially presented,