perfidy

I've been thinking about this for a bit, as I wrestle with my partially completed novel. In my world, genre killing is when an author (usually science fiction) writes a book that destroys a sub genre for every subsequent author. If you think of the realm of possible science fiction novels as a vast, unexplored continent - some writers are like explorers, their novels open up new territories for development. Their ideas create places where others can settle and develop. Heinlein was probably the biggest explorer in this sense. He wrote important early novels or stories that opened up new terrain for others.

But other authors don't just explore, they discover and lay waste to huge tracts of land, and no one but the insane would ever be able to live in the wasteland they leave behind. David Brin is like this, his Uplift series makes it almost impossible to think of writing stories about genetically engineered smart animals. Charles Pellegrino and George Zebroski leveled the once rich region of alien invasion novels by writing Killing Star. This novel debunks nearly every possible motivation for invasion, and then caps it off by introducing relativistic bombing. The only way that you can write about a topic in the wake of a genre killer is to devote extraordinary effort to overcoming, outthinking, and resisting the influence of your predecessor. And even if you succeed, your work will bear the stamp of the genre killer.

The interesting thing is that this process is not merely about writing, it is also largely about the ideas that are at the center of science fiction. Dune, by Frank Herbert, largely killed the interstellar empire sub genre by interweaving it with ecology, politics and religion (wrapped in superb writing) and the only survivors are barely literate pulp sf war porn novels.

This is a small version of the effect that great writers have on all who follow them. Harold Bloom, in The Western Canon talks about this in great depth. Bloom focuses on how Shakespeare, at the very center of Western Literature, put the thumb on every writer who followed him, and will do so to every writer for as long as we have an English language. Shakespeare, more than anyone, killed the Sonnet by perfecting and transcending it. After the Bard, who could even attempt to best Sonnet 130, or Sonnet 123, or whatever your favorite is?

Since I am writing a novel about war, set in the near future, I must wrestle with Tom Clancy. Happily, he isn't a genre killer, which means that I am not wasting my time. But I must be aware of him, always in the back of my mind, so that I don't end up writing a dull Clancy pastiche of a novel. Hopefully, that will make me a better writer.

You may now return to your regularly scheduled kvetching