Here's my first late week post as one of my friends reminded me I haven't been keeping up with the blog this week. To remedy this, I though I would expose on world building a little bit and my experience with it that led to the beginning of this blog. But that lead me to another topic entirely in prep for world building. That is, talking about speculative fiction, and expanding on that a little bit more, because well, it's kind of a broad topic now a days. Because even though it would seem to me that world building is fairly exclusive to speculative fiction--in any other type of fiction, you already have a world: reality-- speculative fiction has diverged along so many paths that this may not even be necessary in all cases of speculative fiction.
And hey, that's what this blog is about, right? Let's get started then.
The first thing you need to know about speculative fiction is that it divides up into three categories: fantasy, science fiction and horror. (In recent years, there has also been a call to add a fourth, supernatural, but I'll get to that towards the end.) Many people who don't write between these genres don't often see the difference, and truthfully there is a lot of overlap between the three, and subcategories that don't seem to fit into just one of the three main categories, and I think that's where people get confused. This may even be where some of the loss of appeal comes from a lot of speculative fiction. That and the willing suspension of disbelief does not get suspended far enough (but we'll get back to that later).
Time, though, does strange things to fiction. After all, have you ever heard the term "Action/Adventure," used to describe a novel or (more likely) a movie? Well, as it would happen, action and adventure are two different genres, but they often overlap because of similar themes between the two. For instance, people in a film mostly described by it's action may go on an adventure to catch the bad guy/stop the world from ending. But the reverse is also true: people on an adventure to find pirate's gold may encounter some scoundrels who are hoping to use the gold for diabolical purposes, and action ensues. In fact, much fiction (films being an especially guilty party) overlap genres, whether speculative or not.
My point of that rather random paragraph was to point out that at their sources, there were things that were pure science fiction, fantasy or horror. But as time goes on, ideas get mixed in together and things happen to the way people perceive fiction. I'm also digressing into problem that not a lot of people understand speculative fiction, because they aren't quite sure what to call it, and where the genres overlap. So, I'll try and give a description to the best of my knowledge of where the areas over lap, and how they stay true to themselves.
Let's start with a fairly easy category: horror. Horror is probably the easiest of the three to categorize because these are the stories that are intended to frighten you. And not just frighten you, but do terrible things to you every waking and sleeping moment for many years to come (all right, that was a hyperbole, I apologize, horror writers and lovers of all ages). But even in it's simplicity, horror has divulged into its own subcategories and crosses over with fantasy and science fiction.
Some of this probably comes from the roots of horror. For instance, if you want to look at horror that crosses over with fantasy, all you have to do is look back far enough to many original fairy tales. While it might be hard to believe, many earlier fairy tales were stories of rape, demons, pillaging, princesses being quite willing accessories to murder and villains dying in terrible deaths, such as, but not limited to being rolled down a hill in a barrel full of nails, being made to dance in hot, iron shoes, and being burnt to death. The originals were not kids stories, and were meant to frighten the bejezzus out of people, but most had fantastic elements to them, such as actual fairies (and in later versions, the Virgin Mary). But also in later projects such as say, Dracula, or the Wolf-Man, there are a lot of unexplained fantastic elements, such as say, where vampires and werewolves come from (aside from, you know, hell). This also links back to the the supernatural genre, but again, I'll get to that later.
If you go later into one of the most famous examples of horror writings, even today, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. While Frankenstein has some fantastic elements, it is more routed in a science fiction background. After all, it is speculative science, mostly medical science such as dissection, tissue donation and resuscitation (only of a being that had never technically lived at all), that creates the Monster and dries Dr. Frankenstein into madness. In fact, I might even consider the original novel more science fiction than horror, but that's another debate entirely. The point I'm trying to make here is that when horror began it was a lot of political fiction. Perhaps not Frankenstein, but many of the films and novels that followed after were trying to relay a message about the way man lives and treats it's fellow man--and how maddening things can get. But, since they would not do this with out people at first, they had to rely on monsters, such as the Wolf-Man, Frankenstein's monster and Dracula.
As time went on horror continued it's flirtation with fantasy and science fiction, and eventually began to create its own subcategories beyond the other two genres. These being mostly slasher fiction and realistic horror (heaven forbid, there actually be such a thing). Slasher fiction denotes the type of fiction where the reader/watcher is introduced to a fairly large cast at the beginning of the work, and watches as members of the cast are slowly picked off until only one or two are left at the end. The most popular of these seem to still have their roots in fantastic (and occasionally science fiction) elements, such as Nightmare on Elm Street or Friday the 13th and even Final Destination, where the slasher is Death, though not all slashers are like this, such as I Know What You Did Last Summer or Scream where the slashers are people. These last slasher films tend to overlap with realistic horror in which the killer is a person who seems to be normal, but obviously wants to kill people. These occur in relatively normal situations, such as road trips, or renting out apartment space.
Out of the three, I want to saw that horror has probably expanded the least, but I am not a huge fan of modern horror, and I would also say that it has crept into other genres. There should also be something said about the thriller genre, which overlaps occasionally with horror as they both can use excessive murder to frighten the audience, but thriller does not always use these techniques, and can rely on other means to create tension and adrenaline in the audience.
I'm hesitant to continue with either science fiction or fantasy, because I realize this post is getting quite long. So, I think I might split that up into three posts and maybe map out more thoroughly the differences between science fiction and fantasy, and also plan out how to go about talking about the newest (sub?) genre supernatural fiction. So, until tomorrow.
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