My brother recently asked me why all literary novels seem to be about a diverse group of people interacting with a single object/person/place in the past, and are subsequently drawn together when that same object/person/place becomes important to them again. Also, there are usually Nazis involved. I was initially going to tell him that this was an unfair assessment of the rich tapestry that is the ‘literary’ genre, until I remembered that I have personally come across at least a dozen examples of the exact kind of plot he’s talking about. Broadly speaking, then, literary novels are all about a diverse cast of characters interacting with things over several generations plus there are Nazis.

Of course, you could do this kind of thing for all genres. There will always be novels that buck the trend, but in general you can fit any particular book into a neat little genre box based on a few key tropes. I think this is probably more true for some genres or publishing categories than others, though. (This is where people will probably start throwing things at me in the comments.) Fantasy and science fiction are usually pretty rigid about genre tropes in terms of the mainstream stuff, although I think that’s probably been changing lately. Urban fantasy is often derided for being formulaic, in that a lot of UF books tend to sound identical to each other, but I’d say that’s more an example of a genre that’s become highly refined; its fans really know what they want, which means that there’s less room for experimentation. Ditto for crime novels. As for Young Adult…well, that’s where things get a bit difficult.

One of the things that first attracted me to YA was the way it seemed to allow for endless transgression of genre boundaries. When I first started following the YA industry closely (as opposed to just browsing the shelves at my local stores), I was struck by the way nobody seemed to be in any hurry to sort books into discrete boxes – within the loose confines of ‘Young Adult’ as a publishing category, there seemed to be endless room for diversity. Now I’m not so sure. It’s true that a lot of YA authors do things that you couldn’t do in other categories, but whether those things are actually worth doing is another question entirely. There’s also a certain level of rigidity creeping into YA, as anybody who spends too much time on Goodreads could tell you. (Oh look, a booklist called ‘Best YA of 2011′. Can I guess what 90% of the books on it will be about without knowing anything about them? I can? How utterly astonishing.)

I’d like to suggest that a truly genre-free world probably doesn’t exist anywhere in publishing…or at least anywhere in novel publishing. Something approaching such a utopia might just exist in the world of manga, though.

That’s the Japanese cover for the first volume of ‘Planetes’, a manga series about a group of people who collect space debris for a living. They don’t just do that at the beginning of the story, until the ‘real plot’ shows up, nor do they do it as a flimsy pretext for something more exciting; it’s actually about people who collect space debris for a living. And it’s awesome.

But that’s an outlier, right? Well, sort of…

That’s the cover for a volume of Saturn Apartments, a series about space window washers. Which is to say, people who wash windows. In space. Again, it’s awesome. I’m also reading Children of the Sea at the moment, which is kind of like what would happen if somebody got all those crappy YA mermaid books, threw them into a blender and poured in a few bottles of liquid creativity. It’s really not the kind of thing that I could imagine finding a home anywhere else.

My point here isn’t that the Japanese comics industry is absolutely chock full of weird, genre-defying flights of fancy, because it’s not; most Shonen Jump series these days are painfully derivative if you’re familiar with the magazine’s handful of endlessly-recycled clichés. Rather, I find it telling that these things exist at all. There seems to be a staggering amount of diversity in manga, with established genres for everything from ‘manga about businessmen’ to sports manga to cooking manga. (By which I mean manga where the story is focussed around cooking, not non-fiction cooking manuals.)

I don’t really know why this is the case, but it certainly makes for good reading. You can find almost any kind of story represented in manga if you look hard enough, from the most formulaic action/fantasy stuff for kids to off-the-wall, highbrow fare. A lot of this stuff feels like it probably couldn’t be done elsewhere.

This is sort of what I thought YA would be like during my early days following the industry: not that it would be a kaleidoscope of wild experimentation, but that there would be room for at least a few examples of almost anything you could think of. Sadly, that is not the case: Paranormal Romance is still stubbornly entrenched as the big genre of YA, true Science Fiction is still hard to come by and ‘Dystopian’ novels became homogonous faster than I would have thought possible even in my most cynical moments.

I guess what I’m saying is that YA feels like squandered potential. I think teens are a lot more open to stories that don’t fit comfortable into genre boundaries, yet the entire industry seems focussed around love triangles and the next big Paranormal Whatever. Where’s the YA equivalent of Planetes, with some everyday aspect of a teenager’s life realistically transported into a future setting? (And I mean genuinely ordinary, in the same way that Planetes is very literally about a working-class guy’s struggle to achieve a dream that he can never afford on his measly wages.) I know there are things like that in the ‘adult’ SF world, but I have a feeling it could really find a receptive audience in YA. I would love for YA to be known as a place for unusual genre titles – not really crazy stuff, just something a bit further from the norm.

SynthSkin. Grav Tubes. Med-Bay. Med-Anything. Vids. PortaComps.

Today I want to talk a little bit about negative characterisation, by which I mean creating a character who is defined mostly by what he or she is not. Put that way, it sounds like something every writer would go out of their way to avoid, but it’s more common than you might think.

I most recently encountered this with Julia Karr’s XVI, which features a fairly typical YA setup: Nina Oberon, our main character, is feeling increasingly distant from Sandy, her longtime best friend. They’re still fairly close when the story begins, but there are signs that that won’t last for long. Nina is terrified of turning sixteen (or ‘sex-teen’, to use the book’s occasionally-irritating slang) while Sandy can’t wait. Nina has no interest in fashion or pop culture or boys, while Sandy is interested in almost nothing else. Nina is artistic and mature for her age, Sandy is essentially a stereotypical airhead.

I’m sure you can see where this is going. Sandy is the negative half of the dichotomy, the character who the reader isn’t supposed to be entirely sympathetic towards. Nina is her opposite, thus making her sympathetic and ‘good’…right? Well, not entirely.

The problem here is that Nina is defined in large part by what she isn’t: she isn’t interested in boys, she isn’t looking forward to having sex, and she isn’t shallow. There’s obviously more to her character than that, but this fairly lazy shorthand persists throughout the book. Rather than showing us that Nina is X, we’re told in a disapproving tone that Sandy is Y – instant characterisation!

You can find this kind of mechanism at work in a distressingly large number of YA female relationships. Rather than being allowed to develop into a sympathetic character in their own right, the ‘best friend’ is set up as a cheap strawman, compared to which the protagonist will supposedly shine. It ends up cheapening both characters, since they become nothing but mirror-image cardboard cutouts.

That’s bad enough on its own, but I also take exception to the idea that somebody like Sandy is a ‘typical’ teenage girl. Surely there’s a way to get across that your main character is unique (or at least unusual) without denigrating 98% of the female population? And for that matter, what exactly is so wrong about having a character who likes shopping or fashion or who wants to have sex? I’d love to see an author take a character like that and turn the stereotype on its head. Force me, the kind of person whose ideal wardrobe would consist of five identical pairs of jeans and t-shirts, to really believe that a genuine interest in clothes can make somebody a well-rounded person. I would love to read a female character who jolts the reader out of their complacency, rather than following the story of yet another ‘different’ girl whose only unusual character trait is an unexplored penchant for art. (Which is another massive cliché, while we’re on the topic.)

In short, avoid negative characterisation. It’s inevitable that readers will compare your characters to one another and significance from their differences, but try as much as possible to define them by what they are rather than what they aren’t. It will make them more sympathetic, more compelling and above all, more believable.

As you can probably guess, as a group of five speculative fiction writers, we often end up reading the same (often highly hyped!) books–and because we’re all so damned opinionated, debate and discussion almost always ensues. Sean and I recently both read Ally Condie’s Matched. You can find our complete reviews here and here, on our respective websites. We thought we’d use this space to expand on some of our reactions.

Sean on Sex

When I was in secondary school (that’s high school for all you Americans), there was one topic of conversation that eclipsed all others for most of my classmates. You’ve probably already guessed from that opener that it was sex, so I’ll just dispense with the build-up and confirm that you’re right.

It wouldn’t be much of a stretch to say that people talked about it almost constantly. Sure, almost everybody was bullshitting as hard as they could about it (either that or they were all doing it seven times a week by the age of fifteen, which I have trouble believing), but still. I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that sex would have been of chief concern to anybody who suddenly found themselves becoming one half of a teenage romance.

Why, then, do YA protagagonists seem to be so utterly disinterested in sex? I’m not talking about contemporary here, where sex seems to be handled in a far more realistic way by most authors. No, I’m talking about the paranormal romance where both main characters make epic declarations of love to their stunningly-attractive counterparts after holding hands for the first time, or the dystopian where sex, the transgressive act in most heavily oppressive societies, is never once talked about by anybody.

Ally Condie’s Matched obviously falls into the latter category. Cassia’s society is based on the idea that the government (or the ‘Society’, in this case) can let a person live a perfect life by ensuring that they follow a certain statistically-optimal path: people eat what they’re told to eat, die when they’re told to die and love who they’re told to love. By now you probably know how the story begins: Cassia’s ideal match, her best friend Xander, is momentarily replaced on her computer by an image of the outsider Ky. She eventually comes to love them both, but in the end chooses Ky. That outcome will, I am sure, surprise absolutely nobody. I can say that with confidence because this kind of story is all about straining at the limits of a restrictive society. If Cassia chose Xander, it would mean she fell back into the role that the Society picked out for her. And really, where’s the fun in that? The problem comes when Cassia and Ky’s relationship turns out to be as safe and unobjectionable as it could possibly be: they talk, they go for long (endless) walks in the forest, they share poetry with each other. It’s only well after they’re both aware of each other’s feelings that they finally, finally kiss for the first time.

I have two major problems with this. First of all, it’s incredibly unrealistic. Yes, I’m aware that most adults would like to pretend that teenagers never even think of doing more than kissing until they become 18 (and Cassia is near enough at 17, for the record), but the real world just doesn’t work like that. Writers are constantly being told that they can’t talk down to teenage readers, but that’s what writers are doing when they construct such blatantly sugar-coated romances.

The second problem is that the lack of passion in Cassia and Ky’s relationship undermines the entire book. We’re constantly told that what they’re doing is dangerous, yet it never feels that way. If it’s handled properly, sex (or at least the implication of it) can add a level of danger and risk to a forbidden romance that’s nigh impossible to create with hand-holding and chastity. Even having Cassia think about sex (worry about it, be curious about it, decide she doesn’t want it) would have made things more interesting, yet I can’t remember her once doing that. In the end, the central relationship of the novel comes down to a great big ‘meh’ – or, if you’ll excuse the pun, a literal anti-climax.

I’m not entirely sure who to blame for all of this. It’s certainly true that there’s a strong trend for this kind of romance in YA right now, but where did that trend come from in the first place? It’s tempting to blame American/religious prudishness about sex. The great majority of paranormal and dystopian authors are American, after all, and it’s probably not too controversial at this point to say that an awful lot of these books reflect the Mormon ethics of many of their authors. I think there’s probably more to it than that, though. A lot of YA has started to become a kind of wish fulfilment, as evidenced by how often the love interests are hot, mysterious and rich. These are not ‘real’ relationships were talking about here. With some minor exceptions, the conflict between the two main characters is external rather than internal (their undying love for each other is not at stake, only the fulfilment of that love) and all complexities or ambiguities are resolved the moment those external conflicts are removed. I’m not sure if that simplicity could survive meeting such a complicated and touchy subject as sex…and if not, all the better.

Phoebe on Dystopic Elements, and the Danger of Being a Special Snowflake

I’m supposed to be writing on the dystopic elements of Matched, but, truth be told, every time I try to address this topic, my writing gets away from me. The crux of the matter is that there’s not much to say about Ally Condie’s world building. It’s a sound-enough universe—a world where people are monitored and controlled—but it’s also one we’ve seen over and over again in both YA and adult literature. Lois Lowry gave us the same euthanasia of old people; we’ve seen arranged marriages and assigned jobs before. Even the mysterious pills that are carried by members of Cassia Reyes’ society (called, appropriately, The Society) seem lifted right out of The Matrix.

Part of the reason I suspect I’m having so much trouble saying anything about Cassia’s world is because, beyond these broad, derivative brush strokes, we never get to know it, truly, as a place, and this is largely for one specific reason: Cassia. Our narrator isn’t a typical member of her society in any way. Though we’re told that she’s been traditionally a good, obedient citizen, the point from which she diverges from her people begins in the very first chapter. At her Matching Banquet, Cassia is already an exception when she’s not betrothed to a boy in a distant city (like the rest of her cohort), but to someone from her very own town.

We’re told that such a match hasn’t occurred in generations, and certainly not within the lives of Cassia’s peers. This is a common enough trope in young adult literature, I guess—that the main character is special, somehow gifted above her contemporaries. But it’s an ill fit for this kind of science fiction.

When you’re introducing a strange world—either science fictional or fantastic—there are typically two ways to approach it. A writer can either make her viewpoint character a visitor to this universe, a sort of Gulliver, so that he can learn about the strangeness of her surroundings as the audience does. Or the writer can have the viewpoint character begin fully immersed in the universe, and, through the use of word choice and striking detail, slowly teach the reader how this world is different from our own (a process sometimes called “incluing”).

Condie is supposedly taking the second route, but the execution is a bit sloppy because she insists on making Cassia so exceptional. She’s not matched to her mate the same way the other teenagers are, so we never really learn the typical (and I guess we’re meant to assume, sinister?) mating rituals of her people. Then, when she eventually learns that she may have been intended for another boy, that match is also exceptional: another unusual, unheard of pairing with a local. This makes it difficult, very difficult, to wrap one’s head around the laws of the Society, or to even understand what’s so objectionable about it.

This happens again and again in Matched. Most citizens take some science fictional version of Xanax whenever life gets too stressful, but not Cassia (a symbol of “strength” that I rolled my eyes at, as someone who has suffered from panic attacks myself!). Everyone in the Society is supposedly obedient, but her parents enact small acts of rebellion so many times that their occurrences lose their impact. Ky, Cassia’s second love match, is an “Aberration” and so not allowed to own “artifacts” (why no capital letters there, Condie?), but for some reason, he does, anyway. And then, at the novel’s climax, we find out that two of the other sinister pills carried by all citizens don’t even work on two of the primary characters.

Maybe all of this was intentional; maybe Condie was trying to show the fraying seams in her society Society. But I doubt it. In a story like this one, supposedly about an oppressively controlled society, it can really only be a flaw when you show us again and again how everyone in your story is an exception. Otherwise, where’s the danger? Certainly, it doesn’t seem like a world that poses any particular threat to our heroine, Cassia. Because, you know, she’s special.