Hello hello. I’ve been swallowed by a vast organism beyond my comprehension. Really, who needs Dr*co when you can watch a soviet film from 1972 where a middle-aged man wanders around an isolated space station for two hours. In leather pants. Am I mixing my references? This is ephemera, my brain makes the connections it does and now I hope you think about Kelvin in leather pants as often as I do.

I recently became mutuals with someone on Tumblr who reads a lot of similar sci-fi to me and shares my opinions on many books. They’ve made an incredible giant database of old queer sci-fi, and I am now locked in an eternal one-sided battle to find books for my TBR on Storygraph that they haven't either found or already read. I have a bad habit of becoming strangely competitive about finding obscure books, and while I know I can often win within my own genre niches, trying to find a book for my other friend who is an avid queer and historical romance reader within her genres is an unwinnable battle. I have fun though. One of these days, I'll find an Austen retelling first, you'll see.

These days, my taste in science fiction is creeping further and further into the strange and nebulously defined 'slipstream'—"a genre...that blends together science fiction, fantasy, and literary fiction, or otherwise does not remain within conventional boundaries of genre and narrative" [1]. I prefer Bruce Sterling's description—"a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the twentieth century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility."

Genre is an interesting beast, something like the half-formed offspring of art movements nurtured by the consumer market. Slipstream formed as an offshoot and response to New Wave science fiction, which arguably found its roots in post-modern sensibilities and stylistic decisions. When I recently tried to explain literary fiction as the opposite of genre fiction, I found myself trapped by the fact that I do not believe that statement.

The Tiger Flu by Larissa Lai certainly has the trappings of science fiction—plagues, vast artificial satellites, and uploaded consciousnesses—but I would also place it firmly within the literary style. Genre fiction is often looked down on by the literary community as lacking artistic merit or value (see, the entire discussion of hard vs soft sci-fi in my needlessly thorough complaint about The Martian). New Wave was a way to distance science fiction from the pulp era of early sci-fi magazines, a way for the genre to be taken more seriously. Many of my favourite authors of the 60s and 70s fall into this category—James Tiptree Jr, Ursula K Le Guin, Stanislaw Lem (yes I am just pulling from the Wikipedia page but I had a good laugh when I saw the list and realized had all these authors in one pile on my bookshelf). Genre and literary fiction are not inherently opposites and never have been. While there are definitely works which could be more easily sorted into one category or another, there will always be even more which fall somewhere into the grey area between them. I hope that anyone who has spent enough time in the genre would be familiar with this, but alas, when you get too stuck into your own niche you can become blinded by it (cough cough, me with space operas in high school).

I originally titled this document 'Solaris', though I knew from the start that what I wanted to talk about was really genre, but I suppose I should pull back to what I had meant to say. I read Solaris back in high school, kept my copy, and kept saying that I was going to reread it (spoiler, I never did. It's come with me through multiple countries and far too many apartments). All the same, it was one of those books that sat in the back of my mind, lingering, informing my taste even as I forgot key aspects of the book's loose 'plot' and themes.

Well, I finally re-read it.

Solaris is deceptively simple, three men on a space station, descriptive but not complicated or flowery prose. While Snauf and Kelvin do go off on philosophical tangents, more often than not the true tangents within the book are the chapter-long description of the imaginary field of 'Solaristics'. As someone currently in the world of academia, I have to admit I genuinely had a wonderful time laughing at the accuracy of the overly pedantic scientists, the researchers who spent their lives on a single phenomena only to give up and proclaim that the great ocean of Solaris was truly unknowable to man.

Sometimes I wonder if we artificially attach the label of 'literary' to things which are merely old. As always, the point can be raised that Dickens wrote serials and popular stories, Shakespeare’s plays were entertainment, but as those works now form the basis of our literary canon we prescribe greater value to them than they perhaps would have had at the time. I’ve rewritten the next section a couple times to try and get across what I want to say: I think that sometimes people mistake the language of a work for its literary value. On one hand, you have books that frankly aren’t very good, but are overwritten, purple, and hence seem ‘important’ or literary. On the other hand, I sometimes wonder if people actually understand why the titans of fiction and classics are valuable, or if they’re seen as complicated and dense, and therefore intellectual—which leads us back to the first point. I recently read that study that was going around on Tumblr about a group of English majors attempting to read and interpret the first chapter of Bleak House and being completely unable to, then claiming that they could easily read the rest of the book for class.

Solaris, however...there has always been some divide, in science fiction, between pulp fiction (no, not the movie) and the genre's offshoots into New Wave and slipstream, and you can certainly tell apart the stories that actually have something to say. Solaris certainly has something to say. It also is a hallmark of the science fiction genre, and in many ways matched the style at the time. All the same, our perceptions have shifted, and while Lem's writing was always more philosophical than many of his contemporaries, I still cannot help but wonder how the shift in language, style, and the style of the Kilmarten-Cox translation impacts how people view and interact with Solaris.

What I'm reading right now:

Steering The Craft, by Le Guin--a book discussing the craft of writing, focusing on structure, style, and technique. I've been rolling a d10 each night to choose one of the exercises in the book to warm up. There have been quite a few that I scoffed at before I started, only to realize that hey, she genuinely knows what she's talking about. Sometimes you need to write in a totally different perspective and tense to understand what you want to say. Sometimes you need to write only dialogue, or no dialogue at all.

An album to listen to:

Lights of Endangered species, by Matthew Good. Found it from a decade-old video by Folding Ideas about genre and how working outside of the genre that your audience expects of you can alienate people, and is still valuable for all that.

What I'm working on:

The aforementioned writing exercises. A paragraph from 'write a couple paragraphs of descriptive prose without using any adverbs or adjectives'. I suffered. This is horrendously purple, but really forced me to think about how I was writing.

The ship groaned with each adjustment to their flight plan, skeleton and shielding protesting their age. The captain himself looked as if he'd been flying since before the ship had been dreamt up in its orbital cradle. His face was a map of fissures and peaks, a seismic event each time he smiled or frowned at their responses. He'd been talking about his family, the daughter who ran the streets of Ternary like she'd been born to outstrip the hands of her parents. Jae imagined they could see her, and in their mind she grew to cover the length of the orbital with each stride, until the people reaching for her shrank to nothing.