Unsettling Futures - The Nameless Subgenres of Science Fiction
Or, What We Talk About When We Talk About Genres
We're still talking about cyberpunk, huh?
There's a sense in which almost every piece of science fiction I've ever published is cyberpunk.
Patience Lake is certainly cyberpunk, with its cyborgs and self-driving cars and its mildly dystopian near future. The Remora? Definitely. Payday Weather? You could argue it. After Midnight at the ZapStop and The Acheulean Gift are more biopunk, but I'm one of the few who regularly uses that term, and it's obviously just a squishy, oozy cousin to cyberpunk, anyway.
But you could also argue that most near future SFF is cyberpunk. We live in a cyberpunk present, by the standards of the 1980s birth of the genre, right? Every future out into the next 100 years not interrupted by alien first contact, time travel, or a honking big killer asteroid is going to have cyberpunk elements. So, does the subgenre actually exist anymore?
I think about this kind of thing because, like a lot of nerds, I have that cataloguing urge. I love to pin science fiction stories like butterflies in the glass cases inside my brain and neatly label them. New Wave. Military. Post-cyberpunk. Ribofunk. Post-singularity. Feminist. Literary. Anthropological. New Weird. On and on and on. Science fiction fandom/scholarship has helped with this by creating dozens of subgenres.
And yet, there are some types of novels and stories that I see as fitting into neat categories, yet which are never or seldom discussed as belonging to a distinct, named subgenre. And since I can't stop myself, I'm going to point out a few of those. You might think some of these are bunk, and you are very likely right! But as everyone knows, we make genre distinctions so we can argue about them. So let's get cracking!
Faux Fantasy
Back in the 1960s, science fiction ruled the paperback spinner racks, and fantasy, particularly of the epic sword-fighting, dragon-slaying, spell-casting sort, barely existed.
So writers wrapped their fantasy stories in a veneer of science fiction, libraries stuck a rocket ship sticker on their spines, and the gears of publishing ground onwards.
When I wrote about the possible legal risks of fanfiction some time ago, I called this "deniable fantasy," and mentioned that Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover series was one of the early entries. But far more famous is Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series.
Pern is classic faux fantasy – technically, the whole thing takes place on an alien world colonized by humans from Earth. But since settlement, their technology and society have regressed to a pseudo-medieval state, their psychic powers stand in quite well for magic, and of course, their ancestors genetically engineered some useful local flying reptiloid critters into big rideable dragons.
People still remember Pern, but there were literally dozens if not hundreds of books like these. One of my favourites is Julian May's Saga of the Pliocene Exile, which takes place about six million years in the past and has time travelling humans encountering two groups of aliens who just happen to be really similar to the Tuatha dé Danann and their enemies, the Firvulag.
A variation is the self-aware faux fantasy, in which an astronaut or a cryogenically frozen early settler has to navigate this peculiar society, often posing as a wizard or god – and this version is still sometimes used, as with Adrian Tchaikovsky's recent (and quite good) Elder Race.
Ever since Stephen R. Donaldson and Terry Brooks spun up epic/high fantasy into a viable publishing category in the 1980s, building off the foundation of Tolkien and the (first) D&D boom, there's been no need to disguise fantasy, of course. But it's still a pretty big historical category, and an unacknowledged influence on the fantasy novels that followed.
Time Skip Epics
One of the fun things you can do in sci-fi is have a character with a normal lifespan experience a truly vast span of time, simply by either packing them away in a stasis chamber, cryofreeze, or sticking them on a starship that's going to zip around at relativistic speeds, thus dilating time and leaving your protagonist aging one year for every hundred passing for everyone else.
This is a story about the sweep and scope of history, or even of geological time, and about how the protagonist deals with future shock on a truly epic scale.
The first time I remember encountering this plot is in Robert A. Heinlein's Time for the Stars*, but it shows up in so many stories as either a key plot point that it's a bit weird we don't talk about it regularly as a sub-genre of its own. Orson Scott Card used it in both the Ender's Game series and the Worthing Saga books, Ken MacLeod's Engines of Light trilogy makes ample use of it (as well as biological immortality) and Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time wouldn't work without it. Joe Haldeman's The Forever War is usually considered military science fiction, but it's about these themes as much, if not more, than warfare and combat. I could go on listing examples for hours, but you can probably think of half a dozen off the top of your head without even trying.
Nanopunk
This is a term I've seen in use, and it even has its own Wikipedia entry, but I'm adding it here for two reasons.
First, I think it's underdiscussed in general.
Second, I think it's a dead sub-genre.
Nanopunk is really about a very specific slice of the late 1980s through the 1990s, when everyone writing science fiction had read Eric Drexler's non-fiction Engines of Creation, looked at its diagrams of potential nanoassembler machines, and said "Huh. Okay."
And then there was a furious explosion of books that were explicitly about a society transformed by nanoassemblers.
The big books at the time were Greg Bear's Blood Music (arguably the progenitor of the genre, appearing several years before Drexler's book did), Kathleen Ann Goonan's Queen City Jazz and its sequels, Bear's 1990s series starting with Queen of Angels, and Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age**. Playing a major supporting role was William Gibson with his Bridge Trilogy, and space opera quickly adopted it as an adjunct, as in Walter Jon Williams' Aristoi.
I think this genre died, like cyberpunk, because its assumptions became embedded in so much SF that they ceased to be a distinct movement. Nanotech shows up on Star Trek and in MCU movies, it's almost certainly going to play a role of some kind in any medium- to far-future story. But it's almost entirely ceased to be the transformative element in a story, largely because real-world nanotech hopes have died, or gone into abeyance.
Nanopunk was directly birthed, aesthetically at least, by cyberpunk, and led to another dying subgenre, the singularity/post-singularity story, which flared even brighter and briefer in the hands of Charles Stross, Cory Doctorow, and a handful of others.
Colony World Fiction
My personal theory is that some genres have sustaining power purely on the strength of their names. Cyberpunk, urban fantasy, space opera, infernokrusher, those are names to conjure with! This is why everyone tries to stick -punk to the end of their newly minted subgenre/manifesto.*** It makes everything sound better!
I think that's why no one has ever pointed out that there is, was, and will be, stories set on colony worlds, a thread running through SF for decades.
What's the cool way to say "colony world stories?" Col-fi? Colony fic? Ugh.
And then you get into the fact that views on colonizing and colonialism have changed quite a lot over the last few decades, but even if you're talking about colonizing barren, lifeless rocks, we don't have a neutral word. Settler fiction? That's no better!
Anyway, there are a couple of major sub-strands to these stories. The first is the actual setting up of the colony, which usually turns up either hidden sentient aliens (L. Beam Piper's Little Fuzzy, Elizabeth Moon's Remnant Population) or some kind of dire threat (thread in the backstory of the Pern books, the grendels in Niven/Pournelle/Barnes' The Legacy of Heorot).
The other strand focuses on the society of the colony in some way, either far after landing (often so far the colonists have forgotten their origins) or within a few generations. Many of Ursula K. LeGuin's best books and short stories are in this mode, including The Dispossessed. More recent examples include, again, Ken MacLeod's Engines of Light books (humans and other hominins plucked from various eras of history and plunked down on terraformed planets) and John Barnes A Million Open Doors (worlds settled by existing and artificial cultures, including one based on swashbuckling ideals lifted from French poetry and The Three Musketeers).
Anyway, colonypunk (ugh, kill me). It's a thing!
Subgenres as fuel
The reason genres exist, including mystery, thriller, and category romance, is to help readers find stories that are "more of that thing they liked." They are, or ought to be, useful signposts which publishers can affix to their books as a guide to readers.
This is why I think it is, sometimes, useful to apply a nerd's cataloguing impulse to books. When you say "anthropological SF" you might be talking about stories that are set in post-apocalyptic wastelands, near-future tales, or lost-colony stories. If I want more stories about humans dumped by their sub-light colony ship on a weird world (or if I'm trying to sell one, or flog one to an agent), I don't have a clear guideline in the form of a defined subgenre.
They also, secondarily, have a critical role to play. Can we really talk about the rise of fantasy without talking about faux fantasy? Most people ignore it in histories of the genre! What about how colony fiction and time skip epics interact with space opera? Do they rise and fall in prominence separately? Are they fully divergent? Is nanopunk going to make a comeback?
Insofar as we create new subgenres and name them, it should be useful for discovery, discussion, and most importantly, for fighting about which books belong in which category.
Dune. Is it faux fantasy? I say it is! Space witches and worm-riders and feudalism, c'mon! And, further, I say that it's been a bigger influence on modern epic fantasy than Tolkien! Call me an idiot on Twitter, while we still have Twitter!
Obligatory Self-Promotion
Nothing new to see here, folks. Currently in the limbo of "some of my short fiction has been under consideration for a loooooong time at a couple of markets, but I could still get rejected and have my hopes and dreams crushed by rejections, it's a crapshoot!" I'll let you know if anything sells.
In the meantime, remember to never, ever like, subscribe, or tell your friends about this newsletter. The last guy who subscribed dropped his gom jabbar into his cupholder, and tried to fish it out while he was doing 120 on the freeway. You could see the smoke from the pileup thirty klicks away!
Notes
*Until I glanced at the plot summary of Time for the Stars, to refresh my memory for this newsletter, I had forgotten that this book ends with the protagonist marrying his own great-grand niece, because apparently Heinlein was already starting in on his weird incest fetish as far back as 1956, in his books for kids! We talk waaaaaaay too much about "libertarian/sometimes racist Heinlein" and not nearly enough about "weirdo incest-creep Heinlein" if you ask me.
**One thing I never tire of pointing out is that, when it was published, The Diamond Age was considered a much more mature and sophisticated work than Snow Crash. And it was, but it's proved, for various reasons, to have less staying power than Snow Crash. I dunno, I do think it's flawed, but it also might still be Stephenson's best book. That or Anathem.
***Except Mundane SF, which is the dullest name anyone ever came up with, and cli-fi, which does not exactly roll off the tongue either. Fine, -punk it is, ugh.