August books: 4/6 (The Other Valley)
I think the time has come to actually outline the card story to completion.
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I finished reading a book the other day (The Other Valley by Scott Alexander Howard) and got me thinking about genre tropes again. (A million years ago, in the early days of the blog, I did a Subgenre Series, where I looked at what made a subgenre that particular subgenre–focusing on speculative fiction subgenres, of course. Feel free to go look at those.)
I did one on time travel, which is a subgenre of the science fiction genre, but looking back at that particular entry now, fifteen years on, I can see that even back then it was irking me. When I was doing the Subgenre Series I kept finding that there weren’t really hard and fast rules on what made something a particular subgenre–tweak things a bit and you could argue for a different subgenre, or you’d find that one person would shelve a book one way and another would shelve it differently. (Take Science Fiction Western and Space Western, which are two different subgenres that look near identical on first glance.) Genre in general is very fluid and enough to make an analytical person want to tear their hair out.
But while genre tends to be fluid, there are some things that are Genre Root Beer. (Oh goodness I’m going to have to find the Root Beer Analogy. Nah, I’ll just write it out again.) When I was a kid, on the rare occasions I was at a restaurant with a self-serve soda machine, I would often mix different types of soda together, which generally created a weird, sweet but not unpleasant conglomeration of flavors. But the moment you added root beer into the mix, the whole thing tasted like root beer. Even if you only put in the tiniest amount.
Time travel is a genre root beer. You put time travel in a story, and it is science fiction. Which is kind of funny if you think about it, because time travel is not (currently) scientifically possible and is theorized to never be scientifically possible (aside from maybe things like wormholes or black holes or just good ol’ time dilation and…never mind, not important). But often time travel is just a plot device, and it feels like its inclusion should be more…up to interpretation.
(Hold on, I have to check what genre something is shelved as.)
(My point stands.)
Take The Other Valley for example. The premise of the book is that the world is set up in a series of identical valleys. The valley to the west is 20 years in the past, and the valley to the east is 20 years in the future (and the valley beyond that is 40 years, etc.). Each valley is the center of their own world, and travel is strictly regulated between the valleys, with precautions taken so travelers can’t interact with the citizens of the other valleys.
No devices. Nothing the characters are doing. This is just how the world is. Where is the science fiction in that?
(Now, if we want to be very pedantic–my favorite–we can talk about how science fiction doesn’t just focus on science but also on social projections, and arguably this world could have been built on the premise of “what if you could travel to the past/future just by walking to the next town over, and how would that society look.)
The book I went to check on was Outlander, which, if you are somehow not familiar through the general cultural zeitgeist, is the story of a WWII-era nurse who goes through a stone circle in the woods and finds herself in the…1700s(?) in the Scottish Highlands. (I made it through a third of the first book and have not seen the show, but my Scottish clan ancestry is Fraser of Lovat and so it is everywhere.) From my understanding, it is mostly historical romance, but when I checked it is still listed under science fiction even though the time travel is arguably magic and should be fantasy, and also is not important aside from the initial inciting incident.
Genre Root Beer is fascinating to me. But I guess this is just one of those things we shouldn’t think too hard about.
Time travel thoughts, squiders?
