Lincoln Michel and the fascinating tradition
The only way to win the genre war is not to fight it
Journalist
once wrote a comprehensive account of “why authors are still sniffy about sci-fi”; I myself wanna summarise two increasingly phoney lines of attack in the perennial war between literature and the-everything-else that gets put in the genus of ‘genre’.One line concerns the snobbery of literary authors towards genre, the ill- or uninformed interventions they make, and the way they shy from genre labels whenever they dabble outside of the mainstream.
John Updike, neither a snob nor uninformed, gave a thorough and thoroughly pleased notice to Ursula K Le Guin’s otherwise neglected novel The Beginning Place, and he read enough science fiction stories to make a learned survey of them, ‘The Flaming Chalice’. Yet in it he writes:
Those rhapsodies… which Proust delivered upon the then-fresh inventions of the telephone, the automobile, and the airplane point up the larger relativities and magical connections of his great novel… The modest increments of fictional “news,” of phenomena whose presentation is unprecedented, have the cumulative weight of true science—a nudging, inching fidelity to human change ultimately far more impressive and momentous than the great glittering leaps of science fiction.
Not heeding Updike, other literary authors have gone beyond true science into the fictional kind but haven’t been as duly diligent as him. Ian McEwan, doing the press rounds for his alt-history android novel Machines Like Me, told The Observer, “There could be an opening of a mental space for novelists to explore this future, not in terms of travelling at 10 times the speed of light in anti-gravity boots, but in actually looking at the human dilemmas”—as if Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? to name one of a hundred novels hadn’t looked at them before. And when Kazuo Ishiguro worried whether his readers would follow him into The Buried Giant or call it out as fantasy, Le Guin responded: “Well, yes, they probably will. Why not? It appears that the author takes the word for an insult.” This led to a kind of beer summit on genre between Ishiguro and Neil Gaiman in the pages of The New Statesman, despite which the Booker-prize-winner still gave an air of a naive pioneer when discussing his own android novel, Klara and the Sun for the Adam Buxton podcast. Elsewhere the dilettantism takes the form, or formula, of ‘Well it’s not only [insert genre]’—take Catherine Shoard’s clanging phrase from her review of Arrival in The Guardian, “Yes, it’s set among space beasties, but it is a movie absolutely about the human condition.”
The other attack line concerns genre authors and their persistent self-image as the underdogs, their truculence as a flip-side to their mainstream rivals’ snobbery. This leads to retaliatory caricaturing; why, for instance, works of literary fiction in the UK get name-called ‘Hampstead novels’, the London location being a metonym for a certain kind of dull, middle-brow literature about ordinary people. (Ironically, ‘genre’ used to mean, in the context of painting, ordinary scenes, i.e. the purview these days of most literary fiction.) Other times the truculence takes a class inflection; Alan Moore famously doesn’t like the term ‘graphic novels’ as he suspects it was invented for posher readers who don’t want to feel like they’re slumming it with comics. At the same time you often get sour-graping at the literary establishment for denying recognition or prestige to genre. China Miéville blurbed that the fact the author M. John Harrison:
is not a Nobel laureate proves the bankruptcy of the literary establishment… he is one of the very great writers alive today. And yes, he writes fantasy and sf, though of a form, scale and brilliance that it shames not only the rest of the field, but most modern fiction.
A way to squeeze out from these two sides is to underscore the artificial grounds for their fight. “Who cares if Kazuo Ishiguro is a sci-fi genre writer or not?” says Nicole Kobie for Wired. She goes on to write that “much of these designations are semantics, little more than titles for bookstore shelves.” Genres - and this includes literary fiction - are conveniences of marketing, so the theory goes. A genre can be where an author started out - see
and his debut Grimus - or where they could’ve got stuck - what if Gollancz and not Canongate had picked up Lanark? - or it’s a category that got associated with their brand early on to the point that blurring it risks the readership in the hand for the two in the bush. As Emily St. John Mandel, author of post-apocalyptic Station 11 protested:My only objection to these categories is that when you have a book like mine that doesn’t fit neatly into any category, there’s a real risk that readers who only read ‘literary fiction’ won’t pick it up because they think they couldn’t possibly like sci-fi, while sci-fi readers will pick up the book based on the sci-fi categorization, and then be disappointed because the book isn’t sci-fi enough.
(Proof that she’s sincere: only a literary fiction writer would use ‘sci-fi’.)
Novels like St. John Mandel’s, along with all the others being published nowadays that don’t “fit neatly” either, make you wonder after the ongoing soreness about snobbery. Discounting the few ignorant flubs from older writers, aren’t more and more literary writers publishing novels which could be called horror, crime, fantasy, SF (even romance! Couldn’t Sally Rooney’s novels have been categorised as such but for the grace of her literary agent?) and which, in the form of critical attention and prizes, are establishment-approved? Meanwhile can writers who’ve always defiantly worked in genre still stake a claim to underdoghood?
argues, and I paraphrase, that in terms of sales, wider media impact, and centrality to the popular culture, literary fiction is hardly the topdog any more, if it ever was. (In fact the past 20 years have witnessed the triumph of geek culture.)David Barnett for The Guardian has a good, de-escalating line:
Science fiction and fantasy is often described disparagingly as a ghetto. Instead of dragging authors like Ishiguro into this imaginary ghetto (one often of our own making), why not throw open the gates, tear down the walls, and when literary authors appropriate the tropes of genre, see it not as an insult but as a good thing, something that potentially allows us to be evangelical about the books we love to a whole new audience? That way, everybody wins.
Going further than his proposed detente between categories would be to dissolve them altogether. Isn’t the best writing sui generis anyway? In utopia won’t everything just be categorised as ‘BOOKS’? Who cares what you label a book so long as it’s good.
This always struck me as too thin a criterion. There’s a lot of ways to be good. The question is good how. One set of the ways is to be good at genre. For although genres might be labels for bookstore shelves, they’re not only that. In a film review ‘Arrival—of what, exactly?’, I wrote that:
genre is always an opportunity, not only for inventiveness of ideas but everything. Conventions of a genre - ways that a type of story has been told, and therefore is told - are like walls. They mark the shape of things, and seem to close them off, but they’re also what can be climbed to get elsewhere. You can think of art-making then as a constant coming up against walls: i.e. being confronted by a series of problems and finding answers.
Another way of saying conventions is expectations. All art is by definition an interplay of what we expect of it (hence why we can discern that a novel is a novel and not a phone book) and the unexpected—the inventive (hence what makes a particular novel good).1
Some writers have always known this, and yet have split their work into distinct modes, as if a neat split was what freed their creativity in each, like Iain (M) Banks, say. Others merged lanes throughout their careers, like J G Ballard (after all where would his Crash fit?). The dabblers, meanwhile, will always be hobbled by the ignorance that their condescension traps them with.
Le Guin, an ace at literary and science fiction, had her own chippy moments about the SF label - smarting at those who sniffed at genre but herself never wanting to be pigeonholed - but she maintained a standard that writers shouldn’t use “essential elements of a serious genre irresponsibly, superficially.” They have to be rigorous with the matter they work with, whatever that matter is, whether genre conventions or literary language or the ethical and political tangles of fiction. As she wrote in her review of Ishiguro’s scare-quotes fantasy novel The Buried Giant: “[t]he imaginary must be imagined, accurately and with scrupulous consistency.” She got annoyed as a critic, “by the unjustified presence of coffee in a story set after ecological collapse, betraying to her a lack of seriousness on the author’s part.” Any writer who wants to thrive in or out of genre won’t go amiss using her high standards as a north star.
One such literary code-switcher and genre butterfly of a writer is Lincoln Michel. He’s the author of Upright Beasts (Coffee House Press) and the co-editor of the crime and horror anthologies Tiny Crimes (Catapult) and Tiny Nightmares (Black Balloon). You can find these books and more online at lincolnmichel.com or you can follow his ever-useful Substack
.Since his fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, American Short Fiction, NOON as well as a who’s-who of SF, fantasy and horror magazines, and since he’s written himself about writing across genres, I got in touch to discuss the commercial differences and artistic blurriness between them, two horrific stories he’s written for Granta, and why thinking of genre in terms of literary traditions can be liberating.
ARTLESS: I’ve been reading your fiction in both literary and SFF/horror magazines. But a lot of your stories which have appeared in the former - say ‘The Smarthouse of Mrs O’ and ‘Dark Hair’ - are still what I think it’d be fair to classify as SFF/horror. What decides where you place a story? Is it that these Granta stories were too literary for the classic SFF magazines, or are literary mags becoming more open-minded?
Lincoln Michel: First off, thank you for reading! When I was younger, the fiction that really spoke to me were writers like Italo Calvino, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, and Shirley Jackson. Writers whose work doesn’t really fit comfortably in the modern literary / SFF binary. Is ‘The Metamorphosis’ fantasy or literary? Is We Have Always Lived in the Castle horror or literary? The answer for me was always “both.”
So when I began writing, I never thought that a story with monsters or ghosts or magic couldn’t be “literary.” And I’m really happy that in the past decade or two the walls between “literary” and “genre” have been, at least in large chunks, torn down. I think readers and writers feel increasingly free to roam whatever literary fields interest them, which is as it should be.
That said, there is still a separation between the ecosystems—publishers, awards, magazines, etc.—of “literary fiction” and SFF/horror. I don’t think there’s any difference in quality or prose between the stories I publish in genre magazines versus literary magazine, but there is maybe a difference in focus. The more a story engages (subverts/remixes/explodes/etc.) with established tropes of a genre of fiction, the more likely it is to be published in a genre magazine perhaps. But really what decides it just which editor takes it. I’m sending the same story to both sets of magazines most of the time.
If genres are becoming fuzzier, and lit-fic authors in recent years have been getting in on the SF/horror/fantasy game, what explains the hold-outs? How come a Booker-prize-winner like John Banville still writes his crime fiction under a pen name? And why do the SFF magazines still exist if now you can publish SF (or soft SF) in Granta and the Paris Review?
These are interesting questions. I do think the barriers have become blurrier but I also believe they’re durable in certain ways. My preferred metaphor for genres is that they are ongoing conversations between readers, writers, and critics that stretch back through time.
When I write a hardboiled detective story or a haunted house story or whatever it might be, I’m contributing to that conversation. I’m both listening to (that is reading) the works of the past, and hopefully adding my own unique spin on things. And a reader reading a work in a given genre is also coming to that piece with their knowledge of other works. We’re participating in an aesthetic tradition.
That is to say that I don’t think genres will go away. Nor would I want them to. But it would be nice if we stopped pretending a certain set of literature (dubbed “literary fiction”) is inherently more artistic or deeper or whatever some people think. As my examples of Kafka and Calvino hopefully show, the idea that “literary” work is just realism is completely ahistorical. We could come up with a million examples from the genre-infused works of the postmodernists back to Shakespeare writing plays with ghosts and fairies.
I love the John Banville novels I’ve read, although haven’t read his Benjamin Black works. I’m not sure why he feels the need to distinguish. But I think a lot of writers care less and less, especially in my generation and—judging by my students—younger, emerging writers.
Both ‘The Smart House of Mrs O’ and ‘Dark Hair’ are body-horrifying. Will Self once criticised literary fiction for being so un-embodied: ignorant or unconcerned with the physical processes of being human. How much was your writing in these stories a conscious push against that trend? Or were you playing with horror genre tropes in a literary setting? And is this what you meant by your Substack post about removing ‘trite physicality’ from fiction?
I do try to put the body in fiction and agree a lot of contemporary fiction is very unembodied. (My friend Brandon Taylor /
often talks about “character vapor” in modern fiction, which is a great phrase.) It’s not a horror-specific thing for me. I took a class with the great writer Diane Williams once, and while she writes mostly realist fiction I remember her telling us that the physical and characters touching is always charged. It makes scenes come a little more alive. So that’s something I try to include in my all my work, regardless of genre.The Substack post wasn’t about including brains in vats—although I wouldn’t mind more of them—but more about removing trite actions that don’t do any work on the page. The tendency of some student writers to fill the space between important lines of dialogue or whatever with pointless actions that don’t tell us anything about the character or story. Basically, just making every sentence matter.
In your essays and Substack you write a lot about craft, ‘rev engines’, and other methods a writer can use to generate prose. How aware are you in your own stories of the traces that those methods left?
Those methods are not something I think about in a very conscious way, especially during drafting. They’re pretty submerged in my process and not something I articulate until I write a craft essay. I probably use them more consciously in revision, when trying to figure out how to better animate a line, paragraph, or scene.
That ol’ canard about art, that it’s to “delight and instruct”. What is horror for then?
Hmm. I don’t think I agree art is about instruction. For me, art is about expanding us. Making us see in new and different ways. And that includes the darker parts of life.
You’ve edited (and contributed to) anthologies. What is the artistic case that can be made for anthologies over short story collections by a single author? How much do contributors influence the structure of an anthology? Or is an anthology meant to be more like a general sampler?
I think there is nothing wrong with a sample. You always know that every story in an anthology won’t suit every reader, and that’s typically true of a single-author story collection too. The anthologies that I co-edited (with Nadxieli Nieto) had fairly specific goals of exploring the limits of different genres within the flash fiction form. We had a flash horror anthology, a flash crime/noir anthology, etc. We intentionally included a wide range of authors from both the SFF and literary world, emerging and established writers, etc. In that way, they were probably even more likely to have a “love some, hate some” reaction from readers. But hopefully we also introduced readers to authors they never would have read and made them think differently about the boundaries of those genres.
Milan Kundera said that fiction should be short enough the reader can grasp the whole thing in their head at once. Does that mean short stories ought to be the ideal form for fiction writers? If money was no issue, would you only write / prefer to write short stories?
That’s an interesting comment to think about in our current era of ever-expanding franchises and universes. Who could hold the entire MCU films or A Song of Ice and Fire books in their head? But then again maybe people do hold those in their heads, as I think part of the reason short stories are harder for many readers to get into is that you are entering a new world and new set of characters each time. It’s easier to stay in the world of one long novel than to dip in and out of a couple dozen story worlds, perhaps?
I do love the short story form and certainly wish there was a larger readership for them. But I really love the infinite variety of literary forms and like trying to see if I can succeed in them. I’ve published a lot of flash fiction, poetry, etc. Even if money was no object, I think I’d want to prove to myself I could, say, publish a multi-volume epic or a little novella. And for that matter that I can write a novel in every possible genre. I’m not saying I have the skills to do all that, just that the challenge and the joy of playing in different forms motivates my imagination.
When Stephen King serialised The Green Mile everyone got excited about the return of that form. And I know more recently
and have been serialising novels. Serialised fiction used to appear in print magazines however; is it harder for serialised fiction to work online? Are there ways short fiction can work with and not against the grain of the internet?That’s interesting to think about. My immediate thought is some serialized—sorry to default to American spellings here—fiction has been successful, but not online. Rather in book series that are published quickly. I’ve seen publishers start publishing a whole series in a single year. The most successful of these was probably Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy.
But traditional serialization in magazines seems hard these days. Few people read magazines as consistently as they did, and with online… well, I’m like you. It’s hard for me to focus on a short story online when my fingers want to keep clicking away and cycling through my various tabs…
As a writer of genre short fiction, do you think there might be new genres out there? Does it take a societal or historical change to make new ones? Is climate fiction a new genre? Are your two Granta stories climate fiction? (Cli-fi? surely someone’s coined that?)
Climate fiction is definitely becoming a genre, or at least series of subgenres. There’s an emerging body of climate horror fiction certainly. I’d be happy to be included there.
I absolutely think that genres grow, shrink, change, and yes can die. (I know I said genres in general won’t go away, but individual genres can.) To refer to my genre as conversation metaphor, conversations can fade out or grow into something else or merge with other conversations. Southern Gothic fiction used to be a full-fledged genre in America, but these days it’s more of a style that’s been largely absorbed by the category “literary fiction.”
Similarly Gothic fiction itself is now a kind of style you might find in horror fiction, rather than a full-fledged genre. I’m not sure if it takes societal and historical change, but genres are definitely societal and historical. The genres that exist in the Anglo world aren’t the same as are used in other literary traditions. E.g., in French literature “the fantastique” predates Anglo “fantasy” as a genre I believe and is defined very differently. It’s closer to what we later called “weird fiction.” And the major genres of, say, the Victorian era are different than the major genres of today. Hell, the genres of television and film also don’t’ match up with the genres of literature. There’s no “medical drama” section at the bookstore.
So genres are always contextual, societal, and historical. But I think if we do away with snobbery, that makes them beautiful and fascinating traditions to explore.
Compare with writing verse, and how meter and rhyme schemes are conventions that brace rather than constrict.