Subgenre Special: Creepypasta

What? What’s that? This isn’t Saturday! You’re an imposter!

Nope. This is a bit of a special post for a couple reasons. One is that I’m actually posting one of these. Subgenre Saturdays are kind of on a bit of a hiatus for a lot of reasons. I really enjoyed writing them, but they are an awful lot of work on my part, and I’ve just recently signed several contracts (Seriously. Three contracts in a three day span.) and I have a lot of edits on the horizon. I was also running low on subgenres I have a lot of experience with. So I do intend to pick them back up eventually, but not within the next couple weeks, to be sure.

The other reason this is a bit special? Well, I don’t know for sure that you could really call this a subgenre. Today, I want to talk about creepypasta.

Scared? I knew you would be.

Oh, you’re not? And you couldn’t lie to me?

(A note, in good faith: some of the stuff in these links is really unnerving, including pictures that portray some (Photoshopped) body horror. You'e been warned.)

Creepypasta are a sort of internet-based urban legend. But also not quite the same. Urban legends are believed, at least by someone. Enough people that they move from mouth to mouth. Spiders in the bouffant, alligators in the sewer, that sort of thing.

With creepypasta, most people are fully aware that these are fictional accounts. Slenderman, Jeff the Killer (Warning: Terrible Writing), Smile Dog. You know, reading them, that they are totally and completely not real. But it doesn’t matter, because they’re still that kind of skin-crawling terror that’s so hard to capture.

Now, what kind of name is creepypasta? You’d be surprised how few fans actually know why these stories of fear are titled with such a silly-sounding name. It comes from the term ‘copypasta,’ which is just a block of text that gets copied and pasted from one internet source to the other over and over and over. Copy-paste to copypasta to creepypasta, for these deeply ‘creepy’ stories spread through the internet the same way.

It’s difficult to pin down exactly what makes a creepypasta a creepypasta and not just a horror story that’s been posted online. Part of it is the same as urban legends compared to other legends. They could maybe happen. Most normal legends, like most average horror stories, are so far-separated from our general, modern reality that they lack that creepiness. It’s not a hard and fast rule, but it’s fairly good starting point.

As a rule, creepypasta also leave a lot of room for experimentation and modern storytelling techniques. They don’t have to be linear narratives, or even traditional narratives at all. One of my favorites of all time is the series of creepypasta connected to Candle Cove. Seriously, those stories give me goosebumps every time, even when I know what’s coming. But the original and a number of the off-shoot stories are told in forum posts and interviews and other epistolary-style formats. A lot of them use pictures as an aid, or even audio and video. I’ve even seen some using hidden HTML code that are only available if you copy the base code of the website. Things like that help set creepypasta apart as a unique internet phenomenon.

If I were to recommend starters for you… well, I’d preface it by telling you to keep the lights on before you begin your dive into the realm of creepypasta. But aside from that, I’d say that you should go through and click the links to the creepypasta that I’ve shared in this post already. On top of those, I’d check out the Russian Sleep Experiment, Squidward’s Suicide, and Ben Drowned.

I won’t say that these are the best (Although I hold that Candle Cove is one of the top creepypasta on the internet.), but they are definitely some of the most popular creepypasta you’ll find, and they do encapsulate a good amount of what you’re liable to see when you read creepypasta, if you decide you like this genre... or whatever you’d call creepypasta, anyway.

Voss

Subgenre Saturday: Military Fantasy

I am a big ol’ subgenre slut. That’s pretty much why I do this column or series or feature or whatever you want to call it. I enjoy looking into the different subgenres of speculative fiction, especially the weird ones and the obscure ones. Which is what we have this week.

Now, military science fiction is actually pretty popular with a lot of SF readers. I’ll get into it more next week. This week is to the sister that kind of sits in the corner waiting to be noticed – military fantasy. It doesn’t happen that often, I don’t know for sure why. I do, however, have a theory (When do I not?). I think the issue comes in with the fact that it is fantasy. It seems simple on the surface, but putting in that magical element can really throw a wrench into the works for a lot of authors when it comes to military strategy and inner-workings and such. It’s just such a foreign thing to work with. Depending on how powerful the magic is that’s available, you could be looking at two sides of a conflict bringing nukes onto the battlefield. I think it’s daunting to have the threat in the war amped up so high, and it subconsciously turns people away from it.

The fact that it’s uncommon is part of what makes me want to read it. Military fantasy has to fill in some very strange gaps, and it can be very well-done. Or it can fail pretty spectacularly.


There are some pretty big names playing in the military fantasy pool, too. Jim Butcher with the Codex Alera series is possibly one of the most popular, right along with Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archives (The Way of Kings).

But to me, the most interesting is sort of a subgenre that falls underneath this subgenre, and it’s small enough that I won’t be doing a separate post on it: gunpowder fantasy. Magic and wizards and elves… and rifles and railroads and lots of warfare. It’s a genre that’s pretty much dominated entirely by two authors: Django Wexler (The Shadow Campaigns) and Brian McClellan (The Powder Mage), with a smattering of others in their for good measure (Lindsay Buroker’s Emperor’s Edge books come to mind). I put gunpowder fantasy under here because, for the most part, it deals with war, and is set in worlds that, if not Earth in the past, is fairly recognizable as equating to the 17th-19th century, which was an incredibly war-torn era to be on our big blue marble.

When it comes to other media, military fantasy tends to be either totally nonexistent or, if you’re an optimist, just skirted around. If things had gone differently in Hellboy II, we would have had military fantasy. War is a part of a lot of fantasy books and movies (and movies based on books), but it’s not the focus, which keeps it from being the focus.

If you find yourself longing for military fantasy and can’t find it, just know that you’re not alone. The struggle is real, and there are a lot of people who wish they could find something more. Alas, publishing is a business, which makes it harder to make a sale of something with a fringe audience. So if any of you know any military fantasy that you feel should absolutely be on this list that I’ve forgotten, let me know in the comments. And as always, if you want more Subgenre Saturdays, make sure to subscribe.

Voss

Subgenre Saturday: Splatterpunk

So, we’re back again. If you’ve been around Subgenre Saturdays with me, or just around this blog, you’ve probably figured out that I’ll take just about anything if you slap the word punk on the end. I know this about myself, I accept it, I’m good with it. So yeah, a lot of the subgenres here are going to be X-punk or punkpunk or whatever your preferred catch-all is.

Write along with this (I realize that was a typo. I did catch it, but it seemed too good not to leave in.) is something that isn’t quite the same as most of our other punkpunk genres. See, most of them fall under the big category of ‘retrofuturism,’ which is a fancy way of saying ‘tech/science that just doesn’t belong.’ High speed zeppelins and complex difference engines and machine guns that run on kerosene.

The key there is that they somehow subvert their given time period. Steampunk balks at Victoriana, dieselpunk at the ‘greatest generation,’ and cyberpunk at the distant world of the 80s. All punk genres are subversive, I think. That’s the binding theme, and today’s entry is no exception to that rule.

Ladies and not-ladies, I give you splatterpunk. Right around the dawn of cyberpunk, there was something else going on in the horror community. If you read horror, you’ll probably notice that it’s mostly about the psychological side of things and the suspense and tension. Which is amazing. I don’t do well with horror because of those things. However, there were several authors who, all independent of one another, decided that horror was too clean and distant. So they decided to muck it up and bring in intense gore and violence (hence the splatter) and, yes, a little bit of weird sexuality, too. It was very in line with the general ‘edgy’ vibe a lot of people were going for in the 80s, but splatterpunk was cranked all the way past eleven. While it’s something of a flash in the pan, as far as duration is concerned, it does still exist out there and, more importantly, it shook up the world of horror and brought back the gore.

Probably the most famous splatterpunk author (and director, screenwriter, artist, etc) is Clive Barker. Yeah, that Clive Barker. Candyman and Hellraiser and Books of Blood Clive Barker. They were dark and bloody in a way that wasn’t really seen at the time. This was the era of books like Misery and
Red Dragon. Clive Barker wasn’t the first splatterpunk, necessarily, but he more or less codified a lot of the things about this subgenre. He was to 80s horror what Lovecraft was to 20s horror. Both of them still have ripples flowing out into the world, influencing what people create to this very day.

Other well-known splatterpunk authors: Poppy Z. Brite, Jack Ketchum, Matt Shaw.

But it’s not just books (is anything ever just books?). If you want splatterpunk, look no further than the Saw franchise, or any of the horror movies directed by Rob Zombie. Hell, for that matter, just go watch some Clive Barker movies and really cut out the middle man. Hostel would fall into splatterpunk as well, and there’s a large movement in Japanese filmmaking involving splatterpunk as well. I can’t come close to naming them all, but Tokyo Gore Police comes to mind.

A lot of people will notice a similarity between splatterpunk and bizarro fiction… and they’d be right. I describe bizarro as ‘magical realism meats splatterpunk’ (Another good typo I just had to leave in.), and I think that about captures it. So if you’re not quite ready for the intense gore and sex and violence in splatterpunk, I would point you at any number of bizarro books. If you are ready? Have at it.

Subgenre Saturday: Science Fantasy

It’s Saturday once again, which means a new subgenre for us to look at. Last week, I went into one of my favorite underappreciated (and unfortunately underpopulated) subgenres: new weird fiction. Now, I was planning something else for this week. Something a little more strictly sci-fi, like dystopian fiction or space opera. But last week really got my juices flowing, and I got inspired by my own little bit at the end, going off into a cousin of new weird. If new weird is the kid who likes to break the rules, then science fantasy is the kid who sits in back and dresses funky, but still pulls a 4.0. Or some metaphor that makes much more sense.

Science fantasy is essentially just what it sounds like: a combination of science fiction and fantasy elements, styles, and tropes. Things like McCaffrey’s Pern books (Dragons and telepathy and supercomputers?), Colfer’s Artemis Fowl (Yeah, leprechauns and elves… but also high tech computer things and mathematics.), and even The Giver (A genetically perfect society set somewhere after a great conflict, the world turned flat and perfected, and also the inexplicable ability to transfer memory through physical contact.).

On the film front, you don’t need to look any deeper than Star Wars (George Lucas even said the movies were space fantasy.). Set in another galaxy with FTL travel and aliens and lasers, but also more classic fantasy tropes than you can count. The chosen one, the wise old mentor who dies, the questing party, the princess, the evil overlord with a mysterious connection to our hero. Plus, no matter what anyone says, the Force is magic. Magic magic magic.

Unlike some of the other subgenres I’ve looked at recently, there are plenty of works that are absolutely science fantasy, all across different media. I touched on Gunnerkrigg Court last week, which is too blatant to ignore (Seriously. Go check it out.). Most of the Final Fantasy franchise of video games falls into this subgenre, and I would posit that you’re more likely to see science fantasy in video games than almost anywhere else. You also see it in cartoons (Gargoyles, The Legend of Korra), live action TV (Power Rangers comes to mind. All of them.), and anime and manga (Yu-Gi-Oh!, Dragon Ball Z).

What are some of the big ones I missed (I’m sure I missed something blatantly obvious.)? Let me know in the comments below, and subscribe to stay caught up on Subgenre Saturdays.

Voss

Subgenre Saturday: New Weird

And now for something completely different. Well, maybe not completely, but we’re looking at a subgenre that sits in my wheelhouse, but it kind of clings to ceiling and drips stuff down on everybody else’s head. See, starting in the late 1800s and bleeding into the early 20^th century, you had a genre that’s known simply as ‘weird.’ It came before horror and fantasy and their ilk were really being categorized as such. These were the writings of people like H.P. Lovecraft and Franz Kafka. They didn’t fit into what was being written at the time. Mainstream/literary fiction, science romances, that kind of thing. They were different. Subversive. They were just plain weird.

You saw the same thing in the sixties and seventies, only this time it was new wave, not weird. Fantasy and horror were now well-established genres, and they, along with science fiction, had their own tropes, their own vibe, and their own expectations. New wave was just as subversive as weird fiction, but it had much more to subvert. And it did. Writers like Roger Zelazny and everybody’s favorite curmudgeon, Harlan Ellison (Who, to take this whole subversion thing to the max, refused to even call his work sci-fi or fantasy. He insisted on the umbrella term ‘speculative fiction.’).

As with everything in the publishing world, things come in cycles (Doubt me? Compare the popular romances of the 80s with the popular romances of today.). These subversive tendencies cycled right on back through into the movement I’m finally getting to: new weird. A somewhat inelegant title for what I consider to be an incredibly elegant subgenre of sci-fi and fantasy.

New weird is a strange beast. It’s not mocking SF/F as much as it is mocking literary fiction. For years and years, there’s been a struggle between the lit-fic community and the spec-fic community. As SF/F writers, we’re very often pushed into the ‘science fiction ghetto,’ because it can’t possibly be worthy fiction if there are jetpacks or aliens. Then, when there is something that the literary crowd likes that manages to claw out of the ghetto, they steal it and take that glory away.

New weird protested, and did it by writing brilliant fiction. Yes, it’s speculative fiction through and through, but it’s too completely genius for anyone to brush off, no matter the content. It’s full of sweeping ideas and it plays against the tropes standard in sci-fi and fantasy (or at least the tropes standard at the time it was written). Often, it blurs the line between the genres to a point where you can’t even tell which side of the line it falls on.

The one name that comes to the top of almost every new weird list, and for very good reason, is China Mieville. Essentially, it’s what he writes, and if you pick up his work, you’ll see exactly what new weird is. My favorite from him is Railsea, a story that could possibly be sci-fi, but could just as easily be fantasy, but maybe it really doesn’t matter. A world where the oceans are gone, replaced by railroad tracks lid in an ultimate war. It mixes religion with science, and you just can’t place it. Pure brilliance.

A few other perennials of the subgenre are His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman, and Mervyn Peake’s brilliantly atmospheric Gormenghast books (Titus Groan, Gormenghast, Titus Alone). New weird even has its own magazine, for fans of this type of fiction (Tales of the Talisman). There’s also the SCP Foundation, of which I’m a huge fan. A huge intersection between all crossroads of speculative fiction, and all very much bound in a well-woven format.

There aren’t a lot of TV shows and movies like this, unfortunately, or I would recommend them. It’s a little more common in anime and manga, where genre lines as we know them blur as it is. Things like Durarara. I feel like an argument could also be laid out for Gunnerkrigg Court as new weird, but it would perhaps be better-suited as a straight up science fantasy. More on that one next week.

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Voss

Subgenre Saturday: Sword and Sorcery

So last week, when I was talking low fantasy, I made lots of promises that I would go through and clarify the differences between low fantasy and sword and sorcery. Well, today is the day.

Now, the main confusion comes from the fact that, yes, sword and sorcery absolutely fits all the criteria for low fantasy. The main thing that makes sword and sorcery so different is the scope. Take everything that makes low fantasy what it is (cynicism and questionable morality and rare-to-nonexistent magic), but amp up the conflict. Like majorly. Normally, whatever your hero is up against will have magic, while he or she has nothing but a sword and determination. And the antagonists can get pretty far up there on the scale of terrifying and world destroying, including Lovecraftian horrors (Conan of Cimmeria, for example, existed right alongside HP Lovecraft’s world of elder gods.).

Sword and sorcery is also identified by the hero or heroine. Physically powerful, able to wield some kind of physical weapons, doesn’t fit in with the rest of society, or is a final remnant of their culture/kingdom/village/what-have-you. It’s not a glamorous, pretty genre. It’s about fighting and killing and glory and sex. The dirty parts of life that normally get swept under the rug.

Obviously, the most famous of all sword and sorcery works are the Conan books by Robert E. Howard. Kull the Conqueror is right up there in fame as is Red Sonja, inspired by a character in one of Howard’s stories, but taken much further than that. You also have Michael Moorcock’s Elric Saga in the mix.

When it comes to TV, there are approximately two sword and sorcery shows worth watching: Hercules and Xena. Hercules came first and Xena was a spinoff… and much better, in my opinion. Both have wandering warriors of great fame, and both have to deal with enemies far more powerful than themselves. I would personally say that Xena fits the genre better, only because she’s a much darker gray on the morality scale than Hercules (she was a warlord, after all).

With movies, I’ll bypass the Conan flicks (although you really should watch them) and go for The Scorpion King. It’s perhaps a bit heavy on the magic, compared to other works in the genre, but if you’re looking for a quick intro to sword and sorcery and can’t bring yourself to watch Conan the Barbarian/Conan the Destroyer, The Scorpion King will give you some idea of what you’re working with.

If you’re looking for something a little bit more diluted, then ignore what the reviews say and take a chance watching John Carter (based on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princes of Mars). Yes, it’s on Mars, which technically makes it scifi. However, the main character is big and muscular and has a physical strength him (the long jump). The enemy has a strange power (in this case, highly-advanced technology), and in spite of that, the main conflict is on a fairly small scale (all John Carter really wants is to get back to Earth). And obviously, he doesn’t fit in where he is, being a human and all.

So, what are your favorite sword and sorcery works? Let me know in the comments, and don’t forget to subscribe, if you want more Subgenre Saturdays.

Voss

Subgenre Saturday: Low Fantasy

So, most everyone knows what high fantasy is, I would assume. Tolkien and Dragonlance and Shannara and The Wheel of Time. Huge world that isn’t earth, lots of magic everywhere, and normally massively important consequences (though not always). I don’t even feel like I need to go into it too much. It’s pretty much what comes to most people’s minds when they hear about fantasy fiction.

It’s also not what I write. I’ve tried my hand at a traditional high fantasy once or twice (or more that I’m just not remembering), and it never turns out well. I love reading them, when they’re done well, but mine are never really done well (although I still have aspirations of one day writing my high-fantasy epic… just haven’t found the time for it between everything else). What I do write (when I’m not doing urban fantasy or sci-fi) is something I never had a name for. I described it as ‘high fantasy, but without the magic.’ Or with very little magic, or magic that just wasn’t overt. So, as I was scrolling through lists, trying to decide which subgenre to do this week, I ran across ‘low fantasy.’ I was intrigued because they had ‘urban fantasy’ as a separate entry on that list, and I’d always been told that urban and contemporary fantasy was low fantasy. So of course I clicked.

Turns out, I’ve been writing low fantasy for years, at least by that definition. It’s one of those that people can’t seem to decide on. Some people still say that urban fantasy is low fantasy. To me, that just seems redundant, so I’m sticking with this. Low fantasy is an alternate world, just like high fantasy, but you don’t have wizards running about throwing fireballs at dragons to save the Holy Chalice of House McGuffin from Larinth the Dreameater. Magic is rare in low fantasy, when it’s present at all. If there’s magic, it’s often gone missing or isn’t widely accessible. It may exist only in artifact form, or require the will of the gods, or belong to a single nearly-dead bloodline. Whatever the case, it’s not normally a viable problem-solving option in low fantasy.

Now, I’ve never read A Song of Ice and Fire (it’s on my to-read list, I promise), but I’ve talked to people who have. From what they describe, at the beginning, those books are low fantasy. Magic is uncommon and the major conflict to start with is this battle over the throne (all what I’ve heard, so I may be wrong. If so, I apologize). As magic comes more and more into play, it becomes sort of high fantasy, but it’s the most popular example I could think of.

(There’s also apparently a lot of crossover with sword and sorcery, when it comes to the great wintery world of Westeros. There’s also a lot of crossover between low fantasy and sword and sorcery. I’ll get into that particular subgenre next week.)

There are a handful of other things that set low fantasy apart from high fantasy and, at least for me, make it more enjoyable to read. It hits a lot of the things I like to see in my fiction. It’s a much smaller plot, which I prefer. Instead of saving the world, you’re trying to save your sister or your house or maybe your village.

It also hits one of the big character things I love: gray morality. In high fantasy, you often have a very cut and dry, black and white morality, including villains and heroes that get color-coded for your convenience (The evil forces all wear black armor, and the good forces are shiny and sparkly). In low fantasy, while it’s not ubiquitous (there’s very little in any genre or subgenre that would be considered ubiquitous), the characters often have gray morality. You don’t often get into anything as light as white and gray morality (a clearly good side, and a sort of ambiguous side, or evil that is sort of kind and really just needs a hug), but I’m sure it’s out there somewhere. You’re much more likely to see both sides with gray morality (neither side is necessarily all that evil, but they’re not going to bring you cookies and milk, either). Their conflict isn’t necessarily based around one side being bad and the other being good, but just around them being opposed. And then, at the dark end of our morality scale, you have black and gray morality. Basically, neither character is wonderful, but one of them is just downright evil, so a lesser evil has to be brought in to solve it (like summoning a demon to fight the Devil).

Now, as I said, none of these things have to happen to make it low fantasy. Take Scott Lynch’s Gentleman Bastard books. There’s very clearly some real magic going on, but it doesn’t factor into the plot, and it’s not something the characters can turn to in order to solve their problems. At least not reliably. They have to go with cleverness and quick-thinking and more mundane skills.

On the movie and TV side of things, you norm

ally don’t come close to low fantasy. When they go for it in a medium like that, they normally really go for it. The closest would be something like Conan the Barbarian, but that’s sword and sorcery to the core (again, next week, I promise).

Unfortunately (at least for me), low fantasy has never really taken off on its own. It can be used to describe a lot of different genres and subgenres, but very few people produce it. So, if you know any really good low fantasy that I should be reading, let me know. I’m on the lookout for these kinds of books, and now I know what to look for.

As always, subscribe if you want to keep getting Subgenre Saturdays.

Voss

Subgenre Saturday: Wuxia

Well, today we’re going for something a little bit less familiar to a lot of my readers…and possibly something I’ve talked about before, but not necessarily in depth like this. Wuxia fiction. It’s at once a very specific description and also an incredibly broad one. Wuxia translates (roughly) to ‘martial hero,’ if I can believe the internet. I don’t speak any dialect of Chinese, so take what I have to say with a side-dish of doubt, when it comes to that.

Wuxia is a very old genre, and it deals with the adventures and wanderings of martial artists. Normally, they aren’t serving anyone but their own code of honor, which is often the best sort of law. It’s normal in wuxia to see a corrupt or unjust government (or at the very least, incompetent) which forces our martial artist hero to take matters into his or her own hands. All of this is set against the jianghu, assort of alternate reality version of imperial China (Note: wuxia doesn’t technically have to take place in that setting, but it almost always does. If anyone knows of any set in the modern world, please please let me know—I think that would be so awesome to read/watch/what have you.).

So all of that is what makes it such a specific subgenre of fantasy. If you miss those essential beats, it’s going to leave the audience a bit perplexed, at best, even if they don’t know why. At worst, it’s going to make for a very upset audience member or two… or more.

What makes it so general is… well, everything else. Wuxia is a very broad-ranging genre. It was initially literature, but has so pervaded culture in China (and is taking a stronger and stronger hold in other part of the world) that it’s moved into opera and, probably most famously overseas, cinema. All those movies (or a lot of those movies, anyway) that you see full of martial arts and questionable physics? They’re part of the rich landscape that is wuxia.

Probably the most famous wuxia movie for most people in the US is Crouching Tiger, HiddenDragon. And it hits all the beats. A government that has some seriously messed up stuff, a bunch of disparate martial artists, each with a very strict code of honor, the jianghu, and of course the fighting.

But then, on the other side of the movie coin, you have Kung Fu Panda. Yes, I’m absolutely serious about this. Take a look at it. Kung Fu Panda hits all the required wuxia beats: the closest we have to a real government (the prison) lets the incredibly dangerous evil kitty cat out. At the same time, our hero, who has no master, is destined to fight the evil kitty cat. And we’ve got the jianghu, which is very obvious. I’ll admit, it’s incredibly westernized, but it’s still widely considered to be a wuxia movie, and for very good reason. It even touches on a lot of tropes that pop up in other works of wuxia (the secret technique, the counter to the unstoppable style of combat, the old man/woman you don’t want to mess with).

When it comes to books, probably the most famous of all in wuxia are Romance of the ThreeKingdoms and Journey to the West, both written hundreds of years ago. In more modern literature, you have the Dutch-written Judge Dee books (initially inspired by an eighteenth century wuxia work) and the slightly-off-from-wuxia Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox.

Now, I wouldn’t be able to go into wuxia without at least touching on the influence it’s had in a newer story-telling medium: video games. You have the Dynasty Warriors franchise (based on Romance of the Three Kingdoms). You also have one of my favorites from my gaming era, Jade Empire. Even World of Warcraft got on board the wuxia boat with Mists of Pandaria.

And there are TV shows. There are comics and graphic novels. There are anime and manga that take from wuxia. It’s one of the most pervasive subgenres, yet it’s also hardly known to those outside of China. It’s also one that I think deserves its time in the spotlight.

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Voss

Subgenre Saturday: Magical Realism

The first installment of Subgenre Saturdays was all about bizarro fiction which, as the name suggests, is bizarre. But it's bizarre in a very in-depth way. The plot, the characters, the writing style, even the formatting of the books can sometimes be very strange.

Today, we're going for a different sort of bizarre. Everything seems all right, everything's familiar, either as modern day or something historical (normally modern day). Except your neighbor drinks blood, your boss is a psychic, and there's a dragon that lives in the alley down the road. And nowhere will anyone even give the slightest suggestion that anything might be out of the ordinary. Not even the narrator.

Welcome to magical realism. People react normally to outside stimuli, such as being attacked by the dragon who lives in the alley. You're still going to be pissed that he caught your skirt on fire, but that doesn't mean you question him being there.

The most well-known example of magical realism is probably Big Fish (I've only seen the movie, so I can't say for certain if the book is magical realism as well.). Everything's just fine and normal… but a fish turns into a woman, heaven is a hidden village in the middle of the woods, and you can see death in the eye of the witch in swamp. It's all absolutely real. It's not really dismissed (except by the son, but that's central to the plot), but it's not really explained, either. It just is. That's magical realism in as much of a nutshell as possible.

My favorite example is a short story by the grandfather of magical realism: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by Jorge Luis Borges. A short story, it still took me an hour to read, and a couple hours after to roll it all out in my head. Which should give you an idea just how trippy it is. Essentially, a secret world order is trying to create a new world and make it real by writing the history and culture of it and letting it pervade the world. And eventually? It does. And it comes into being. Not just something 'so real you can almost touch it,' but something that can't be real, even though you're pretty sure at this point it is. Modern magical realism, on the other hand, is dominated by a single man, the same way Borges dominated it in his day. Bruce Taylor, Mr.Magic Realism himself. He also dabbles in bizarro fiction and other more conventional styles, but he's most known for his work in this strange little subgenre.

In the realm of TV, you have Twin Peaks (or almost anything by David Lynch) and, perhaps most familiar to a modern audience, Lost. A bunch of people getting to know each other that just happens to be set on a time-traveling island. And when you get back into film, you have Pan'sLabyrinth (here's a war, and here's some weird stuff that may or may not be magic) and Stranger than Fiction, the story of a man who also happens to be a character in a famous novelists work. Once it's established that he's actually hearing the voice of the author, nobody ever questions the strange things that happen. It becomes a morality tale about the nature of death and life and suicide.

I realize that wasn't much of anything, but really, magical realism is like a bird flying by. You can observe things about it, but capturing the bird is almost impossible. If you have a better grasp on it, I really hope you'll comment. I feel confident in what I've said, but it's a tough nut to crack, so I always welcome a new viewpoint. And make sure to subscribe up above if you want to stay up to date on everything to come.

Voss

Subgenre Saturday: Gaslamp Fantasy

So, we were talking about steampunk last week, and I mentioned gaslamp fantasy in passing, but that's all. I figured now is as good a time as any to go ahead and cover it. So here we are. Steampunk and gaslamp fantasy are intensely tied together, and could almost be considered the same genre. Lord knows that they play into each other an awful lot. But where steampunk is a divergence of Victorian era technology, gaslamp fantasy is a divergence of the basic laws of nature. Just one. There's magic of some sort. Pretty obvious, yeah, but that's the main thing. There are more subtle differences, of course. Gaslamp fantasy doesn't rely as much on the subversive 'punk' nature of the main character(s), although it can be included. You're less likely to touch on how the tech works, for that matter.

Compared to other breeds of fantasy, gaslamp tends to be a lot heavier on the setting. It creates more of an ambience than a lot of its kinfolk. Take Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, considered by many to be the prime example of gaslamp fantasy in literature (it's also a bit of a slog to get through, if you're wanting to read it. Fair warning.). There are pages of time spent just setting the scene and the history of the gaslamp fantasy world being created.

You see the same thing in His Dark Materials, which does jump in on the 'punk' part of things. A lot of time being put into setting the scene (though admittedly not as much as in Strange and Norrell). I guess you could say the same thing about contemporary (urban) fantasy, as well. The world is normally shown in a very descriptive vivid manner. In a way, gaslamp fantasy is the intersection between steampunk and contemporary fantasy.

I'd say that's the most obvious in the work that named the genre, Girl Genius. You have steampunk technology that can be used to create magic, but also unexplained things (a magic river, a strangely living castle, etc) that aren't specifically called magic. But they're magic in all but name. I'm not far in the comic, but I highly recommend it.

If you don't have time for that (it's not just Strange and Norrell: most gaslamp fantasy works tend to have some good heft to them, more than you would usually see in either steampunk or contemporary fantasy), but you're still interested, then look to Van Helsing. Much less technology-based than some gaslamp fantasy, it's very much Victorian era mixed with magic. Vampires and demons and holy power and werewolves. It straddles the line a bit, leaning heavily toward gothic horror, but it'll do for gaslamp fantasy in a pinch.

What other subgenres do you want to see? Let me know in the comments, and be sure to subscribe if you want to get the latest updates.

Voss

Subgenre Saturday: Steampunk

So last week, we talked about bizarro fiction, the new kid on the block, kind of weird. You're pretty sure he worships some kind of god he made up, but you don't ever want to call him on it just in case he snaps.

This week, we're going mainstream… or as mainstream as it really ever gets with SF/F: steampunk. Steampunk isn't just literature anymore. It's a whole movement, and it makes for some very polarized opinions. I know people who hate it and say that it's all full of fun vampires who obsess over the historical accuracy of buttons on a jacket. And I know people who do, in fact, obsess over the historical accuracy of the buttons on a jacket… they most certainly are fun vampires.

On the flipside of the steampunk coin, you have people who think that like gears and so they throw them on their outfit and think: Boom. Steampunk. In a way, they're not wrong. It might take a little more care, but if you're using brass and gears and goggles and corsets and top hats, you're probably going to hit close enough to the visual aesthetic that people will say, "Hey look, steampunk."

Steampunk literature sure didn't suffer from the popularity of the movement, either. The word steampunk, like all of the other punk genres, came about from the big bad granddaddy that, unfortunately, most people aren't as familiar with: cyberpunk (more on that another week). They do have some similarities, the most obvious being the technology. Steampunk is, of course, tech from the steam-powered Victorian era, and the works are often set in an alternate history version of the Victorian world, though by no means is that always the case. My favorite steampunk books, the Leviathan trilogy by Scott Westerfeld, focuses on the first world war. Still not exactly modern, of course, but certainly not Victorian.

One of the other defining factors is the subversion. It's where the 'punk' comes into all of the many X-punk subgenres. It's not ubiquitous—beyond the tech, nothing is ubiquitous in steampunk literature—but it's extremely common to see something or someone railing against social convention for one reason or another. Hence why the steampunk skies are full of female mechanics and air captains, in a world where it simply wouldn't have happened, and Ada Lovelace is raised onto her (deservedly) high pedestal. It's why a chimney sweep who also repairs complex machines on the side would work just fine. But moving outside of the Victorian era, subversion is still very much present. Rebels exist throughout steampunk, people working outside the rest of society (The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comes to mind, there, although that's still Victorian.). Even in my very limited steampunk offerings, subversion is everywhere. Two mad scientists bonding over conquering the world, or an automaton going against government rule to provide water for the boilers of the poor.

 

I've mentioned a couple of my favorite works already: Leviathan, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (the comics and the movie). But there are many more, and many of them are considered some of the greatest in (and about) the genre. The Difference Engine, Boneshaker, and a fair number of the offerings of Jeff and Ann Vandermeer, most notably the Steampunk Bible.

There's also a fantasy side to steampunk called gaslamp fantasy, but that's also for another week. But while we're talking about things that aren't quite steampunk, I'd like to touch on the Victorian sci-fi out there. This is personal opinion, so feel free to ign

ore it, but I think it needs saying:

Jules Verne did not write steampunk. Neither did H.G. Wells. Steampunk is retrofuturistc, meaning that it deals with the past, but with advanced science and technology. Jules Verne and H.G. Wells were writing contemporary sci-fi. I will wholeheartedly agree that their work should go among the big influences for steampunk, but they were not writing steampunk. Sorry… but not really.

Now, if I haven't horribly offended you with that last little tirade and you want more Subgenre Saturdays, make sure to subscribe to the blog, an if you have any speculative fiction subgenres you'd like to see on future Subgenre Saturdays, leave a comment below. Always happy to hear from you.

Voss

Subgenre Saturday: Bizarro Fiction

People know what they like, for the most part. It hardly needs stating, it's such a well-accepted fact. But what people don't always have are the words for what they like, the names that they can actually use to communicate it. That's not exactly a problem I can tackle, but I'm going to take a little nibble off of it with this new set of posts.

So welcome to Subgenre Saturday, a look at the myriad subgenres tucked under the speculative fiction umbrella… and maybe a handful that hang around just outside the umbrella, too. And believe me, when you start digging deep into it, there are a lot of them out there.

But today, we'll start with one very near and dear to my heart, one of my great loves, as a reader. Bizarro fiction. Sort of a new kid on the block, sort of a Frankenstein compiled from other 'cult' genres, bizarro is described by the writers and publishers involved in it as 'literature's equivalent to the cult section at the video store.' It's the B-movie of the literary world (although there are bizarro movies and other such media, as we'll see).

 

Bizarro fiction didn't officially become a thing until 2005, when houses like Eraserhead Press (easily the biggest bizarro publisher out there) adopted it to describe the books they were working with. From a literary standpoint, you could say bizarro is a bit of magical realism mixed with a bit of splatterpunk horror and stirred up with some sex and nudity. But even that's not a good definition. I think the best definition I've found was from a blog about writing bizarro. It's taking an idea that sounds absolutely worthless, then making it not suck.

Let's take a look at my favorite bizarro novel (novelette, really), just to maybe explain it a little better: Ultra Fuckers, by Carlton Mellick III is dystopian sci-fi… but not. But maybe. Here's what the 'worthless idea' part of this book would be (spoilers ahead): a sentient gated community that takes over the world. Yeah. Sure. But it ends up as such an unnerving book. A husband and wife head to a diner party in a new housing development. But they can't seem to find their way. The streets are to confusing, and it just seems so huge. Eventually, they get directions from one of the stations scattered throughout the community (they also serve fast food, and just about anything else you need). But the directions, of course, lead them nowhere. The wife leaves to find it on foot, and the husband continues to drive.

For days.

Eventually, we learn that the whole community is continually replicating, processing everything from the world, filling in holes, covering the planet in the same set of houses and streets again… and a

gain… and again. Eventually, it circles back through the whole world and starts again, reprocessing what it already made. An endless cycle that leaves the world a barren suburbia.

That. That is bizarro, and that's pretty tame, compared to a lot of the other books. Dead Bitch Army. Shatnerquake. Razor Wire Pubic Hair. Just to name a handful of them.

When it comes to movies, there are a few that definitely fall in the bizarro category. Probably the most famous is Eraserhead, which is where the press got its name. It's an excellent movie (it's pretty hard to go wrong with David Lynch and space sperm), but it's not my favorite bizarro flick. If I was going to personally recommend just one bizarro movie to someone, it would be The Saddest Music in the World. The story of a legless Canadian beer baroness (who uses glass prosthetics filled with beer) who hatches a plot during the Great Depression to find the saddest music in the world, because sad people will drink more and buy her beer. It's a good intro to the sort of off-kilter vibe that pervades bizarro works, and it's fairly humorous, so it doesn't get as heavy as some of the darkest works.

So, if you like things that are pretty out there, I'd give bizarro a try. It's one of my favorite genres. But as fair warning, I should point out that a lot of the works have some pretty adult content. Lots of blood and gore, sex and nudity, violence and language. NC-17 books, here… of course, if you're like me, that just makes you want to read them more, right?

Voss