Is it Future History?: I need a genre

 Editing The Ancestor’s Tale, the fourth in the series is a little late, you may think, for me still to be wondering what genre The Sefuty Chronicles should be slotted in. I myself have no care - I dislike labels with a vengeance but I do realise that for many folk this categorisation is essential. So my search has been continuing off and on. I lost last year for any kind of sensible work therefore picked up the research this year and maybe just maybe I have discovered where Ellen and her companions belong. At last.

Of course I maybe wrong.

I had wandered through dystopia and apocalyptic and reluctantly decided they were not quite right, had been rubbished when suggesting romance or historical. There are further sub division I have discovered, including soft sci-fi. This interested me as 'anthropological' and' social' sci fi was included, the feminist side of it I discarded immediately as in my world women are still having babies(they do fight sometimes) and men are still fighting( they are nice people as well) - The Chronicles are a story based on reality. But society, anthropology? yes, now I was creeping closer. The Chronicles are very much about how societies manage their affairs, cope with the ever present dangers of life. This didn’t though completely explain the books. I kept these new genres to one side for the moment and continued wandering through layers and layers of Wikapedia- I’m afraid none of my books seem to bother with these genre labels - Wikapedia has a great deal to say on the matter of genres , many a happy hour can be spent exploring.

Where has this exploration led me? I went back to the ‘topians. The list of authors published under this genre included many I had enjoyed in the past. Had I been influenced by such as Huxley, Orwell, Wyndham, Ballard and Atwood? My world is certainly difficult to survive in, food security is poor, physical security the same. I always call The Sefuty Chronicles hopeful dystopia - there is no sub division for that!

However a newish sub division has crept in, ‘neutropia’ = a world which is neither terrible nor perfect , such as Brave New World. Well not a bad book to stand alongside - I kid, I kid:) Another sub division is ‘eco-dystopia’, a dystopian world caused by some ecological disaster rather than political, war etc.

I could live with either, but I am still thinking that ‘topia isn’t really the full picture, what of the history? the romance?

Further investigation just this month has uncovered a few more possibilities. There is a sub genre called Future History - now there a concept to juggle with. Wikepedia is at pains to point out that if one writes in this genre there is a possibility the story will end up as Alternative History if a different reality overtakes. I personally (though I don’t expect to be alive in 2100s) wouldn’t be at all displeased to find my doomsday scenario turned out to be Alternative History, after all I would be alongside George Orwell. 

I rather fancy Future History for my Chronicles, after all they are not only set in 2160s looking back at the events of 2111, they are also set in the Archives; the relevant source materials are letters, interviews and diary extracts, and the events being examined are being written up as History publications. Yay, Yay, - knew it was historical:)

So is it a Future History, eco-dystopian with a love story or two weaving their way through? I suppose I could drop the romance description and stick to calling it a love story, after all it is love in some form or other which drives the tales. Love between man and woman but also love for children, country, between soldiers, between friends.I cannot drop the love

Is eco-dystopian a good description, well eco-neutropia would be better, as I have said there is a great deal of hope and optimism mixed with the dreadful life. I’m not sure any of the other  ‘topians really capture it.

Then I found an even shorter sub divion Cl-fi(c) = climate change related fiction:)I like this a lot, not only does it draws away from science fiction and dystopia's, the label does not pin a tale down to being Apocalyptic - climate change might not be sudden, not always bad for everyone. Cl-fi may be a recent name but of course it is not new fiction, Ballard was writing about climate change before the issue had a name(early 60s). Further reading of cli-fi and future history and neutropia is needed and I will report in the future. However for the moment I am happy with these labels.

How about SF?:I need a genre!

Now I had decided I had written a romance and, as far as I’m concerned looking back fifty years and using archives equals history, I had written an historical story.  I now had to address the main strand and have been forced back to Science Fiction – why am I so reluctant? 

I enjoy SF myself, have done since quite young although I have not read much lately.  My heyday was back in the 50s and 60s when I devoured the likes of H G Wells, Isaac Asimov, Robert A Heinlein and EE (Doc) Smith, Arthur C Clarke.  This was the age of space travel in books, hopes and dreams and by the 60s we were up there.  I think in my mind this form of storytelling remains fixed as true SF; no space travel, alien invasions or intergalactic wars, no SF.

In the 70s when I began my travels, in the days before e-readers, I took the classics on my journeys.  War and Peace in the Hindu Kush, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom

overlooking Sydney Harbour, that kind of thing.  Although large they lasted me longer and so my suitcase actually had room for a change of clothes! I did once, when stranded bookless in the outback for six weeks, read someone’s collection 30 of lurid covered science fantasy back to back, and as far as memory serves me – enjoyed them.

I discover now that the genre divides continually into more and more subgenres, and the subdivision continues as fast as do bacteria in a petri dish.  The form I read so excitedly in my far distant youth is now labelled hard SF.  This is not the Sefuty Chronicles.  I went to Wikipedia, a site I have always been suspicious of but I hadn’t found my trusty Oxford dictionary up to these subdivisions. 

I was still vaguely avoiding SF as Ellen’s Tale had very little of what I would call fictional science or even speculative science; although friends point out with much eye rolling that men who are manipulated genetically does kind of suggest science!  Any science in the Chronicles is only a continuation of what is possible now and indeed has been tried in some instances.  I never counted it as fiction somehow.  Genetic manipulation has been around for decades now.

I found a new genre to me, Dystopia, with The Handmaid’s Tale mentioned.  I had read this excellent book years ago and somehow never associated Margaret Attwood with SF.  An anthropological story of the future but a very realistic one, I could see how society could evolve thus; by this time I was well into my anthropological studies.  Well, well, Attwood was writing SF?  This was more comfortable, who else and what was this Dystopia? 

It was Gulliver’s Travels, Brave New World, Animal Farm and 1984.  All of these I had read when they came onto the bookshelves but if I had labelled them at all it would have been as political satire and rages against society.  I investigated further now that I had a ‘name’ for what I was looking for.  Maybe, maybe I was writing dystopian tales.  My dystopian world though was tame in comparison to those before mentioned, it had no bite; my government might rule as a dictatorship but it genuinely has a ‘heart of gold’.  As I say, hardly political satire.

Onward and outwards.  In these explorations into Dystopia I came across another subdivision, Apocalyptic.  I was hopeful again, after all hadn’t I single-handedly destroyed 8 billion plus of the world’s population in Ellen’s Tale; this may well be the answer.  

I did have a moment’s hesitation, however, when I found that Neville Shute was supposed to have written a novel in this genre – Neville Shute?  That wonderful author of quiet splendid people in the 40s and 50s, those books that couldn’t get any quieter if one muffled them in a sand dune.  I had read them all avidly when I was younger.  On the Beach I remembered was about nuclear war, it was a idea which exercised us all a great deal post WW2 .  We had witnessed for the first time the horror that man could unleash on man at first hand.  On the Beach  had been chilling and filled with those splendid people behaving with what is best of human nature.  I had read it as a story.  I began to see my problem.  I didn’t really think in genres, a book was enjoyable for its story.  I browse bookshelves like a grazer and never stopped to question what fodder I was eating up.  My mind barely has a cubby hole for genre let alone all these subdivisions.

Margaret Attwood had more than dipped her toe into this subdivision with her Onxy and Crane and The Flood.  I discovered Maggie Gee along the way , then that the old man of fiction,J G Ballard, was known as a dystopian writer, as I say I do not seem to think in genre.  Surprises abounding I began to settle into this search.

Actually these were all post apocalyptic which would have summed up the my chronicles well, after all the Sefuty Chronicles  are set 50 and 100 years after the great climate wars that had destroyed the greater part of the population.  I had moments of doubt as I realised that many of these Post Apocalyptic novels had such as vampires zombies and werewolves in them.  Not the Sefuty Chronicles cup of tea at all so now I had to put a rider into this genre as well;

Post Apocalyptic but without vampires.  Dystopian but with a beneign dictatorship and a hopeful ending.  An historical romance but set in the future!

More reading needed into these, it seems I was following some kind of a pattern and then there was a mysterious subgenre I have found - soft SF.  Ah well, back to the research.  Somewhere, somehow I will find a place to nestle!