Diane and I went to see Super 8 this past Friday, as one of our mostly-weekly date nights. She was really excited about it — I was less so, but only because I've been cruelly disappointed by movies too many times in the past decade.
(Capsule review: The Goonies Meet Cloverfield. Four out of five stars.)
My only real beef with the picture was that it was too faithful a pastiche of early 1980s Spielberg films. I always knew what was going to happen. The plot seemed almost ritualized. But when I mentioned this, Diane pointed out that the same thing is true of other movies I've enjoyed. Iron Man, for example, unfolds according to the standard comic book origin-story plot: hero is victimized, hero gains superpowers (or builds a supersuit, or trains obsessively for twenty years), hero metes out justice to minor-league evildoers, hero finally confronts those who victimized him at the start. Could just as easily be Spider-Man, Batman, The Punisher, or whoever.
And that, in turn, started me thinking. Genre fiction seems to be very prone to this kind of standard ritualized plot. Romance novels — woman meets attractive, aloof man (or vampire), there are complications, at last they get together. Mysteries — crime is committed, detective unravels red herrings and deceptions, criminal is caught. Westerns — a stranger comes to town, stands up for the weak, confronts the bad guy, shootout, rides into the sunset. Fantasy epic — Dark Lord threatens kingdom, orphan hero goes on quest, magic weapon secured, Dark Lord defeated. One could go on.
There is an exception: science fiction, at least since the days of Edmond Hamilton, has not had much of a default plot. Foundation is not The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress is not Ringworld is not The Fountains of Paradise is not The Player of Games. When parodists try to come up with a stereotypical SF novel they usually wind up riffing on 1950s giant bug movies instead, because those did have a ritualized plot structure. When it comes to plot, science fiction stories are all over the map.
Science fiction has also dwindled as a publishing category.
Notably, the most commercially viable branch of SF is military science fiction, and that actually does have a couple of standard plotlines. (Anabasis or Thermopylae, mostly.)
What does this say about readers? They claim to want novelty and variety, but with their dollars they vote for familiarity and repetition. Long series and template plots.
Should the writer cater to that? Or try to challenge the readers with something new? The brave, gutsy, "correct" answer is the second one — but you can't challenge anyone if your sales are too low to get any more books published. Readers buy what they want to read, not what someone thinks they should read.
I don't have an easy answer for this. Thoughts, anyone?
The Cambias Digression 
3 responses to “Genre and Plot”
“But that’s not what audiences want. Clever things make people feel stupid, and unexpected things make them feel scared. People don’t want anything original, they want to see the same thing they’ve seen a thousand times before.”
-Futurama
But the thing is that you people do get tired of the same old thing, and they do want something new. It just has to have some point of contact with the old to make it accessible. That’s a tough line to straddle.
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RE: readers claim to want novelty and variety.
From THE TRUTH by Terry Prachett. The Patrician has words of advice for the newspaperman:
‘Be careful. People like to be told what they already know. Remember that. They get uncomfortable when you tell them new things. New things … well, new things aren’t what they expect. They like to know that, say, a dog will bite a man. That is what dogs do. They don’t want to know that a man bites a dog, because the world is not supposed to happen like that. In short, what people think they want is news, but what they really crave is olds’
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Military SF? When I mentioned that at work, people didn’t seem to know what it was.
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