The power balance in my marriage is despairingly unequal—my wife is unquestionably in charge. I confess this to explain how it is that I watched every single episode of The Big Bang Theory; my wife has a weakness for Chuck Lorre sitcoms, and I have a weakness for making her happy. Incidentally, The Big Bang Theory is also prominently featured in my moments of Existential Horror when I realize that I, too, will someday die; it’s incredible to realize the show debuted in 2007, six months before Marvel’s Iron Man.
For anyone who wasn’t alive or aware back in 2007, you can now look back on it as possibly the last time that a concept like The Big Bang Theory—which can be summed up as Haw Haw Lookit These Funny Nerds!—was a viable pitch for a TV show. Because not only have nerds clearly inherited the Earth in terms of pop culture domination (the Top 5 highest-grossing films of all time, for example, include two Avengers movies, The Force Awakens, and Avatar—all released post-2007), but the genre distinctions that once separated us from the rest of the world are quickly becoming meaningless.
The Thin Gray Line
Genre has always been a meaningless invention of marketing forces, to a certain extent. While defining something as ‘science fiction’ or a ‘thriller’ has utility for the consumer, it’s a messy business that was never well-defined. The reasons we might categorize Homer’s Odyssey or Shelley’s Frankenstein as ‘classics’ or ‘literature’ instead of epic fantasy and sci-fi horror are pretty thin. The argument against considering many James Bond films (not so much the novels) works of sci-fi is kind of weak, and so many TV shows, films, and works of modern literature have used the magical realism of A Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life for lame plot devices they’ve become genres unto themselves—and yet are rarely called out as speculative in nature.
The main reason for such seemingly arbitrary genre classifications is due to a general attitude that genre was juvenile, the sort of stuff kids enjoyed because they’re dumb and immature. It was perfectly okay to love comic books when you’re eleven; by the time you grew up you were supposed to leave those childish things behind. A show like Doctor Who was conceived in the early 1960s as a children’s program, and an educational one at that, because no one at the time would have imagined that adults wanted to watch a show about a time-traveling alien magician who lectures about Earth history for reasons unknown. With a few exceptions, sci-fi, fantasy, and horror films were always low-budget affairs designed to serve what was assumed to be an audience of teenagers and younger kids.
And then Star Wars happened, kicking off a four-decade shift as people began to realize two simple things: One, adults were just as into sci-fi and fantasy as kids; and two, there was money in speculative genres. A lot of money.
The Nerdening
It’s no joke to say that the last few decades of pop culture have been a slow triumph of all things speculative. So, so much of modern-day pop culture is driven by science fiction and fantasy, from the Marvel Cinematic Universe to Game of Thrones and Stranger Things. What was once the province of grindhouse and pulp is now mainstream, and one unexpected and oft-overlooked effect of this shift is the erosion of genre lines. Put simply, it’s increasingly common to find speculative tropes used in ‘literary’ genres—and vice versa. The result is a kind of new Gray Genre that isn’t clearly definable as old-school literary fiction but also doesn’t seem to fit neatly into the classic sci-fi or fantasy categories.
Two easy examples of this new, mixed Gray Genre is Never Let Me Go by Haruki Murakami and The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Both are clearly science fiction—one telling the story of clones grown to be sources of replacement organs, the other about the grinding attempt of a small number of people to survive the end of the world. Yet both are usually categorized and discussed as literary fiction, largely due to the prior work of both authors and a lingering prejudice against sci-fi in literary circles—writers with reputations for serious work still fight hard against what they see as a cheaper, more juvenile classification. Ian McEwan recently worked pretty hard to insist that his novel Machines Like Me, which deals with artificial intelligence in an alternative universe, is not actually sci-fi. And Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, also won an Arthur C. Clarke Award, though you wouldn’t know it from the book’s official website, where the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal, and the Man Booker Prize are all mentioned prominently.
But these lingering prejudices are the product of that earlier age, and are fading fast. The fact that Whitehead can publish a novel that is essentially a work of alternate history and magical realism and have it win a Pulitzer proves that. As more and more novels like these—and more and more writers follow in Justin Cronin’s (The Passage) footsteps as a writer who moves between genres without losing anything for it—there will be less of a focus on the specific genre of a story, and having speculative tropes pop up in all kinds of stories will be more common.
Consider a TV series like HBO’s Years and Years, which is marketed as a drama but has a clear-if-subtle sci-fi premise that follows a British family over the course of fifteen years stretching into the near future. Notably, the discussion surrounding the show has little to do with whether the conceit makes it any less a drama, signaling that general audiences—people who have been watching Marvel movies for more than a decade now, and who undoubtedly include folks who never read epic fantasy growing up but became hooked on Game of Thrones—no longer find these elements foreign or juvenile. They’re just tools of the storytelling trade.
None of this excuses my having watched all 279 episodes of The Big Bang Theory, of course—but it’s how we got to the point where a film like Hobbs and Shaw (a spinoff from the ridiculous and ridiculously successful Fast and Furious franchise) can be marketed as an ‘action’ film when the plot involves a cybernetically-enhanced supervillain, a deadly virus, and a complete suspension of the laws of physics. All the genres are being slowly baked into each other, until eventually they just won’t matter any more.