Willis Couvelier just dropped me a note and asked, “Is there a difference in a “southern” style of writing SF/F?”
His question was prompted by John Scalzi’s introduction to Scenting the Dark, where he says, “Mary Robinette Kowal is from the U.S. south, specifically from the Chattanooga, Tennessee area. This means two things. First, she has truly impeccable social manners and a personal style that will relax you and put you at ease. Second, and as a consequence of the first, she is astoundingly sharp at observing humans up close and personal without them knowing she is observing them. This second datum is a key to her writing.”
So is there a southern style?
I suspect there is. There’s a difference in the way southerners speak that goes beyond the accent into sentence structure and word choice. But this is true of any region, really. The tricky thing is since it all looks normal to me, it’s hard to define from the inside.
Since he prompted the question, I asked Scalzi what he thinks. “Yes. It’s a more observant, more intimate style, as rooted in Flannery O’Connor as Isaac Asimov.”
Thinking about the authors that I know who hail from the south like Alethea Kontis and Cherie Priest, that certainly seems true of their writing.
All of this makes me curious of course but it’s hard to step outside the culture that I was brought up in to see what is region specific. So what do you think? Is there a definable southern style to science fiction and fantasy?
Another part of the thought behind the curiosity was writer’s voice. Is there a noticable commonality in the tone of a style of writers from the south? I wondered about this as well as if there were a specific southern style with genre writing.
I tend to think so. This is the sub-sub-genre that my Southern Fried Weirdness project was trying to capture and I saw plenty of it in my slush pile.
I tended to see a lot of Southern Horror (sometimes veiled as rural horror) and much of that crosses the genre borders into dark fantasy. I saw a lot of “urban fantasy” in contemporary rural settings. I never saw as much in the way of science fiction as I would have liked, however. At least not hard science fiction. I did see more than my fair share of cattle mutilation and alien abduction stories, however.
The real question for me, when going through the slush, was what makes a speculative story definably southern? Is it setting? Dialogue? Tone? For me it usually ended up being about the tone and setting more than anything else in the end. Very subjective, I know.
While not true for all the authors I read in my slush pile, in most cases, the stories I tended to accept — the kind of stuff I kept my eyes peeled for — were more likely to have an observant style of writing like you mentioned above. Somewhere between Bradbury and Faulkner, I guess. I was more focused on the tone and flow of the story in most cases than on the speculative nature of the story itself.
I think all Southern writing, regardless of genre, tends to have a very specific tone. It’s evident in the manner, dialect and cadence of its characters’ speech, but also very much in the overall atmosphere of the stories. It makes sense that these same characteristics carry over into the speculative genres. An author’s culture almost always informs his writing, even when he is trying to write from the viewpoint of someone outside that culture.
In particular, Southern culture tends to lean towards the Gothic most of the time anyhow, which probably explains why so many vampires hang out here. 🙂 We also tend to be less reticent than many other regions, I think, so most Southern authors probably have a life-long habit of examining and observing others, which, again, has a definite influence on writing style.
I’ve been thinking that some of that lifelong habit of observing others comes because of the way that politeness is built into the culture. When everyone is nice all the time, you have to look past what they are saying to what they mean.
Mary, you are absolutely right about this. I grew up in Louisiana, where seeing behind the smile was essential to reading the true meaning of a person’s words.
What a fascinating question. I have no idea, because I don’t know the region from which most authors come. For instance, I didn’t know you were a southerner.
I’ve lived my entire life south of the Mason Dixon line in the US, but I’m Cuban-American, and I’ve lived most of my life in two big cities full of transplanted northerners. So I’m not sure what I count as. But I lived in South Carolina for two years, in Tennessee for a year, and in North Carolina for a year, so I’ve spent a lot of time in southern culture–and really came to love many aspects of it.
Back when I was in grad school as a literature major, forever ago, southern fiction was my favorite area to read and study. It felt to me like twentieth century southern authors differed from other English language writers because they still believed in the power of narrative. It wasn’t all about the style or about absurdity.
I had the same observation about African American women writers. My pet theory was that peoples that often felt marginalized from contemporary intellectual discourse were more likely to have powerful shared stories. My plan for a thesis, until I decided not to write one, was to read up on English-language literature by Latino authors, and see if my observations of held true for that group of authors.
I don’t know to what extent that applies to science fiction, since most genre authors, I’d say, believe in the power of narrative.
What other writers might be considered Southern Science Fiction?