Nichism
Originally published at Grasping for the Wind. Please leave any comments there.
When Og first drew on the cave wall, how do you think he described it to the world’s first fan base? Did he say “It’s post-modern primitivism with a bit of abstract expressionism and some of that ‘real’ school thrown in” or did he say “Og make. Look!”?
Back then, there were no schools. There was no right way or wrong way, just the way. The race’s abilities and interest in classifying, identifying themes and unifying elements, developing methodologies for critique, just didn’t exist. It would take a lot of drawings and a lot of different styles before someone could make a living telling us why one picture of a gazelle was different from another picture of a gazelle.
When the unsung geniuses way back in Babylonia tamped that first ‘^’ into a clay tablet and began recounting the tale of Gilgamesh, do you think they agonized over whether the story was mythological? Did they wonder if it was a fantasy story with elements of science fiction or a science fiction story with elements of fantasy?
Doubtful. More likely their thoughts turned to the inadvisability of writing epic poetry with sticks and clay.
Flash forward to the modern era where there is as much verbosity devoted to minutely examining the distinguishing factors that make one science fiction story not like another science fiction story as there are devoted to producing A science fiction story.
Nichism is killing us.
When I first wandered the library stacks in search of something new, I learned very quickly how to find what I was looking for. Hit the fiction section and start looking for the yellow and red sticker that featured a rocket ship and an atom.
There were others of course, as you can see from the illustration. Locally, they used the yellow and red rocket. Recognizably a Sfnal element. (Fantasy had one too; I remember it as being a stylized dragon, but I’m not sure.) (Note that it says SCIENCE FICTION. Not Sci Fi. Sigh.)
This made it very easy for me to ferret out what I was looking for and it exposed me to ideas and authors that are as wildly different as one can possibly get, ranging from Asimov to Zimmer-Bradley.
If you wanted to get some sense of what the story was about, you had to read the blurbs (maybe even the inside of the dust jacket). You’d never know whether you’d like it or not (let alone whether it was good, bad or indifferent) until you’d read it.
Today, we have mostly turned our personal filters over to others. Dark, faceless people who used to be employed at the Post Office, sorting letters into slots by number. Today that task has been taken over by machines and new employment had to be invented for the pigeonholers. Today they spend their hours sorting fiction by sub-genre.
Works are no longer ‘Science Fiction’. They must needs be Romance SF, or Alternate History SF, or Steampunk or Cyberpunk or Space Opera, New Space Opera, New Weird, Magical Realism, Urban Fantasy (Magical Steampunk? Urban Space Opera?)
They can’t just be SF. These works must now be defined for a specific niche audience, or so the arbiters of marketing have decreed.
The sad reality is that much of Pohl and Kornbluth’s masterpiece - The Space Merchants - has come to pass. We are all locked up in a circular trust, where our purchasing habits are known, product is delivered to meet those known habits, we buy them based on their niche appeal and sales reinforce the production of more of the same, ad infinitum.
I’m not a student of marketing history, but I imagine that this concept began to take hold somewhere in the 70s or 80s. Marketing types discovered that for every product, there was a specific demographic who would BUY MORE if the product had elements designed to appeal directly to them. You could even get them to spend more, or buy in greater volume, by re-packaging existing product to appeal to certain demographics (be it color, price point, application, whatever).
Years ago I’d get sent on errands by my parents. Go to the store and pick up some dish washing detergent. That used to be easy. For one reason or another the household preferred Prell. There it was - big squeeze bottle, green fluid, PRELL on the label (the pearl-being-dropped logo for those who remember).
We bought based on utility and brand name (and price). There were no niches, only brands.
Today I spend a good half hour in front of the dish washing detergent section; generics, anti-bacterial, environmentally safe, environmentally safe AND anti-bacterial, with lemon scent, or lavender scent or patchouli; regular, heavy-duty. Safe on hands. Grease cutting.
For every color, flavor, scent and property, there is a niche. 17% prefer lemon anti-bacterial; 22% buy on price alone (generic anti-bacterial with grease cutting action); 7% want lavender smell regardless of what’s inside.
The same is true for just about every product category you’d care to mention. Colors, size, appeal factors. The marketers want a guarantee of sales and their research has proven that by narrowing their focus, they can get them.
Unfortunately, this kind of thing, while wildly successful (remunerative and therefore bound to last an eternity) reinforces boundaries. When the marketer places the exact thing you are looking for in front of you, for a price you are willing to pay, it is virtually impossible to say no.
Spend your hard earned money on a thing designed just for you? Or, take a risk with those dollars and spend them on the unknown, untried, untested, possibly useless, other thing? I think not. I’ll take the Prell, thank you. At least Mom won’t yell at me for wasting money on the wrong thing.
The same exact dynamic is taking place within genre literature these days. Small presses, realizing that they can ‘guarantee’ their sales numbers, increasingly specialize on one niche or another. Big publishers develop ‘lines’ and get self-referential in their promotional copy (if you liked X, you’re gonna love Y - it’s THE EXACT SAME THING YOU ALREADY READ - only by a different author).
Blogs specialize the territory they cover and more often than not proudly proclaim their boundaries right on their splash pages: ‘A blog about (pick your sub-sub-sub-genre of choice)’.
This is useful if you are searching for like-minded individuals, or guarantees that your book budget will not be wasted on wall-bangers, but entirely detrimental to what we all pay lip service to from time to time: the need to broaden our horizons, gain exposure to new talent, experience something new, walk-through unopened doors. It’s slow death to our creativity (most genre readers are writers); the stuff of which dreams are made comes from cross-fertilization. Rather than looking for mates outside the tribe, sales and promotional techniques are encouraging incest. Down that road lies imbecility.
I fall prey to this just as much as the next reader. I find it much easier to spend money on authors I’m already familiar with. I shy away from certain labels, judging (without merit) that the label is an indication that I probably won’t like it. I’ve deliberately stepped outside of my niche(s) to gain broader insight (the results have been 50/50) and found it an uncomfortable process. I almost always regret (before reading) spending twenty-five or thirty bucks on “something new” when I could have spent the same on something known.
The niche market of science fiction readers is a much larger niche than the one for science fiction steampunk readers, much larger than that for space opera readers, much larger than that for planetary romances.
The ironic thing is, if we really want people to cross those niche boundaries, we have to do away with the labels. Sure we’d be guaranteed of sales by marketing the Science Fiction Romance novel to Science Fiction Romance readers, but - how many new fans of SFR would we create if we just left the sub-genre nomenclature off the spine and replaced it with a generic Rocket and Atom logo?