Glee Fix: Scatting on Genre at Making Light

[jesse_the_k]

Making Light is a blog hosted by the SF editorial power couple, Teresa and Patrick Nielsen Hayden. As with most blogs, there's a regular crowd; mostly the discussion stays inside geeky rails (While I have disagreed with TNH many times, I do appreciate her willingness to tightly mod the place so it's generally worth the time spent reading).

On April 11, 2011 Teresa Nielsen Hayden posted A digression on literary categories:

Say your book features a strange and powerful device, the Transnistrian Infundibulator:

If the storyline is about the inception, interim difficulties, and eventual happy resolution of the relationship between the inventor of the Transnistrian Infundibulator and some nice young woman, it’s a romance.
[... snip ...]
If he’s a scholar studying the Transnistrian Infundibulator, she’s a governess, and his best fossil specimen of T. infundibulator falls out of his pocket during a reception at Almack’s, it’s a regency.
[... snip ...]
If she’s his lab assistant, he thinks she looks hot in goggles and a tool belt, and the Transnistrian Infundibulator is a huge rivet-intensive steam-driven mechanical wombat, it’s steampunk.
[... snip ...]
If the effects of the Infundibulator leave blood and brains splashed on the walls, and the last surviving viewpoint character winds up in a desperate hand-to-hand fight in the dark with one of its half-rotting revenant Transnistrian victims, it’s horror.

I stopped there, but you don’t have to.

At the moment I'm posting, there are 291 variations on the theme, and many of them are delightful, quite a few are hilarious, and here are some of the better ones:

2 ::: Niall McAuley ::: (view all by) ::: April 12, 2011, 03:39 AM:
If the Transnistrian Infundibulator is supposed to be a power source, but when turned on, creates a black hole which threatens the world, until the inventor's assitant works out that modifying the backup to use a toroidal core instead of a spherical one creates a wormhole generator which can be used to a) trash the original device and b) travel faster than light across the universe, that would be cool.

#5 ::: Ingvar M ::: (view all by) ::: April 12, 2011, 05:59 AM:
If the Transnistrian Infundibulator is a method for mediating snippets of writing between people communication, it's a blog.

#7 ::: ajay ::: (view all by) ::: April 12, 2011, 06:31 AM:
Your novel fails the Infundibulator Test if it does not contain at least two characters who at some point have a conversation with each other that is not about Infundibulators.

#10 ::: John Mark Ockerbloom ::: (view all by) ::: April 12, 2011, 08:38 AM:
For all your Transnistrian Infundibulator needs, if you're seeking Infundibulators, Transnistrian or otherwise, you've come to right place for the best deals on Transnistrian Infundibulators. Our Transnistrian Infundibulator expertise is unmatched by anyone else in the Transnistrian Infundibulator business. This Transnistrian Infundibulator website is most likely in the SEO spamblog genre, according to most Transistrian Infundibulator experts.

#26 ::: Nicholas Condon ::: (view all by) ::: April 12, 2011, 11:15 AM:
If an ordinary guy is mistaken for the person who stole the plans for the Transnistrian Infundibulator, and he falls in love with a beautiful, icy blonde while trying to escape from everyone and clear his name, it's a Hitchcock movie.

#43 ::: Dave Luckett ::: (view all by) ::: April 12, 2011, 12:24 PM:
If the Transnistrian Infundibulator is an artefact created by a secret order of illuminati, AND:
it prevents the apocalypse, it's a Dan Brown novel,

it causes the apocalypse, it's a H P Lovecraft novel,
it causes the apocalypse, but nobody notices, it's a China Mieville novel

it causes something, but nobody has the least idea what, it's a Cory Doctorow novel.

#44 ::: wrw ::: (view all by) ::: April 12, 2011, 12:28 PM:
If the writing wobbles between second person and third person generic ("one"), and covers in great detail how one Infundibulates, but not why one would want to, or how the Transnistrian nature of an Infundibulator affects the Infundibulation process, you have stumbled upon a Transnistrian Infundibulator technical manual.

If it makes a series of empty promises about the quality of Infundibulation, and implies that Transnistrian Infundibulation is the best type of Infundibulation without providing any evidence for this claim, you instead have a Transnistrian Infundibulator marketing pamphlet.

#76 ::: Glenn Hauman ::: (view all by) ::: April 12, 2011, 03:05 PM:
If you actually see what the Transnistrian Infundibulator looks like in the book twice, it's comics.
If it also has a spine, it's a graphic novel.

So if you feel like giggling about genre, read on!