Can a blogger dream of the taste of "Blade Runner"?
(or, my odd relationship with genre fiction)

I have met a number of women who have a strong relationship with their physical sense of taste. People who can, years later, remember how a great meal tasted or even dream of it.

My sense of smell is quite limited, and I suspect my palate may suffer a commensurate impairment. Certainly, I am occasionally struck by that most powerful of memories – the memory of how a person, thing or place smelled.

Far more common for me, however, is to be struck by powerful sense of how a work in a genre felt. This is a difficult thing to describe. Do you remember watching cartoons as a child? Not just the frisson of excitement when the theme music played, or a little tingle of anticipation in the spine, or even the moment when you suspended reality and forgot you were watching the show and were just with the show.

Do you remember not just “Astro Boy” but the Astro-boyness of “Astro Boy”? How that cartoon felt viscerally? Does it have a sensation for you that is like taste or smell? Is it a palpable sensation in your head?

For me it is. I often recall in the same way I recall a smell the feel of a work in a genre. The sensation of another world opening to me, one with its own rules and internal consistencies, an architecture more hinted at than apparent, but in its own terms – complete. In fact I recall such sensations far more often than I can recall a taste or smell. For me, this feeling is a taste or smell. My favourite vampire novels, a great episode of “Aeon Flux”, the way it felt to watch my first episode of “The Goodies”, or the mysterious world that opened the first time I saw the director’s cut of “Blade Runner” on the big screen - all have a distinct taste in memory.

Maybe I'm alone in this, maybe not. But I mean here something more complex than remembering whether a book or film or cartoon scared me or made me feel sad or happy for the characters.

So, what do I mean by genre? A key feature of works in a genre is that they use a series of conventions and conventional signifiers. Stereotypes, devices, tropes or patterns. But, you might say, in many respects so do works of "literary" fiction. That's true. "Literature" and "genre" are not hard categories, or even opposed categories – and as a lover of genre I am not privileging one above the other. However, literature for me can be identified by a certain personal reaction it evokes – I feel like I have had real insight into an imagined character, or I have been left with “big” things to ponder, or the sheer artistry of the prose (or cinematography, or whatever) has knocked me sideways.

Genres (and sub-genres for the connoisseur) are recognisable by their attributes, props, settings or conventions. We can speak of historical novels, detective fiction, science fiction despite the fact that these are fluid categories that may blur into one another. Often works in genre have a fantastic sense of atmosphere and location, but limited characters - and as a whole do not transcend their props and formulas to do anything more or different than the bulk of loosely similar works.

Can one have “literature” that is also a work in a genre? Certainly. The easiest to point to is Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”, commonly seen as the foundation work of science fiction. I would also think of genre works that transcend their setting, in effect exploding a genre and showing how much can be done with it literarily. In a similar vein would think of what the novels of Raymond Chandler did for detective fiction, or the way the work of Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman changed English speaker’s perceptions of the possibilities of comic books as a literary medium. They use the tool-box provided by a genre to do something radically different or better than what has gone before, something that does leave you with other things to ponder than the sense of a marvellous adventure completed.

But below that level of literature-in-a-genre-mode, I am quite capable of having "peak genre experiences" - things that are great, the best of what can be done within a genre, without transcending it. What has always captivated me at this level is the architectural sense of an imaginatively complete world, only fragments of which can be glimpsed in the book, movie or cartoon.

Anyway, I raise all this by way of a preliminary outline to my review of China Miéville’s “Perdido Street Station”, which I hope to post tomorrow. In the meantime I imagine my obscure rantings and categorisations may draw the odd comment from those versed in literary theory.