Greg R. Fishbone
When we last checked in, I was writing a book for you called Residue of an Especially Poor Vintage. I’m still at it.
At the start of the month, I was 20,000 words shy of a 50,000-word goal, which would have been a rather short book. By the end, I was 18,000 words from a 60,000-word goal, which would be a less-short book.
If words are your metric, the manuscript went from being 60% of a short book to 70% of a less-short book, so…progress?
While word count is important, over the course of April, Residue also went from kinda-sorta fitting into the sci-fi, fantasy, and horror genres to firmly planting itself into the dreampunk genre.
A genre, by the way, is a category of fictional works that share a set of tropes, traits, and features. While all books are unique and special, genres are used to place those works into a larger context, forming connections to guide authorship, shape reader expectations, and determine how the books get shelved.
That shelving part is especially important, since a book that resists being properly shelved will tend to fall into a pile on the floor, never to be found again. (Not that I have any shelves like that…) A book that can't be categorized into a genre will be less discoverable by booksellers, librarians, reviewers, algorithms, and readers. Even the most well-crafted tale without a genre can be doomed to obscurity.
The broad arena of speculative fiction is traditionally broken down into sci-fi, fantasy, and horror genres, with some fuzziness and overlap at the borders. Each of those larger genres can be broken down further into subgenres.
At the start of this book project, I was expecting Residue to fall into the sci-fi bucket, since it's centered around a giant robot and a flock of digital sheep. But as the story developed, it veered away from the expected sci-fi tropes. Sure, there's cool tech doing cool stuff, exploring the potential impact of sufficiently developed AI on human lives, relationships, or societies, but that’s not what the story is really about. The giant robot is of unknown origins and spends the entire book asleep, while the digital sheep primarily serve as dream signifiers.
Dreams...hmm.
Residue also includes fantasy elements, taking place in a contemporary setting that operates under different rules from our own experience. It’s a world where characters can turn invisible (for all practical purposes) or produce prophetic insights simply because that’s just how the universal laws consistently work in this particular story world. However, instead of exploring within a four-cornered map of a fantastical setting, Residue goes off the edges of that map to interrogate the broader nature of reality, perception, and dreaming.
Dreams...again?
Finally, I considered that Residue could be psychological horror: horror, in that characters are put in perilous situations; and psychological, in that the dangers manifest as threats to their mental health, rather than being focused on purely physical harms. But where horror stories tend to congeal around issues of morality, Residue focuses on the nature of being, of thought, and of dreams.
Again, and again, and again with the dreams!
The book was clearly trying to tell me something about itself, but the message wasn’t getting through. Instead, I consigned myself to be writing a “psychologically horrific science fantasy book but not quite” with few comparables and no set place on any bookshelf.
Then I stumbled upon the dreampunk genre by typing, “what if dreams but punk?” into a search engine and arriving at this page by author Cliff Jones, Jr., whose novella, Dreck, I am currently enjoying. (So far, it’s very trippy, very weird, and very much packed with pro-privacy and anti-corporate messaging. Thumbs up!)
Dreampunk stories question the nature of perception, cognition, the inner world of our dreams, the outer world of subjective experience, and our shared vocabulary of symbolic meaning.
The -punk suffix denotes a family of subgenres, including cyberpunk, steampunk, dieselpunk, solarpunk, mythpunk, and the like, that subvert various technological and literary conventions. The various -punks are set in strange, disturbing, absurdist worlds where anti-heroes emerge from the fringes of their social hierarchies to carve their own paths, not caring what anyone else thinks of them, much like the 70s and 80s Punk movement in our own increasingly strange, disturbing, and absurdist world.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll can be retroactively shelved as an early dreampunk novel, as can its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. These were favorites from my childhood, along with I Am the Cheese by Robert Cormier and The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin.
Philp K. Dick explored dreampunk themes in many of his stories, including those that became such major movie adaptations as Total Recall, Minority Report, and Blade Runner.
Since Residue started as an explicit homage to Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, it makes sense that the book would want to be written as a dreampunk novel even before its author became consciously aware of that genre’s existence.
The visual language of dreampunk lends itself especially well to cinematic expressions. Inception and the Matrix films were dreampunk movies. Likewise, the Lego Movie and Toy Story franchises, which take place in a child’s imagination, as well as Greta Gerwig’s 2023 Barbie movie, in which Barbies and Kens populate a dreamworld connected by a psychic feedback loop to another world much like ours, with character emotions in the one world and playtime scenarios in the other world having a direct and instantaneous impact on each other.
Notably, Frank L. Baum’s Oz books were not dreampunk (nor was Gregory Maguire’s Oz pastiche, Wicked) because Baum depicted storybook Oz as a physical realm that required a physical journey by tornado or hot-air balloon to reach from Kansas. However, the 1939 MGM adaptation, The Wizard of Oz, turned that story into a dreampunk adventure manifesting as a tornado-inspired fever dream steeped in Dorothy Gale’s subjective anxieties and recent experiences.
To circle back on the past month’s Residue progress, I started April with 60% of a book that was struggling to find its place among three separate genres and ended the month with 70% of a book in the tradition of a fun and fascinating cohort of imaginative masterworks that I have loved since I was a kid.
Now that’s progress!
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