Babel Clash

This talk about genres reminds me of a current persistent trend in genre fiction of which I am growing painfully weary. It’s certain to irritate some of my writers friends when I bring it up, so I hope some of them will jump up attempt to tell me how wrong I am.

Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life, by Philp José Farmer.

I’m speaking of what I’ll call “mashup fiction.” The This sort of thing has been around for some time, but in the last few years there’s been a flowering of it in comics, fiction and cinema and I am frankly sick of it. By “mashup fiction” I mean stories whose genesis is the intentional combination of unrelated tropes, historical figures, or characters from previously published works. What some call “crossover fiction” I’ll relegate to a subcategory of this.

You know what I’m talking about. Zombies versus werewolves versus Dracula. Alien versus Predator. Steampunk Thomas Edison. Sherlock Holmes and Tarzan fighting King Kong and his band of merry vampire pirates. Vampirates, I suppose you’d call them.

Again, this isn’t anything particularly new. Philip José Farmer turned heads with his Wold Newton Universe books, where Tarzan and Doc Savage and Professor Moriarty and every other neat fictional character he could get a hold of where smooshed together into a single world, powered by genetic mutations from a meteorite. Alan Moore created the comic-book apotheosis of it in League of Extraordinaty Gentlemen. Half of my friends have novels or novels in production in which Shakespeare is a secret agent in Elizabethan England, or Nicola Tesla fights robots from Middle Earth, or (one that I haven’t read yet but really want to) were-pirates.

And I’m not opposed to the concept qua concept. Clearly it’s a goldmine of ideas, and when done well is marvelous. In Bill Willingham’s Fables, all of the characters from fairy tales and nursery rhymes exist in our world and have banded together in a secret community in New York called Fabletown. Endless storytelling possibilities. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a happy mix of vampires, demons, werewolves, aliens (remember that Season 4 episode with the monster from space?) and probably a hundred other things I can’t think of. Dracula showed up on Buffy once.

The problem is that I feel a hangover coming on. As the father in the Great Brain books once said, “The first time is funny; the second time is cute; the third time is a spanking.” I wrote a short story for my comic House of Mystery (I think it’s in issue 15, in the TPB The Space Between that will be available at your local Borders in January…) called “Jordan’s Idea with the Gorillas and Sh*t,” in which a hapless character describes the plot of his new screenplay. It’s about a sentient gorilla who’s half ninja and half vampire who fights wizard dinosaurs in space after the giant killer robots subjugate mankind along with the zombies. The climax comes on a space station, when our hero realizes that his cloned twin brother is behind it all, and then they make up and go back in time and kill Hitler. Oh, hell. I just spoiled the ending. Anyway. Granted, it was a lot of fun to write, and it was one of the more popular things I’ve written for that series. But it was definitely me thumbing my nose at this stuff, not so much embracing it.

It’ll run its course, I’m sure, just as cyberpunk did. Maybe it will take Smashing Pumpkins releasing a concept album about Heathcliffe and Ralph Waldo Emerson squaring off against steam-powered T-Rexes to do it: Unitarian of the Cretaceous Moors. Like when Billy Idol released an album called Cyberpunk, the writing will be on the wall. Time to do something else. I just pray we come to our senses before I hear the Pumkins’ first single, “Transcendental Tyrannosaur,” on the radio.

Okay, tell me how wrong I am and give me eleventy-thousand examples. I can take it.

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