On Genre and Maximum Velocity

I Feel the Need, the Need for Speed

This was something I started thinking about when I was studying Jane Austen’s novels, especially the unfinished Sanditon.

As part of my Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia, I was required to write a straight academic essay. With endnotes and a colon in the title. I chose to study with Roger Sales, who was a wonderful teacher.

Re-reading all of Austen’s writing (although I may have finished Mansfield Park for the first time up at Norwich), I realised she had certain rules about travel.

It meant a great deal which direction of the compass her characters were heading in, and, even more so, it meant a great deal how fast their carriage was going.

Travelling north, fast, essentially means disgrace.

When Lydia Bennet elopes with George Wickham in Pride and Prejudice, their direction and their haste are morally appalling.

(Because, during that period, you could get married without parental approval in Gretna Green, just over the Scottish border, northwards travel suggested succumbing to youthful lust. You probably knew this already.)

I am calling this back to memory because what it led to was a broader suspicion about genre. (My whole essay is up on Academia.edu, if you’re interested in reading more. The title is ‘Your mistake is in the place: The Orientation and Disorientation of Jane Austen’s Sanditon’.)

Yesterday, after the cliffhanger of the paywall, I said that —

Genre fiction loves radical changes of pace; literary fiction largely avoids this.

But one of the reasons genre fiction can do radical change of pace is because it has the possibility of accelerating faster to higher velocities.

Novels which only ever progress at walking speed, where no-one runs or drives a fast car, are limited in the change of pace they can achieve. They’re not suddenly going to drop a chase sequence. Emotional pace is a different thing.

My theory — if you can call it that — goes something like this:

You can identify which genre a novel belongs to simply by knowing the maximum velocity attained by any of the named characters within it.

You don’t need to have a plot summary, know the title or even be told the name of the that character. (Though these could all be giveaways.)

Clearly, there are a couple of genres where the maximum velocity makes the very action of the novel.

Let’s start at the extreme.

Faster than light-speed travel is confined to the fantasy end of Science Fiction (loosely called). This is SF as Science Fantasy. The jaunte-ing of Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination or the jumps to hyperspace of Star Wars break the established laws of physics but allow characters to go rapidly from world to world.

More realistic SF, or speculative fiction, might allow spaceships to get up to half of light-speed. But it’s hard to see any other genre in which a character need zip that fast. Where would they go? London to Brisbane in less than half a second?

Mundane SF will only go as fast as humans are likely to get — which, right now, is nowhere near the speed of light.

Travel at speeds faster than planes go is likely to be indicate fantasy fiction or mythical rewritings. Gods, demi-gods and fairies. This is the kind of pace that Zeus sends Hermes whizzing around the Mediterranean, or that Puck achieves in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ — ‘I’ll put a girdle round about the earth/ In forty minutes.’

(As the world’s circumference is 24,901 miles, I reckon that means Puck can travel at 37,351.5 miles per hour. The fastest manned aircraft ever flew at around 4,473 mph.)

If we decelerate to Mach 7 and below, we enter the realm of the technothriller. Again, as with SF, you can say that part of the point of this genre — very much the reason readers are drawn to it — is that the characters get to go this bloody fast.

Authors such as Clive Cussler, Craig Thomas, Tom Clancy, and Nick Ryan aim to give their main characters frequent short rides in very fast machines.

Passenger planes fly at around 475 to 575 miles per hour. And characters in contemporary literary novels often need to go from one country to another, so things become a little fuzzy here.

Perhaps the theory needs tweaking, and the maximum velocity needs to be one attained by a vehicle that is under the character’s control.

575 mph therefore leads us to novels featuring airline pilots.

There’s a bit of a jump down to just below land speed record territory. If a character’s maximum achieved velocity is 300 mph, we can say, with some certainty that they are driving a very fast car. Therefore they must have a plot reason for wanting to go that fast. Therefore they are most likely either chasing someone or being chased by someone. Therefore they are almost certainly in a glamorous thriller where they have access to James Bond-like tech.

Does anyone drive at even 200mph in a Julian Barnes or Zadie Smith novel?

Not as far as I’m aware.

I’m going to leave the slower velocities for tomorrow, because I’m starting to get whiplash.

Any suggestions for tweaks to the theory will be gladly received.