I would like to thank Francesca from Luna Publishing for an advance copy of this book in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher – Luna Press Publishing

Published – Out Now

Price – £16.99 paperback £6.95 Kindle eBook

The culture we live in shapes us. We also shape the culture we live in. Stories we tell play critical roles in this shaping.

The heart of cultural transmission is how stories and the way we shape knowledge come together and make a novel work. How do they combine within the novel? Genre writing plays a critical role in demonstrating how this transmission functions.

Science fiction and fantasy illustrate this through shared traditions and understanding, colonialism, diasporic experiences, own voices, ethics, selective forgetting and silencing. They illuminate ways in which speculative fiction is important for cultural transmission.

This study uses cultural encoding and baggage within speculative fiction to decode critical elements of modern English-language culture.

How do you recognise what type of story you’re reading or writing? The plot, the type of characters or the world? What happens when we find an element doesn’t fit and what happens when we think the author has overlooked something? In the past we often hear the term worldbuilding but this tends to cast authors as godlike beings who summon lands into creation, but Gillian Polack makes for me a very persuasive argument that it’s the surrounding culture of those stories and genres that may have more influence than a single’s author’s power of creation. In the excellent non-fiction book Story Matrices – Cultural Encoding and Cultural Baggage in Science Fiction and Fantasy we get an examination of how our shared and also personal sense of a genre’s culture (and this includes authors, readers, and publishers) has a strong influence on what we accept as stories too. Although neither an author or academic I found it raised some interesting ideas that readers and perhaps also reviewers may want to look at.

This was a really fascinating and thoughtful read as Polack looks at how stories get created making the argument that there are cultural building blocks that have been shaped by the stories and world that an author will personally absorb (the idioculture) and the one we share more widely (the diaculture). The former is hard to work out what an author has personally read, watched and also experienced in their life as Polack points out is hard to research for the present day and tends more to be done in more biographical focused studies but we can see a lot more of the diaculture that wider popular view (with caveats) where a mass of components are recognised ss currently comprising a genre. Early on Polack looks at a more SF&F adjacent genre of regency romance.

While the likes of Jane Austen created the texts Polack notes that this was actually originally more contemporary fiction and while clearly an inspirational novel the work of Georgette Hayer in the 20th century probably did a lot more to create and promote a stylised view of what Regency work could be and Polack notes that there is a strong influence of 1930’s social communities that pops into the book which would have been more the culture of the time that influenced Hayer. Since then Hayer’s influence has been popular we also have seen the play side of regency – costumes, games and social groups has further developed what you can do in that world and now the boundaries have crossed into Regency supernatural or Regency SF. It is not therefore hard to see that say Lord of The Rings itself sets a long shadow on what an epic fantasy needed to look like even though the genre is older and you can definitely see D&D games influenced by Tolkien have subsequently pushed what you can do and itself influenced authors, This isn’t saying authors are always copying but what it does suggest is as a story culture develops what Polack usefully labels building blocks i.e. the common elements get utilised more and more as they become the norm.

Another non-S&F example use is how historians often find medieval fiction seems more influenced by tv and film than actual historical records. For readers though we have our own expectations of what we expect in medieval tales through our culture and so we don’t mind of the accuracy is actually off! Polack then very helpfully walks the reader some ways of identifying the blocks that make up the world. This is a really interesting section as worldbuilding that we tend to discuss often focuses on land, magic systems and the races that live within the realm or universe that the tale takes place in. We also get an examination and walkthrough of an analytical approach to explore concepts within stories such as religion, language, customs, and gender being proposed and how the writer’s choices (and society’s diaculture expectations) will influence the story produced but also reflect back current culture. If society is very male orientated, we shouldn’t be surprised that the fiction of the time only placed women in nurturing roles and now we see that cultural trends shift reflecting today’s world The idea of books focused on women were allegedly not what the culture wanted (again interesting to think how publishing is playing a role here).

Polack points out that while it is easy for writers to take standard templates – there are reasons it is really easy to set a urban fantasy series in New York as that world is very much regularly in our books and therefore in our minds so authors can focus on the characters and plots; the more interesting idea proposed for writers is how you can also play with those expectations. Polack uses their own experiences in shaping their writing choices in their fiction for example exploring the variations in Jewish culture can be used challenge the narrative of what a fantasy story should look like and probably gives the reader some new rather than standard building blocks to take on board. I took from these sections that it is when writers try to do something new with the building blocks that they can really push the story and as those book’s influence grows the subsequent culture where future books get influenced by it. Just think how many books take a similar approach to a previous unique bestseller (or are made to fit that template by advertising).

The idea of culture impacting story can also have drawbacks. In particular that it tends to reflect the majority view (and often the Publisher view) of what a story needs to do to be successful. In one real life example we see a romantic tale of a Nazi prison guard falling in love with a Jewish Concentration Camp prisoner that led to a muti-award nominated novel and a bestseller and yet it seemed the author and publisher were oblivious that such a tale would be deemed hideously offensive to the Jewish community for what should have been obvious reasons. The majority US white Christian culture likes redeeming romance and was not focused on how other communities would see this differently. This can explain many other poor choices we have see with other bad mistakes in publishing. Its also I think why we took way too long to see an increase in LGBT or non-white focused tales as readers and publishers were ultimately focused on the UK/US white demographic who had a very standard view of what stories and the characters should look and act as. This for me raised some interesting questions about how readers can misidentify the building blocks of a story and why so many keep labelling very different books as YA (a debate for another day).

Overall, I found this a really interesting read I had to focus on but took away a great deal about how our world and experiences shape stories and our expectations of them. Writers will enjoy this for some ideas on how to create their own story cultures but I do think readers and reviewers may find this interesting to explain how we ourselves process and judge a story as meeting our expectations and what we should be wary of getting trapped in or being oblivious to. Very impressive and highly recommended!