Category Archives: Cross Genre

Genre – An Emotional Journey

ice creamAsking someone which genre of books they prefer most is like asking someone what’s their favorite ice cream. Everyone has an answer, but often they don’t understand why they prefer one over another. Or they’ll cite specific examples they loved within a genre, or perhaps discuss common tropes. Those definitions of genre are limiting and exclusive.

As has been pointed out in other posts this month, genre a marketing label, but books can vary widely within a genre, or fall across multiple genres. For example, my Facetakers series is a sci-fi time travel thriller, but it also has a cool magic system. It’s hard to pin it down to a single genre.  I could just as easily call it an alternate history fantasy, but it reads more like a sci-fi thriller, so that’s the slot it’s been assigned. The story is more powerful for the mash-up, but that cross-genre approach does present challenges for finding the right readers because people forget one important truth.

Rune Warrior coverGenre is all about emotion.

This truth is taught by David Farland, who has a knack for audience analysis beyond anyone I’ve ever met. He points out that genre labels generally reflect the most powerful emotional element in the story. Some genres are easy to spot:

Horror – well, obviously.

Humor – this one is often mixed into the other genres (humorous fantasy, humorous sci-fi, etc)

Romance – again – obvious

But what about science fiction and fantasy? There’s a reason these two genres are combined so often in story telling and in how they’re shelved, and it has nothing to do with the size of their audiences. These both share a common emotion: Wonder.

Think about it, whether a far distant planet is reached by interstellar flight or by flights of fancy, whether they include arguably-possible technology or unexplainable magic, the greatest draw for these genres is the wonder of discovery and exploring new worlds.

Many of our stories contain a lot of other emotions, though, and that can lead to genre mashing and a bit of confusion. If there’s lots of horror in a SFF story, it’s often called Dark Fantasy. I already mentioned Humorous Fantasy. If there are lots of action beats, it may be called a SFF Thriller. If it explores history and gives it a twist, it’s called Alternate History Fantasy or Time Travel Sci-Fi. Etc.

So when analyzing the genre of your story, or of those stories you love, consider the emotional journey the story immerses you into. What was the primary emotional beat? For those stories hard to pinpoint in a narrow genre, this might be the most accurate way to describe it.

 

About the Author: Frank Morin

Author Frank MorinA Stone's Throw coverFrank Morin loves good stories in every form.  When not writing or trying to keep up with his active family, he’s often found hiking, camping, Scuba diving, or enjoying other outdoor activities.  For updates on upcoming releases of his popular Petralist YA fantasy novels, or his fast-paced Facetakers scifi time travel thrillers, check his website:  www.frankmorin.org

Genre As Immersive Metaphor

A guest post by Martin L. Shoemaker.

“Listen, now. Read this carefully, because I am going to tell you something important. More than that: I am about to tell you one of the secrets of the trade. I mean it. This is the magic trick upon which all good fiction depends: it’s the angled mirror in the box behind which the doves are hidden, the hidden compartment beneath the table. It’s this: There is room for things to mean more than they literally mean. That was it.”

— Neil Gaiman, “Confessions: On Astro City and Kurt Busiek”

What is genre? That’s our topic this month, and you’re getting many answers from many authors, because genre has many aspects. It’s part setting, part conventions and tropes, and more. At a meta level, it’s reader expectations – and to a degree, non-reader expectations: many people have said of my story Today I Am Paul, “Oh, that doesn’t sound like science fiction!” Excuse me? An android caring for an Alzheimer’s patient isn’t science fiction? But every person who said that also said first, “Oh, I don’t read science fiction.” These aren’t SF readers, because they “know” what the genre’s about: spaceships and phasers and light sabers and such.

And that’s, unfortunately, another aspect of genre: it’s a wall people use to divide the world into “books I might like” and “those other books”. Without even understanding the range of a given genre, they decide it’s not for them.

One of the complaints non-genre readers often have is that genre is too clichéd, that the worlds of genre are ridiculous. They like to mock the tropes of fantasy and science fiction, in particular, finding and exaggerating the worst tropes. And let’s be honest: there are plenty of bad examples out there (even if we can’t all agree which ones they are). So they come to associate these bad examples with the very concept of fantastic worlds.

And there I think they’ve missed the mark entirely. By focusing on the worst, they miss the best, and the incredible literary power of worldbuilding, of genre.

What power is that? Let’s start with metaphor.

The Moon hung in the sky, its icy eye glaring down at us and demanding to know: When would we return?

The Moon doesn’t hang. It doesn’t have an eye, nor is it icy. It makes no demands. But as Gaiman tells us: There is room for things to mean more than they literally mean. By momentarily writing statements that are literally false, I conveyed a feeling and an effect that a more literal statement would lack:

The Moon in its orbit remained unoccupied since our last visit.

The same facts are conveyed, but the facts are – like the Moon – dead. In the metaphor, however, the Moon seems alive. Mysterious. Beckoning.

From metaphor, we move to the extended metaphor, or conceit. As the name implies, it’s a metaphor that builds over a longer passage, allowing you to build and explore similarities and contrasts.

He longed to return to the distant fortresses of the Moon: the palace walls of craters, with their mountainous turrets in their centers and their chambers and dungeons mined below. There a man might establish his quiet, airless kingdom, and no barbarians could storm the castle. Not without a space program of their own.

By describing the Lunar craters and central peaks in terms of castles and fortresses, I conveyed (I hope) the POV character’s militarized and somewhat romanticized view of life on the Moon. He’s not an explorer, he’s looking to build a kingdom.

Metaphor and conceit are powerful literary techniques, but I think genre gives us one even more powerful. In a good genre story, the entire world can be what I call an immersive metaphor. The world you build conveys the feelings, moods, and themes you wish the reader to experience.

For one recent example, look to Nnedi Okorafor’s novella “Binti” (excerpted here), winner of the Nebula. It was Okorafor’s first space story; and I heard (secondhand – I’m still trying to get an exact quote) that she said that prior to this story, space intimidated her. It was so isolated.

And when I heard that, I wanted to shout, “YES!”

Of course space is isolated. That’s one reason to tell a story in space: to put a character or characters in isolation and then explore the effects on them, in a story where you can pick and choose the environment to highlight your theme.

In The Lord of the Rings, forests are metaphors for both deep age (old forests with hidden secrets) and yet also spring and youth (the timeless forests of Lothlorien, where the past still lives). In Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest, the forest is a metaphor for unspoiled nature before man mars it for his purposes. In both, though, forests are essential elements of the worldbuilding, both as locations and also as challenges. There is room for them to be forests and to mean more.

In a typical cyberpunk story, the crowded megacity is a metaphor for the massive power structures that dwarf the individual, mocking their powerlessness; and the small but stubborn ways the protagonists find to pursue their own goals represent rebellion against that power. Cyberspace represents a frontier right inside the existing power structure, a place where knowledge literally is power. Yet at the same time, these elements drive plot and shape character. They are both world and metaphor, a metaphor that is all around the characters, wherever they look. A metaphor so pervasive, so immersive, that the characters don’t see it. But the readers can, if we as writers craft it into our worlds.

In my own work, I have two recurring metaphors that are also critical elements of my worlds. The first is simple: a character leaping from an airlock. The airlock is a boundary, and a metaphor for decision: Behind you is safety and the known; before you is danger and the unknown; and at some moment, you have to decide to cross that boundary. How a character crosses tells you something about their approach to challenges. Some people might do so timidly, but my characters almost always leap. They trained and fought to explore the unknown, and they’re not going to hold back now.

My other recurring metaphor is microgravity (sometimes called zero gravity, but microgravity is the more accurate term). In microgravity, you can’t walk or stand, you can’t sit, you can’t even lay down. Unless you strap yourself in place, you float; and the slightest force, even air currents, can set you onto a different course. Microgravity is a metaphor for uncertainty and change. How a character manages it can represent either watchfulness and skill or careless naiveté. Nothing is fixed, and you can’t just stand still. If you don’t consciously set your course, forces around you will set it for you. Yet at the same time that it serves as this metaphor, it also presents a physical challenge for the characters, one they cannot ignore.

And this worldbuilding can be a challenge for the writer as well. If you strive to get it right, you become keenly aware of how many ways there are to get it wrong. I write a lot of microgravity stories, and I have to go over every scene in my head. Have I implied that the character is standing or walking? When they swung their arm or shook their head, did I note how their whole body moved in response? If the engines fired, did I portray which direction suddenly became down?

But I like to think that it’s worth the effort. I want the reader to feel the weightlessness, to sense that nothing is fixed and the characters must control their own course. I want the world to be immersive – and the metaphor as well. I want the reader to live briefly in my world – and I want that to mean more than it literally means.

GUEST BIO: Martin L. Shoemaker is a programmer who writes on the side… or maybe it’s the other way around. Programming pays the bills, but a second place story in the Jim Baen Memorial Writing Contest earned him lunch with Buzz Aldrin. Programming never did that! His Clarkesworld short story “Today I Am Paul” was nominated for a 2015 Nebula and will appear in four year’s best anthologies and eight international translations. His work has appeared in Analog, Galaxy’s Edge, Digital Science Fiction, Forever Magazine, and Writers of the Future Volume 31.

The Silent Majority that is Science Fantasy

When we talk about genre-blending, we’d be remiss if we didn’t address the Mûmakil in the room (or the black hole if you prefer). After all, when we speak of “SFF” in our genre shorthand, we’re really describing two separate genres, Science Fiction and Fantasy. And the truth is that many, if not most SFF stories are actually a combination of the two.

Even a casual glance will yield many, many examples where the two genres are blended together to great effect. Though almost always referred to as one or the other, properties as diverse and popular as Star Wars (called Space Fantasy by George Lucas himself), The Dark Tower, Lost, and Doctor Who all exhibit some degree of shading between the two ostensibly separate genres.

Does your science fiction story contain technology that, while plausible, also skirts the edge of Clarke’s Third Law? Does your fantasy magic system or worldbuilding adhere to a well-established set of internal rules in the vein of Robert Jordan or Brandon Sanderson? While you can certainly cite examples of stories existing purely in one camp or the other, the reality is that Science Fiction and Fantasy are generally grouped together for good reason.

As with any literary technique, there are good and bad ways to employ this genre-blending.  But rather than pretend I’m an expert on the subject, I’m going to highlight the work of a couple of lesser-known authors who have mashed Science Fiction and Fantasy to good effect*.

*Note: One of my examples is technically more a blend of Horror and Science Fiction. Now, I know Horror is its own genre, but for the purposes of showcasing a fascinating bit of worldbuilding, I’m paraphrasing Daniel Abraham and considering Paranormal Horror to be a form of Fantasy set in a malefic universe. *ducks*

For starters we have R. Scott Bakker’s The Second Apocalypse meta-series, consisting of two sub-series: the trilogy named The Prince of Nothing and the tetralogy named The Aspect-Emperor. These are grimdark epic fantasy at its grimmest and darkest (think George R.R. Martin dialed up several notches), and Bakker creates a fascinating world with a history nearly as detailed as Tolkien’s Middle Earth. His philosophy-based magic system is more powerful the more pure a sorceror’s ability to grasp the Meaning (capital “M” intended), and those sorcerous schools that have to rely upon Analogies rather than Abstratctions produce sorcery of inferior power.

But it’s the two SF elements I want to discuss. In the first, an Übermensch-like group of warrior monks have hidden themselves away for 2000 years, practicing eugenics (and terrible neurological experiments) upon themselves over all that time in order to become beings of perfect logic, utterly devoid of passion (and thus, they believe, utterly in control of their own actions in a way no other humans are). The end result is almost a separate species, so attuned to subconscious cues that they are able to essentially read the thoughts and emotions of normal humans better than the humans themselves are.

Every epic fantasy needs a Big Bad, and instead of a fallen angel-type character in the vein of Sauron, Bakker gives us the Inchoroi, an alien race whose ship (called the Ark-of-the-Skies by the inhabitants of Bakker’s world) crash-landed on his world several thousand years prior to the start of the series. Their overriding goal? They’ve been traveling from world to world in their vessel, exterminating the inhabitants of each in order to sever the living world’s connection to the Outside, Bakker’s equivalent of an afterlife. It turns out that morality in the world of The Second Apocalypse is black and white and absolute, and the actions of the Inchoroi have guaranteed their damnation by the gods after death. Only by severing the connection between the living world and the dead can that fate be avoided.

Given its uncompromising view into humanity’s ugliest sides, The Second Apocalypse can be a rough read, But given its willingness to tackle issues of free will and the self, issues that modern neuroscience (a major influence of Bakker’s) are tackling currently, there is no other epic fantasy like it.

For my Science Fiction-based example of genre-blending, I present you Peter Watts’ brilliant (and Hugo nominated) book Blindsight. It’s an alien first-contact hard-ish Science Fiction that I’m not sure will ever be topped for me. His take on truly inhuman aliens is both believable and massively unsettling (and Watts himself spent time as a research biologist), but it is his science-based vampires that I want to talk about today. In Peter Watts’ Earth, the legend of vampires sprang up from a human subspecies that went extinct thousands of years ago. While they lived, the vampires evolved to hunt humans (and thus developed significantly more strength and brain power than us) as well as the ability to hibernate for long stretches to allow time for human populations to bounce back and forget the vampires existed.

But all that brain power came with a cost. The vampires would fall into a lethal seizure at the sight of any true right angles (like, say, a cross). Right angles are not something often encountered in nature, but as soon as baseline humans began constructing habitats and cities filled with right angles, the vampires went extinct. But the lure of all that brain power proved too great to resist, so in the near-future world of Blindsight, advanced genetic engineering has been used to resurrect the vampire subspecies. One of their number is deemed the perfect leader of the expedition to investigate the alien presence that has recently arrived at the edge of our solar system.

Reading Watts’ book, you’ll find yourself half-convinced that the vampire subspecies really did exist, so convincing is his biological background work. And much like Bakker’s works, Blindsight deals with issues of consciousness and self and what those concepts even mean (if you can’t tell, these issues are a pet interest of mine).

The combination of Science Fiction and Fantasy has produced some of our most enduring works of literature and popular culture. So if you are a purist who prefers one genre to the total exclusion of the other, think again about some of the works you have read and enjoyed. You may find the line dividing the genres is a lot blurrier than you realized.

About the Author: Gregory D. LittleHeadshot

Rocket scientist by day, fantasy and science fiction author by night, Gregory D. Little began his writing career in high school when he and his friend wrote Star Wars fanfic before it was cool, passing a notebook around between (sometimes during) classes. His first novel, Unwilling Souls, is available now from ebook retailers and trade paperback through Amazon.com. His short fiction can be found in The Colored Lens, A Game of Horns: A Red Unicorn Anthology, and the upcoming Dragon Writers Anthology. He lives in Virginia with his wife and their yellow lab.

You can reach him at his website (www.gregorydlittle.com), his Twitter handle (@litgreg) or at his Author Page on Facebook.

 

 

What Genre Is My Story?

Guest post by Renee Bennett.

Ever read about a ‘dystopian steampunk mystery’ or ‘epic fantasy conspiracy thriller’ or ‘romantic horror with an ecopunk twist’ or ‘weird West, with zombie superheroes’!

Yeah. Genre is complicated.

When people talk genre, they talk about story content: a love story, or aimed at kids, or contains rocket ships. They mean marketing categories, and marketing categories mean audiences.

Different audiences expect different things from different genres. People looking for love stories want sentiment, kids want kid stuff, and there is nothing so satisfying to the rocket-seekers as a really good blast-off. But what makes each genre what it is? And if you have blithely written a tale of first love between teenagers who are flying to Mars, which genre – which marketing category – does the tale belong to, and why?

It starts with conflict.

All stories have a main conflict. Orson Scott Card in ‘How To Write Science Fiction And Fantasy’ describes a tool to categorize a story’s main conflict: he calls it the MICE Quotient.

MICE stands for Milieu, Idea, Character, and Event. Each story type has its main conflict arise from a different story element. All stories will have all of these elements (mostly; exceptions apply for avant garde or experimental works), but they will weight them differently, depending on what their primary audience wants.

Milieu stories generate their conflict from setting and world-building. This is the conflict engine behind ‘big’ stories – epics, real and fantastical. It is also present in survival stories, war stories, and historical stories. The Lord of the Rings is a Milieu story: its main source of conflict is the motion of nations and the transformation of whole peoples in response to the war with Sauron.

Idea stories generate conflict through the exploration of ideas or information. The main character will start in a state of low information and end in a state of better understanding. The story is a puzzle: once it is solved, it’s over. This pattern is widely used in science fiction, particularly hard science fiction, and in detective stories. Andy Weir started The Martian from the seed of ‘What would happen if an astronaut were stranded?’ and built the rest – including the main character – from elements based on that premise.

Character stories generate conflict from within the characters, or from the relationships between them. They are intimately involved with characters facing – or refusing to face – their lives, choices, and selves. The novel Ordinary People begins with Conrad Jarrett’s return home after having tried to commit suicide in the wake of his brother Buck’s death, and it shows the ways he and his family confront and come to terms with this history – or fail to come to terms with it.

Event stories begin when a chaos agent is introduced into the main character’s life and end when the chaos agent is resolved. This agent can be another character, such as a love interest in a romance, or it can be an object (Maguffin) such as a treasure map or a packet of secret documents, as in adventure stories or thrillers. Consider the movie TITANIC, where Rose’s life changes completely when she meets Jack, and changes again when he dies. Against this, even the sinking of the ship (itself an Event plot) is secondary.

Note that last sentence. In a story which contains more than one plot, one plot will be the main plot, and all others will be subordinate. In fact, most stories will rank them.

For instance, in THE MARTIAN, the Idea of being castaway leads; the next most important element is Milieu, because Mars provides the obstacles main character Mark Watney faces. A number of Event subplots follow as obstacles are encountered and overcome. Watney’s Character was built last, from the question, “Who does this person need to be to survive this story?”

So, how does all this help decide which genre a piece truly is?

The main genres are Fantasy, Horror, Literary, Mainstream, Mystery, Romance, Science Fiction, Thriller, and Western. Each of these lends itself to the MICE Quotient in different ways. Sub-genres can also be ranked this way, but we don’t have space for that discussion.

Core works in each genre tend to rank MICE as follows:

Fantasy: Milieu, Event, Character, Idea.

Horror: Event, Character, Milieu, Idea.

Literary: Character, Idea, Milieu, Event.

Mainstream: Character, Event, Milieu, Idea.

Mystery: Idea, Event, Character, Milieu.

Romance: Event, Character, Milieu, Idea.

Science Fiction: Idea, Milieu, Event, Character.

Thriller: Event, Milieu, Character, Idea.

Western: Milieu, Event, Character, Idea.

You may notice that some of these are similar. Fantasies and Westerns rank MICE items the same, as do Horror and Romances. The difference comes down to expectations and the use of tropes.

Westerns are always set in some version of the ‘Wild West’, either past or present, or in a setting such as the Australian Outback which evokes similar images of rural living, wide open spaces, and individuality. Fantasies, however, do not restrict their settings in this way. They will always contain some other element, such as supernatural beasts or magic, which takes the story out of the familiar world we know and place it firmly in a different one. The changes may be minor, such as vampires living next door, or major, as in completely realized secondary worlds.

If the two genres combine, as in a Wild West Fantasy, then the main genre is considered Fantasy, because it is less restrictive.

Horror always has disquiet at its core. Its inciting Event renders the main character unsafe in body, mind, or both, and the story resolves when the character escapes or is overcome. A Romance Event is explicitly the meeting between main character and prospective mate, and the story is always about the decision to accept or decline that prospect.

In stories which combine Horror and Romance, where the inciting love interest is the Horror element and where the story ends unhappily, the story is a Horror with Romance overtones. Core Romances are comedies – they have happy endings. Unhappy endings are tragedies, which are acceptable in Horror, so the expectations of the audience will be better met there.

And so it goes. Literary works need in-depth analysis and exposition of Character first and foremost, and afficionados of the genre will forgive works which provide excellence in this while scanting everything else, which is why experimental and avant garde works (such as plotless novels) exist. Literary is also the genre which puts a premium on flashy writing for the sake of flashy writing.

Mainstream looks for Character first, but readers of this genre will tolerate only minor deviations from ‘real storytelling’, meaning these works will not scant Events, Milieus, etc. These audiences prefer ‘real world’ events or settings, but the category also contains works which ‘transcend genre’ – which only means the publisher thinks their appeal is broad enough that even non-genre readers will enjoy them.

Mystery begins with a puzzle and the character who will solve the puzzle. In this genre, Idea is better described as Information, where the villain of the piece has all of the information and the hero must discover that information, despite all obstacles.

Science Fiction, particularly Hard Science Fiction, starts with an Idea, a “What if…?” question, and revolves around the implications and permutations of a world in which the answer is “True.” However, Soft Science Fiction, which includes most Space Opera and -punk sub-genres, such as Steampunk, Cyberpunk, Dieselpunk, Decopunk, et al, tends to follow the pattern of Fantasy. Both types, however, have science – or science-like – Milieus, often in the future. Fantasy settings tend to be either past or present, and rarely feature science.

A Thriller always has a ‘thrilling’ element to its inciting Event, usually a matter of life or death and often containing a ‘ticking clock’ against which the characters contend. Acceptable settings, characters, and subordinate event types vary. ‘Typical’ thrillers are set in the present and involve at least one character, main or secondary, who is an agent of authority (government, police, etc.) and whose actions either oppose the disaster or work to assure it. Think spies stealing government secrets, terrorists set on mass killings, or anyone trying to avert a foreseeable catastrophe.

In mash-up work, the main genre is almost always going to be the least restrictive one – the need to abbreviate or eliminate inconvenient tropes will hit narrower categories harder. Combinations where MICE rankings are at extreme odds to each other pose special difficulties: Literary and Hard Science Fiction, for instance, do not mix well because Literary wants deep exploration and description of characters, accompanied by linguistic gymnastics, and Hard Science Fiction wants deep exploration and description of ideas told as simply and clearly as possible. Mixing genres, one must consider which audience is served first and best. A story suited to a narrow audience but marketed to a wider one is likely to be rejected.

But … do what you want. Write the story your way and worry later about its genre; it’s your story first. While I can point out different structures and what audiences see in them, they don’t matter until you have a story for its first and most important audience: you.

What do you look for?

 
Renée Bennett arrived in Calgary in 1972 and has been endlessly entertained watching the city grow ever since. In 1992 she joined IFWA, the Imaginative Fiction Writers Association, and is now their vice president. She runs In Places Between, the Robyn Herrington Memorial Short Story Contest, and coordinates the Author Liaison table at When Words Collide. Her own fiction has appeared on CBC Radio, Year’s Best Fantasy, and Rigor Amortis, among other places, and she has been a finalist in Canada’s Aurora Awards five times.