Tag Archives: cross genre

Genre-Blending: 3 Keys to a Well-Mixed SFF/Crime Blend

Guest post by Jayne Barnard.

It isn’t easy to pull a balance of elements from two genres into a single story. Mysteries need crimes, suspects, red herrings, and character development for motivation. Science fiction and fantasy require questing characters, a reasonably adventurous plot, and a certain amount of world-building as well. Each of those elements absorbs words, and melding them all smoothly into a single narrative – often a short story with a tight word count – can be agonizing. Here are three keys to cutting down the word-wastage and blending the genre elements smoothly:

  1. Don’t describe anything about the story-world except the facets needed to understand the action. Concentrate on what’s different from the reader’s default Earth-based mental image. Integrate those world-building elements into the characters’ inner thoughts, actions, and dialogue. Even though you, the author, must know what political, social, technological and possibly tectonic elements shaped the physical surroundings, your readers don’t need to know it all. Your readers only need to feel confident that it does fit together in some rational pattern, and that if they asked you, you could tell them. So only describe the bits that they need to know to understand the current story.

In When the Tide Burns (appearing in BURNT, Analemma Press, August 2016), the setting is a barge moored in a garbage-packed cove as the wind is rising. This could be present time, familiar reality for coastal dwellers until the fifth sentence. The soapberry wax, all that protected their clothing and equipment from the acid spray, was down to its last sheen in the tin’s bottom corners. Not such a normal cove after all, but one holding a danger unfamiliar to the readers. The implied menace of the acid spray, combined with the rising wind, are not only effectively alien elements of world-building but introduce a sense of a rising menace against which our protagonist must pit her wits.

  1. When introducing characters, only describe what makes the alien, orc, or robot different from an ordinary human. Don’t bother with anything about their culture or planet of origin unless it’s vital to the plot of this story. You need to know it all; the reader doesn’t. Again, integrate. Don’t info-dump.

In Quest for Parts (Enigma Front, Analemma Press, 2015) we see what the protagonist sees: a scrawny, pasty, generally human-looking intruder. But… Ignoring the racket, the guy stared into the sky-blue mirror, adjusting a knob at his collar with one claw. His face shimmered, gaining warmer tones while losing the sharp tips to his nose, ears and chin. The lasers in the room shimmered, too, stopping when his face settled. This character has claws, not fingernails, and can adjust his appearance by turning a knob. He’ll need those assets later in the story, so best to slide them into our protagonist’s, and the reader’s, first impression. 

  1. Make some element of your mystery one that could only occur in that particular alternate reality. Stories that could have happened down the block but are set on a space station will not be as engaging as those that require, nay, demand the setting and culture you have created for them.

In MADDIE HATTER AND THE DEADLY DIAMOND, the inciting incident sets this up immediately: The expeditionary airship of Baron Bodmin, ardent African explorer, has been found adrift and deserted. Its log-book is missing and no clue remains to its captain’s fate. A fortnight after its last sighting over the mouth of the Suez Canal, the airship appeared off the coast of Cornwall, floating low and rudderless above the waves. No escape canopy or life-vest remained on board.   The batty baron must have vanished from an airship because only airships can stay aloft indefinitely without fuel or a pilot. Exactly where he vanished, and whether by accident, on purpose, or someone else’s design, is the first of many questions for which our intrepid Steampunk reporter must seek answers.

Now to integrate them all. An example from Painted Jade (unpublished) opens with all of the above: Working security on the top side of a conglomerate-built drift makes you a traffic warden in any gated community anywhere. You spend your days petting the dogs and smiling at the nice ladies. Or, if you’re me, trying to reverse that process. Troubles happen way down the bottom, where the ore processors and overcrowded labor force are located. Not my turf. I’m up here with the shiny clean management and their families. Low crime? Try non-existent. So it was unusual, to say the least, to get a morning report about a body bobbing against a pricey porthole high up on C7. A human body, not a stray hunk of rock freed from the asteroid belt. The dome owner objected less to the body proper than to it blocking his view of ore-blasting among the asteroids.

This opening encompasses all three of the keys: world-building, character, and unique element to the crime. The space habitat, the mining industry and the rudiments of a class structure are set out immediately. The point-of-view character’s job and general attitude are on the table up front. No other setting but space allows for the body, and all the evidence the killer left on it, to be perfectly preserved from the moment of disposal. Additionally, the space station serves like one of Agatha Christie’s isolated manor houses: all the suspects and the next possible victims are trapped in one place. The story could not happen anywhere else.

Thus, the essence of a nice, smooth blend of genres: integrate world-building with the lead characters’ actions, which also reveal their attitudes and attributes. Make the crime specific to that world, and the solution unique to those characters.

 

Jayne from steamconJayne Barnard is a founding member of Madame Saffron’s Parasol Dueling League for Steampunk Ladies and a longtime crime writer. Her fiction and non-fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines. Awards for short fiction range from the 1990 Saskatchewan Writers Guild Award for PRINCESS ALEX AND THE DRAGON DEAL to the 2011 Bony Pete for EACH CANADIAN SON. Her longer work has been shortlisted for the Debut Dagger in the UK and won the Unhanged Arthur in Canada. You can visit her at her blog, on Facebook or @JayneBarnard1

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

Gregory D. Little is the author of the Unwilling Souls, Mutagen
Deception, and the forthcoming Bell Begrudgingly Solves It series. As
a writer, you would think he could find a better way to sugarcoat the
following statement, but you’d be wrong. So, just to say it straight, he
really enjoys tricking people. As such, one of his greatest joys in life is
laughing maniacally whenever he senses a reader has reached That
Part in one of his books. Fantasy, sci-fi, horror, it doesn’t matter. They
all have That Part. You’ll know it when you get to it, promise. Or will
you? He lives in Virginia with his wife, and he is uncommonly fond of
spiders.

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.