How Genres Work (And How They Don't)

These days, it seems like there are almost as many fiction sub-genres as there are books.

Me: What type of book is this that you wrote?

Indie Author Who Is Too Hipster To Be Confined By Labels: It’s sort of like a mind-bending, urban fantasy thriller with elements of eastern philosophy, all wrapped up in a Dr Seuss-meets-Kafka package, but if it were written by Stephen King pre-Dark Tower.

Me: Uh-huh. I see…well, what sorts of readers might enjoy this?

IAWITHTBCBL: People who like books. And people who like reading. And everyone else. I mean, it’s a story everyone can relate to. So it’s for everyone. Also: aliens.

…so…you don’t really know what you wrote, then.

Or if you did actually write that book, then God help you.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m all about bending genres. I love when authors successfully marry disparate elements in their books. This is, for example, one thing that makes Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges so wonderful.

But, genres are real things. They exist for a reason. And we have to label our books somehow, right? How else would you know where to find a book when you walk into a bookstore?

I admit, genres can be a little hard to define sometimes. Sometimes books legitimately cross into a couple genres.

Let’s look at The Hunger Games, for example:

• It’s too violent to be a drama/general literary fiction.
• There is a romance in it, yes, but the book as a whole isn’t a romance. (And really, what book doesn't have romance in it? It's probably the most universal element in books.) 
• It’s got its unsettling elements, but we’re certainly not talking about horror here.
• Some things about it will surprise you, and crimes are committed left and right, but that doesn’t make it a mystery.
• It’s not really a fantasy. Sure, it has a few fantastical elements in it, but not enough magic.
• It definitely can't be historical fiction, if for not reason other than that it takes place in the future.

All of that that is a good start, I suppose. Here’s where it gets tricky, though…

It has some heavy sci-fi elements: it’s in the future, and they have some technology that we don’t have. Can you imagine walking through your favorite bookstore and finding it in the sci-fi section, though? Sure, some of the important pieces are there (though not all of them), but it’s not really intended for people who love sci-fi, is it?

It looks like the basic genres aren’t enough, then. Now we have to start looking at sub-genres. (Sub-genres of sci-fi, that is, since that seems to be the closest parent genre.)

Though The Hunger Games has a bit of technology that we don’t, it’s not a high-tech sci-fi. Certainly it’s not Neuromancer or Blade Runner or the Matrix. No AI, no virtual reality worlds, etc.

And there aren’t any aliens or space travel, so that rules out space-based sci-fi.

It’s certainly speculative, though. (“What would happen in this scenario…”) And it’s definitely dystopian. (One-world order which is – shocker! – actually really bad for everyone.)

So it’s speculative and dystopian. Great! So we've basically figured out where The Hunger Games goes. (Oh, but don't forget that it's a young adult novel, which doesn't really say anything about the content itself, but there you have it.)

Interestingly, speculative fiction and dystopian fiction very very often go hand-in-hand, but they don’t always have to.

1984 (Orwell), Brave New World (Huxley), The Giver (Lowry)…these are all both speculative and dystopian.

But then we have The Road by Cormac McCarthy, which is speculative, but not dystopian. That’s fine. Rather, it’s speculative and post-apocalyptic.

…which, come to think of it, brings up another problem, though: I identified speculative as being a sub-genre of sci-fi. Yet The Road is certainly not sci-fi. It’s very realistic. No AI, no futuristic technology, no aliens, etc. So can speculative fiction actually be a sub-genre of both sci-fi and something else (in this case, literary fiction, I suppose)?

Further, if something can be the sub-genre of two parent genres, then doesn’t that mean it’s not really a sub-genre at all, but rather its own parent genre? What is a parent genre, if not that?

And don’t even get me started on horror. (I only say this because you don’t have to get me started on horror: I've already got plans for making that its very own post in the near future.)

My my. How all very confusing. Maybe IAWITHTBCBL wasn’t that crazy after all.*

What are your favorite genres?

And what are some books you love that are hard to pin down into just one genre?

*False. He’s definitely still crazy.