Lately I've been having trouble with genre. Specifically, the lines between them. I like to think of geek-related stuff as "speculative fiction," which I then further delineate into science fiction, fantasy, and horror. But that really doesn't cover it all, as I'm coming to learn.
This comes to mind mostly because I'm working on getting one of my novels, Reign of Rezal, ready to publish in e-book format. Which means I've been thinking about various ways to market it, but I run into an impasse because I don't know how to describe it.
I've had this problem for years, of course. People ask me what my novel is about, and the best I can do without delving into a lot of plot summary is say "alien invasion." There are also genetically-modified super soldiers in a pseudo-dystopian futuristic America, which I originally thought made it fall very solidly within the science fiction category. Of course, there are also psychics and people who can tap into the energy of the Earth to produce magical effects. So there are fantasy elements. And, like most things I write, there are darker elements (zombies, apocalypse, that kind of thing) that reek of horror.
The more I think about it, though, the less I think this is particularly unique. Here's an example everybody should be familiar with: Star Wars. At first glance, it's science fiction. There are spaceships and aliens and lasers and other such tropes. On the other hand, there are the Jedi and Sith, who access a mystical field of "life force" to produce magical effects. If that's not fantasy, I don't know what is. Similarly, I ran into this problem for the brief period in which I tried to organize my shelves by genre and it came to my X-Men comics. I'm starting to think they have more in common with urban fantasy than anything else (despite that unfortunate storyline with the Starjammers and all that crap).
For a lot of people, it means creating more and more genres. Superhero, paranormal (or urban fantasy, if you prefer), even steampunk--although I don't know how much that counts since there are barely any books or movies or anything more than guys in costumes that constitute that genre. And, of course, making anything "comedic" just creates more offshoots.
I guess there's nothing wrong with this, although my neat little mental organization method gets shot all to hell. But then again, nothing is that simple when you really analyze it, huh?
For a complete mind-bending and genre-mutt film, you should watch She. It is streamed on netflix if you have it. Not the 60's movie, but the 80's one. There are post-apocalyptic pseudo-barbarians, psychics, cults, and other weird things.
ReplyDeleteAnd come to think of it, I think that this helps show the need and often use of word clouds that describe a post, movie, book, etc. Maybe instead of going into a overly descriptive or not descriptive enough genre nomenclature, you should just word cloud it. Unless, this isn't possible, I am not sure how that would word on a epublish list.
DeleteI'm hoping they have some function where you can just add tags to things, which just means there will be like a dozen different tags to describe the same book.
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