A Modest Request for a Little More Genre Chaos

I am here today to advocate for a certain amount of chaos. A certain kind of chaos. I have been reading, accidentally, some rather stodgy post-apocalyptic books, and they are making me crave one thing and one thing only: genre fuckery.

In modern times, with our plethora of genres and subgenres, there is a lot of fun, a lot of wire-crossing and bridge-building among bookstore sections. There is so very much of what I think of as “1 + 1 = 4,” which is to say mashups in which two genres (inasmuch as any genre is solidified or certain) make a very pretty Venn diagram with one another and find that the overlap in the middle is, as the man says, bigger on the inside. 

SF and cozy mysteries. SF and horror. Fantasy and procedurals. And, of course, the biggest of them all: fantasy and romance. It would be absurd for me to ask, at this moment in time, that the world cough up more genre mash-ups for me; what is romantasy if not the juggernaut of mash-ups? It may not be my personal cup of tea, but I am genuinely quite delighted for everyone standing in front of the monster-fucking display at their local bookstore in a state of absolute bliss. 

I love a mashup. I love Malka Older’s cozy, tea-drenched, sharp-as-a-tack space mysteries. I love Catherynne Valente putting Douglas Adams and Eurovision in a blender with a whole Michael’s worth of glitter and satin. 

But I can love something and still want more. 

I have a loosely sketched out periodic table of messing about with genre, and it has four categories. (There are more. You could probably come up with five more off the top of your head. These are just mine, in this moment.) There are the mash-ups, as discussed. There is genre indifference, when writers—often those shelved in the literature section, sometimes not—are unconcerned with what genre is or does or believes in. There is genre playfulness, a sort of “what if?” kind of messing around. Can an orc run a coffee shop? Turns out the answer is yes! 

And then there’s fuckery. I am using this word—fully aware someone will turn up their nose at my coarse language—for all that it implies: Intention. Irreverence. Maybe even a hint of aggression. Not hatred, not scorn; that veers off into its own category, and one in which I’m not as interested. (There is a special place on shelves I don’t visit for authors who think they can reinvent a genre without reading any of the books in it.) But a sort of gonzo appreciation that turns into its own series of questions: Why does this genre tend toward this sort of behavior? What does X trope say about the genre as a whole? What if you turn it all on its head? What if you cut off its head? What can we find in the wreckage of all these ships (literal, not fandom) and carriages and planets?

It is hard to say exactly what I mean by genre fuckery because, like so many other things in this world, it’s a matter of knowing it when you see it. It’s a little bit brazen. Sometimes it’s something magical and powerful, and sometimes it’s a hot mess. (Genre creativity is by no means a perfect indicator of a great book.) It requires a big swing; sometimes the results are more admirable than enjoyable. 

I started thinking more about genre fuckery when I read Rakesfall, which resists any genre label you might try to put on it. I kept thinking about it when I read Olga Tokarczuk’s 2018 Nobel Prize lecture, which is about a lot of things, bigger and more grand than I can really get my head around. But she thinks there is more that books and stories can do—more ways to tell them, more ways to fit the whole world into them. She is not a fan of genres at all: “The division into genres is the result of the commercialization of literature as a whole and an effect of treating it as a product for sale with the whole philosophy of branding and targeting and other, similar inventions of contemporary capitalism.”

I think this is true, and I also think that some readers like genres the same way we like tags and other classifications: ease of finding. A genre label can help and harm, a fact well known to anyone who’s ever read about an author insisting that their book about robots is not science fiction. Genre is a tool, and tools can be misused.

But as Tokarczuk goes deeper into this space, in this artfully meandering discussion about narrative and story and books and the modern world, she nears a question: She wonders if there is another kind of narrator possible, one with “a point of view, a perspective from where everything can be seen.”

If you have read The Spear Cuts Through Water, you know where I’m going with this. In that book—an epic fantasy, full of battles and magical tortoises, and yet also the story of a family and a history, and also so much more—Simon Jimenez gives voice to an incredible panoply of characters, of creatures and things. Voices intrude on the main narrative in italics, butting in to say their pieces, short and to the point, heartbreaking and strange. It is a kind of genre fuckery, I think, to insist on the power and possibility of those voices. It is a kind of genre fuckery to say things that a genre does not often say. 

I love the tropes and trappings of SFF; I grew up on the most well-worn of stories, the low-born boys growing to save the world, to come into their power, to marry the princesses. And I love watching writers twist and turn those tropes and trappings, translating them, reshaping them, making them sing in new voices and registers. But I feel like we’re on the verge of a next step, maybe. Another shift in what this whole big, sprawling, multiversal kind of storytelling can be. I see it in Rakesfall; I see it, in ways I can’t explain, in Kerstin Hall’s Asunder; I see it in The Archive Undying and Out of the Drowning Deep and Radiance and Archangels of Funk and In Universes, and I think all the time about how I saw it in Midnight Robber and having been chasing that same reading experience ever since. I see it in every book that finds magic among the stars. (I feel like Clarke’s law should have given us a lot more space magic by now.)

There have always been writers fucking with genre. There have always been writers using genre to say things that its most successful books were not saying. Maybe what’s really happening is the doors to visibility, to bigger readerships, are finally cracking open. I hope we can shove them open wide.