Unfortunately I Am Wrestling With Genre Again - Reactor

When Orbital won the Booker Prize in 2024, arguments cropped up like weeds: Was it science fiction? Was it most definitely not science fiction? If not, why not; if so, why? I’m still thinking about those discussions. I’m hung up on the recurring discourse about what literary fiction is and what it isn’t in relation to SFF.  I still want to know if you can draw a line between “romantasy” and “fantasy with romance.” Is which genre term comes first indicative of where a book falls on the spectrum? I dunno. I don’t know anything.

But while going in these loops of is/is not, knowing/not knowing, I stopped and asked myself: Does it matter?

Does it matter what genre something is? Does it matter to you when you’re reading? When you’re looking for a new book? When you’re reading about books? Do you think about the genre or subgenre or handy-dandy tropes-turned-tags when you’re reading or shopping? 

I am genre-indifferent at many of these times. But the world at large seems to feel otherwise. There are newspapers that put their SFF coverage into occasional columns, if they have it at all; there are outlets that publish “All this week’s new books!” lists that never include SFF books. There are, still, somehow, people who act as if genre writing is not “real” writing, and reading it not “real” reading. (SFF books that have gotten so big they’ve become mainstream are the allowed exceptions, of course.) All these things demonstrate the fact that genre-specific spaces are necessary. We need Locus and Strange Horizons (and this very site!) and blogs and social media lists made up of all the people who read SFF. 

Genres need their own awards because general literary awards are not going to recognize genre. Genres need their own readers and reviewers because too often, general literary critics don’t recognize what they’re looking at when they read genre fiction. 

I don’t particularly like any of these terms, and I don’t even really like the way I’m using them. I was trying out “mainstream” instead of “general literary,” but that didn’t work either. What “mainstream” means in books changes all the time. When I was a kid, everyone read Dean Koontz and Stephen King. Now they still read Stephen King, but they also read Rebecca Yarros and George R.R. Martin. Or James Patterson and Sarah J. Maas and Suzanne Collins. We’re mainstream! Except when we’re not. 

Here is what frustrates me about genre conversations: the way they so quickly become us vs. them. What might begin as a discussion of topics or tropes or themes or approaches to fiction so often becomes a hierarchy or a series of sweeping generalizations. These are right, and these are wrong, or at best less right. Literary fiction is about midwestern professors trying to sleep with their students, and fantasy is about feisty princesses who can do their rescuing themselves, thank you very much. Neither of these things is true (except when they are). 

At Strange Horizons, Ada Palmer has a very interesting argument that SFF writers are historians. There is so much to like in this piece, which cleverly manages to be very smart about worldbuilding while only using the word “worldbuilding” twice. She has intriguing thoughts about power and changing the world, and if I do not particularly like the phrase “advance claims”—as in, stories advance claims about how the world might change—she does step back and say that she could use the word “teaches” there instead. I would go a little further and say that books about the world changing explore possibilities about change, or ask questions about who might manifest it, and why or why not. I like my SFF to ask more questions than it answers.

But my pushback really came in here:

Do I love a book in which a “powerless” character goes on an internal journey to come to terms with the world? Sure do. But is this a universal trait of literary fiction? Well. How do you define “powerless,” and what constitutes “the world”?  (I also don’t think SFF is only about changing the world, and in fact I’d love to see more SFF that wasn’t operating with such large stakes, but that is a topic for another column.)

But I suppose it could look like a litfic trait if you’re setting litfic up in opposition to SFF. Us versus them. What our books do versus what their books do. I bristled here because of how it creates an either/or situation. As Roseanna Pendlebury noted on Bluesky, “But if litfic is universally characterised by the ‘coming-to-terms’ definition, and SFF by ‘the world usually changes’, as Palmer focuses on, they can never cohabit. The definitions /are/ mutually exclusive.”

This is hard for me to argue with, in a way, because of how I read, which is across this line and around it. I am especially interested in books that defy the idea that SFF and literary fiction are mutually exclusive—books like Confessions of the Fox, and Cloud Atlas, and The Ministry of Time, and North Continent Ribbon, and a whole lot of YA books that will only muddle this discussion of genres further. I don’t read any genre all that differently from any other genre. I read books about people dealing with situations and feelings and other people; sometimes they change the world, and sometimes they change a small corner of it, and sometimes they themselves are changed. Sometimes all of that happens at once. Sometimes the books’ authors are clearly, intentionally wedding their work to a lineage of other works, and sometimes the lines of influence are less clear.

But Palmer’s definitions did make me wonder: Is this why SFF readers can seem reluctant to read books that appear to be “literary” even when they’re using the same devices as SFF? Why general readers are sometimes resistant to accept that SFF that has reached the mainstream—The Handmaid’s Tale is a classic example here—is, in fact, SFF? Are expectations actually the defining factor between the genres, if there is one? Is that the real deciding line between which climate-fiction novels get published by SFF imprints and which come out on the literary side, with minimalist covers?

I can’t define literary fiction. At swordpoint I might say it is made up of the books taken seriously by award committees and higher-brow press; that it might be said to depend more heavily on the writer’s prose style than genres that are more plot-centric; that it frequently takes place in the real world and considers real-life concerns and the hows and whys of a person moving through their world. But if you asked me again in a week, I might argue with myself.

I have a faint memory that bookstore sections were once sometimes labeled “general fiction.” This, one might argue, is too broad. Too general! Anything could go in there. And yes, it could. But readers are sophisticated now. We know how covers are designed to get genre across in a single glance. Blobby colors: highbrow, has a blurb that calls it “important,” ambitious in some way, destined to be reviewed by the New York Times. Mostly black background with an elaborate serif font, ornate florals/daggers/vines, faintly William Morris-inspired background: romantasy or dark academia, depending on how much black is used. Cartoon-like illustrations in bright colors and simple lines: contemporary romance. I won’t go on. (But I want to.) If you put a regular reader in front of a shelf of books, without looking at the backs she will probably be able to pick out which ones are of interest to her. We are all so well trained.

Still, “general” may be more useful than “literary,” given that the implied superiority of “literary”—anything not “literary fiction” is clearly less literary, no?—is doing no one any good. 

I can’t define science fiction, or fantasy, and I don’t really want to. But I do want us—whatever “us” my fellow genre readers feel we are a part of—to consider not being in opposition to “them.” To use genre terms as descriptors rather than buckets with the lids tightly glued on. These things should be tools, not dividers. Fantasy, romantasy, cozy, thriller, cyberpunk, dark academia, the rest—they’re nebulous clouds, overlapping, shifting, moving across the sky of public opinion. 

We can, and maybe we should, read the same books differently. Orbital can be science fiction and not be science fiction—be a story about humans in space, doing science, and also a story in which humans are small and the Earth is large and they are absolutely not changing it, only watching it. Their tech is realistic, as I understand it; they do not appear to be from the future. But Earth is a planet, and observing a planet is a science fictional activity.

All of these things can be true. 

None of this is to say that genres shouldn’t or don’t exist, or that we should stop categorizing things; we would do that anyway. If genres didn’t exist, we would invent them (see also: the ever expanding lists of sub- and micro-genres!). But there is a long history of us vs. them when it comes to SFF and litfic, and the more I read, the more I think we are policing those boundaries too closely. I understand why SFF readers want to claim some things as ours and reject some things as not-ours, especially when we have long been looked down on by people who think they don’t read genre. (I believe that literary fiction is a genre, even if I can’t define it.) But I also think that defensive streak does us little good. 

And yet, I find I get most invested in the idea of genre in defense of it. I resent the beloved outlets that seem to only cover SFF as an afterthoughts; the lists that simply don’t bother to include it; the people who act as if it can never live up to some specific literary measure and refuse to be shown examples of things that do, in fact, live up to all kinds of literary measures. I resent the people who will take the worst example of an SFF cliche and pretend it is a definitive example of anything. As if there are not terrible books in every genre. With any given genre, you have highbrow, you have lowbrow, you have every brow in between. SFF has pulp, and we have poetry. It’s what I love about this nebulous cloud of a genre.

But I want to reject that defensiveness. I want to reach out instead of closing off, to extend a welcome to the readers who think that genre, any genre, is only one thing, to show them how it contains multitudes. Is it so difficult to think that a literary fiction reader could love Ancillary Justice or Rakesfall or The Spear Cuts Through Water? Are SFF readers ignoring Interior Chinatown or The Bone Clocks or Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind because they might be in a different part of the bookstore? Are we not going to claim Station Eleven as SFF? What do we do with Annihilation? Who gets to call dibs on Zone One? As the meme asks, why don’t we have both?

If we must define genre, though, I think I will go with Ted Chiang, who said in The Believer that genre is “an ongoing conversation. Genre is a conversation between authors, between books, that extends over decades.”

Some people will reject that conversation (looking at you, Ian McEwan); some will bound enthusiastically into it; some will be wallflowers, or think they’re at a different party. Some will stumble into a conversation they might not be aware has been going on for decades. But the conversation continues, the guests change, readers start new offshoot conversations. Genre means everything; genre means nothing. Reading SFF means holding the possible and the impossible in your head at the same time. Can we do that with genre, too?