We spend a lot of time discussing how genres work, where to draw the lines between genres, and which tropes and motifs are essential to a particular genre. But I haven’t seen as much chatter about where genres come from and why they exist. If anything, I usually see people saying things like, “Genres are marketing categories.” Which is true, as far as it goes—except that it doesn’t address why those marketing categories matter, or why they’re so effective. So here’s my working theory for why genres exist in the first place.
Basically, somebody reads a book and really likes it. And then they want to read more books like that one, so they go looking for books that are similar to the one they just enjoyed.
Maybe that book was Lord of the Rings, in which case they want more epic fantasies featuring quests, plucky heroes, and elaborate worldbuilding. Maybe that book was Dune or Foundation, in which case they might go in search of complicated politics in outer space. Maybe it was Neuromancer, in which case they’re gonna crave cyberpunk. See also: Harry Potter (ugh), Twilight, Hunger Games, Fourth Wing. Y’all get the idea. There’s usually one book or one series that tons of people embrace, and it leads them to track down other books that have similar characteristics—not just tropes, but also style and ethos.
So yes, genres are marketing categories—but they usually work because they address a real demand on the part of readers, who really liked something and are hungry for more of it. (This is an important distinction, because a lot of the time marketing is about getting people interested in something that they might not care about as much, like one brand of soap over another.)
If you accept the notion that most genres have one (or a few) foundational texts, whose extreme popularity fueled demand for more of the same, then the question of what belongs in a genre really comes down to how much “the same” it needs to be.
I did some research on the history of epic fantasy for an episode of Our Opinions Are Correct, and the received wisdom seems to be that at first, authors stuck pretty closely to the template laid down by Tolkien. Lester del Rey started publishing other epic fantasy novels in 1977, and the earliest ones were somewhat closely modeled on Middle-earth. (Again, we talk about this a lot in our podcast episode, I’m summarizing.)
Over time, it seems like epic fantasy diversified in style, subject matter, and the sort of people whose work was centered in it. At this point, an epic fantasy no longer needs to feature a quest, a band of adventurers, or many of the other elements that mostly defined post-Tolkien high fantasy. What remains is a propensity towards maps, some notion of huge sweeping events that may or may not involve a war, the fate of kingdoms… and a hefty page count.
My sense is that a lot of genre labeling and identification comes down to vibes, or know it when you see it, much like porn.
Nobody read The Hunger Games and thought, “I need to read more books about a teenage girl who fights with a bow and arrow and eventually wears a pin with a bird on it.” Nobody even came away craving more teen death sports. What many people who loved that book wanted—myself very much included—was more of that feeling we got from it. Speaking for myself, I was dying to read more YA books that had that level of disdain for entrenched hierarchy, the state use of violence to crush resistance and placate/entertain a complacent population, and an entertainment-industrial complex that all too often dehumanizes people in the pursuit of pandering.
In fact, I’d argue that a genre only really becomes healthy when it outgrows its foundational text and starts appealing to the spirit, rather than the letter, of its influences. Another example: after George R.R. Martin’s Westeros books hit big, I read some grimdark fantasies that felt like they were trying to recapture that same magic—but I’ve gotten more of the same feeling I got from A Clash of Kings by reading fantasy books that share few of the same plot devices but have a similar respect for the characters and showing the consequences of their choices.
So when I approach a genre, or a particular work that I’m influenced by, I try to think about why I love it, and how it made me feel—rather than the specific elements I could lift from it. (Of course, those two things often blur together quite a bit.)
In the case of my YA space-opera trilogy, I thought a lot about why I love space opera, both on the page and on screen. I especially thought about space battles—not because I felt like something can’t be a proper space opera without pew-pew-pew, but because I really, really love a good space battle. I love cool tactics, taunting speeches over viewscreens, ambushes, and one commander trying to get inside the head of another.
At one point I went on Twitter (RIP) and asked people about their favorite space battles, and what made them so good. The answers predictably involved Wrath of Khan, BSG, and Galaxy Quest, but also a few others I didn’t expect. I worked really hard to make every battle in my trilogy pull its own weight narratively and feel like a real turning point in the story—but also made sure it was as cool as I possibly could make it and as different as possible from the other ones in the trilogy.
That trilogy is instructive in a different way, though. In earlier drafts of Victories Greater Than Death, I struggled a bit to balance the Star Trek framework of a captain and experienced officers with young-adult fiction’s expectation that teens will be on their own with no adult supervision. I knew the obvious thing was to have a group of teenagers steal a starship and go off on an adventure alone—basically like the first season of Star Trek: Prodigy, which didn’t exist yet. But I wasn’t so interested in that, for various reasons. Nor did I want to magically give my protagonist Tina all of the experience of a seasoned captain right off the bat, which absolutely was on the table with the premise I had set up—because I felt like that made her less interesting as a teen protagonist.
In the end, Victories Greater Than Death plays with the tension between those two modes, the Star Trek story and the teen adventure. That let me kind of play up Tina’s identity crisis, and her struggles over whether she needs to murder people in order to be a galactic hero. Plus I got seriously attached to Yatto the Monntha, a former movie star turned officer.
The second and third books of the trilogy lean much harder in the direction of “teens on their own” and away from the Lower Decks-type thing of having my teen characters be cadets/ensigns on board a ship full of older officers. This partly came from listening to the characters, at least half of whom were not interested in joining the Royal Fleet after their first adventure. But I also feel as though, ironically, getting further away from the direct influence of Star Trek in the second and third books helped me come closer to capturing the spirit of what I love about Star Trek.
I don’t think I’m alone in caring more about the feelings that a book gave me than about the specific widgets it used to conjure those feelings—in fact, I would imagine I’m not the first to say any of this. We do live in an era where people are more highly aware of specific tropes they like or don’t like, thanks to things like TV Tropes and Archive of Our Own among other things, but I still get a strong sense that it’s about the feelings those tropes evoke rather than simply having that trope be present.
In other words, I think genre labels are immensely useful, but we should all remember they’re mostly vibes and feels, rather than a set of prescriptions.
This article was originally published at Happy Dancing, Charlie Jane Anders’ newsletter, available on Buttondown.
I agree with you about the spirit being far more important than the foundational books. We see this in movie adaptations all the time. The debate is often whether the movie captures the spirit of the book.
I seek out SFF that features, to use the D&D terminology, chaotic neutral. I want disruption without dystopia. To go back a few years, I found the Honor Harrington series too lawful for my tastes but, moving to the present, I found Manibo’s Escape Velocity perfect.
I’ve drifted away from stories of space battles. I found space dogfights unrealistic but I still love Star Trek’s Balance of Terror with two space ships hunting each other in the cosmos, likely at great distances from each other, with lightspeed weapons, and one with stealth technology. My favorite book was probably Glen Cook’s Passage at Arms. I can’t classify my later science fiction favorites cause I haven’t found enough of them to group into a category. They might deal with space exploration but they tend to benefit from the author’s state-of-art knowledge of science and technology. Nowadays, I’m attracted to urban fantasies that are also mysteries.
A lot of the arguments about where a [sub] genre begins and is bounded has to do with different people picking out different elements as the fundamental spirit of the genre
Sometimes movies seem to miss the point on what makes a movie successful.
I see genres as labels much in the way that nouns operate as labels. So arguments about how we need to “transcend” genre seem to sound as though we are being told to “transcend” nouns. Instead, we should be sharpening them. Dictionaries, anyone?
Unsheathe your dagger definitions.
How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have an undefined word!
I had a university lecture once, talking about the difficulties of object recognition in AI (in the general sense, not the current narrow hype around Large Language Models). The lecturer showed a series of pictures of chairs, starting with a very typical functional chair, and getting increasingly different from one another.
It was easy to agree that all were chairs, but very hard to define what exactly they had in common, beyond some sense of “chairiness”. In the same way, genres tend to coalesce around a shifting feeling of commonality, not something you can apply hard rules to.
To “transcend chairiness” would, I guess, mean designing a piece of furniture which was useful for sitting on, but maybe also had other purposes. Something where people could debate whether or not it “counted” as a chair, but would be missing the point if they did.
That’s what authors sometimes aim to do: rather than worry what genre label their readers might put on the work, they concentrate on it being enjoyable, or meaningful, or impactful. Others use genre more straightforwardly, helping users understand what to expect; that is also valid.
I often think about the phrase regaling us to “tear down the walls of genre!” And then I wonder what happens to the roof over our heads when we tear down the walls…
Admittedly, definitions can be contentious (“Is a hot dog a sandwich?”). But in general, they are useful for communication in much the way that genres communicate to readers the content/intent/relationship of a work to other works of interest.
Should authors worry about observing genre labels or conventions? Only to the extent that they wish to communicate with the readership. Or amuse/surprise/annoy them by playing with the labels or conventions. If not, then not.
TLDR;
“Genre labels should be descriptive, not prescriptive.”
I think this is great. You really hit the nail on the head for me with your point about “appealing to the spirit, rather than the letter,”
The genre question is one I’ve wrestled with several times, on blog, newsletter, and now Substack. I still don’t think I’ve reached a complete resolution, but you may have helped me get a bit closer. I’m saving the URL of this essay to refer to again.
Thank you.
Marketing?
Tolkien’s works became a high-selling product at a certain point in publishing history, and in terms of The Hobbit, long after they had first been written and published; a cascade of fantasy followed, that ran the gamut when it came to quality.
“Hard-SF,” dystopian SF, utopian SF, space opera, mil-SF, etc. have all had their moments, followed by deconstruction, followed by “a fresh take,” etc.
Depending on when one takes as a starting point for a given genre in a given language (Verne? Poe? Wells? Shelley? Haggard? Dunsany?) seems like a vaguely 20-year cycle, in terms of popular tastes and sales, but also seems like as the market and channels have atomized, the cycles get shorter.
It gets even more confusing when you have books by mostly-SF authors, such as some of the books by Iain Banks (with no M), or William Gibson’s Blue Ant trilogy, which don’t contain anything actually Scifi. No spaceships, no aliens, no advanced technology or future time frame, and yet they somehow still feel like scifi. It really is all about vibes.
I’ve also always loved the cattiness of referring to ‘proper’ literature as simply “non-genre”.