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BEYOND THE RUINED NIGHTS is now available for preorder. You can see the announcement here.
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Project Progress:
Publication for BEYOND THE RUINED NIGHTS is still on track!
I haven’t made much more progress on Book 2, because I’ve been tied up with publishing stuff.
Other projects are still currently on hold.
At the June Meeting for the private writer’s group I run in the Jackson Metro, during the critique of a member’s work, we ended up discussing the finer (one might even say granular) details of the Fantasy Genre. That is to say, the many, many, many, sub and micro Genres that actually make up the big, umbrella term of FANTASY.
Recent Fascinations: Too Many Damn Genres
What I’m really saying here is that, as someone who is both fascinated by the nuances of genre as a whole, and someone who is intimately invested in the terminology, I started asking particularly…specific questions about the piece. The piece was great, by the way, but as I asked my questions I realized that the other writers in the meeting didn’t quite see them as absolutely vital questions. That isn’t to say that I think genre terminology is some ironclad topic that should always be treated as the most important piece of the writing process. Instead, I think it is more of a marketing necessity, and one that the previous generations of Fantasy writers did not have to deal with.
That isn’t to say that there hasn’t always been genre delineation. Speculative Fiction, the old man genre that eventually split off into Science Fiction and Fantasy, which nowadays is reserved for more “literary fiction”, was in and of itself a term to help categorize the various books out there. Once Fantasy found its true footing, really around the time of the publication of LORD OF THE RINGS, the greater genre delineation started to become common knowledge.
For decades, the core terminology worked as follows:
- Epic Fantasy-Wide spanning, epic worlds, end of the world stakes. Example: LORD OF THE RINGS.
- Heroic Fantasy-A single, heroic figure versus the forces of evil. Example: Conan the Barbarian and Elric of Melnibone.
- Urban Fantasy-Fantasy set in the “real” world, typically more grounded. Example: The Dresden Files.
Of course, there were always conversations around what fell into what sub-genre, and where things like DUNE belonged, which eventually spawned its own subgenre of Sci-Fantasy along with a handful of others. For the most part, though, these categories were embraced by publishers and turned into usable, categorizable things, things that readers could at least partly rely on to describe the book they were planning to read, and handy labels that writers could use to quickly give a sense of the tone or feel of their work.
Since about the 80s and 90s, though, things have started to get a little more complicated. Sticking to fantasy for the sake of this particular discussion, there were a number of things that started to happen that further muddied the waters. First was the specification around what LEVEL of magic a story dealt with. Terms like “high” and “low” fantasy came to define entire sects of the genre. The more overt the magic, the closer it came to “high” fantasy. Then, when writers like Glen Cook and George R.R. Martin popularized the “Grimdark” genre, which focuses on low magic, epic stakes, and gritty character portrayal, the tendency to micro-name genres started becoming more and more common. This only became infinitely more complicated in the late 2010s and the early 2020s when short form social media content created an entirely new type of fiction analysis, one hyper-focused on categorizing more and more specific genre traits in an effort to identify the crux of a readers taste, eventually, or at least possibly, removing the possibility of a “disappointing read.”
Regardless of what anyone may think of this desire to cull out any potential bad reads, I think it’s a horrible idea for the record, especially for writers, one undeniable fact is that it has led to an explosion of micro-genres.
A handful of examples:
Romantasy, a combination of fantasy and romance, where the romance is as central as the rest of the plot elements. It has its own host of sub-sub genres. (i.e. ACOTAR)
Magepunk, a type of fantasy combining elements of the steampunk genre with high magic. Partly popularized by fantasy titan Brandon Sanderson, it’s another genre that is easing up to the line of science fiction in a way that often makes the science fiction hardliners very irritated. (i.e. Mistborn and Arcane)
Cozy Fantasy, which takes the traits of slice of life anime and injects it into a western fantasy setting. This one, I think, anyway, is the most recent example of an industry disruptor and seems to be growing in popularity day after day. (i.e. Legends and Lattes)
LitRPG, a sub-genre focused on the DND-like progression aspects of fantasy. This genre is another that is currently taking the world by storm, despite having been around for more than a decade. (i.e. Dungeon Crawler Carl)
I could go on and on, listing increasingly obscur sub genres, but I think the point comes across fine with just this handful. Fantasy, and on a broader scale, all genres of fiction, have started to fracture into more and more specific subcategories.
Now, all of this isn’t to rant unobstructed to a captive audience about why I hate what social media did not genre fiction, that’s another conversation entirely. Instead, what I’ve been building up to is this:
The limit has been met on genre categories and their usefulness as marketing terms, and even publishing and distribution companies are realizing it.
For example, my book is decidedly sci-fantasy, but that term has never been accepted by publishers, so when I prepared to publish it, that option didn’t exist. So, in turn, I was stuck going with the decidedly less attractive “Dark Fantasy”, which isn’t even a sub-genre I’ve gone over today. It is, by whatever definition you find, essentially fantasy imbued with at least some degree of horror elements. However, because of the degree of magic in my story, it is high fantasy. So is it then a high dark fantasy? Well, that isn’t an option. So I either have to choose high fantasy, or dark fantasy. Since my story isn’t set in a medieval-appearing world, I went with Dark fantasy, and I’m decidedly not happy about it.
How would I define my own work? Southern sci-fantasy, quite plain and simple. Or, more tightly, just Mississippi Fantasy. But that’s too specific, and again not available on publishing platforms.
What I believe is that we have hit a kind of singularity on genre division. Publishers are beginning to find the divided terms less and less useful, writers are struggling to define their work using the more nuanced modern terminology, and social media communities are steadily fragmenting into increasingly siloed, specific in-groups that revolve around a single set of genre tropes.
Where does that leave me? I think, for SONG OF CALARINE, I’ll stick with the Southern Dark Fantasy idea, and rely on marketing materials to drive home that there’s sci-fi elements. I don’t really know where it leaves the broader landscape, and I’m not sure what direction this sort of thing is heading. Could a collapse of genre terminology be in the future? Almost definitely, as the term and tropes begin to hit critical mass, but what comes out on the other side, I have no idea.
Maybe some of the writers working in these experimental micro-genres like solarpunk and hopepunk and so many others will be lauded as the heralds of the future major genres.
I guess we’ll see, but regardless of what happens, I’ll always be here. Writing, mostly, about Mississippi.
Thanks for reading.
