Thoughts on Genre

Discourse around genre is contentious. To many readers, a book’s genre constitutes a rigid promise about what it contains, to default on which is a kind of false advertising at best and a moral betrayal at worst. To others, genre is a complete fabrication, a label publishers impose on books against their will. To complicate things, it is clear that not only readers but many books also treat genre in the former way, and others in the latter.

Simply, genre is a word we give to similarities we notice between stories. We notice some stories have crimes in them, and we call them crime fiction; some have spaceships in them and we call them science fiction; some have their characters fall in love and we call smut romance. It does not describe anything more profound than this, but it describes something real.

It would be wrong to say, as many people do, that genre is fake, or purely a marketing term. That ignores the many writers who work lovingly inside the confines of the genre as they understand it. But it is just as wrong to assume that genre gets at something real or fundamental about books, something that every book definitely has, in an easily identifiable and scientifically demonstrable way. Every book’s relationship to genre is individual, and genres’ relationships to each other are fluid.

Take, for instance, science fiction and fantasy, two genres that seem easy to distinguish: one is about science and the other is about magic. What could be more different? But as Arthur C. Clarke said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. From the beginning these genres were closely allied; many early writers wrote both, and sometimes the distinctions they drew would surprise us. When The Lord of the Rings came out, Tolkien’s friend Naomi Mitchison, author of Memoirs of a Spacewoman, blurbed it as “super science fiction”; when it won the International Fantasy Award in 1957, it beat the science fiction novel The Death of Grass.

Or take Psycho, by Robert Bloch. Bloch is primarily a horror writer, and his novel and the movie based on it are usually classified as horror. I dislike the classification. There is nothing supernatural, or even apparently supernatural, about the events of Psycho. It is a fairly straightforward murder mystery, with an emphasis on suspense and a few well-timed moments of shock. What makes Psycho a horror story and The Silence of the Lambs a crime novel? Wikipedia suggests the compromise term “psychological horror”, which I suppose I endorse, but would consider a subgenre of crime, not of horror.

But who cares? Bloch almost certainly considered it horror, along with most of everything else he wrote. In Bloch’s era, critics were busy arguing about the difference between horror and terror, a distinction completely irrelevant to modern readers. These genre labels go stale as soon as they are agreed upon, and become outdated as soon as a new book is released. If someone tells me they’re not interested in Psycho because they don’t like horror, it is useless to quibble with them about ghosts and goblins; they’re telling me that they think the story is too bleak, too violent, too grim for them to enjoy. They’re probably right. If the label communicates that, it’s doing its job. I wouldn’t ask it to do more.

Some books fit very neatly into an established genre. Their authors read widely, or even exclusively, in that genre, and aspire explicitly to carry on that tradition. There is nothing wrong with this, and much excellent fiction (as well as an expected amount of dross) has been produced this way. Other books combine two or more genres deliberately, like Isaac Asimov’s science fiction mystery novels, or modern romantasy. Still other books seem to defy categorization entirely. There is also nothing wrong with this, and indeed books are often celebrated for the inventive way in which they combine the effect of multiple genres—and to many, the ultimate praise of a book’s originality is its inability to be slotted in easily next to any others.

Some wear their genre lightly, and for others its genre is a central part of how to properly understand and approach it. It may be obvious at first glance, or it may be subtle or misleading. It may be a complete red herring, or an irrelevancy, and there are a thousand shades in between. The only way to really get to know a book is to read it.

Anyway, did you know the word genre comes to English from French? That’s why French-Canadian Alex Trebek said it like this. It means “gender”.

Happy Pride.