Surgery with a Shotgun: Why Genres Matter

Categories are made up. They will always be nothing more than an approximation of the thing itself. Nothing as simple as a label can encompass the experience, the reality, and the nuance of any individual work of art. A book, a story, will contain multitudes that defy categorization. I don't even mean edge cases here (of which there are many) — I mean things we consider core to a genre will not fit. Canonized works that are foundational to a particular space will defy elements of any construct we can invent. 

The map is not the territory. It's barely even a map.

And yet, the idea of genres, the language of genres persist. The genres of fiction matter, whether we like it or not. The idea itself has utility. It allows us a shorthand to encompass a range of ideas, a lineage of thought, a community of readers. 

Part of how these terms persist is as a site of fracture. Not only are we trying to encompass an unencompassable thing, but we can't even agree on what it is we're trying to approximate when we say "science fiction" or "fantasy" or "horror." Worse – these terms are entangled with our livelihoods, egos, artistic ambitions, and identities. The resulting mess is an almost guaranteed fight whenever the subject comes up in any sufficiently large room. The internet, of course, being the largest and most guaranteed field of battle.

And so I bravely, foolishly sally forth into the fray. Because I think we've overloaded the word genre. I think that the root of the frustration I see crop up in essays, posts, and newsletters is that various communities bring different valences to the terms. Genre is a signifier scattered across communities, usages, identities. The idea of genres is important to each community, but in a different way. The terms serve different needs to different people at different times. And the importance of those needs cannot be understated or dismissed. 

So, caveats in hand, and reaching for a brush so broad it might as well be one of those rollers you use to cover graffiti under a bridge, I propose that there are three fundamentally different ways to think about the idea of genre: commercial (bookstore categories), analytical (theory and criticism), and recepting (reader reactions and discourse). Each of these applications is distinct both in purpose and in application to each other because the fundamental needs of each group are at best orthogonal and often in direct opposition.

Okay, so starting with the publishing industry – where I make my home – genres are a useful shorthand so that we can do the business of selling books as quickly and efficiently as possible. The thing I always say about my job is that it consists of putting special flowers – unique, thoughtfully grown and developed with chrysanthemum-levels of complexity – into uniform boxes so that they can be shipped around the world and sold to as many consumers as possible. To engage in industrial, commercial publishing is to submit your work to a process that requires a factory-style efficiency. It demands that your stories and all their nuance and artistry fit inside systems that can process, package, market, and ship physical objects to retail stores.

When an agent, editor, or publisher says "fantasy" or "thriller" or "literature" or "general fiction" we're not making a deep textual analysis of the book. The question isn't one of themes or lineages or even particularly the aesthetic elements. The question is, "where the hell do we want them to put this in the bookstore?" What other books that sell a lot are most like this one? If you accidentally picked up this debut novel full of magic and adventure instead of Brandon Sanderson's latest, would you be mad about it?

The process of deciding what genre a book is, what BISAC code we put in the metadata, is a bit like doing one of those magic eye puzzles. You squint and look at it with soft eyes until you can see the overall shape of the thing and fit it into a convenient slot on the shelf. It is both a careful decision made with a great deal of thought and a bit like trying to perform surgery with a shotgun.

When critics and academics think about genre they, unlike publishers, are keenly interested in the nuances of how the story is constructed and operates. Specifically, the lens is often one of finding deep connection between different texts in a way that is concerned with constructing canon and understanding lineage. Essentially trying to understand what works are in conversation with what other works. How are the thematic and aesthetic elements of Asimov's I, Robot present in Martha Wells's Murderbot books? It's about finding linkages in an evolving conversation to understand connection, consequence, and contrast. 

This is my personal favorite mode to think about genre. I have a background in literary theory and very nearly went off to become an academic. I love to indulge in thinking about genre fiction with regard to its history, context, and cultural impact. This is a much more fine-grained analysis and is fundamentally interested in a kind of precision that would be counterproductive to publishers. Publishers want to connect as many books as possible to the major successes in the genre. We want to squint and say "sure this is like George RR Martin, it also has dragons in it." But for a critic, there are other considerations. What are the elements of cyberpunk in its original construction versus what we mean by it now? What are the thematic elements that tie the genre together and how has that evolved over time independent of the aesthetics?

To be very clear, I love criticism. I think it performs an essential function in the world, far more important than what I do for a living. Criticism and analysis provokes thought, engagement, it helps understand why we care so much about the books we read. And of course reviews and conversation can bring attention to worthy works. I find these questions fun and interesting. But on a personal level, in my process, they don't help me sell a single god damn book.

Lastly we consider the readers. Readers are a blend of these two ways of thinking about a book. They are primarily looking at the question of genre from a perspective of "is A like B" in the way publishers are, but are also looking at it in a more fine-grained mode the way a critic might. This is where we see the emergence of microgenres, like solarpunk and cozy horror and a million other appellations with their own legacies of discourse and controversy. I suspect the volatile component is that readers are often engaging with the fiction they love in an identity-forward way. It's not just that we love science fiction, it's that we're science fiction fans. It's part of how we see ourselves, how we find each other online, and how we choose to be viewed by the world.

Are you Marvel or are you DC? Are you an X-men fan or an Avengers fan? Are you team Sarah J Maas or team Brandon Sanderson? Now ask which one is better. Which one is more "real." Is Star Trek more true to science fiction than Star Wars is?

These are volatile questions. We use media as a shorthand to explain who we are in the world. To explain who we are to ourselves. Personally, I align myself with Star Wars in a way that I don't with Trek. Stories of grand, epic melodrama just appeal to me more than the idea of a five year mission. I find the Force to be more compelling than the Prime Directive. It doesn't mean one is better than the other – trust me I have plenty of critiques of both, to be a Star Wars fan is mostly to suffer – it's a personal preference.

But when it comes to the discourse, identity and preference get conflated – or even worse, substituted. It becomes hard to parse where "I like this” ends and "this is my personality now" begins. I think integrating media into how you see the world, what you care about, what questions lie at the heart of your perspective is natural and productive. 

Trek and Star Wars are interested in fundamentally different questions. They come from different lineages of thought and storytelling. They use different models of storytelling, approaches to serial content. But marketing experts, TV executives, and algorithms treat these franchises as if they are the same when a critical analysis would find in every detail that matters they are wildly opposed. Both have big star ships that go boom sometimes, and the similarities start to dwindle from there.

Even this construction of "is one of these better, truer, or more important than the other,"  – is a construction that has been artificially imposed on two worthy stories rooted in the idea that there's only room for one. As if the genre can not contain multitudes, the audience can not be excited about both. As if only one story can emerge with the true heart of what it means to love space adventure stories. 

But it's the construction we see reflected in discourse, in the surrounding media, over and over again. We live in an environment algorithmically designed to provoke engagement. We're victims of a model that profits from controversy. An insistence that because these stories matter to us, that we see ourselves in them and we see them in ourselves that we must fight over what the genre should mean to everyone.

I think about one of the final images of Jane Schoenbrun's I Saw the TV Glow all the time. In it, the protagonist Owen cuts his own chest open in a public bathroom to only find that inside him is the glowing static of a television screen. It's an arresting, surreal, horrifying image. The idea that we've constructed ourselves out of media to find that in the end, the things we love can never encompass the entirety of who we are and who we strive to be.

I don't have an answer to how to resolve this endless debate about what "fantasy" means or what is truly "science fiction" or if "romantasy" is actually a distinct category. I know that inside me are several wolves each emerging in different moments. Each craving a different mode of engagement when thinking about fiction. I think as a publisher, as a critic, and as a fan constantly when engaging with story. I can't help it. But as a result, I find it useful to step back and consider what my reaction is rooted in. What drives my irritation or joy or disinterest? Knowing what role I'm inhabiting helps clarify my feelings about a work and enriches my engagement with it.

Genres are important. The way we align ourselves to these stories does matter. But if we let it be all we care about, if we care about the labels more than the meaning – if the map supersedes the territory – then we lose something essential along the way.