When talking about an upcoming anthology, an author asked “So if I wrote a story with my Cats! In! Space! characters, but they were in a holodeck equivalent doing a Sam Spade schtick, it went haywire, and they had to kill Adolf Kitler in a Katzi America, would that be Moggies, Noir, or Alt-History?”
1.) I realize he’s making a joke.
2.) To answer his question straight, though, because this is a common sort of question authors ask when trying to figure out marketing:
Authors will look at a story and see elements of all sorts of genres and tropes in it, and then flounder, going “But it has this! and that! and other thing! So it must be cross-genre and do I put it in All The Things?”
This makes publishers twitch.
Because the readers use genre to set expectations of the story before they read it, and it doesn’t matter if a story has elements of the genre to them, it only matters whether or not the story met the expectations the reader has when they bought it.
This is why a holodeck story must be space opera: because if you promise alt-history, and then open on a spaceship, the reader isn’t going to get to your alt-history part, they’re going to Did Not Finish and complain that they wanted alt-history and got a futuristic space story.
Note: different genres have different essential core elements. It is possible to have overlap, but it is also possible to screw it up six ways from hades.
Alt-History, by the way, is “What if this changed?” – You have to make the single turning point clear, and then work through how that affects the historical situation.
For example, science fiction is about three things on a Venn diagram:
A.) the settings: strange new worlds, whether our current patch of earth changed all out of recognition, or a galaxy far-far away
B.) The sense of wonder: the feeling of awakening, or awe, at seeing a concept anew in the context of a completely different setting. (paradigm shift) Alternatively, because it’s used both ways, the feeling of immensity and awe when the vastness of space/time is revealed.
C.) What if / If this goes on: taking a concept, and running it out to its absurdity or ultimate end, and speculating how it will change and alter the world around it for good, ill, and bizzarity in all consequences intended and unintended.
Meanwhile, Romance and Horror both are almost completely indifferent to the trappings and the suits, and instead completely focused on the emotional arc of the characters.
Thrillers by contrast are focused on the emotional arc of the reader, and on solving the mystery/ the puzzle and bringing justice.
The Mystery is not the same as Mystery Genre, where the question is “Who did it?”, and the story is about:
A.) finding out who, what, when, where, why, and how.
B.) Bringing justice to those responsible.
Thriller’s core mystery/puzzle is “How are they going to get caught/foiled before Bad Thing Happens?”
This is why mysteries will open with the discovery of the crime, but many thrillers will open with the villains putting the pieces into place – placing the metaphorical bomb under the table, so the reader can see the impending catastrophe even when the characters can’t.
So, it doesn’t matter if a Cats! In! Space! story has noir in it… it matters if the tone of the whole piece is noir, from beginning to end, conveying both the bleak and cynical outlook, and the mystery / justice cycle. If you break that anywhere in the story, from first line to last line, then it’s not going to give the people who picked it up expecting it to be noir satisfaction
Nor, to answer a common question he didn’t ask but many do, does it matter if a story has romance and kissing in it: unless the entire emotional arc of the story is romance, it’s not romance genre, it’s merely a romantic subplot.
Mad Genius Club 
12 responses to “What genre is it?”
Nicely done. I completely agree with your characterization of science fiction; you captured something I have always felt but never made explicit, even in my own mind. And applying that lens to other genres (and the problem of categorizing works) makes perfect sense. Bravo.
Your comment about Did Not Finish effects made me think a bit about my own experience. Of the roughly 7000 books I have read, there are only a handful I DNF. And on reflection I think all of them were for violations of the expected arc, mostly in rather egregious ways. Incompetence will do that, as will “but sex always sells”. (On that last point, let me add that few authors can create sex scenes that are more than just a mental exploration of their sexual fetishes, which is almost always more than I want to know about the author.)
On another note, modern technologies make it much easier to avoid books which break the mold — the reader reaction polls will mark them pretty well. And I for one no longer read books without significant positive reviews. I have sadly been forced to accept that I will never read them all.
On a somewhat off topic point, does anyone know what is going on with cedarwrites.com? None of the links off the home page work for me.
Confirmed by me, too.
Thanks for letting me know. I’m going to have to reach out to my host, as they changed some setting recently and I think that’s the issue.
She’s looking into it.
Weird west in space. Except it is about how the relationship between the two characters happened, so it keeps wanting to do deconstruction of paranormal romance, except it does not hit the correct beats for that, at all.
So weird west, in space.
See also:
1.) What genre / subgenre do you think it is?
2.) Do you read widely in that genre?
3.) What favoured tropes of that genre are in your story?
4.) If you answered no, or could not answer 2 & 3? It’s not that genre.
It’s about forty thousand words!
21st century man teleported through spacetime warp to – someplace else. Setting resembles a cross between an alien planet and a Hollow World similar to Pellucidar. (Did I mention the lizardmen, robots, and mysterious alien towers?) SCI-FI.
What begins as a tale of simple survival and trying to find a way home quickly transforms into a stumbling cross-cultural attempt at romance after he and an Amazon cavewoman mutually save each other. Romance? At least a strong subplot or co-plot?
Also he discovers the ancient life-support systems are on the verge of failing and everybody is doomed unless he uncovers the mystery of what happened to the men? Mystery / thriller?
The way I think of it is similar to a 1970’s planetary romance (in the sense of adventure). At least for the external plot thread. The internal plot thread of the main character quickly becomes dominated by the attempt to forge a relationship with the Amazon cavewoman (This take a while. “What is this thing called ‘love,’ handsome breeding stock that I used to secure my proper place in the clan?”)
Upcoming release: Urban fantasy, mystery sub-plot (who done it, why done it), adventure (magic and fisticuffs leading up to the boss fight), sprinkling of romance but no romance beats so NOT genre romance.
Now, getting them in the proper order in the ad copy and sales categories in order to lure in readers, that’s the trick.
Well, I hate this problem. I might have written a coming-of-age story, which is a genre I do not read, and I have no idea what the tropes are. Naturally, therefore, I have no idea whether I met them. I was trying to write a mystery and it just wouldn’t mystify. On the other hand, my beta reader who hated it initially, finally decided for herself that it was a coming-of-age story, which she’s much more excited about than whatever she thought it was originally, and now she’s all jazzed to see if I did it right. The other beta reader swallowed it whole and squeed. She likes words in front of her eyes.
Huh. I found a category called Small Town and Rural Life and that’s at least one keyword…
It’s action sci-fi. With zombies.
When I have to spaghetti wall to get it on some rando online writing site to get eyeballs, it’s a lot more than that. But to me it will always be action sci-fi with zombies.
Of course its also post-apoc, space, mystery, nerd lead MC, etc etc… But that’s more of a niche thing. Come for the zombies in space, stay for the murder mitten kitten and straight man shtick. There’s a few call backs to old school sci-fi. There’s a bit of Hero’s Journey because everybloody story has that somewhere innit. There will be some spaceships a bit later in the current story arc. Probably. Might even be a bit of… spoilery things.
It’s readable, at least according to the readers. Eh. Needs more plot progression and fewer cliffhangers, but what can a man do? I write, therefore the cliffs will hang.