I’ve been reading a retrospective about the Goth sub-genre in music. What’s fascinating is how all the early groups associated with the dark music side of punk/post-punk/rock is that they all balk at being called “goth,” and they all describe how much fun it was because there were no hard genre lines. People could experiment, find their own sound, borrow ideas and techniques from other sorts of music, and it was all good. Listeners were generally open to experimentation to a degree, and creativity was encouraged. Yes, it was hard to get a studio to work with you, and bands sometimes had to scrape together money to get albums made and sell them by hand, but the creativity was flowing through the scene.

Sound familiar? “Back in the day, we didn’t have all these rigid categories we had to fit into. Fiction was fiction, and the pulps had dragons and star ships and engineers and wizards all in the same issue.” And so on and so forth, in saecula saeculorem, amen. There actually was some sorting, as readers decided what they found more interesting, but cross-pollination wasn’t a bad thing, and categories were pretty darn broad.

Then along came the need to sort books for bookstore sales, and advertising, (and libraries that did not want “suitable for kids” in with “gives adults nightmares or flashbacks”), and science fiction was separated from fantasy. Then each was subdivided further, and so on, and so on. Authors were encouraged to stick with one or the other, and read more in “your genre” and so on. Readers got used to sci-fi being one thing, with certain things on the cover, while fantasy had something else, and literary fiction was over there. Some authors crossed over, so Ursula K. LeGuin could be found in the fantasy or sci-fi shelves depending on which title it was, and was and is taught as literature. Anne McCaffrey was sold as sci-fi despite the dragons, because there was no magic, just telepathy and eventually rockets, (and later genetic engineering).

This was great, until it wasn’t. Writers who wanted to include ideas from outside their genres were shut out of markets, or told that they had to get rid of the [not-in-genre] bits. Sales categories gradually became silos, confining the genre. Genres beget subgenres, which in turn seemed to get siloed.

By the time I got ready to launch my first fiction, I discovered (2012) that there was no way I could fit my work into a tidy silo. A time-traveling mercenary shape-shifter and her dragon sidekick … Because everything was explained with science (genetic engineering, telepathy, and so on), I settled on mil-sci-fi. At the time it was still a relatively big tent, even though my work did not fit into the David Weber, Pournelle/Sterling, Drake sort of mil-sci-fi.

When I released the first Colplatschki book, Elizabeth of Starland, it still fit mil-sci-fi. Now, it would probably be slotted into Colonization Fiction first, then mil-sci-fi, even though the military element is what drives the story.

Like several of the Mad Genii, I tend to write around the silo, sometimes around the entire farmyard. “Well, it has all the beats of X, but isn’t X because I got mad at this thing in X and so how do I label it for readers?” I can sympathize with China Mieville’s grumble about preferring the label “speculative fiction” to “urban fantasy” because there is more room for what he prefers to write in the former category. Too, he’s more literary, and does not care to be lumped in with Robert Jordan, E. L. Modisitte, Brandon Sanderson, and other genre fiction writers.

In academic life, you are strongly encouraged (ordered) to read only in your field, so you can stay current on everything being published and the latest information. In writing fiction, we are often encouraged to read deeply in our genre and subgenre, so we know the tropes and patterns that are popular [are they?] and that readers expect. Self-siloing starts, and the subgenre turns in on itself. I tend to read widely, which my grad school profs did not approve of – mostly. There were two exceptions. Ditto fiction reading, when I have time to read fiction. [Day Job requires keeping current on history, which is not entirely an oxymoron.]

Music categories have gotten so siloed that some websites list four or five subgenres, most of which I have never heard of, for bands I’d just call “dark metal” or “goth metal” or “symphonic rock.” Then fans squall when the band decides to try something new, or experiment, because the fans have a set sound and content that they now prefer. Some book genres and subgenres likewise.

Should we try to bring back the “good old days” of fantastic fiction and speculative fiction, when everyone was gathered under one big tent? Probably not. Readers are strongly conditioned to being able to select specific subgenres. Too, it is easier for books to be “found” when categories are specific and relatively small. As many of the Mad Genii have observed, if you find a niche of readers who really like [thing], and few people are writing good [thing], you can cater to that market and do very, very well.