Is 'Fantasy' even a genre?

I still think it's a genre. All of the other genres you mentioned also have very broad definitions within the genre. In fantasy, you know there is going to be some kind of fantastical element. That element could be in any setting. For example, Xanth takes place in an alter-demetional Florida, Harry Potter takes place in current day England, WoT takes place in a completely different world similar to earth's medival times. But the unifying characteristic is the fantastical element.
<laugh> Just my $.02

Maprilynne

It is a genre because it shares an abstract quality (speculative, not due to technology). Genre doesn't tell you much about the storyline unless the genre is highly cliche or one of the abstract qualities of that genre relates to storyline (i.e. 'mystery' does, 'literary' doesn't).

Genre, because there are still conventions which are expected and should be followed. To eliminate science fiction, fantasy, and westerns as genre is to, in a sideways fashion, indicate that all the other genres must follow predictable patterns and storylines, which is not accurate at all.

The term "genre" is so silly to begin with, that I like to use it as a tool to find out who is truly erudite and who is truly merely arrogant.

Great books transcend the place that marketing places them. Refusing to read book from "over in that section" is not a symptom of an educated mind.

Placing Ursula K. LeGuinn, J. R. R. Tolkein, and William Gibson over in the genre section, and placing Danielle Steele, Stella Getting her Groove Back, and Under a Tuscan Sun over in "Literature and Fiction" is a seemingly random placement based on factors that can only be truly understood by marketing people that literally judge books by their covers.

My ideal bookstore? One, huge section called "Fiction, Drama, Poetry and Narrative Non-Fiction". No sub-categories at all. Place trade paperbacks beside hardbacks and manga based solely on the alphabetical order of the author's name (or first editor's name in cases of compilations). Browse and discover new things.

Bookstores separate things for convience, however convenience isn't how they make their money. Bookstores make money based on browsers coming into the store for one book, and/or looking around for something that might be interesting. Designing a store to encourage browsing across "genre" -- I suspect -- will increase sales.

If someone truly wanted convenience, they'd pre-order off a website, or pick up the book immediately and leave. People can do that whether the books are separated into "genres" or not.

My 2 cents...

badducky said:

Great books transcend the place that marketing places them.

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True. Great books do - fantasy books don't.

Mike, you don't think "The Hobbit", that mainstay of high school reading lists and a world classic, doesn't transcend the place marketing has placed it?

What about Ursula K. LeGuinn's Earthsea cycle?

Terry Pratchett?

Neil Gaiman?

Gene Wolf?

Great writers transcend their location, and people all over the store go "slumming" in Sci fi/fant to find their favorite authors.

Heck, they've moved Stephen King to literature and fiction, and he writes primarily dark fantasy.

I do think that assuming you have to follow the "conventions" leads to bad fantasy all too often. Or even well-written generic fantasy. The books I find fascinating are the ones that take those conventions and twist. Or push the boundaries.

And a lot of people know only generic fantasy and call it "fantasy". Mike Coombes, have you read Tim Powers' The Anubis Gates? I suspect you'd like it. It's totally fantasy; it's also entirely unconventional and a great book.

But in my opinion fantasy and SF are both genres because there is a tone associated with them. A feel. In Fantasy, a sense of the mysterious, of the world (or the universe) being a big and unfathomable place. In SF, there's the sense of the unknown, coupled with the idea that we can make sense of it in a rational, scientific manner. That may not be the focus in, say, military SF or romantic Fantasy, but it does seem to be a characteristic shared by most books in each area.

It's partly marketing. But it's not totally marketing. Marketing might set the boundaries, but it doesn't define the core of the genre.

badducky said:

T
My ideal bookstore? One, huge section called "Fiction, Drama, Poetry and Narrative Non-Fiction". No sub-categories at all. Place trade paperbacks beside hardbacks and manga based solely on the alphabetical order of the author's name (or first editor's name in cases of compilations). Browse and discover new things.

Bookstores separate things for convience, however convenience isn't how they make their money. Bookstores make money based on browsers coming into the store for one book, and/or looking around for something that might be interesting. Designing a store to encourage browsing across "genre" -- I suspect -- will increase sales.

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Oh, fiddlesticks. Bookstores arrange books by marketing category because that increases sales. Please don't think that the other plans haven't been tried. The reason you don't see them everywhere is because they don't work.

There's a little bookstore in SF that arranged all its books by the color of the spine, for a few weeks.

It was an art thing. And, I suppose publicity.

But man, walking in there was cool. All the reds and oranges up on the left, all the greens and blues at the back, all the blacks up the right wall...

And this made for really weird neighbours. I and my friends went to check it out just for the weird experience.

But in reality, I'd get hugely annoyed if all the fiction was stuck together. I love cross-genre fiction, or fiction that gets beyond the whole genre thing; but I far prefer having to look in three places for the books I want, to having it be hard to scan the shelves for what I want.

James D. Macdonald said:

Oh, fiddlesticks. Bookstores arrange books by marketing category because that increases sales. Please don't think that the other plans haven't been tried. The reason you don't see them everywhere is because they don't work.

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I'd love to see a side-by-side comparison on that one. Has marketing research actually set this up, or did their scholarly method merely involve "doing what they want" and taking surveys after?

Bookstore size would likely come into play. Small airport bookstores would be easier to manuever if they didn't insist on plunking everything into genres.

And larger ones shouldn't be easy to manuever. They should be fun to browse.

Like the bookstore arranged by color, we go to these places because it's fun to browse. Amazon made them obsolete years ago.

I have to disagree, ducky. I kinda wish it were true.

But most people go to Borders, or Barnes & Noble, and it's not really for the browsing experience.

And experientially, clicking on things is not at all the same as picking up a new book, looking at the cover, seeing its thickness, feeling its weight, reading the first couple pages, skipping ahead a bit and reading more, seeing if anybody around has anything to say about it...

It's easier to find the books you do that with, if they're arranged in genres. There are just too many books for us to give them all that treatment.

I disagree with ducky, too. If I go to a bookstore looking for some fantasy, I wouldn't want to waste my time looking through all the political thrillers, horror books and romance dramas that have nothing to do with fantasy and praying that I find a fantasy book soon. Not for me, nope.

Fantasy is a genre, and so is SF. I wish they would not be lumped together, though. I think it's done because of so many cross overs.

I happen to like the way books are shelved. It's easy for me to find them by categories. As it is, I spend hours reading blurbs, so I can't imagine looking through jundreds of books just to find a couple of SF stories.

I think it's a combination of setting and genre. You can have a Fantasy genre work that has a non-Fantasy setting, or a different genre work with a Fantasy setting, as well as a Fantasy genre work in, of course, a Fantasy setting.

A good example of this would be the Star Wars series. It is an epic Fantasy, as I understand it, (Jedi Knights with mystical powers) but in an SF-style setting (Another galaxy).

Another good example would be Charlotte's Web. I would consider it a Fantasy (talking animals, a girl understanding them, etc.), but by far, it does not take place in a Fantasy setting.


On the other hand, I've seen SF stories take place in Fantasy settings (Gene Roddenberry did a lot of that with the Star Trek and other SF works that he worked on). A good example of this would be the Enterprise crew in a Garden setting, facing the Greek god Apollo himself. Interesting stuff, but definitely a Fantasy setting, IMO.

Take Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials Trilogy. It is said to be a modern fantasy but it's all based on parallel dimensions, string theory, and quantum physics so wouldn't that make it science fiction?

Shweta said:

I do think that assuming you have to follow the "conventions" leads to bad fantasy all too often. Or even well-written generic fantasy. The books I find fascinating are the ones that take those conventions and twist. Or push the boundaries.

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In order to "take those conventions" or "push the boundaries", one must first start with the conventions and within the boundaries.

badducky said:

I'd love to see a side-by-side comparison on that one. Has marketing research actually set this up, or did their scholarly method merely involve "doing what they want" and taking surveys after?

Bookstore size would likely come into play. Small airport bookstores would be easier to manuever if they didn't insist on plunking everything into genres.

And larger ones shouldn't be easy to manuever. They should be fun to browse.

Like the bookstore arranged by color, we go to these places because it's fun to browse. Amazon made them obsolete years ago.

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Amazon is not where I want to buy books. I greatly prefer brick and mortar bookstores, and from the sales numbers, so do the great majority of readers. If they didn't, the bookstores wouldn't exist. They stay open because they sell enough books to make a huge profit, not so people can have fun browsing. Amazon is a piker compared to the chain bookstores. No business can exist unless very large numbers of epople buy from that business, and teh chanin bookstores are having no trouble existing.

And UJ is right. Most readers hate it when bookstores arrange things in any way other than by genre. Most readers have genre preferences, and it's a pain in the rear to go into a bookstore wanting to find something to read in a specific genre if the books aren't separated this way.

Our local library tried the arrange everything by writer's last name approach, and it's been a disaster. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but after five years they've had hundreds of complaints, and less than a dozen patrons who preferred the system.

It's a fine system, if you already know the writer you want to find, but it makes it darned near impossible to find a new writer you've never heard of in a given genre.

And bookstore or library, the vast majority of readers go in looking for novels in a specific genre. I read just about every genre there is, but most of the time I want to find novels in whatever genre I prefer reading at the moment, and a system that alphabatizes novels really ticks me off.

Our local library finally had to go thrugh the stacks and stick genre labels on everything, and add half a dozen terminals wherein novels are listed by genre, and even this hasn't stopped the complaints. When they find a time when it's possible, they're going back to the genre system.

It's a genre. I know this because, after reading a good fantasy, I think I want to read another book like that one, and I head to the fantasy section.

Same for mystery. I can be in the mood for a mystery novel, and I know where to turn to get one

Just remember that mixing genres can sometimes produce interesting stories. I have one that's out that is difficult to categorize because it invokes fantasy, science fiction, and police drama on current day Earth with a dragon as the main character in what is essentially a parody of almost everything it touches upon. I'm leaving it to retailers to solve the problem of where to place it.

Birol said:

In order to "take those conventions" or "push the boundaries", one must first start with the conventions and within the boundaries.

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Well, at least one needs to be familiar with them. That's not to say you have to start writing them.

Of course you don't have to write them, Shweta, if by writing you mean the actual act of putting words to page, but knowledge of your target audience, what they expect and how to use those expectations to your advantage in order to move beyond them, is part of being a writer, too.

I think we're talking past each other, Birol. Orrr maybe my one-line response above was a bit unclear (can't imagine why!) Let me try to clarify my position.

The way I'm seeing it, the vocabulary of fantasy is vast, but incomplete. Anyone who's familiar with just a tiny part of it is going to be writing a tour from the Tough Guide to Fantasyland. Anyone who's using only that vocabulary is missing out on the richness and weirdness of the real world. And anyone who tries to cram it all in is going to come up with a 500 book series.

I do think it's a writer's responsibility to be familiar with as much of it as possible. I also think it's a writer's responsibility to pick the vocabulary items that are appropriate to the story at hand, and not to use the conventions without reason. Certainly not just because they're the conventions.

Cause there are an awful lot of conventions.

Insofar as fantasy is a genre, which genre? The conventions of historical fantasy are different from those of sword and sorcery; those of urban fantasy are pretty different from those of epic fantasy; I suppose I could write a gritty yet tender coming-of-age story about a kid who has to go on a quest through downtown San Francisco to rescue the great-granddaughter of EEmperor Norton. Swords could probably be worked in, and so could conspiracy theories. Someone other than me could maybe even make it work. But that's not my point. My point is that this it a deliberate juxtaposition of conventions that aren't normally seen together. Which is to say a choice of 'em, not just a use of 'em.

Insofar as fantasy is a type of setting, which setting? There's the simplified-medieval-Europe of much fantasy, there's any real place and time skewed for urban or historical fantasy, and there are some really fleshed out imagined worlds. You could call these conventions. Which setting one picks would seriously affect the range of plotline conventions that are possible/sensible.

So the conventions set up a really complex space, and it's one with a lot of traffic at the center. I'm hoping to set up shop at or near a boundary; some familiarity, some unexplored territory, and several weird places to go if I dare. This isn't to say I will succeed at this. But I suspect that starting with the conventions, simply because they are the conventions, is a good way to get locked into them.

Oof. That was long. I will stop subjecting you all to the results of my insomnia now

Wesley Smith said:

What say you?

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If mystery, romance, and horror are genres, then fantasy is the ultimate genre, because it can incorporate all of that and much more. You think fantasy is just imagination and in a way it is if you think about it, but it is the mother of all genres I think. Mystery is, in a weird way, a sub-genre of fantasy, romance the same thing, and so on... It's all in how you look at it, but most people think of fantasy as dragons, knights and damsels in distress. For me, it is a place at the peak of my imagination no matter what the sub-genre is; so in a way, if I wrote a mystery novel in my mind it would really be fantasy, despite that view negates what people think of fantasy. However, in my writings, fantasy always incorporates a journey in a far away place, mythological beasts, and so on... There is almost always an element of otherworldliness, if you will, in my stories (some supernatural entity, or force that gives it that clichical fantasy ring). I close by saying that it's all up here...in your perception...your view...