Speculative Fiction—perhaps Science Fiction most of all. Perhaps.—has always been about pushing the boundaries of the known vs. the unknown, the possible vs. the only-likely, in fact, the whole gamut of human imagination. Why not genre boundaries as well?
Did you think that if you can't pin down your genre because it has equal elements of different genres, your novel just might be unsellable? Well, grasshopper, you might want to revisit that thought.
Tor. com discusses "Six Recent SFF Novels That Give No Effs About Genre Distinctions".
Did you think that if you can't pin down your genre because it has equal elements of different genres, your novel just might be unsellable? Well, grasshopper, you might want to revisit that thought.
Tor. com discusses "Six Recent SFF Novels That Give No Effs About Genre Distinctions".
Science fiction and fantasy exist as strata of various subgenres: hard SF and space opera, epic and urban fantasy, steampunk and cyberpunk, and so on. It’s baked into genre fiction, this omnipresence of tropes and conventions that allow picky readers to know exactly what they’re in for.
But some authors say: screw that noise. Why limit yourself to just one genre when you can toss them all across the floor, grease up your book, and roll it around in the resulting debris, picking up a little of this and a little of that? (You know, metaphorically.)
Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
Is it a fantasy? Well sure: there’s magic galore, dredged from blood and bone. Is it science fiction? Undoubtedly: Gideon is a citizen of a galactic empire and attempts to book passage on a spaceship that will take her to the front lines of an intergalactic war. Is it a mystery? Maybe that most of all: the plot resembles nothing so much as Agatha Christie on mescaline.
The Affair of the Mysterious Letter by Alexis Hall
Few fictional characters have been remixed and rejiggered and totally reimagined quite as often as Sherlock Holmes of 221B Baker Street. . . Alexis Hall’s The Affair of the Mysterious Letter is an excellent mystery in the style of Arthur Conan Doyle, a slightly seedy affair that finds its uptight Watson stand-in being yanked along by the deductions of a possibly quite mad detective. But it is so much weirder than that.
Empress of Forever by Max Gladstone
Though Gladstone throws around a lot of ideas sprung from classic SF (nanotech, artificial intelligence, multiple dimensions, a mind-expanding vision of the future of cloud computing), all of them are taken so far over the top that they’ve basically ceased to resemble science fiction and are something closer to bizarro space magic.
The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins
What fascinates me about the book’s genre savvy is how closely Carolyn’s quest hews to the conventions of the commercial thriller, if one were slathered in phantasmagorical horror.
Middlegame by Seanan McGuire
This is all the stuff of fantasy, of course, but McGuire’s worldbuilding is so exacting, it plays out like science. Where Roger is able to change the world through an innate mastery of language, Dodger has a strong head for numbers and can see the equations that underlie all of existence. Alchemy is, of course, a magical science in and of itself, an attempt to command and codify the impossible. This all plays out in a grab-bag of cross-genre tropes: time loops, alternate dimensions, genetic engineering, blood magic and more.
Saga by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples
Saga’s execution is as offbeat as its setup: its universe is truly weird, a place where magic definitively exists, as do ghosts, as do sentient robots with heads shaped like TVs, as do beasts out of fantasy stories and aliens out of your nightmares (but don’t judge a book by its cover, or an armless spider-bodied assassin by her vast number of eyes).