Defying Categories
Way back when, it seems like it was easier to figure out genre. At least it was when I was a kid going to the library or the bookstore (and when I wasn't writing). If a novel wasn't mainstream Fiction, it was one of the following: Mystery, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Romance, or Western.

Horror was shelved with either SF&F or in mainstream Fiction. The Western shelves were huge (is there even a separate Western category these days?). I don't think there was even a separate Romance section for a long time at my library--they either didn't stock romance or shelved them with the mainstream fiction, though Tower Books had a separate case for them.


--A tangent--I grew up in Sacramento (Fair Oaks, actually), the original home of the Tower stores and I mourn their passing. The absolute best bookstore I have ever been in was Tower Books on Auburn Blvd. It was huge and carried *everything* in fiction and nonfiction. I could spend hours just browsing in that store, lost in a sea of imagination. The bigger chain stores today, like B&N and Borders, may be prettier inside (Tower Books had linoleum floors and was never as sterile as today's stores), but they can't compare with the personality of Tower or the sheer number of books. Tower felt like a bookstore should feel -- it was *all* about the books.--

Okay, back to genre. Subgenres might have existed, but I don't remember them being talked about much--or maybe I wasn't paying attention--until sometime in the early 80s, I think. Hmmm. Maybe that isn't true after all, come to think of it. Mysteries always had distinct subgenres, didn't they? The cosy and the procedural come to mind, at least. And SF had space operas, though I'm not sure you'd call that a genre or a description. Oh well, this really is all about me, then, isn't it? ;-)

Anyway. I noticed that Horror got more attention and it's own shelves. Westerns seemed to be going the way of the dodo, though Louis L'Amour nearly single-handedly kept the genre alive. And in SF&F, the genre that I used to read most, Cyber Punk was an exciting place to be and other subgenres were also starting to gain momentum.

It seems the same thing was happening in Romance, though I wasn't aware of it, because at the time I wasn't paying much attention. I'd occasionally pick up a book from my mother (over the years she's introduced me to Nora Roberts, Jayne Ann Krentz and Susan Elizabeth Phillips, among others), but in general, romance wasn't where I was at.

A funny thing happened, though. The lines were beginning to blur. Romance was taking on fantastic elements (time travel and paranormal -- a term I truly loathe), SF and Fantasy were becoming more...human is the best I can come up with... (Lois McMaster Bujold and Martha Wells). Suddenly it seemed like those hard divisions that defined what category a book would fall into just weren't valid.

So where does a book that combines strong elements of romance with science fiction AND fantasy belong? The SF is time travel--and not just a wave of the hand, but an actual machine and explanation of how it works--with a touch of quantum physics and alternate universes thrown in. Oh, and the machine in question comes from an alternate Steampunk world. And the Fantasy is that within those alternate universes there are worlds where magic is possible. Where the heck does that belong?

Or a mystery where romance is integral to the mystery itself, yet the story would fall apart without the mystery?

Or--well, I could go on and on, but you get the picture. I could play the What Genre am I? game all day, but I guess, at the end of the day it doesn't really matter. All that matters is telling the story the best I can. Figuring out where it belongs will wait until I've done that.