So you have a book that is about a spoiled rich girl in New York who goes to France for a visit and plays music by the Eiffel Tower, but while she's there, she is somehow transported back to the time of the French Revolution, where she becomes a servant to the French royal family. Is it historical fiction (since half the story takes place in the past), or is it general fiction (because it's the story of a teenage girl struggling with her life in the present day)? Maybe it's science fiction (because there is time travel going on), but maybe it's actually more on the paranormal/supernatural or fantasy spectrum (because the time travel is all sort of magical and unexplained).
How about this one: There is a girl attending a prestigious music academy, and she is having issues with her peers - you know typical high school stuff (definitely reads like realistic fiction), but there are some magical-type things going on, that I can't really explain without giving away the story (these things clearly fit the bill for paranormal/supernatural fiction), and then there is this cosmic element that is only vaguely explained (sort of science-fictionish), and a whole bunch of crows stuck into the story in a variety of ways (creating a creepy/gothic vibe). Oh, and the author threw in a romantic thread with the two main characters as well.
So what genre do either of these two novels fall into? I didn't really put much thought into this problem before I started writing my blog - when I wanted to recommend a book to someone, I would just tell them about it and encourage them to run out and get a copy right away and
find some time to actually read it. But as soon as I had the need to categorize these stories into neat little compartments, I discovered that naming the appropriate category wasn't always an easy thing to do. Heck, even naming the appropriate
categories wasn't always an easy thing to do.
And to muddy the waters even more, what criteria is supposed to be used for identifying a genre in the first place? Take horror novels for example. Some of them actually intend to horrify you. But others are more just kind of creepy. They aren't trying to be scary at all, just creep you out. Do those still fit into the category of horror?
Or how about paranormal fiction? I always thought of this as being stuff that was out of the realm of ordinary. So, to me, a story about people with special abilities would be paranormal fiction. But my son told me, no, ghosts are paranormal - you know like that movie
Paranormal Activity, which I guess was a scary/horror movie type thing. Well, okay, I guess I could agree that ghosts could be paranormal, but what if the ghost story was about a person who was having trouble moving on? They weren't really causing any havoc or even doing things that affected anyone around them. It is just a story about the
spirit and their inner struggle. Hmmmm. I feel like this belongs more to the realm of supernatural things, like angels and demons and heaven and hell and the afterlife etc. That's what I think of when someone mentions the supernatural, but then again, maybe that's not what supernatural even is.
I thought,
hey, I'll look online. Surely there is a list of genres along with their descriptions. Um, yeah, there are like a gazillion lists just like that and they all say slightly different things. So then I thought,
I'll just look to see what the library catalog and/or accelerated reader put down for the genre. Turns out that t
hat was
so not helpful.
So
then I thought,
I'll just ask my sister, who is a high school English teacher. I gave her the example of a book that was about a witch (
Fantasy! she says).
But wait! I counter.
The story isn't set in some imaginary fantasy land. It is set in New England, during the end of the heyday of the whaling industry. It is very historical-fictionish. But it has a witch, and magic, so we both knew that it didn't qualify as historical fiction. And... the witch isn't all Harry Potterish with magic wands and hats and spells and bla bla bla. She is simply a girl born to a line of mothers and daughters who come into their power at some point and use it just to protect the whalers and their ships. It is presented as if it were a story ripped right out of the history books, as if we all know that this sort of thing can and did happen. The story isn't even really about the magic. It's actually a coming of age type of novel.
We were both pretty much stumped until I mentioned to my sister that in my struggles to define genres, I had come across the term
Speculative Fiction. Here are two descriptions of the genre that I found online:
Speculative fiction is also more than the collective title for works of horror, science fiction, and fantasy. The term also embraces works that don't fit neatly into the separate genres. Tarzan. Television's Early Edition. Stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Tales that span the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres. Stranger in a Strange Land. The Twilight Zone. Stories by Edgar Allen Poe. Tales that have been labelled simply as 'weird' or 'adventure' or 'amazing' because there was no proper place to put them. Stories on the fringe.
When you've come across a story or movie or game that both is and isn't science fiction, fantasy, and/or horror, then you've discovered speculative fiction. (Sorry, but I don't remember the source!)
Speculative fiction is a world that writers create, where anything can happen. It is a place beyond reality, a place that could have been, or might have been, if only the rules of the universe were altered just a bit. Speculative fiction goes beyond the horror of everyday life and takes the reader (and writer) into a world of magic, fantasy, science. It is a world where you leave part of yourself behind when you return to the universe as we know it, the so-called real world. Speculative fiction defines the best in humanity: imagination, and the sharing of it with others. [http://www.shadowkeepzine.com/]
Okay, so if a book has alternate realities, is a bit weird or disturbing, or doesn't fit into established categories, that's speculative fiction.
That's it! Perfect! Problem solved! Only not really if the whole reason you are trying to label a book with a genre in the first place is because you are writing a blog about books. Because, let's face it, the sole purpose of listing the genre is to help readers decide whether or not they might want to read a specific book. And maybe they would love to read an action/adventure type of speculative fiction, but romance or historical type of speculative fiction, not so much. So relying on this category alone is probably a bit too undefined to be very helpful.
So what do I do? Right now I have listed multiple genres that the book might fall into, even if none of them fits exactly. And on my book lists, I have placed each title under multiple lists if they even sort of fit. You'll notice that I avoided the whole paranormal/supernatural controversy by lumping them together in a category called Paranormal/Supernatural. (And I'm not even going to get into the crazy stuff like the new 'Supernatural Fantasy' subgenre - you'll find those books on my Supernatural list
and my Fantasy list.) Maybe I'll add the new Speculative Fiction genre in along with the others, to give an even clearer sense of the muddled picture, and maybe by the time you come across this blog, I'll have changed my mind and removed it. And who knows, maybe I'll end up using just the speculative fiction label for those rare books that really don't seem to fit anywhere else at all (because I've just read one of those ....)
By the way, if you want to disagree with my labels, go right ahead - chances are I disagree with myself on those ones anyway!
Books mentioned in this post (in order):
