Blended-genre books are a growing trend in the current market. Movies and Books like Twilight blending teen romance with supernatural vampires, Harry potter blending magic with the English school model, and the dark tower blending everything. Should this excite fans? Or does it look to weaken the stories and structures you’ve come to love? I for one love the idea of mixing the best of genres it’s such a fine line between things like fantasy, horror and sci-fi…

To some extent every good story blends genres. You just have to hit the right balance.
Sometimes it can be too much and your story just gets bogged down in its own genre-ness.

I waffle back and forth on this topic. I'm not really keen on the idea of blending elements from sci-fi with fantasy and the like, but I'm coming to see genres in a new light, I think. A friend of mine made a really good point that got me thinking: fantasy is just the old western repackaged. It contains the same basic elements, and fantasy as a genre started taking off about the time the western style was fading. And mystery, which is a relatively new genre, lends itself well to most stories, because mystery and intrigue fascinates us. The elements will look different for any given genre, but they're still there.

I think one potential problem with mixing genres is the way it affects marketing. If you don't know what category of story it falls into, you can't target an audience as easily, unless of course it's a well-defined "mixed" genre.

Plot and structure isn't as cut-and-dried within genres, either. Technically, there aren't that many plot types, and those can easily be applied to any genre. What is the plot of an epic fantasy? Usually to go on a quest, to find something or destroy something. Or maybe to save the world. Which is what the gunslinger in the western does when he comes to town and saves the people from the bandits. It's not so much that a plot is defined by the genre it's within, I think, as it is by the elements that are the present depending on the genre. In other words, a romance can be a romance whether it takes place in a fantasy world or in a modern day story.

I like genre-blending to a certain extent; have a few story ideas that mix fantasy and sci-fi, myself, because for whatever reason I like the idea of magic and high-tech together. I'm not really sure how blending genres would weaken the story or the structure either; I guess I kind of see it as one genre providing the framework and setting while the other one fills it out a little more by adding its own unique elements.

To be honest, I love seeing how two different things can be mixed together into something that's recognizable but still very much its own thing. I read fanfiction and I've discovered I really love a good crossover or alternate universe story. Part of that's seeing how the author blended and merged things and made them fit together in unexpected but fantastic ways.
I also don't think of myself as being someone who likes worldbuilding, but give me an unusual or interesting setting to work out, and I love it.

One of my favorite authors, Patricia C. Wrede, has written a number of alternate universe stories, as it were (not sure what you'd call it), where she takes a period from our history (shortly after Napoleon, for example, at least I think that's about the right time) and writes a story in it where magic is and always has been a natural part of the world. So in one sense they're historical fiction, but the addition of magic makes it very, very different.

Anyway, I think it's clear I love the idea of genre-blending. Yes, it can be done badly, but so can everything else.

(Oh, and Tarin, you're making me want to write a fantasy western now...)

(Also, I entirely blame this thread for the fact that I plan to go write a scene that blends military sci-fi with steampunk after this.)

I did that. It was fun.

I lovelovelovelove good genre blenders. I don't even really care what genres they are either. Western and fantasy, cool. Stone age fantasy private investigator with striking similarities to a hard-boiled noir detective from the 30s? Sounds like fun!

I do quite a bit of it myself, mainly in -punk/-pulp genres where such a thing is more accepted, but I've done some experimenting. The Starsailer project on HWSF is one example, combining steampunk and space opera, with a dash of the maritime adventure novel as well.

(I may have just found a new favorite thread.)

I tend to genre-blend almost all of my stories which end up being historical-fantasy or fantasy-science fiction. I think it's because I like the elements of the separate genres that I enjoy mixing them together to make for a unique plot that can reach out to a broader audience.

~Calen

Shooting for a broader audience can be a detriment, however. It's best to define a narrow target audience, because then you know exactly who to market for. It's the age old adage that some people will love your book and others won't. So people in your target audience will like it (if the book is good enough) and people who don't prefer that type of story won't. On the other hand, there's probably an audience out there who would read genre-blended novels, depending on what genres you mixed. Just some thoughts.

I do a Blended-Genre with my book that is still in the making. Sci-Fi and Fantasy together.

Matt-- er.... Batman, is that his user name at the moment? Anyways, Matt does a lot of genre blending, and does it very successfully. I don't know that I would be good at it, but I think it is very doable and can work well.

I think you'd probably be good at it.

Aww, how sweet! Thanks, Varon.

You're welcome.

Those (there's the "Mairelon the Magician" series, which I read in the omnibus Magic and Malice---or is it the other way around?---and there's also the books she wrote in collaboration with Caroline Stevermer, starting with Sorcery and Cecelia: or, The Enchanted Chocolate Pot; they've deliberately avoided saying whether the two Regency-era-plus-magic series are set in the same universe or not) are fairly straightforward, with basically history as it was in our world and then thinking of how magic might have been involved or be affected; more interesting from a genre-engineering perspective, I think, are her recent "Frontier Magic" trilogy (starting with The Thirteenth Child), set in a "United States of Columbia" in the mid-1800s, soon after the "Secession War," protected from mammoths, ice dragons, and other very dangerous wildlife (you'll understand why the Lewis & Clark expedition never came back) by the "Great Barrier Spell" created by Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson running up the Mammoth River, through the Great Lakes, and down the St. Lawrence River. That series is as much "Laura Ingalls Wilder" as "magic"---but also as much "magic" as "Laura Ingalls Wilder."

Her friend and critique partner Lois McMaster Bujold (who's a far more widely known author, though primarily for the mostly-space-opera Vorkosigan series) is a still better example of an author doing "genre engineering." Most of her fantasy milieus are something else in nearly equal measure: The Curse of Chalion draws heavily on real history (the unification of Spain), and the Sharing Knife books "feel" like the American frontier and are (or at least the first two are) also romances. (I'm hesitant to give unqualified recommendations here---given the number of younger readers here---for any of these, since each of her fantasy settings, except perhaps the early The Spirit Ring, has some aspects of its worldbuilding that are deliberately constructed to show, "critique," and "subvert" what she considers errors or weaknesses in the Christian worldview---Chalion has "the Holy Family," who cannot overwhelm the human will and cannot directly affect matter at all, instead of God, while the Sharing Knife setting has "absent gods" and, contra Tolkien's idea of "eucatastrophe," a generations-long fight that requires "saving the world" over and over and over again---and the Sharing Knife books are present-day secular romances with everything that implies "content"-wise, though as such I think they're fairly non-explicit. But I think her ideas are ones that Christians ought to encounter, understand, and engage with.)


You just have to learn---so as to either follow, or knowingly break---two sets of genre conventions. And learning one is hard enough when you're starting as an adult.


That's something I might be interested in reading ...

In my own work, I invariably end up mixing fantasy and science fiction, and I'm going to have to draw on historical fiction in some places. And some of the stories are intended to also be mysteries ... and I'm hoping to put in some romantic subplots in some of them ...

I like to mix science-fiction elements into a fantasy setting.

I love genre blending! I want to say I do it all the time, but that's not strictly true... I've seen some really weird scifi/fantasy crossovers but I also have dozens of really good ideas so it's a hit and miss thing like all the rest of the genres in the world. I think that the more mashed up and messed up and unrecognizable your genre the cooler of a plot it's likely to have. Not strictly true, but I love confuddling the rules.