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