WARNING: This is a result of a twitter conversation.
WARNING: Opinions, even heretical and unorthodox ones, are allowed.
DISCLAIMER: The subject of this thread is a mess. Forgive me.

GRACE PENNINGTON - There are two kinds of genres. The one the author thinks their book should be and the one the public expects their book to be. This is why authors so often argue with promotional people about genres. They think their book is "Amish Vampire Romance Science Fiction Horror" and the publisher says, "No, that's speculative."

"But, but, but! It's so much more than that! Speculative doesn't begin to sum up everything that my book is about..."

So if you're your own publisher then you're still entitled to your stubborn opinion on genre, but you must also take an objective view and realize that Amazon doesn't agree with you, and that genre classification is not about the author, it's about the audience.

JORDAN SMITH - Low fantasy is not demeaning. It's a way to separate it from High Fantasy. It's like the upper and lower Nile, or the highlands vs. the low lands. It's a description of height, not status. High fantasy involves quests and international disaster. (Lord of the Rings.) Low fantasy does not. High Fantasy is magic in a fantastical world on an epic scale and low fantasy is magic in the real world on a personal scale. Those are probably the only two fantasy sub-genres I understand.

ME - I haz question. I would like an answer. I am writing a book. A very long, very epic, very dark book. Ya'll know it as Lighting Ranger. It's fantasy, there's no question of that. But. There is no magic. No sorcerers. No dragons, fairies, or elves. It's a dark ages kind of story of outlaws and priests and sacrifice. The world is fictional, the history is fictional, and the religion is all fictional. What fantasy sub-genre do you use to describe this?

Example - Ranger's Apprentice. It's fantasy. It's a fictional world, fictional people, fictional history, but there's no magic. No witches, no dragons, no fairies or elves. No fantastical elements. Now then, it's official categorized just as "Fantasy, Adventure." (That's two genres. Remember, you can have up to two genres to describe your book on Amazon.) But with so many subgenres in the fantasy world surely one exists to humor the whims of an author who says "Fantasy doesn't begin to describe the intricate complexities of my world!"

First of all, my comment about "low fantasy" was more tongue-in-cheek than anything… I know what it means, I just don't like the "high" or "low" labels which imply at simple first glance that one is better than the other. But I don't have any good alternate terms, so I don't complain too much.

As far as your question of sub-genres in fantasy goes, Katie, I would almost ask if it even matters. Given your response to Grace at the beginning of your post, I don't quite understand why you want to classify yours beyond an Amazon genre… If you really need it, "high fantasy" is the closest thing I can think of. But then again, I'm bad with genre and prefer to read the logline to draw my own conclusions…

I think, for authors, it's better to define your book by target audience than genre. It's usually something like, "readers who love the style of ______ will enjoy this book," or "readers who enjoyed the setting of ________ will love this novel".

I wasn't sure, so I felt the need to reply.

I'm curious! I keep running across those types of books, and fantasy is almost as well known for its subgenres as scifi, so I'm wondering what that particular subgenre is called, if it exists. That's a purely curious, not technical, question, despite my whole rant at the beginning. Like I said, the subject of this thread is a mess.

I agree with every word. From my own perspective, I'm about to publish my first fantasy book. It's clearly epic fantasy: unknown person is pulled from humble circumstances and must embark on a perilous quest to save the world. (Much like LOTR.)

There are many types of fantasy (not necessarily sub-genres but more like placeholders), such as the aforementioned epic fantasy, high fantasy, low fantasy, sci-fi/fantasy, adventure/fantasy, urban fantasy, and because Tolkien said so, romance. I know what you're thinking, but don't freak out. He had an entire argument for this type of discussion but I don't remember it and alas, the book was from the library. Here, Tolkien's definition of romance was a genre of medieval adventure stories, such as King Arthur and others.

The sub-genres should describe what type of fantasy, not indicate that it's fantasy in the first place. The definition I have of fantasy is "a type of fiction featuring imaginary worlds and magical or supernatural events." So anything falling outside that would probably not be considered fantasy. But that doesn't mean you can't impose variations into the general definition. Does it have to have elves and wizards and quests to count as fantasy? Obviously not, but without certain key elements, the ones that make it fantastic, it fits better into a different category.

To some extent, the audience's opinion on the book's genre should reflect the author's opinion. You should know enough about your book to be able to accurately label it, something that is necessary but sometimes counterproductive. Where this gets sticky is in difference of opinion and taste. Your idea of, say, high fantasy, might not agree with someone else's idea. So Neil's point is useful here. Don't tell them what genre the book is in (unless it's obvious), tell them what other books it's like and then let them make the determination.

The real point of genres is to draw specific lines between types of stories that aid the reader in searching for what they want and understanding what they're getting. Labelling is useful to categorize, but its focus is narrow. So instead of saying the book is about "Amish Vampire Romance Science Fiction Horror," it says that it's speculative fiction because there doesn't exist a definition for such a conglomeration of genres.

To solve this problem, one might pick the overarching genre. An example would be some of my previous books. They are considered sci-fi, because they take place on different planets and have futuristic aspects. Yet they are not only sci-fi; they contain elements of adventure, mystery, and dystopia. So I would classify them as science fiction with twists of mystery, adventure, etc.

And it may be that there are books to which no genre or sub-genre can be applied, in which case we might want to start inventing new definitions, if only for our own clarity.

Hope that made sense and wasn't too rambly.

Well, authors are notoriously bad critics of their own work, and publishers are notoriously ignorant as to the actual tastes of their reading public (see my comments on the "Your Publisher Won't Save You" post on Aubrey's blog a while back, for example), so there's the genre the author thinks the book best fits, the genre the publisher thinks it fits (or, at a sufficiently large publisher, one genre named by the submissions department or the editor and a different one from the marketing department), and the one the intended audience is looking for, and they don't necessarily have anything to do with one another ... though if you write for long enough in a single milieu, you'll be able to say "I have X similar books already published in such-and-such genre, and a devoted following that will be looking on those shelves ..." (And speaking of shelves, some bookstores have been known to decide that books are different genres from what their publishers say ...)

Oh, and unless I've forgotten something, I've only met "speculative" as a term encompassing all of science fiction, fantasy, and horror.


Yes. Genres are a set of (organic, rather than comprehensive like the Dewey Decimal System or the Library of Congress catalog system) conventions to help suitable readers and books find each other.


Mmm ... I'd say it's not like the upper and lower Nile, but rather more like the "High Middle Ages" vs. the rest of the Middle Ages, or perhaps "High German" vs. "Low German." It began as a value judgment, that "high fantasy" was closer to the true and pure center of the genre, but continues because we need something to call the subgenre, and "high fantasy" will do as well as anything else.


That's ... not my understanding of them at all. "High fantasy," as I understand the term, is basically the branch of fantasy descended from the Greco-Roman and Norse myths, from the various European epics and fairy tales, and from the medieval romances. The "epic scale" and "fantastical" (especially quasi-medieval) "world" generally come into it, but neither is absolutely essential---a simple story about the troll that lived under the bridge in "The Three Billy Goats Gruff" might well count as "high fantasy." I've not met "low fantasy" used as a serious term.


Quite possibly "mythopoeic"---though that's not a term that gets much play outside of Mythopoeic Society circles, I fear.


Really? The first couple of books had some decidedly fantastical elements (mostly relating to the first main villain and his minions).


One reason there are "so many subgenres" is that so many critics invent their own systems of classification instead of working with someone else's, and so many authors do "genre engineering" and then insist on (as you noted in the first example above) a "perfect fit" for the nominal genre.


The trouble with that is, again, that authors are notoriously bad critics of their own work And that even on this forum, the main reason I love, say, The Hobbit, might be vastly different from the reason someone else loves it, even if we use the same words to describe what we love, so something that exhibits the same feature might be painful reading for one of us and sheer pleasure for another.


It's worth noting that "science fiction" and "fantasy" are in many circles now considered subgenres of "speculative fiction" rather than "standalone" genres---after so many books that aren't quite one, but aren't quite the other either.


From what I understand, Tolkien stood at the end of an era when everything we would now classify as either science fiction or fantasy would be termed a "romance" (Jules Verne, Lord Dunsany, William Morris, probably even Macdonald, etc.), so he used the formal and customary term for the genre. I'm not sure it's a good idea to revive it


Make that "imaginary worlds or magical or supernatural events" and I can tentatively agree to that (with the proviso that "events" can include the mere existence of creatures)---your definition would seem to exclude the whole "urban fantasy" subgenre, which is largely set on the streets of our world's cities. (Mercedes Lackey had a series with elves set in, I think, LA back in, I think, the '80s ...)


Or vice versa ... (which may be what you meant)


Except that, again, authors are notoriously bad critics of their own work ... give your book to a very-well-read friend who's a raving fan (assuming, of course, you have such a friend) and have him tell you what books it's like ... and even that will give false positive and false negative recommendations.


Mmmm ... The root of the whole problem here is that there usually aren't lines between genres, so authors often engage in "genre engineering," choosing to write from a less-populated area of the genre-space.


For what it's worth, to me "dystopia" is a subgenre of science fiction ... so it isn't so much a "twist" for a SF novel to be dystopian at times as venturing for a while into a corner of the genre it's already in.


What we need is a standard set of classifications so we can see what the state of the meta-genre is ... authors, publishers, readers, and critics have been inventing sub-genre terms right and left for the past decade and more

Well, I think you may have misunderstood what I was trying to say. Your target audience is the group of people you want+expect to enjoy your books. We can all agree that most Amish Romance novels are targeted at, say, women, and the last statistic I looked at said they are read mostly by middle aged women. If you're writing Amish Romance, you know who's going to read your book.

Every author, not just authors of Amish Romance, should know who their target audience is. Let me put it this way:

Christopher Paolini said he was writing a book he would want to read. There's his target audience: young lovers of fantasy in the Tolkien vein.

Is that something you put on your back cover? No. But something like it does go there: the back cover copy (description of the book), and reviews. These are intended to draw the target audience to the book by a) describing the story in such a way that it appeals to the target audience, and b) attract the audience with positive reviews by people who are either part of the target audience or experts in the target audience.

All of that to say, your target audience contains three pieces of information: an age group (and possibly gender if you're writing Amish romance), a macro-genre (fantasy vs. thriller vs. historical fiction), and a similar work, or a work that inspires your work (have of us can put Tolkien right here).

Sub-genres can't write your book, edit your book, attract agents or publishers, or sell your book in stores. Knowing your target audience helps you write, edit, get agents and publishers interested, and ultimately get your books flying off the shelves at Barnes and Noble.

Hence, I think sub-genres are useful for critics, but not for authors.
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BTW, if fantasy is so well know for it's genres, why are we all having trouble naming them?

Sci-fi has, to name but a few, space-punk, cyberpunk, apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic, space opera, etc. All of these and more are clearly defined, easy to pin down.

Critics of fantasy, for all that they throw around words like "romance", "adventure", and "dark fantasy", really only seem to recognize two genres: high fantasy, and low fantasy. And all of these terms are extremely nebulous and deceptive. Dark fantasy could be high or low. Low fantasy can still be "epic."

Science fiction has been around, in its modern form, for quite some time. Modern fantasy, on the other hand, has only little more than 50 years history. It's nature for genre-conventions to be less defined.

No, I think I understand what you said---but I think you're overestimating authors' ability to accurately determine their work's appeal.


If you're writing firmly within a genre with defined but narrow boundaries and a small set of set conventions, then probably you'll be able to accurately predict who will enjoy the book. (Though you're probably not writing fantasy.) But we started out talking about hard-to-classify/genre-blending books, where this breaks down very quickly if it ever worked at all---like I said, if I like book X because of a reason I describe as Y, and you like book X because of a reason you describe as Y, and I see my reason Y in book Z and therefore love it, it's actually quite likely that you will at most merely "like" book Z.


Most authors would say the same thing ... (I've heard that Edgar Rice Burroughs got started by reading something in a pulp magazine and saying something to the effect of "If they want something that bad, I can write that", so there are authors who will pander to an audience they despise ... but they are certainly a tiny minority.)


And that's where we run into trouble Because most of modern fantasy is a series of imitators of, if anything, a caricature of Tolkien---part of what I love about The Lord of the Rings is the thorough understanding of interaction between various cultures, the attention to detail, the theological themes (such as eucatastrophe), and so on, features that I've rarely met in more recent fantasy, and then only in books that weren't really superficially similar to Tolkien's work at all.


Yes ... but, like I said, the author's or publisher's idea of the target audience and the actual "target audience" (the set of readers who are actually most likely to enjoy the book) are often wildly different, at least for anything that isn't essentially identical to a previous success.


However you want to define it is entirely orthogonal to my point


Mmm ... It seems to me that "sub-genre" is yet another way of specifying your target audience (subject, alas, to the identification problems I've repeatedly described in this thread) more precisely. While there is some overlap between fans of (for example) alternate-European-history-plus-magic, elves-on-the-gritty-streets-of-LA, and misty-mythic-past-of-legend, marketing something that basically fits in one of those categories primarily to fans of the others is probably counterproductive.


And my point is that identifying one's target audience is a critical (by which I mean relating-to-criticism) task, and is so difficult because authors and publishers are notoriously bad critics


I think you've got your history a little oversimplified and confused there There's a great deal that we now identify as "modern fantasy" that predates the coining of that term for the genre, though the distinction between proto-fantasy and proto-SF is fuzzy at best. But there are lots of subgenres of fantasy that, when identified, will be fairly well understood---however, pinning down where the borders between them are can be difficult because fantasy authors have often tended to deliberately blur those boundaries, and there isn't any one set of terms because critics tend to reinvent them rather than using someone else's terms.

To summarize: You think that authors can't determine their own work's appeal. I think they can.

Neither of us can exactly be proven right...it's kind of a subjective topic.

But I would say that, in a sense, we're both right. Not all authors understand their own appeal. But some do. In fact, it's the difference between good authors and bad authors.

Tolkien understood, and was in fact an expert in, Germanic (Norse, for example) mythology. He admitted that the tales which became the Silmarillian was very much in the spirit of those tales (he even includes some reference to them, if you look carefully).

Paolini, on the other hand, probably doesn't even realize that he was imitating Tolkien (or Star Wars, for that matter). He likes Tolkien and attempted to emulated him, without actual understanding.

As far as the history of modern fantasy goes...your statement can explain what's going on in fantasy, but not why sub-genres are so clearly defined in sci-fi, except to say that authors intentionally blur the lines and critics don't know what they're talking about...both of which are true of sci-fi as well.

And yes, it was oversimplified. I didn't think Vanya wanted to hear about 6000 years of the history of fantasy.

That's a not-unreasonable-but-not-quite-fair summary. I think that, at least in recent history (the past few decades), most or at least many authors of fiction in our genres (and/or their publishers) have not shown a true and clear understanding of their work's appeal. And also, more broadly, literary history's judgment on authors who were also critics has overwhelmingly tended to be that they were at best mediocre critics of their own work.

I think a real difference is that you seem to be assuming that an author would be determining the intended audience, then starting to write a book aimed at that audience (while nearly all the books I've seen that gave evidence of that approach are the sorts of books that feel more like "tourist trash" than something of real value), rather than figuring out to what audience a particular story (which has usually been already written) will most appeal so as to market it to that audience.


It's at best a completely orthogonal consideration, and in practice the authors who seem to best understand "their own appeal" are the hacks (publishers as well as authors ...) churning out one mediocre repetitive volume after another rather than anything of real quality. (For example, when I used to help out at book sales run by the local Friends of the Library, we often had people who would donate boxes and boxes of romance novels, then come in to the next sale and buy a tray or two of them, not caring whether they'd read some of them before. I'd say the romance publishers and their top-list authors almost certainly understand that audience, but I don't want to imitate them in any respect.)


I'll readily grant that Tolkien understood his own work and the earlier tradition in which he was placing himself, and Paolini (whom I haven't yet read) probably didn't understand Tolkien beyond a superficial level, but that's a separate (related, but different) matter from understanding to whom his work would appeal.


I didn't say that "critics don't know what they're talking about," but rather that in fantasy critics usually tend to invent their own classification systems rather than using building on earlier critics' systems; in science fiction (though admittedly my exposure to recent criticism is very limited) my impression is that critics seem to generally be working within a shared classification system. And while genre-blending does occur in science fiction, I certainly get the impression that it's something that "happens occasionally" in that genre, but I would say that from what I've seen most fantasy does "genre engineering" to some extent.


For my concerns, you only need to go back about a generation earlier.

Jaynin: Stick it under fantasy and let readers choose which sub-genre.

Science-fiction, I think, is different because when there are sub-genre differences, you can tell. The difference between a space opera and a post-apocalyptic story are very well cut. Fantasy isn't really like that. High fantasy? Low fantasy? Medieval fantasy? The three often seem to blur a lot of boundaries. There may be small differences, but I don't think there's enough often times to create a whole new subgenre for it.