Our Genre

This is yet another post about the short stories in Organisms, the collection of stories I contributed to the Bundoran Buddies Science Fiction StoryBundle. This time I’ll talk about “Three Damnations: A Fugue”.

In most bookstores and libraries, books are separated by genre. The three biggest genres of fiction are Mystery, Romance, and Li-Fi (often just called “Fiction”, although literary fiction is clearly just as much a bounded genre as any other—it has its own quirks, conventions, and unspoken assumptions just like any other genre).

So after Mystery, Romance and Li-Fi, what’s left? Sometimes Science Fiction and Fantasy are split into separate sections, but often they’re shelved together. These days, Horror is blended into the SF/F section; there was a time a few decades ago when Horror had a section to itself, but I haven’t seen a separate Horror section in ages.

So Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror are often combined into a single entity. This is more than just an oddity of retail; SF/F/H are often seen as comprising a single unified field of literature. Most web sites and blogs that deal with one of the three will deal with the other two as well. The same thing holds for publishers, especially the larger companies: any publisher who publishes one of the three probably publishes the others too.

Some people fiercely object to the notion that SF/F/H is a single thing. Such people draw a hard line between Science Fiction and Fantasy. Then they put individual works of Horror on one side of the line or the other. (“Alien” is Science Fiction. “Dracula” is Fantasy. Et cetera.) Many readers only read Science Fiction or only read Fantasy. The same goes for writers writing.

But many writers write all three of SF, F, and H, switching freely between them. Many readers do the same. And many stories are resistant to pigeonholing. Despite physicists playing around with blue-sky ideas, faster-than-light travel still seems to be scientifically impossible…whereas unicorns (i.e. horses with single horns on their noses) are just a gene-splice away. I sincerely expect that real unicorns will be created in the next fifty years. Yet any story with a unicorn would be shelved in Fantasy, whereas any space opera with FTL would be shelved in Science Fiction.

For myself, I consider Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror to be parts of a single thing. I call it Our Genre: the Genre of Geek/Nerd culture…the Genre of comic books…the Genre of RPGs and many many computer games.

This gets me back to “Three Damnations: A Fugue”. I decided to write a single story that explicitly combined all three aspects of Our Genre. For Horror, it has a haunted house and obsession; for Science Fiction, it has time travel and obsession; for Fantasy, it has a magic grove and obsession. The story presents all three sides of Our Genre, by means of three characters who just can’t help themselves making the same bad decisions, over and over again. They aren’t nice people, but I like the story quite a bit.