Tag Archives: genre busting

Speculation

First of all, speculative fiction, what is it?

This blog, What is Speculative Fiction, goes into more detail, but I understand spec-fic to be a kind of cross-over or middle ground between the following:

  • Alternate histories
  • Science ficiton
  • Dystopian fiction
  • Fantasy (ish)
  • Horror
  • Post Apocalypic

It’s that middle ground between hard core Sci Fi and a character-driven story, that place where reality seems normal enough until you realise it isn’t. It’s where the reader is challenged to think, what if the world had taken a different course, what if things were not as they appeared? In conversations with readers and fellow writers alike, I often hear people saying you can’t mix Sci Fi with romance or you can’t mix fantasy with literary fiction (well, what about magical realism, for a start?). This is an assumption which is lacking in imagination.

For readers who like to see traditional genres turned on their heads, or who like to journey further into imaginary worlds, there’s speculative fiction.

Literary speculative fiction titles

This excellent blog about novels which straddle the fence between literary fiction and speculative fiction goes into more detail about how this is done. It lists a whole host of well known ‘literary’ works which could be considered ‘speculative’, but some of my favourites in this area are:

  • Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
  • The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
  • 1Q84, Haruki Murakami
  • The Road, Cormac McCarthy

Speculative fiction to try out

Aside from my Borderliners trilogy, the first book of which will be out in the new year, there is a wealth of speculative fiction out there. If you’re interested in this mixed genre approach to fiction, why not look at this comprehensive 2013 list of speculative fiction titles to try? I particularly like the following suggestions:

  • In Search of and Others, Will Ludwigsen
  • Anything by Aldous Huxley
  • Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell

Happy holiday reading!

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Have I written a ‘holy crap’ novel?

… or just a crap one? As my current work in progress straddles sci-fi and general fiction, this is a question which has been worrying me for some time.

 

Having read through a fascinating article, Holy Crap': The Flawed Notion That Novels Can Transcend Genres, about the nature and classification of genre, I’m forced to reflect: can an aspiring novelist ever write a genre-buster or is genre-straddling just a sign of inexperience?
As an avid reader of cross-genre, I’m not sure. I love Kate Atkinson, for example, and her most recent novel ‘Life after Life’, more than ever. I’m also a great fan of Milan Kundera, and I’ve just started reading a book which I’m sure is going to blow my mind, ‘A Tale for the Time Being’ by Ruth Ozeki. She does everything I wanted to do, only better. Much better. But the very existence of a book like this is heartening. It’s a so-called ‘Holy Crap’ novel, and it is glorious!

But as an avid reader of such novels, how can I ever hope to write one without making a mess of things? One published writer I know advised me not to put all my eggs into one basket -or into one debut- as there would always be time to write different types of novels within genres. Maybe. But what if I like to read cross-genre and would like to see more of it?

Mix it up

And then there is the question of what to mix. As my 11 year old put it, ‘You can mix thriller with romance and you can mix sci-fi with thriller, but you can’t mix sci-fi with romance.’ Out of the mouths of babes…?

Or is it, as the quoted article suggests, true that ‘Genres aren’t conceptually solid enough to be transcended. Any genre is going to be made up of things that both fit and don’t, and over time those things will change and shift.’

I’d like to think so.

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Filed under Novel writing