Toe in the Water

Genres and All That

Genres and All That

One thing WdC does to you, it makes you think about genre. It’s not something I’ve taken much notice of in the past as I normally write a piece and then decide what genre it should be assigned to. Not so easy to do when you’re writing to a contest’s specifications!

This became particularly relevant when I started trying to write for SCREAMS!!! Not having read a lot of horror, I had to work my way to a definition of the genre. One of the most horrific books I’ve read was the first in a series that probably was never classified as horror in the first place. It was about a company of civil war (the American) soldiers who fall through a portal leading to a planet remote from Earth.

There are other communities on this world, all comprising groups of humans who fell through various portals in other regions and at different times. So one little town might be a microcosm of China in the Ming dynasty, another might be full of Romans from the time of their empire and the next could be a bunch of Maoris from New Zealand.

All these people lived in reasonable peace with each other but told terrifying tales of the large aliens that ruled the roost on the planet. These overgrown lizard creatures were nomadic and spent their days in wandering around from settlement to settlement, culling the populations and then moving on. They were farming the communities for food. Everyone had tried fighting them but, thanks to the aliens’ size and prowess in war, the humans were easily crushed.

The civil war guys reckon that their technology seemed a little ahead of the aliens and that they might stand a better chance against them as a result. They make preparations to receive the next visitation by the aliens in a somewhat hotter (and gunpowder-driven) reception than they were used to. The rest of the book and those that followed in the series are concerned with the war between the aliens and the alliance of Earth peoples created by the civil war guys.*

But the really horrific aspect of the book comes in when an alien feast is described. It is too scary and frightening for me to go into here but, if horror is your bag, it’s a good place to start. When I can write short stories as terrifying as that feast, I will accept that I’ve nailed the genre.

And now I’ve joined a fantasy/science-fiction group. This should be much easier for me since I’ve been writing in those two genres most of my life. But there are still difficulties, particularly with fantasy. At times I see in WdC the statement or assumption that fantasy has to include magic, mythical creatures, wizards, etc. There’s none of that in my world. It’s fantasy because it’s set in a world that isn’t this one and has its own geography, history, weather, all the aspects that go into our real world, in fact. But it’s peopled by humans.

I admit I’ve bowed slightly to the WdC idea of fantasy in that I’ve written about dragons, wyverns and ogres for contests. And I have an ongoing series about trolls which I’ve decided are much nicer creatures than their reputation would allow. But none of these are getting into my world. It’s intended to be fantasy for grown ups and deals with humans only. After all, what are all those creatures but people in silly costumes? The dragon is just a big geezer in a dragon outfit, the elf in a smaller one.

It’s heresy to fantasy exponents, of course. But I’ll endeavour to stand my ground in the group. Maybe I’ll have to get a cadre of troll bodyguards formed to protect me. I know one or two that would make a fine job of a thing like that.


Word count: 633
*If anyone knows the name and/or author of this series, I’d be really grateful to be advised. Just can’t remember what it was called.