Genre ramblings
Sep. 3rd, 2009 08:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
megwritesAuthor N.K. Jemisin on the urban fantasy trend in SF/F literature.
While I think the article is well written, I don't yet if I agree or disagree about it. I don't know if the situation she describes concerning the market expansion and then contraction of the horror genre is completely analogous to urban fantasy.
I think urban fantasy's rise in popularity is a different animal from the spike in horror. Urban fantasy isn't a genre, really, it's a convergence. It's what happens when romance, fantasy, horror, and mystery all get together and throw a party in somebody's book. The composite parts of the genre have always and will always exist in one form or another.
What will change is the branding, the shelving, the marketing. Soon people will get tired of the label and the superficial trends. The heroine-in-leather trend, god willing, will die in a fire. A big fire. With gasoline being thrown on it.
But the ideas behind will remain. I don't think people stopped writing horror in the 90's, I think they just stopped calling it horror and stopped trying to put a thin veneer of Stephen King over their works. I think they found different masks to wear.
Keep in mind the history of genres is a very fluid thing.
Some of what Shakespeare wrote would, if appearing in novel form, be branded as everything from history to horror to romance to fantasy. What was written as Gothic fiction or Romantic fiction in the 18th and 19th centuries would be marketed as urban fantasy or dark fantasy, not horror. Frankenstein, if submitted to a publisher today would be closer to fantasy than horror.
So, the stories about these supernatural, fantastic things will always exist. The genre we call "urban fantasy", however, will eventually have to undergo a sea change as people get tired of the Laurell K. Hamiltonesque (Hamiltonian?) version of it.
Also keep in mind that tales of the modern meeting with magical have predated urban fantasy by quite a bit. It's been alive and well under the guise of "magical realism" in works from those outside the U.S. for quite a while. And mainstream American speculative fiction has been slow to acknowledge it's illegitimate little subgenre. But people like Gabriel Garcia Marquez have been doing it for ages. He wrote A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings in 1968, for crying out loud.
Novels about vampires aren't going anywhere. People have been reading, thinking, writing, and talking about vampires since Dracula. Same for werewolves and witches. That's been around since time immemorial and it's not going anywhere.
I think when Urban Fantasy's time is up, when people are tired of the Hamiltonian style romances then all the composite parts of the genre will go their separate ways. And the writers who were thinking about vampires or erotic fiction or tough talking heroines will have to find new genres, new masks, new directions.
So what does this mean for writers?
The same thing it's always meant, I think. Markets and genres are always expanding and contracting. You keep up with what's in demand, you read widely in your field, and you find a way to write what you want and make it marketable.
While I think the article is well written, I don't yet if I agree or disagree about it. I don't know if the situation she describes concerning the market expansion and then contraction of the horror genre is completely analogous to urban fantasy.
I think urban fantasy's rise in popularity is a different animal from the spike in horror. Urban fantasy isn't a genre, really, it's a convergence. It's what happens when romance, fantasy, horror, and mystery all get together and throw a party in somebody's book. The composite parts of the genre have always and will always exist in one form or another.
What will change is the branding, the shelving, the marketing. Soon people will get tired of the label and the superficial trends. The heroine-in-leather trend, god willing, will die in a fire. A big fire. With gasoline being thrown on it.
But the ideas behind will remain. I don't think people stopped writing horror in the 90's, I think they just stopped calling it horror and stopped trying to put a thin veneer of Stephen King over their works. I think they found different masks to wear.
Keep in mind the history of genres is a very fluid thing.
Some of what Shakespeare wrote would, if appearing in novel form, be branded as everything from history to horror to romance to fantasy. What was written as Gothic fiction or Romantic fiction in the 18th and 19th centuries would be marketed as urban fantasy or dark fantasy, not horror. Frankenstein, if submitted to a publisher today would be closer to fantasy than horror.
So, the stories about these supernatural, fantastic things will always exist. The genre we call "urban fantasy", however, will eventually have to undergo a sea change as people get tired of the Laurell K. Hamiltonesque (Hamiltonian?) version of it.
Also keep in mind that tales of the modern meeting with magical have predated urban fantasy by quite a bit. It's been alive and well under the guise of "magical realism" in works from those outside the U.S. for quite a while. And mainstream American speculative fiction has been slow to acknowledge it's illegitimate little subgenre. But people like Gabriel Garcia Marquez have been doing it for ages. He wrote A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings in 1968, for crying out loud.
Novels about vampires aren't going anywhere. People have been reading, thinking, writing, and talking about vampires since Dracula. Same for werewolves and witches. That's been around since time immemorial and it's not going anywhere.
I think when Urban Fantasy's time is up, when people are tired of the Hamiltonian style romances then all the composite parts of the genre will go their separate ways. And the writers who were thinking about vampires or erotic fiction or tough talking heroines will have to find new genres, new masks, new directions.
So what does this mean for writers?
The same thing it's always meant, I think. Markets and genres are always expanding and contracting. You keep up with what's in demand, you read widely in your field, and you find a way to write what you want and make it marketable.
no subject
Date: 2009-09-04 05:50 pm (UTC)Of course, lately, so do the Anita Blake series.