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A Post-Genre Future or Read Any Good Books Lately? - M. Darusha Wehm
Chuck "Hilarious Potty-Mouth" Wendig has a good piece up about the shifting value of genre labels in fiction. He's not the first person I've seen with this idea; Charles Stross talked about this back in May. I'm particularly taken with Wendig's notion of More Granularity: Think of fiction as having aspects or elements (and those of you who game in the RPG sense will see the value of this) — a piece of fiction might have a “time travel” aspect, a “tragedy” aspect, a “detective” aspect. One novel might be “serial killer / robot / erotic love triangle.” Another might be, “dinosaur / noir / bioethics.” It seems clear to me that in other than the most basic of genre plots this is already what's going on in genre fiction. Really great mystery stories are about a lot more than just figuring out whodunnit - they're also romances, war stories, alternate histories, literary fiction, buddy stories... the list goes on. The point of genre has historically been, both Wendig and Stross argue, to help readers find things they'll like.
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