Careful What You Wish For III: I Want a New Genre

One piece of advice most writing books make is that a new writer should familiarize themselves with their chosen genre so they don’t repeat worn out tropes and ideas. (And they were named Adam and Eve…) After a few decades of reading and writing in a genre you arrive at a different place. You get to that spot where all the landscape has been surveyed. You haven’t read every single work but you have a pretty good idea what’s been done, who the innovators were, who is imitating who, and you ask yourself: “What have I got to offer this genre that hasn’t been done before?”

I stand at such a point with fantastic literature.

I laugh when I recall the twelve year old who discovered the Barsoom books of Edgar Rice Burroughs in the Dawson Creek library. These were the old Ballantines with the horribly small print and the weird Gino D’Achilles covers. I remember looking at the weird four-armed ape attacking a red-skinned Martian on The Mastermind of Mars and thinking I would never be able to read, let alone write, something so good. It was an actual ache in my heart to be able to do so.

Forty-five years and many, many books later, reading the Burroughs books simply for enjoyment is no longer possible. I am too aware of ERB as a figure of Pulp history, as the wellspring of films, comics, TV and even cartoons and video games. And so many others as well. You learn the field. And you want to add something, not merely repeat what has come before. Does Sword & Sorcery have room to grow? Is the ghost story done or can it reach in new directions? Does the world need another Cthulhu Mythos pastiche? (No. The answer is no.) What of Science Fiction or any variation there of? Do you chase the current popular “punk”, splatter, steam or cyber? Or do leave the field and write Mysteries or Westerns? (Two genres with probably even less room for growth!) Or give up fiction and write articles like this instead? (This is my 817th post on this site.)

I don’t know. Standing here at this point and looking about I can see no obvious path. There is cross-genre, mixing together two or more genres to produce a new variant. This can be a lot of fun but feels like a half measure. Instead, I want to create an entirely new genre. This is a tall order when you think about it seriously. How do you create something entirely new? It can’t just be a variation of a previous genre. It has to fulfill some new function, tell new stories that haven’t been told before. This is a very tall order.

And what if you actually succeeded? What would be your reward? Science Fiction editors would call it Fantasy and Fantasy editors would call it Science Fiction, in a poor attempt to grasp what you had created. Publishers invented genres as a marketing tool. They are not going to greet something new with open arms because it would involve risk. Innovations usually sneak in by accident, while nobody is watching. Science Fiction could embrace CyberPunk because it was still `Science Fiction`. To be followed by everybody jumping on the bandwagon to milk the cow (if I might be allowed to mix two metaphors).

So there I stand. Looking around and wondering where to jump to next. I feel like the man who has painted himself into a corner. But wait! Those old Burroughs novels haven`t gone anywhere. (Good luck finding them in the Dawson Creek Library or any public library these days!) Public domain to the rescue, here is all 11, a complete collection as I once lusted for back in the days when paperbacks costs 95 cents. Maybe here, on a nostalgia trip, I will find solace, some hint on how to process. Wish me luck. The red planet calls. Tharks and thoats and beautiful princesses await….