Submitted by DiagonallyStripedRat t3_1279fru in books
I mean actually new genres, not just ,,ok Nordic noir is done so time for Latino noir", or ,,there was Steampunk and Dieselpunk so now Late Anciency punk". And also not deconstructions/parodies of existing genres. Legit, new genres like romance, thriller, drama, action. How many are there? What's the newest one?
Yes we can all agree on the first level split of fiction vs Non-fiction. Here the only sticky area is how you separate religion/myth/folk tale.
The second level split most people will agree on is the plot or setting genres.
For setting we have Now in this world, historical in this world, or a speculation about other worlds.
For plot you have mystery, adventure, romance, thriller, drama.
After this level of splitting you start getting an infinite amount of sub-genres.
I think the OP is asking about new second level splits.
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Genres are just words we use to describe a common style of book, movie, game, etc.
New genres pop up all the time and they will forever for this reason, because of the combinatorial complexity of possible narrative and setting elements.
The LITRPG has been surging for a while now, soon we'll be getting LLM-Romace or similar with the ChatGPT craze.
What's LLM-Romance?
Exactly.
:D oh wait you made this up? Because I couldnt find anything about it
Sure. Just a few years ago the LitRPG genre effectively didn't exist. There are a handful of things we could point to that can be retroactively placed in the genre, but it wasn't really a distinct thing until maybe 10 years ago and it didn't really take off until just the last few.
However, LitPRG isn't a new genre it is just a refashioning of fantasy/science fiction adventure story. It's a new style but not a genre. It's not a primary category it's maybe a third level one like mystery to cozy to old cat lady lead.
The definition of genre is, "a category of artistic, musical, or literary composition characterized by a particular style, form, or content".
You're overthinking or mistaking what it means to be a genre. LitRPG stories share a particular style and/or content, so it absolutely meets the definition of genre. Do many LitRPG stories also happen to be fantasy stories? Absolutely. But that doesn't change the fact that LitRPG is also a genre.
It’s a sub-genre.
You do realize that sub-genres are, by definition, also genres, right? One could argue that fantasy is a sub-genre of literary fiction. Does that mean fantasy is not a genre? See how ridiculous that sounds?
You’re trying to do all these mental gymnastics to say that LitRPG isn’t a genre, but meets the very definition of genre.
It depends on how high up the category tree you go.
Lord of the Rings for example is fiction, fantasy, adventure, epic
Circe is fiction, fantasy, myth inspired, coming of age. One could also make a case for fiction, fantasy, women's lit.
Most LitRPG is fiction, fantasy, adventure, LitRPG
I hold that everything below the second split is a sub-genre not an independent genre. If you want a further refinement fantasy belongs to Speculative Fiction along with Science Fiction, Horror, and Alternative History.
I'm glad we've established that your feelings on what "genre" means holds more credence than the actual dictionaries.
And, since you seem to still be focusing on sub-genres, I'll say it one more time: Sub-genres are still genres.
Since you are focusing on dictionaries, Webster defines a sub-genre as one that belongs to a larger genre.
The OP asked about new genres on the level of romance, thriller, and mystery. These are higher level splits.
> Since you are focusing on dictionaries, Webster defines a sub-genre as one that belongs to a larger genre.
It's funny you didn't post Webster's full definition. We both know why that is.
Their definition of sub-genre is, "a genre that is part of a larger genre".
> Legit, new genres like romance, thriller, drama, action
Well by that definition, it's definitely impossible. There are only so many different types of stories to tell about human beings, and those very broad genres pretty much cover it all.
But it's absolutely possible to create new sub-genres. Fiction based on a Earth that has undergone significant climate change is a growing one. Same with the often-dystopian settings in a high tech world, like the stories seen in the TV show Black Mirror.
Fanfiction is a genre not seen much in the past, popularized once the internet made it possible to easily share fanfiction with other fans of the same series.
While looking for more info I found an article mentioning "Gran Lit", romances or adventures featuring seniors rather than the usual young adults.
We had the same argument back in 1901, and for thousands of years, people have constantly declared that there is nothing new under the sun.
Yes, a genre is just a collection of tropes and conventions that allow readers to find books that are similar to other books they have liked. As fashions come and go, new genres and subgenres appear. For example, within fantasy, we have relatively recent subgenres like litRPG, progression fantasy, "cozy" fantasy (like "Legends & Lattes")....
True Cyber Crime (derivative of True Crime genre) arose in the 1980s with Cliff Stoll’s The Cuckoo Egg.
This is noteworthy as the modern novelistic form of True Crime genre arose only in the 1960s. There are influential predecessors, of course.
Doesn't the True Crime Novel arise out of the Penny Dreadful and murder ballad tradition? We have been telling the true crime story in pamphlets going back to at least as far as Jack the Ripper.
If a work has a particular set of qualities that permeate its theme and those qualities are unique compared to any existing genre, then you have created a genre. It's also, I think, about quantity. One work that is unique is quirky. A long series of works by many different authors with the same themes is a genre.
If you created a book about a world run by spiders (which evolved that way and not by technology) and humans as annoying, scary little creatures and then other authors, filmmakers and artists started doing the same with the repeated trope of a spider-run planet, that would eventually become a genre. Some will say that it's science fiction but it's not. Speculative fiction? Sure. But speculative fiction transcends genre whether it's alternative history, fantasy, science fiction, litfic or whatever.
Oh. I think you hit the bullseye, nice
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Of course. Literary genres and tropes are more fluid and arbitrary than most people realise.
For example, I have started reading Japanese fantasy light novels a few years ago and the subgenres in it are completely different from western fantasy : the biggest one is for example the isekai genre, which is a mix of reincarnated / summoned to another world stories and litRPG stories. You also have quite a few book series of Chinese court drama with a fantasy bent, and also book series about interacting with yokai, the supernatural creatures of Japanese folklore. It is very different from the mix of epic fantasy and urban fantasy we associate with the fantasy genre in the West.
So I would not be surprised if new genres and subgenres were to suddenly appear in the West as well. It is enough to have one well-written book doing something new that suddenly becomes popular, and then you will have a bunch of other books imitating it, and then you get a new subgenre. This is what originally happened with the Lord of the Rings : most fantasy books before it was published were Sword and Sorcery, but epic fantasy then became the dominant subgenre in fantasy after the publication of the Lord of the Rings, even though that subgenre did not exist at all before.
Is it accurate to say epic fantasy didn’t exist before LotR? What about classics like the Odyssey (all the Greek myths, tbh), Beowulf, etc? Wouldn’t those classify as epic fantasy?
Epic Fantasy will almost always refer to a work that takes place in its own secondary world. There would be a lot of appropriate genre tags for Greek Epics, but Epic Fantasy ironically isn't one of them.
I see those more as mythology and epic poetry, even if they inspired modern epic fantasy through Tolkien. And the people who originally created these myths probably did not see them as being fantasy or even fiction, but as reality, because they believed that gods and spirits and other supernatural creatures actually existed. That is quite different from the modern fantasy genre.
This is a different topic but I can't help the feeling that ancient people didn't take their myths as literally as we think they did. Ever heard modern religious people say ,,oh the Bible/Quoran/Tora isn't to be taken literally, God isn't an old guy with a beard sitring on a cloud, these are all metaphores and paralels and parables that speak of an idea etc"?
What if ancient Greeks were like ,,oh the myth of Persephone isn't to be taken literally, I mean, she didn't ACTUALLY collapse beneath the crust of the earth! It simply meant, that..."
Probably. The question is, if they end up being popular enough to stick around. The basic evergreen genres we have are not here because it was decided on them, but because they just work well by default. Even in the hands of less talented authors the frameworks of romance, mystery, adventure, thriller and drama work well enough to create engaging texts. If you are doing something unconventional it is a lot harder to get the same results. Additionally it’s harder to selchtet premise.
Of course. It just requires an incredibly creative and artistic mind. Most new genres are a combination of other genres (these genres don't have to be from the same media. Look how silent film combined itself with expressionism in the 1920s) we've seen musicians come up with strange combinations that could only be described as it's own genre (for example station to station by Bowie) so why shouldn't authors embrace the idea of creating a new genre. Though if an author is going to do this it's best off happening as an accident. Let your world, and your story , and your characters dictate your genre.
I mean, if you REALLY want to get into semantics (especially the Greek ones), all genres falls into the category of “tragedy ” or “comedy”. Anything beyond that is based on a series of tropes that get associated with each other over time. I think it’s possible but I wouldn’t go looking for its name before I have its number.
And tragedy?
My bad. Tragedy and comedy.
Fix’d.
Beforgiveneth'd
Now and again, novels try to become literature. They get more and more 'literature', until they are unreadable.
At which point i think genres, are each clearly and obviously, a hormone. Western is one, romance is another. Mystery shall in this short reference remain undefined, as seems appropriate.
To be fair, this is an decade of mixed hormones, to mix my metaphors.
The recent developments in AI are going to open up possibilities for Borgesian complexity in the idea of "authorship". It'll be so much more difficult to tell where human creativity comes into a literary work that authors will play all sorts of games with mechanization.
There’s at least two more coming that I know of in the next 18-24 months, but I can’t say more than that. Sorry, hope that helps!
Windexhammer t1_jedb3z1 wrote
The question doesn't really make sense without some extremely robust objective criteria defining what makes something a distinct genre. See the relevant xkcd:
https://xkcd.com/2518/