Woig is a Genre

A blog post about genre definitions.

Take it from me, it's a good idea to know what genre you're writing in. Yes, before you publish. Which seems obvious, except that there are a lot of genres out there to consider, especially when you start mixing them all together and come up with something seemingly unique.

Don't get me wrong. Genre mixing is fine in my opinion. Wonderful, really. But just know that, eventually, what you're doing is making it harder to get your story into the hands of potentially interested readers. Harder but not impossible, as long as you figure out what genre your readers are categorizing your "unique" type of story.

“What is the difference between Science Fiction and Fantasy?”

That's such a huge, obvious question that I'm going to bypass it here. You can click the link and read up on it over there. I'm going to dive right into the Fantasy Sci Fi sub genres. Since there are many of them. BTW, I just learned that the term sci-fi is frowned upon by serious devotees of the genre, so using the abbreviation SF is recommended. Use that tidbit as you will.

The following list is not exhaustive, as there are many subsets to these sub genres. I provide an example alongside; great books to go check out if you haven't already read them.

• Arthurian F - The Once and Future King by T.H. White

• Comic F - Terry Pratchett’s Discworld

• Contemporary F - Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series

• Dark F - Stephen King's The Dark Tower

• Epic or "High" F - The Lord of the Rings series by J.R.R. Tolkien

• Fantasy of manners - Caroline Stevermer's Sorcery and Cecelia

• Sword and Sorcery - Mistborn, Brandon Sanderson

• Apocalyptic or Post-Apocalyptic SF - Mary Shelley, The Last Man

• Biopunk - Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton

• Cyberpunk - MaddAddam Trilogy by Margaret Atwood

• Hard SF - The Martian by Andy Weir

• Military SF - Old Man's War by John Scalzi

• Parallel/alternate universe - Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland

• Slipstream - Beloved by Toni Morrison

• Soft SF - Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

• Space Opera - A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge

• Steampunk - The Aeronauts Windlass by Jim Butcher

• Timetravel - A Wrinkle in Time. Madeleine L'Engle

And then there is the genre of Science Fantasy...

Which we'll talk about in the next post.