My advice has also been, “If there’s a spaceship in the story, it’s science fiction. If there’s a unicorn in the story, it’s fantasy. If the unicorn is piloting the spaceship, let the marketing department figure it out.”
It is well-known that genre labels are artificial, designed only to market books to niche fandoms who might find them most appealing. (Which makes it really odd when people fight over what is “science fiction” versus “fantasy,” especially after Star Wars mashed the whole thing together.)
I was reminded of this recently when I saw a copy of The Rules of Magic, by Alice Hoffman. Now, there is no doubt that this book is fantasy: it’s about magic. But you won’t find it on the Science Fiction/Fantasy shelf, because it’s labeled as “Fiction” (as if the rest isn’t). But the author has found herself a wider audience and so escapes the genre niche. (Diana Gabaldon does the same with Outlander.)
So far, though, this is old news. What piqued my interest was a Facebook post I saw on a page devoted to “sword and planet” books, which noted that the 35th Gor novel is being published. (I was surprised; the series started in the 1960s and I thought it had expired long ago.) The post explained that regardless of what you think of the Gor books, they are certainly “sword and planet” and belong in the pantheon.
For those who have not clicked on the links, a couple of short explanations are in order. “Sword and planet” generally describes books where the hero is transported by some means to a distant planet where, although technology is advanced, the natives still use swords in their arsenals. The hero typically gets caught up in local disputes and adventures ensue. The most famous example is Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “John Carter of Mars” series, which has inspired many imitators, including my own “Stolen Future” trilogy. The point is to create a romantic adventure in the classical sense of “romance.”
The Gor books, while certainly adopting the trappings, are nothing more than soft-porn male power fantasies. Women exist only to be slaves, chained up until they can be reduced to a “happier” state through domination and mistreatment. Most sword and planet fans who have read any (the first four or five, were more adventure and less … fantasy), quit and would never go back.
And therein lies the irony of genre labeling. Fantasy fans would love for Hoffman or Gabaldon to be seen as “genre,” because those books are as much fantasy as anything you find from Martin or Gaiman or Maas. On the other hand, the Gor books are found in the SF/fantasy section, and most fantasy fans would love to see them declared less genre–or moved, as in to the “adult” genre, and preferably only in the adult bookstore.
So maybe we should worry less about labels than about what’s inside, kind of that “don’t judge a book by its cover” thing. If nothing else, it will really confuse Amazon’s algorithms.
And perhaps we could expand that lesson beyond just our books.
#SFWApro
Graffiti on the Walls of Time 