When I mention that I’m releasing a Speculative Fiction and Magical Realism short story collection, I often get blank stares and confusion. “What’s Speculative Fiction? Magical what?”
And yet, if I rattle off a few titles, I get an ‘aha’ moment of recognition. The Life of Pi by Yann Martel. Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami. The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin. The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. They Both Die at the End by Adam Silvera.
“That’s what those are?” they reply with curiosity.
Well, it depends on who you ask. The labels change depending on the person, but the effect is the same: genre-hopping.
The idea of genre-hopping (mixing tropes, plots, and characteristics of different genres together) is becoming more and more common. New niches are constantly emerging. There are the classics like Speculative Fiction, coined in the 1940s. There’s Magical Realism, first pioneered by Latin American authors. Now we find new labels emerging such as Fabulism, Portal Fiction and New Weird.
There’s a lot of labels, a lot of leaps and bounds between genres, coalescing into an amalgamation of stories that leave readers guessing on what could happen next.
I see this opening of the gates between genres as a strength. Writers shouldn’t be afraid to defy genre in our fiction, despite a publishing industry that’s frantically pushing towards the safer options to try and save what’s left of a slowly dying print market. But the status quo cannot save the industry.
Fiction exists on a spectrum, but there are two pillars that stories swing between: the comforting and the unknown. There are the tried and true tropes and plots in fiction that follow genre-specific guidelines, where the reader has expectations on what will happen when. There are many better breakdowns of the nuances and psychology of comfort reads, but for me, they’re great when I need to feel some control over something in my life. I know I’m not the only reader who seeks them out for this reason. While some authors and readers get cross over the predictability, I see this as a necessary and critical section of fiction. Sometimes readers want a book where they know what to expect.
But on the other end of the spectrum is the fiction that leaves the reader guessing. Real talk: everything has been written before. The only thing writers can do at this point is ‘remix’ what has been done, and genre-hopping is a fantastic tool to do this. By taking expectations and tropes and turning them on their head, by mixing expectations between genres, authors can surprise and delight readers on a different level.
The digital age has made this even more possible. We have available to us more information than ever before, giving authors access to research and resources they could only have dreamed of in generations past. No bit of information is unattainable, no perspective beyond our reach. Inspiration itself is within our grasp, with a bevy of new information constantly being aimed in our direction so we’re being forced to think on our feet as a way of life. For most authors, having too many ideas is a more common problem than too few.
The special ability of a jellyfish may be one man’s only hope to save his husband.
In a world where the gods have returned, their only folly was not expecting humanity to fight back.
When trauma disconnects someone's soul from their body, one person has the ability to reunite them.
A family gift of reading the spirits in flames has taken everything from her, but can it give her everything she needs?
And yet, writers are being cautioned to write to market. What are the trends? What is selling? What is safe? With ebooks on the heels of the print industry, there’s a sense of frantic grappling inward. Ebooks are growing, indies are becoming a force to be reckoned with, and authors are beginning to wonder if the gatekeepers have the best interest of fiction in mind. Publishers, and by extension agents and the rest of the traditional market, are feeling the mounting pressure.
But if you look at the successes of books like The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune and the Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by VE Schwab, we see a weird pattern in what is and isn’t taking off. A pattern, that is, of embracing the weird, different, off-the-wall, quirky, and dare I say, genre-defiant. These are books that fulfill our emotional needs for human complexity, as well as our need to have fiction that has diverse, innovative plots and worlds.
Comfort fiction will always have a market, but it’s not enough to keep publishing afloat at its current level. The only thing that can save the industry is by playing to the strengths of the generation it exists within. Variety, innovation, and humanity are just a few of the traits valued and thriving in the digital age, something that Speculative Fiction, Magical Realism, and other genre-hopping counterparts embody in droves.
That’s not to say that genre-hopping fiction is the only way to innovate, but it’s given far too little credit and space for its power. Despite having been around since the 40s, the average reader couldn’t name a Speculative Fiction novel despite most likely having read many. There’s this assumption that any genre-defiant book that makes it big has always been a ‘lucky shot’ or one-off success rather than a market that has yet to be fully tapped.
To writers: don’t be afraid to defy the gatekeepers that would try to convince you there’s not a place for genre-hopping at the table. We make the table to serve the readers, and the readers are asking for more than what publishers think they’re capable of taking on. We see it in the bestsellers, the indies, the self-publishing sphere. Don’t play down the voracity and complexity of your readers by assuming they only want comfort reads to fit their lives.
Embrace your weird. Be genre-defiant. Don’t write in service of the market, make the market work for you.
An excerpt from The Stars Will Guide Us Back:
Clay looks again, but the space-suit clad astronaut with the ‘Happy 30th Birthday’ balloon waiting for their copies at the printer doesn’t disappear.
He barks out a laugh, which earns him a glare from across his computer monitor from Jessica. She looks up at him with cold green eyes below perfectly stenciled eyebrows before looking back down at her screen. Clay sweeps the room with his gaze, but no one else notices the astronaut. No one seems to see anything out of the ordinary at all.
I’m being pranked, he thinks, and picks up his phone to take a casual photo of the astronaut as they pick their copies up from the tray in their thickly gloved fingers before they move down the hall, the white balloon with the rainbow text cheerily bobbing behind them.
“Clay, I needed that report yesterday!” his boss calls from the fishbowl room next to him, and Clay quickly becomes entranced in his job, forgetting about the strange astronaut for the remainder of the morning.
In The Stars Will Guide Us Back, thirteen short stories encapsulating the elements of speculative fiction and magical realism travel the themes of mental health, loss, mortality, self-confidence, and finding hope through difficult circumstances. Explore the immersive worlds within, along with a range of peculiar, distinct, and queer characters.
Sometimes confidence comes from knowing we have no other choice, and the ones who rescue us come from the strangest places. Dark and light collide in this collection that highlights the liminal spaces of the human experience.
Rue Sparks: Writer | Artist
A widow, disabled, and a member of the queer community, Rue Sparks traverses the equally harsh and cathartic landscape where trauma and healing align to create stories that burrow into the hearts and minds of their readers. In addition to The Stars Will Guide Us Back, Sparks has authored the novella Daylight Chasers, writes the web serial The Dragon Warden, and will be releasing the contemporary mystery novel The Fable of Wren later in 2021. They live in Noblesville, Indiana in the USA with their sweet senior support dog and still draw and paint when they’re physically able.
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