Mixing Genres

One of the most interesting things one learns when reading pulp stories is that 'genre' is just a word. The notion of splitting stories up based on a particular theme was common enough in the early days of the pulps; there were fiction magazines devoted to railroads, for example, or westerns, or scientific topics such as electronics. But the biggest sellers didn't bother with these distinctions. They contained stories that would appeal to a wide range of readers, which is why they sold the most.

For example, the first part of Edgar Rice Burroughs' first published novel, A Princess of Mars, shared space in the February All-Story Magazine with romance stories, western stories, comedies, poetry, and adventures on the high seas. It was a grab-bag, and it was one of the most popular selling magazines in North America. Two hundred pages of variety, fun for everyone. All for the low price of a dime.

Later, the idea of 'genre' came out of the science fiction camp of fans; they wanted to define what a 'science fiction' story was allowed to be. It had to be plausible, scientific, and 'realistic' in terms of if it 'could' happen in our own future. Stories such as Princess of Mars, or Abraham Merritt's Moon Pool, were suddenly disqualified from the ranks of science fiction despite their scientific basis, which was based on scientific knowledge of their time. Instead, they were 'relegated' to the realm of fantasy fiction.

Horror is another genre that gradually became separated from its fantastic cousins; while Weird Tales Magazine, as well as some issues of Amazing Stories, contained stories with horror elements, the idea of separating horror from other genres didn't come until much later. But during the twenties and thirties, in magazines such as Weird Tales, writers such as Clark Ashton Smith and H.P. Lovecraft were published right alongside Robert E. Howard and Seabury Quinn. It was a time when the writer's mind could truly roam free, using whatever story elements fit the author's vision.

Burroughs' Pellucidar envisioned a hollow Earth, with an entire world on the underside of the Earth's crust inhabited by dinosaurs, ape-men, and enormous creatures from Earth's dim past, as well as humans. H.P. Lovecraft's horror contained science fiction elements such as the Mi-Go, fungi from the ninth planet of our solar system (written around the time Pluto was discovered). And Robert E. Howard's Conan, the quintessential fantasy hero, fought eldritch horrors that wouldn't have seemed out of place in a Lovecraft story.

Unfortunately, that sense of 'anything goes' was lost for a long time. Go to a modern bookstore and look at all the genre sections. There's mystery, there's fantasy, there's sci-fi (sometimes the latter two are combined), there's horror, there's romance, there's westerns...it's all neatly categorized, and you can generally have a pretty good idea of what you're going to get when you pick a book out of one of those sections. And that, frankly, gets to be boring. There are only so many ways you can pastiche or deconstruct Tolkien before the stories are predictable. And who reads for predictable?

Today, indy writers are mixing genres the way it used to be done. Brian Niemeier, for example, has written the Nethereal series, which combines far-future science fiction with cosmic horror. Larry Correia's Monster Hunter International mixed modern military-style fiction with fantastic creatures such as werewolves. The genre lines are blurring again, and that's a good thing.

The best compliment a pulp-style writer of fantasy or science fiction can get is that his story can't be categorized in any particular genre. Mix it up! Who cares if your swashbuckling hero in 17th-century France runs into a Roswell alien? That's a cool story! Or a dragon taking on an F-18 in an aerial dogfight? Bring it on! Stories like that expand the imagination and get the reader thinking outside of a particular box. And who knows? That might lead them to a whole new pack of stories that they would never have read had they stuck to a genre.

The old pulps had it right; appeal to multiple audiences, and sell more copies. It's time to get back to that mindset, and ditch the rigid compartmentalization of writing.