What makes science fiction science fiction, what makes fantasy fantasy, horror horror, western western, romance romance, and so on, instead of everything being either mystery, fantasy, realist (aka literary), or historical fiction?
This post wasn’t just prompted by Stephen (Outlaw Bookseller) Andrews’s video Why Horror is Not a Genre: Horror as Science Fiction, Fantasy or Crime , but let’s look at that first as a starting point…
Right up front Stephen asserts that “horror is not a genre, but a bricolage,” which is to say that some horror stories, like the movie Alien , are actually and only science fiction because it occurs in the future, on a spaceship, and there’s nothing supernatural about the xenomorph, which is indeed presented only as a naturally occurring predatory animal. Likewise, Dracula is not horror but fantasy because it contains or depends on the supernatural. And then some horror stories—he uses the example of Psycho —are actually crime novels, which are themselves actually simply forms of realist fiction. This is then extended so that Star Wars , because of the Force, is fantasy and not science fiction, because the Force is supernatural. In another video he also de-genres westerns, grouping them in with historical fiction.
I disagree.
What he’s missing is two things: a proper definition of genre, and the simple concept that genres can be and quite often have been combined .
No proper definition of genre can exclude the fact that genre talks back to itself.
If you can find a well researched novel about what life in the American West was like in the 1800s, like The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford , I’m happy to call that historical fiction, but otherwise, westerns are westerns when they include the goofy stuff that never actually happened except in that idealized/villainized “Old West.” The western genre was born out of “tall tales” of pioneer heroes like Buffalo Bill, whose entire existence was highly fictionalized. In fact, all the various real life outlaws and sheriffs’ real lives were rather different than what was described in the yellow journalism of the day. Billy the Kid sold newspapers. A highly glamorized and fictionalized version of Billy the Kid sold even more newspapers. And finally we have a real person and a fictional character who bear only a passing resemblance to each other. And as the years went on, more entirely invented characters were created for the fiction magazines based on the almost entirely invented Billy the Kids and Buffalo Bills of the time, until what we’ve ended up with is a uniquely American mythology—the western—that dips its toes into a real place and time but otherwise feeds on itself. Western authors reference other westerns, historical accuracy be damned.
Likewise, horror authors reference other horror stories.
That’s what makes horror a genre. If it looks like horror, feels like horror, quacks like horror, scares you like horror… it’s horror.
Indeed, in 1818, Mary Shelley had no concept of the contemporary idea of “science fiction” as a genre. She was writing a scary story based on articles she’d read about experiments in electricity, and, like any good science fiction author would do, accelerated that into the impossibility of reanimating dead humans in order to make a point. That is exactly what science fiction does. The fact that it’s scary also makes it horror.
The various genres as we know them today are largely constructs of the era of pulp fiction magazines . In “ The Pulp Genres: An (Almost) Complete List ,” (November 2021) I broke down how those magazines tended to separate themselves, and get into the idea of the origins of the genres as we’ve come to understand them. And just as Mary Shelley mixed science fiction with horror, so did the pulp authors and editors—often with wild abandon. Edgar Rice Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars begins as a western then quickly introduces what feels like fantasy, but then certainly comes to feel like science fiction because John Carter has gone to a specific place (Mars) based on what was a popular (mis)conception of the time: that Mars was once home to a complex civilization that built canals to bring water from the poles as their world slowly dried out. Other than what seems to be a supernatural form of interplanetary travel, the rest of what we see on Mars definitely feels like advanced technology, even if Mr. Burroughs did quite a bit of what we might today call “hand waving” around how these things actually worked.
Here I’ll once again fall back on my view of science fiction as a ratio of science:fiction. Hard SF authors like Robert Heinlein or Greg Bear tip that scale more heavily toward the science, putting in the time to research the concepts they then push a bit farther out into a plausible future. Edgar Rice Burroughs and George Lucas tip that balance decidedly in the direction of fiction, and just pile on a bunch of fun stuff without ever pretending there was some real science behind the Ninth Ray or lightsabers. Could we call what Heinlein and Bear write science fiction and what ERB and Lucas have given us science fantasy?
That being the case, horror can also be science fiction (as with Frankenstein ) or also fantasy (as with Dracula ) and so on. That’s not only fine, it’s been happening—as is true of both Frankenstein and Dracula —long before the genres in question were properly named and codified. So then Alien and Frankenstein are science fiction-horror, Dracula is supernatural horror, Psycho is psychological horror (two sub-genres of horror), and Star Wars is science fantasy.
I’m okay with that.
—Philip Athans
For more on genre see:
Dialog Exercise: Time, Place, and Genre
Fantasy and/or Science Fiction and/or Horror
Love the Game or Go Play a Different One
Why Fantasy and Science Fiction
Please Stop Shitting on Genre Fiction
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