The Age of Genre Bending, Blending, and Juxtaposing

Thoughts on the most important literary trend of the last 25 years, and novels that juxtapose different genres side by side.

On the Threshold of Liberty by René Magritte

Metallic Realms lands on bookstore shelves next week! The novel has received very flattering reviews so far from Esquire (“Brilliant”), Publishers Weekly (“riveting”), Elle (“hilariously clever”), Booklist (“just plain wonderful”), and elsewhere. If you have any interest, I hope you’ll consider preordering or picking up on pub day. More information here.

Hardcovers are here… and shiny!

The Genre-Bending Age

There have been many takes debating the most important literary trend of the century so far. The consensus seems to be that autofiction—highly autobiographical fiction represented by the likes of Karl Ove Knausgård, Ben Lerner, Rachel Cusk, and (erroneously) Elena Ferrante—has been the most important development. I love each of those authors yet I’ve always thought the consensus was wrong. From my vantage, the most consequential aesthetic trend in literature over the last 25 years has been “genre-bending fiction.”

Younger readers might not realize how entrenched the anti-genre bias was in mainstream publishing between, oh, say 1985 and 2005. The pendulum of literary tastes is always swinging. The 60s and 70s saw a great flourishing of what we would now call “genre-bending fiction.” On the SFF side, “New Wave” writers like Samuel Delany and Ursula K. Le Guin blended speculative ideas with literary style. On the quote unquote literary fiction side, the same thing happened—though called “magical realism” or “postmodernism”—with writers like Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, and Gabriel García Márquez. Anyway, this isn’t the space to lay out the whole legacy of the last 75 years of publishing. Suffice to say the pendulum swung back to realism in the 80s and for decades awards and mainstream attention focused on realist writers like Raymond Carver and John Updike. At least as recently as the 00s, when I went to college, creative writing workshops still had “no genre fiction” rules and “literary” was used as a synonym for domestic realism.

There’s never a single turning point, but we might as well pick the publication of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Many writers were genre-blending before this—Kelly Link and Jonathan Lethem, for example—but The Road had a huge impact. Here was one of the most acclaimed literary stylists writing a post-apocalyptic science fiction novel that was both highly popular (e.g., an Oprah’s Book Club pick) and acclaimed (e.g., Pulitzer Prize winner). Of course, one might point out that McCarthy’s previous books were Westerns or else Southern Gothic novels and thus genre fiction too. True. No one said this stuff was rational. Regardless, before 2006 it was rare to see writers engaged with science fiction, fantasy, or horror concepts competing for major literary awards. Since then, it has been rare to not have writers like Carmen Maria Machado, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Karen Russell, or Emily St. John Mandel in the mix. We almost expect our big literary authors to embrace genre elements for some books. Colson Whitehead’s zombie novel Zone One and magical realist The Underground Railroad. Kazuo Ishiguro’s fantasy novel The Buried Giant or science-fiction works Never Let Me Go (released the same year as The Road) and Klara and the Sun. Etc. Even Knausgård’s most recent series could be called horror or fantasy. We also see more mainstream coverage and acclaim for SFF-world writers, like N.K. Jemisin winning a MacArthur and Ted Chiang being profiled in the New Yorker.

This shift can be seen in literary awards, sales, and in academia. As I mentioned, “no genre” rules used to be common in college creative writing classes. Today, I—and many others—teach speculative fiction classes in MFA programs and students increasingly come to universities versed in genre literature and looking to write in those traditions. This literary genre-bending is mirrored in the broader culture’s genre-shift, in which the rise of prestige SFF TV shows like Game of Thrones, Black Mirror, and Severance, and the ascendency of SFF film franchises like MCU, LOTR, and Star Wars dominates the last quarter century of Hollywood.

Listen, I said it was the most important development. Not an entirely unproblematic one.

But for a writer and reader with my aesthetic preferences, it has been welcome. The shift has opened a wider variety of literature for serious discussion in quote unquote literary circles and given writers a wider set of tools to build their unique stories. As someone whose first collection combined realist “literary” stories with weird monster fiction, whose first novel was a science-fiction noir, and whose newest novel combines real-world satire with space adventure stories, well, I’m grateful the tides have shifted.

Genre-bending novels have been broadly discussed elsewhere. But I’ve been thinking about a more specific subset—or I suppose sub-genre—of genre-bending fiction that we might call “genre juxtaposing fiction.” (Maybe “genre jumping” is catchier?) In your traditional genre-bending work, the styles of two or more types of literature are mixed together to make a single new flavor. A coherent whole made of different ingredients. But in “genre juxtaposing” novels, the writer must navigate balancing different aesthetics while providing the pleasures of each seperately.

Novels that Jump Back and Forth Between Genres

There is self-interest to this topic. My forthcoming novel—yes, I do have to plug with one week to publication!—Metallic Realms fits into this tradition. The novel is half real-world satire about a science fiction writing collective in New York City, and half the group’s gonzo space opera tales. There’s even a chapter of fragmented autofiction in there. Dancing between science fiction and real-world satire was both artistically generative and a formal challenge. There is a delicate balance between making the work feel coherent and indulging in the different constraints of disparate genres. I like to think I pulled it off, but readers will have to judge that for themselves. But let me move onto other books that hop between genres in similar or different ways. In this casual taxonomy, I’ve thought of three different structures that allow genre-jumping.

The Fiction-Within-Fiction Book

The book-within-a-book structure is an old one, going back in time to old classics like The Canterbury Tales and One Thousand and One Nights. But in terms of more recent books that include a different genre within the main narrative, Margaret Atwood’s Booker-winning The Blind Assassin (2000) inserts science fiction into a historical novel. A more recent novel-in-a-novel book is Ed Park’s Pulitzer-finalist Same Bed Different Dreams (2023), which has a few narrative threads including an alternative history novel. (I interviewed Park about the novel in this newsletter.) Kevin Nguyen’s debut novel New Waves (2020) follows a tech worker who is looking into the death of his friend and co-worker, including reading her science-fiction works. (I interviewed Nguyen about his subsequent novel last month.) These are all books whose main reality is a version of ours. For the inverse, Yōko Ogawa’s The Memory Police is set in a surreal dystopia where objects and concepts can be disappeared and follows a writer whose novel-in-progress is excerpted throughout.

One novel-within-a-novel book that was a great inspiration for me is Percival Everett’s Erasure (2001), in which a frustrated black academic writes a scathing satire of “urban literature” that ends up becoming a massive commercial and critical success. If you’ve only seen the movie adaptation, American Fiction, I encourage you to read the novel. It is far more biting and spends more time on the work-within-a-work. Everett lets the satirical novel run for 70 pages. It’s an audacious move that gave me confidence that I could include a significant amount of the space opera tales in Metallic Realms.

Anytime I write about structurally interesting novels, I think of Italo Calvino’s work and certainly If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979) fits here. That novel has two parts. The first is a metafictional detective story in which you (the reader) are trying to track down Calvino’s latest novel and get embroiled in a larger plot. The second half of the book is a series of different opening chapters to unfinished novels that cover a range of genres and styles.

A recent novel I read and enjoyed that had another take on the book-within-a-book form is Renee Gladman’s My Lesbian Novel (2024). The main narrative of that book takes the form of a metafictional dialogue between an interviewer (“I”) and a version of Gladman (“R”) as they discuss R’s attempts to write a lesbian romance novel. Excerpts of the romance novel are included throughout, which I and R then dissect.

Braided and Folded Narratives

The book-within-a-book structure is not the only form of genre jumping literature. Some novels opt for a braided narrative where two (or more) storylines in different genres take place in the same reality. The first of those I remember reading was Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985). This novel is one-half cyberpunk following a Calcutec human data processor in a dystopian setting (aka, “hard-boiled wonderland”) and half surreal fantasy tale following a Dreamreader who must divine dreams from unicorn skulls (aka, “the end of the world”). I won’t spoil how the two stories come together at the end, but they do.

Probably the most famous version of a multi-genre folded narrative is David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) with its six nested storylines that jump between historical fiction, contemporary fiction, science fiction, and more. It’s quite impressive to be able to provide that many different styles and settings while still feeling like a single coherent book.

A very clever version of the braided genre narrative I read last week is Elder Race (2021) by Adrian Tchaikovsky. This tells one story in one time period yet is narrated in two quite different styles: epic fantasy and science fiction. It opens with a warrior princess traveling to tower of a powerful wizard to call for aid in defeating a demon. The next chapter reveals that the wizard is in fact an anthropologist who is stationed on the planet to observe the humans who colonized long ago, lost their technological know-how, and reverted to a more medieval state. Tchaikovsky flips back and forth between the perspectives (and styles) taking pleasure in the way language shapes our understanding of the world.

The Mid-Story Genre Shift

Lastly, there are novels that switch genres in the middle of a narrative. Ling Ma’s Severance (2018)—not to be confused with the TV show—begins as a realist literary novel about millennial malaise and late-capitalist office drudgery. Then a zombie apocalypse occurs. The novel flips between pre-zombie life and post-apocalyptic existence. White Tears (2017) by Hari Kunzru is another that I think could count. That excellent novel begins as a seemingly realist story about two white college graduates who are enamored with old blues music and have success appropriating the style and songs of older black musicians. But as the novel goes on, something supernatural intrudes that I wouldn’t want to spoil here.

An author whose writing process lends itself to mid-story genre-shifting is César Aira. I’ve written about his unusual writing process before, but briefly Aira writes in a form he calls “flight forward” in which he never revises older chapters once they are finished. Instead, he keeps leaping forward wherever his imagination takes him. Most of his books are quite short, but they can leap across multiple genres, settings, and styles as he flies forward. A favorite of mine is The Literary Conference (1997).

[ETA 05/07] A comment reminded me of Gene Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972), which is a fantastic science-fiction novel in three novellas. The middle novella switches to a mythic / fantasy style that complicates the other two science fiction sections.

These are a few methods of what I’m calling genre-jumping fiction, itself just a form of genre-blending fiction. Ultimately, what I love about these books is that they allow the reader and the writer to have it all. Why must everything stay stuffed in separate pigeon holes? Why can’t we indulge in all the aesthetic pleasures wherever we find them? After all, it’s the genre-bending age.

And a final plug. Learn more about my forthcoming novel Metallic Realms here. And if you live in NYC, the launch will be on the 14th. RSVPs encouraged.