BY PETE FORD
A few weeks ago, I read an article by a blogger who had a big problem with certain books. It appeared that he couldn’t decide whether these books were science fiction, or fantasy. These books didn’t—to his mind—fit neatly into one category or the other, so they didn’t belong to either, and therefore were bad books that didn’t deserve serious consideration.
This is something I’ve seen many, many times. Some people really do have a problem with books that don’t fit neatly and obviously into a single category.
Let’s take a step back. Why do we have genres in the first place?
I did a little bit of research about that question but found no definitive answer, so I’m going to theorise a little and say that genres probably originated in the needs of bookshops and readers. People need to be able to find books, or browse among books of interest to them. And so, we categorize books by genre to make that simpler.
Why do we traditionally assign a single genre to a book? Well, let’s say we have a book that could be classed as both Fantasy and Romance. If we assign it to both genres, our bookshop owner would have to keep one copy in the Fantasy section and another in the Romance section.
Do that for several thousand books, and you’re looking at a significant investment in shelf space (and cost). And what about books that fit into three genres or more? So, we decide on a single primary genre for each book, to avoid the complications.
In some cases, the author will be the one to decide the genre, although the publisher would probably have the final word. The bookshops generally don’t make this decision—they wouldn’t have the time or manpower to read every book, as they’d have to do to be able to do that.
I think we can all agree that this isn’t the best way to organise books, simply because many books—in fact, I’d go as far as to say most books—don’t fit neatly into a single genre. (This, I think, is where our blogger friend’s thinking has gone awry; for him, it seems, the books have become subservient to the genres.) But, as long as we have the constraints set by the way a typical bookshop needs to be laid out, it has probably the most practical way. Until now.
We’re not really constrained in that way these days. Many people buy books online (which, regrettably, is making it hard on the traditional bookshops). And in an online bookshop, floor space is not a concern. That leads to new possibilities.
Who remembers the early incarnations of Gmail? In those days, you organized your email in much the same way as you did with email client software, such as Outlook Express and Thunderbird—you could categorize emails by moving them from your inbox to folders that you created yourself. That way, you could keep your family emails in one folder, and business-related emails in a another, for example.
But what about email from a family member, related to a business matter? Which folder do you put that in? It’s basically the same problem as we saw with the books. You can either decide which of the two categories it best falls into, or make a copy of the email in each of those two folders. Neither solution is truly ideal, though.
A few years ago, Google changed all that. Folders disappeared; all your mail is on one big place called All Mail. Instead of using folders, each email can be tagged with labels to categorize them, and then you can filter the view of emails to show only those with a specific label.
And here’s the magic part: you can apply multiple labels to emails. Now, instead of deciding which folder an email belongs in when there are multiple relevant categories, you can apply all the appropriate labels at once. So you label those problematic emails as both “Business” and “Family”, and the problem is solved. No duplicate copies. And you can see the mail when you filter by either label.
This same principle can be applied to books, for the simple reason that it’s a better model of the way books and genres work in the real world. Why agonize over whether a Terry Pratchett book counts as Humor or Fantasy, when in reality it’s almost certainly both? Just label it as such, and voila, the problem is solved.
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In an online bookshop you could, in theory, add all the appropriate labels without issue. Now the customers can look for books labeled as, say, both Steampunk and Romance, and find a complete list of all the books with both labels. All it takes is for someone (probably the publisher) to decide on the appropriate labels.
Of course, we’d need a set of “approved” labels to choose from. It wouldn’t be much help if some publishers used “Swords and Sorcery” where others would use “Fantasy” for much the same purpose. The list of approved labels could be maintained by a body made up of publishers, booksellers and other interested parties.
What about print books on shelves in bookshops? As I see it, in principle they could use the same technology if it’s already in place for the online stores. Many books already have the genre printed on the back cover, and whether or not they do, it could also be attached to the bar code information—so the shop scans the barcode when they receive the book, and their system grabs the matching genres from a remote database.
So now, it’s in the store’s system, labeled according to genres, and they can shelve the books wherever they see fit. If they provide screens for their customers to look up books by genre, much like online shopping—and many bookshops do—the customers can find books in stock and go right to the correct shelf to find what they’re looking for.
It also solves the problem that the blogger I mentioned seemed to be having. If we can get away from the idea that every book belongs to just one genre—which is self-evidently not true—then perhaps we can also avoid unnecessary, and ultimately meaningless, arguments that multi-genre books are inherently bad.
Author Pete Ford writes his Retro Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Alternative History/Steampunk/ Romance/Action Adventure novel, a sequel to Mr. Gunn and Dr. Bohemia, from his home in Colorado, where he lives with his wife. His next short story, “The Voyage of Valerie McGrath” will be published in The X’s Steampunk anthology in the spring.
Follow Pete on his blog, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Goodreads.