by Doug Lewars

If you happen to go to Wikipedia and look up ‘List of Writing Genres’ you’ll find something on the order of 179 of them. That number is rough because my eyes sort of glazed over as I was counting down the list. Nevertheless, there are a lot.

Do genres mean anything? In some cases they do. Clearly there is a difference between, say Hard Science Fiction and Historical Romance (I hope) but within something like Steampunk, how much difference is there between Clockpunk and Dieselpunk? There may be some but I doubt people who enjoy Steampunk in general would bother to differentiate.  Genres are a reasonably good means of starting a search for a book you may enjoy, but they’re probably not fully representative of what you are about to read.