Mastodawn

20th May 2026. If not your current genre, what genre would you write?

This is your daily scheduled reminder that genres are just marketing labels.

I write SF/F, and I had a breakout success in 2007 with a novel about crime inside MMOs. In the UK, it hit its fourth hardcover reprint within 2 weeks of publication and my subsequent book advances quadrupled!

Turns out it went gold because Waterstones systematically misfiled it under "crime", not SF/F …

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HollieK 4d ago

@cstross SF/F Crime, just emphasising the last part of the label.

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Charlie Stross 4d ago

@HollieK72 Yes well, Crime outsells SF/F by about 3:1.

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Mark Whybird 4d ago

@cstross @HollieK72 Your experience is a supporting data point for my theory that SF (and also F to a lesser degree) is not a genre by itself but a sort of meta-genre or theme category, in which you can place almost any other genre (eg crime, mystery, political thrilller, whatever).

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Ray McCarthy 4d ago

@whybird @cstross @HollieK72
You can have multiple "genres" in any novel. It's artificial to help advertising and sometimes makes for shallower picks by the publishers because they want it to fit a box.
Riders of the Purple Sage has romance, adventure, Robinsonade etc.
Dune and early Pern novels are far more Fantasy than SF.
Forbidden Plant is based on "The Tempest".
Caves of Steel is more a detective story than SF.

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HollieK 4d ago

@raymaccarthy @whybird @cstross You need it to fit into a box so you can shelve it in the bookshop. Otherwise you've got hundreds of sub-genres or everything shelved A-Z under Fiction.

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Ray McCarthy

@HollieK72 @whybird @cstross
When I was a teen (and earlier) the all the libraries sorted non-fiction by subject and indeed fiction only by A to Z with separate children's section, though there was no ban on children borrowing the grown-up's books.