I am becoming one of those authors. You know, one of those guys who, upon being asked at a
party what genre they write in, they swirl their gluten free beer in their glass and
start hemming and hawing about how “it’s a little like urban fantasy, but could
be considered horror, with lots of historical mystery and romantic elements and
even scientific and literary aspirations.” Yaddayaddablablabla kill me now before he opens his mouth again.
Aaaaagh! The
questioner silently seethes. Get over
yourself! Is it scifi or not? All your self-overanalysis makes you sound like
an Olympic Class Wanker!
But books
and movies are coming to a point where classic genre classifications don’t
work. Not how we need them to. To address the issue, a dizzying number of
sub-genres have bubbled up from the literary cauldron of Goodreads that can
leave even veteran readers confused. Space opera, urban fantasy, high fantasy,
historical fantasy, magical realism, erotic vampire, paranormal romance,
supernatural thriller, post-apocalypse zombie dystopia, steampunk, cyberpunk… That’s just a smattering of what’s
out there. Go on Goodreads and try taking a stroll through all the genre clubs
out there. An hombre can get lost in that jungle.
I have a
solution. We need the BLT. The Baker Literary Taxonomy, as my first supporter,
author Rob Gregson from Goodreads, ingeniously hailed it. The BLT is a
Greek/Latin/Finnish/Esperanto genre taxonomy system. Readers and literary
establishment types alike hate the application of /’s in the genre subheading
of a book. It’s kind of like the legal fine print disclaimer jargon attached to
Viagra and Happy Fun Balls (DO NOT TAUNT HAPPY FUN BALL!!!). People want to see
something adequately, succinctly labeled. Slashes make many of us uneasy. They
make us think something’s not right with that Happy Fun Ball. Something
sinister and corrupt.
So let’s eschew those slashes for a
cool taxonomy, as for chemical compounds or dinosaurs, plants and animals.
Is your
book a horror/mystery/fantasy tale? Not anymore. Under the Baker Literary Taxonomy,
the work would be (according to Google Latin translate):
Exemplum Mysterium
Phantasiam.
Cool, right? How about an erotic vampire
adventure?
Venerae felis adventum.
And that
military science fiction time travel detective novel you’ve been marketing?
Try:
Tempus spatium bellum sacramentum.
Ooh, and
that magical dinosaur adventure comedy you’ve been banging your head over?
Dinosaurum magicae adventum comoediam.
Oh, and a
murder mystery detective urban fantasy romance?
Homicidium sacramentum inquisitor
urbana luctus felis.
I’d buy those
without looking at the back cover over the reviews.
The BLT
addreses a long-standing problem. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Thomas Pynchon, Anne
Rice, Phillip K. Dick, Kurt Vonnegut, Ray Bradbury, Jonathan Lethem, to name an
infinitesimal few, have elucidated the real world through the prism of the
fantastical. Traditional SciFi gained a foothold with mainstream readership by
promising philosophical solutions to long-standing cultural questions via wild
and wooly scientific theories; indeed, classic SciFi authors like George Orwell
and Aldous Huxley have been looked upon as literary Cassandras for how their
made-up worlds predicted where our world is heading. They did that in spite of
the innate snobbery involved when someone describes a work as fantasy or
science fiction “but it’s really so much more!” Like, because it’s not a
meditation on the plight of transgender Libertarian coal miners in West Virginia in 1994, it’s
not important.
I think the
efforts of great genre-authors deserves a BLT. Don’t you?
