This essay began as an attempt to explain Progression Fantasy and LitRPG. That topic wandered off into the woods and may be glimpsed through the bright autumnal foliage later on.

You are likely familiar with the book industry’s marketing separation of fiction books into overarching categories called ‘genres’ (pronounced as though you are three cocktails into the party and have forgotten the two years of French you took in high school: zhon-ruhs). If we were being honest in our taxonomy, almost every book can be considered fantasy to some degree, but we have collectively decided to pretend otherwise. It is quite rare to find a book which unambiguously falls into just one genre; think of them more as tags which represent major elements in the book, rather than any sort of strict separation. Every book is a mix-and-match; don’t be fooled.

Romance: stories about people falling in love. This has been the largest category by far in both titles and overall sales for some decades, likely because human mating rituals are of tremendous concern to humans. Subgenres of romance include the kinds where the culmination of the whole story is a kiss, with no sexual activity being present except in the unwritten interlude between the wedding at the end of the book and the epilogue in which there are, mysteriously, six children in the house, and also the kinds in which the majority of the pages are concerned with who the protagonists are sleeping with (or not). “Sweet” and “spicy” denote levels of explicitness about sex. If the book is more concerned with the sex than any other aspect of the relationship, it may be labelled Erotica; if the plot is primarily a link between sex scenes, it may be labelled Adult, which means pornography.

Mystery: stories about finding out why people died. Nominally there are mysteries which don’t involve murder or at least suspected murder, but those tend to be a subgenre called puzzle stories. Some mysteries are told in reverse, where the reader knows what happened and the fun is watching the detective(s) stumble around. Abother subgenre is the Cozy, in which a middle-aged to elderly woman is required to exhibit nearly supernatural powers of observation and deduction in a geographically restricted area with a small cast of potential murderers. A cozy mystery usually requires a tanker-truck of tea.

Thriller: stories about the protagonist being chased by enemies or predators. These often start off as mysteries, but it’s usual for there to be more physical altercations and fewer convenient gatherings of the suspects for tea-time interrogation. A popular thriller archtype is the Assassin Who Only Kills Bad People, who is often countered by the Killer Who Enjoys Murder. If the protagonist spends a lot of time killing the enemies, it becomes an Action Thriller.

Military fiction is concerned with refighting past wars. If it is moved into the near-future, it is not damned with the tag of science fiction. If it is set off-planet or off-universe or far into the future¹ or explicitly involves time travel, it becomes MilSF.

Literary: during the twentieth century, publishers in New York and London invented a category called Literary Fiction, which they defined as being better than all the others because almost nothing happened. Without much plot, every incident in the book took on so much Significance that essays could be written about what the author really meant to convey, and so we see that the point of Literary Fiction is not to be enjoyed but to be critiqued. When some of the few events in the story are completely impossible, it is dubbed Magical Realism.

Fantasy: as I said, all of these genres are properly children of Fantasy, which is simply the category in which Things That Did Not Happen in Real Life, do happen. Conventionally, though, fantasy excludes those cases where the primary changes are in the behavior of the characters, and requires at least one major change along the lines of an intentional total reworking of physics, history, or the universe at large. Note the intentionality: mere ignorance on the part of the author does not transfer the story into the fantasy genre.

If the fantastical elements are about technology and its effects, it is Science Fiction. If the story is primarily about the effects of a particular moment in history going a different way than we think it did, it is Alternate History. If one or more protagonists are transplanted to a different universe, it is Isekai. If the story is primarily concerned with one or more protagonists gaining superpowers, it is a Superhero story (even if it is about villains, which most of them are.) When the author focuses on the continual growth of superpowers magic martial arts meditation religion psionics chi ranks levels, it is Progression Fantasy; add character sheets to this and it transforms into LitRPG.

Hard Science Fiction means, in James Nicoll’s memorable formulation, that the author shows enough work that you can confidently spot their mistakes. Science Fantasy overlays the flavor of technology on what is clearly magic. Space Opera defines a setting distant in time and/or space but wide in scope.

It is very hard to do comedy well; satires are often more successful. Set the comedy in a fantasy or science-fictional universe and it becomes more difficult, because the author needs to explain the universe in order to land the jokes. Since puns can be self-contained, they appear more frequently, but suffer from repetition.

When the plot is Romance and the setting has Fantastical elements, it can be claimed as Romantasy, but this is in no way new or different. Urban Fantasy means that the elves, vampires, werefolk, wizards or ghosts interact with recognizably modern cities in some way other than just invading them. The universal cover signifier for urban fantasy is a woman in tight leather pants standing with her back to the viewer and wielding a knife, wand or aurora. Planetary Romance, oddly, does not require a Romance plot: it is merely set on transfigured fantasy versions of the local Solar System.

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1. A surprising number of stories underestimate their own longevity, resulting in the nuclear holocaust of 1997, the post-apocalyptic wastelands of 1985, or the cyberpunk dystopia of 2020.↩︎