Literary genres and subgenres are horribly limiting and absolutely necessary. They can kill creativity or allow it to flourish. Talk about your love/hate relationships.
I’m not even going to explore “literary fiction” vs. “general fiction” because it’s a meaningless differentiation that too often comes down to whether some (usually self-appointed) critic thinks a work has artistic merit or not. I love me some “great” books, but my idea of artistic merit is probably a little different than the Booker Prize panelists.
The stuff that is generally referred to as “genre fiction” gets placed into some pretty broad categories, like mystery, romance, horror, science fiction, western, etc. Science fiction and fantasy used to get lumped together but I’m happy to see that they’re generally now seen as distinct.
And then there’s erotica. Let’s be honest — most people outside our little circle of happy degenerates don’t even think about erotica as a genre. Or maybe they think of it only as the steamier side of the romance genre (which is, of course, also part of our thing).
In general, genre classifications help us find the stuff that we’re interested in. Bookstores have their separate sections, the librarian can direct you to a particular shelf, and we can narrow our search down online.
