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Featured in Publisher's Weekly Genre Mashups Article 10/9/2017 5:54:43 AM
A sorcerer explores the frontier of theoretical physics. --PW on CrossTown In the October 9th Article in Publisher's Weekly, Genre Mashups, several upcoming books were explored as genre-bending works, including CrossTown.
Regarding CrossTown: (from the article)
CrossTown
Loren W. Cooper (Red Hen, Nov.)
A sorcerer explores the frontier of theoretical physics.
Calling himself a “spiritual thug for hire,” Zethus has the decidedly science-fictional ability to travel through alternate realities. Thanks to the mind-bending physics theory—made real in Cooper’s novel—that every decision we make creates a new universe, Zethus is able to conduct an investigation into his mentor’s murder that leads him from the Irish folkloric land of Faerie to the horror-novel NightTown, which is populated by vampires, to the science fictional TechTown, suffused with futuristic technology.
From the article: “I’ve definitely seen more boundary-defying books in recent years,” says Sarah Guan, associate editor at Orbit. “This reflects the genre’s growing stature in the cultural mainstream. Science fiction and fantasy that borrows from, sidles into, or unapologetically gate-crashes other genres is now embraced as interesting and innovative on all sides.”
I'd argue this has been going on for some time. Look at John Myers Myers, or the frequent crime crossovers with science fiction and fantasy (Asimov, Boucher, Simak, Reaves, more recently Butcher, Cook, and too many to list). Not to mention literary fantasy like Magic Realism, or the works of Kafka, Vonnegut, etc. Some authors/critics have argued that most genres are really under works of Romance as opposed to Realism (Romance in the sense of heroic and fantastic feats, as the knightly tales were Romances--not in the modern genre sense). The difference is, genres as marketing devices are specific to what shelf in the store one finds a kind of book. As we move away from the traditional bookselling models, marketing shifts while authors continue to exploit the seams with a certain merry disregard for the confines of marketing genre.
