Tuesday, October 1, 2019

Genre Mashups: Back in time gets futuristic


Hi everyone! Welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by. It’s October, so we’re getting into a new series today, and it’s one I’m really excited to talk about. I’d mentioned something, semi recently (as in, I'm not sure when it was, but I think it might've been over the summer?), that struck a chord with me. I was talking about genre, and how every genre really has more than one genre inside it… and I think we should talk about that, a bit more.

Let’s talk genre mashups, shall we? Every Tuesday and Thursday, I’ll be taking two genres and talking about how we could, as writers, mash them together to make something really fun, and maybe even a bit outside the box. Along the way, I hope we’ll all discover a little something about how genre really works, and why categories really make more sense than genres, nowadays. ;-) I’ll also be sharing some writing prompts, to get our creative juices flowing, just in time for NaNoWriMo!

Genre Mashups: Back in time gets futuristic


Now, I should mention at this point that a lot of these mashups won’t be anything new, to a lot of you. Like they say, there’s really nothing new under the sun. Writers all over the world have been mashing up genres their whole career. We’re just going to explore them, a little bit.

Historical Science Fiction


It’s a thing. If you didn’t know that, maybe you should look it up. But even the X-Men delved into this genre, honestly. Magneto is a Jewish character, who survived the Holocaust. That’s historical fiction. But he’s a mutant, a being who’s developed the power to manipulate metal. That makes it science fiction. But the mashup of the two is what makes that story one that will never get old, in my opinion.

And there are a lot of ways to mash these two genres together, to create something extra special.

In a lot of ways, these two genres are pretty opposite. Historical fiction is set in the past, so there’s a lot of older technologies, sometimes even minimal technology, depending on your time period. But science fiction, on the other hand… well, that tends to be thought of as futuristic, a genre that’s firmly set either in the future or on another planet. And that, to me, is what makes these two the perfect mashup.


Maybe you’re doing a WWI story, where aliens were the ones who really started the war. Maybe you’re writing a medieval fiction, about Napoleon, but he’s so good at what he does because he keeps jumping into the future to figure out the best ways to defeat his enemies. There are a lot of ways these two genres can be combined, to become something you might not have imagined.

So, I have an exercise for you. And don’t worry, we’ll have one of these with every genre mashup, just to get your creative juices flowing. (I’ll be doing the exercises too, I promise!)

Write a short story, that puts these two genres together. But don’t just write any short story. I have two specific things I want you to use, in your short story. I want you to write a short story about rural China in the eighth century, and I want one of your characters to discover their bones are made of metal.

Take that idea, and roll with it. See what your creative mind comes up with. See if you can make a novel out of it, if you will. But most of all, don’t let the constrictions of either historical fiction or science fiction prevent you from being fully creative.


If you’re up for it, share your concepts, ideas, and maybe a paragraph or two with me! I’d love to see what you come up with!

[love]

{Rani Divine}

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