Genre Mashups: Elves in space

Hi there! Welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by. This month, we’re talking about genres. We’re taking genres that might not be often seen together, and putting them together to get our creative juices flowing—and, we’re doing all this just in time for November, NaNoWriMo! I’m hoping I’ll be able to inspire some of you to try something new, and maybe make a really cool story along the way.

If you’ve been trying out my writing prompts, I’d love to see what you came up with! I’ve been having a grand time coming up with prompts for mashing all these genres together, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what I get out of this, by the end of the month. I always learn something too, you know.

Today, let’s talk about my two genres of choice! These are my favorite genres, my wheelhouse genres, the genres I camp out in as my happy place. Only, I never really write them together, nor is it a very common mashup, as far as I’ve seen.

Genre Mashups: Elves in space

Yeah, that’s right. We’re talking science fiction and high fantasy. And sure, it’s been done before. I’m fairly certain that every single genre mashup has already been done, that you can find examples of it all over online—but that doesn’t mean you’ve ever done it, nor does it give you the excuse not to do it. Because the story in you is a story that can’t come out of anyone else. The exact same story told by two different people is always a different story, in the end.

So let’s define our genres:

Science fiction, as we discussed last week, is a genre of the future. It’s not always set in the future, but it tends toward futuristic themes like space travel, time travel, and scientific advances not currently known to mankind. It is really more of a category than a full-on genre, because you can blend many different theme-genres into science fiction, to make a really cool story.

Fantasy, on the other hand, tends toward being set in the past. It isn’t always, but tends to focus on medieval times. High fantasy, in particular, deals with the lives of elves, dwarves, gnomes, dragons, and every other fantastical creature you’ve ever heard of in your life. It also tends toward containing the use of magic, in one shape or another. Like science fiction, fantasy is also more of a category, which also makes it easy to blend with theme-genres.

That means that today, we have two categories we’re mashing together. We haven’t done that yet, this series.

Like I said, fantasy tends toward being set in the past, but it doesn’t have to be set in the past. So I really want you to think outside the box on this one. I want you to imagine what fantastical species would’ve gotten to which scientific advancement first, to show a difference between peoples. I’d like to see at least one species with the ability to space travel.

So, write me a story. Write me a story about a gnome who’s just trying to move up in the world, but he’s a gnome, and he’s small, and only the big people have the best advancements. He wants his people to be the ones to make the next advancement. And he learns how to blend magic with science, to do things no one thought possible.

Write me a story that’s set in our future, but a future where every fantastical race you’ve ever heard of exists and thrives around us. A future where racial tensions aren’t within a single species but pointed outward, at other species (science fiction loves to play with politics, you know). A future where the apocalypse is looming, and everyone’s trying to prevent it—but every species wants their species to be the one to end it, so they’ll have the upper hand in the new world.

My mind is going a mile a minute, I have so many ideas… and I hope you do too!

Happy writing!

[love]

{Rani Divine}