When people ask me what genre I’m writing in, I’m at a loss to find a correct answer.

The thing is, I don’t want to reply something like “it’s a fantasy novel”, because I don’t want to give false impressions. A large chunk of fiction is actual fantasy : S. King write fantasy. Given, it’s not what people imagine when you say fantasy, but it still is. Each time you refer to something, being a place, a time, technology, magic, anything that is not part of our world, you’re doing fantasy.

So, if it’s such a large genre, I need to define sub-genres to explain where I’m writing in.

The closest sub-genre I heard about is called “postmodern fantasy”. That might seem like over-pompous, but it explains itself very well.

Classical fantasy is Tolkien, Lovecraft, Moorcock. When they wrote fantasy, there was no genre defined yet. They defined what fantasy is. A chunk of authors derived their works from the ideas of Tolkien and such.

Then, came a new wave (which we’ll call modern fantasy) which took the elements of classical fantasy and tried to set themselves apart; to redefine the genre. Those are Robert Jordan, GRR Martin and such. Their writing started with classical settings, then, they turned the genre on it’s head.

Now, comes postmodern fantasy. Those authors didn’t grow up reading Tolkien, they grew up reading Wheel of Time. Of course, we all read Lord of the Rings, but to us, fantasy is Wheel of Time and Song of Ice and Fire. When you read that, it’s difficult to write classical (“my orcs are different, they are spelled with a k”-type stories). You might think that we would want to write like Martin or Jordan. A bunch of writers do. Another lot asked itself : what can I do differently? These, I’ll call postmodern.

As a genre, postmodern tries to take some new settings and exploit the fantasy genre to produce something different, so the setting won’t be medieval like in classical or modern : it can be renaissance era, 19th century, or anything else. Writers of that genre aim at bringing something different : inventive new magic systems (like Sanderson’s) or different takes on religions, society, whatever.

If I look back at what I’m writing, this is what my current novel looks the most closely associated with : I’m not writing sword & sorcery, I’m not writing a big high fantasy epic or even an urban fantasy (though it could be the sub-genre most related to my work). I’m writing a postmodern story in a setting familiar, yet different. I won’t write about sword-fights (not in that novel anyway) and not much about magic : I write about a society and the impact that society had on two girls.

So if I have to give you a genre for this novel : postmodern fantasy it is!