Why Genre Matters

1. Genres give readers easy access to the books they enjoy.
   A name, a location, an identity separate from the rest. Most often, you can tell a genre book by its cover. And for additional ease, the book usually says western or romance, or thriller or horror on the cover. (Always be suspicious when genre is intentionally or accidentally concealed.)
   
   
2. Genres allow readers to enter a familiar conversation.
   A genre is perhaps best understood as a conversation among texts, which readers participate in eagerly, appreciate, discuss among themselves and sometimes with the writers. Innovations are made, but they are made within conventional limits.
   
   
3. Genres give readers a sense of belonging, tradition, and common ground.
   Genres provide a certain comforts to readers, among them a sense that you belong to a group of people who feel more or less the same about things that are important to you, and that the group to which you belong has a past and a future.
   
   
4. Genres transmit knowledge.
   Each genre requires and offers a body of specialized knowledge that yields special pleasures to its readers. You have to know some science outside the story to appreciate science fiction; something about behavior and desire in relationships to read romances; something about the operation of ships to read the sea story properly. And you can learn a lot of what you need to know by just reading a lot in the genre.
   
   
5. Genres entertain.
   Good genre literature is good storytelling, however the story is approached or told. And stories are an ancient and enduring from of entertainment in human culture.
   
   
6. Genres offer literary satisfactions.
   The best of genre is always part of the best literature of the age. The guardians of literature usually succeed in marginalizing all contemporary genre literature, even the best, but a generation or two later they have lost.
   
   
7. Genres model, show readers "how to".
   Genres teach behaviors in real life situations, sometimes directly, sometimes symbolically, but the genre audience can recognize it and desires it.
   
   
8. Genres allow transgressions.
   The existence of genre boundaries allows transgression of boundaries, draws lines to cross. Genre's progress and evolve when writers violate one of more of the conventions of a genre, and the audience follows. If the audience does not follow, the experiment fails, no matter how ambitious or satisfying to a core few. This is also precisely the case in fashionable literatures (where the boundaries are there only implicitly).

David G. Hartwell is a Senior Editor at Tor/Forge Books in New York, and is the publisher of The New York Review of Science Fiction. He has been nominated for the Hugo Award 31 times.