You may have misread the title of this post. Take a second look just to be sure.

I’m fascinated by and obsessed with genre, which is not necessarily the most flattering moniker in the literary world.

“Genre fiction” is dismissed as formulaic, literarily subpar, and morally questionable to boot. Passive tools of the powers-that-be drug themselves with one escapist fantasy after another, whether it’s romance, Western, or sci-fi—or so the accusation goes.

Ursula K. LeGuin taught me to reverse my suspicion toward such suspicion of genre fiction, and enough disappointed dabblings in literary fiction have taught me that there’s more than one way to drug a populace. It’s the sniffy writers of beautiful sentences devoid of meaning or plot who are most likely to claim that their work can’t be classified; it’s beyond genre, so they say.

While I do like to read all kinds of things, I’m not especially devoted to any one genre. If it’s a good story, well told and well written, I’m game. The real reason I’ve become a genre devotee is because of the epistemology it unlocked for me…