In the second half of 2017 I was writing about Gray Barker and Albert K. Bender, two flying saucer aficionados who wrote on Fortean topics. Charles Fort, their original, was a monist. His thesis in his first book, The Book of the Damned (1919), is that all things are continuous with each other. That got me to thinking about continuities and discontinuities in genre fiction.
Before there were named genres of fiction, there was just fiction.* Even when there was genre fiction, there weren't any clear distinctions to be made, early on, among the various genres: no fixed categories, no hard conventions, no uncrossable boundaries, no firm labels. In some cases, there weren't any labels at all. That began to change once genre fiction began to develop more fully after World War I.
Another (imperfect) term for genre fiction is pulp fiction. Pulp fiction began in 1896, in the decade during which so much of our popular culture originated. Early on, there were general-fiction pulp magazines: Argosy, Adventure, Blue Book, Short Stories. That changed after the war, coincidentally or not in the same year that The Book of the Damned was published. The first Western pulp magazine, Western Story Magazine, began in 1919. So did The Thrill Book, a forerunner to Weird Tales. Then came Black Mask, the first (I think) crime/detective pulp, in 1920, and Love Story Magazine, the first romance pulp in 1921. Weird Tales came along in March 1923. It was the first weird fiction magazine in America. Amazing Stories, first published 100 years ago this month, was the first science fiction magazine.
As pulp magazine titles proliferated, so did the pulp genres. There were adventure pulps, railroad pulps, sports pulps, aviation pulps, war pulps, jungle pulps, spicy pulps, horror and terror pulps, weird hero pulps, and so on. Even categories such as science fiction were split. The Astounding Science-Fiction of the 1940s published hard science fiction, while others published science fantasy and planetary romance-type stories. There were ghost-story pulps because ghost stories are not the same as weird fiction. There was North•West Stories because stories of the Far North are different from Westerns. There were "Easterns," too, such as Oriental Stories.
The proliferation of pulp genres was partly or wholly an economic matter. Different pulp genres sold to different categories of readers. And every month, readers read vast amounts of fiction and non-fiction. For as long as the pulp fiction era lasted, those different genres were sustained. But even after the pulps faded away, there were still genres--and, increasingly, sub-genres. I think genres and sub-genres shrank away in digest magazines, just as the dimensions of the magazines shrank, but they thrived in newspaper comic strips, comic books, and paperbacks, as well as on television. Once our culture became atomized, beginning, I think, in the 1980s and continuing through the present, genres, sub-genres, and sub-sub-genres proliferated even more. There were evermore (and ever smaller) categories of readers, and each wanted to read within its own genre. In the Middle Ages, the question was how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Now a similar question might be how many sub-genres and sub-sub-genres can dance on the head of science fiction? Or fantasy?
In the 1960s, I think, something else began happening, and that is that academics, as well as critics and writers trained in academia, became interested in the pulp genres, and another proliferation commenced. I don't think that proliferation was economic. Instead it had to do with the academic's need for recognition, validation, improved status, and prestige. Academics and intellectuals pride themselves on being theorizers and discoverers. But what happens once everything has already been discovered? How are you going to make yourself extraordinary when there aren't anymore all-explanatory theories to be made? Well, if you're going to make a name for yourself and earn the esteem (better yet, envy) of your colleagues, you have to find things where they don't exist, in places where there isn't any room anymore for theorizing or discovery. You have to come upon new lands in an already thoroughly mapped world.** And if that takes making things up, well, your self-esteem (which you paradoxically seek to be provided you by other people), dependent as it is on your status and prestige, is at stake, and so you'll do it. Yes, you'll cloak your invention--not discovery--in high-falutin' scholarly language, but you're still making it up. Your hope is that no one will notice. Your hope is that those letters you have appended to your name will provide cover for your ideas and theories and blind people to your purpose. They have to believe what you're saying because you have a Ph.D. You're an expert.
I have written before about a couple of cases of scholars making stuff up. One has to do with Francis Stevens and the so-called sub-genre or sub-sub-genre of "dark fantasy." The other has to do with zombies and when they arrived in America. But I think there's another one, although in this case, it seems to have been critics and academically trained authors who tried to create a "new" thing.*** That "new" thing was called "the New Weird," and I started writing a long series about it in mid 2017. I got pretty far in my series, but it has remained only in draft form since then. As it stands, it's a little out of date. What I'd like to do is bring it more up to date and to publish it in this space over the next few weeks.
Beware, there is much reading to come.
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*There were exceptions: Gothic romance, Utopian fiction, and the English ghost story come to mind.
**Charles Fort came up with an all-explanatory theory. He also wrote a book called New Lands (1923).
***The academic training and viewpoint of the authors is important, I think, in understanding the development of "the New Weird." In his introduction to the 2008 anthology The New Weird, Jeff VanderMeer referred to authors of pulp fiction, for example H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, as "self-taught." I'm not sure that he meant that as a pejorative, but it's clear that he was making a distinction between what he called "Old Weird" and a more well-educated, well-informed, and more aware (or self-aware) "New Weird."
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| North•West Stories Romances, Spring 1945, with a cover story, "The Snow-Witch" by Dan Cushman. The artist's signature is on the lower left, but I can't read it. It's times like these when we need an Internet Western & Northern Fiction Database. |
Text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley
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