<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

A genre (from the French word for "kind" or "type") is a category or classification applied to artistic or cultural works.

In literature and publishing (and to a lesser extent, in movies and TV), genre is applied to the major categories of popular entertainment such as science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery, detective stories, westerns and romance. These categories are often lumped together under the heading genre fiction, which is then contrasted (often unfavorably) with literary fiction, a distinction harkening back to the days of the pulp magazines.

One response to the disparaging connotations of the genre labels was the movement toward the use of the label speculative fiction (also abbreviated sf) by proponents of the New Wave of the 1960s and 1970s to describe fiction that combined elements and settings of science fiction with the complex exploration of the human condition associated with literary fiction (thus meriting serious critical attention).

Within the major genres, a dizzying number of subgenre labels are used, such as science fantasy, sword and sorcery, vampire fiction, dark fantasy, mythic fantasy, paranormal romance, historical romance, and alternate history, all of them vaguely defined and occasionally intersecting.

In the sf/fantasy/horror community today, genre or in the genre is often used as shorthand to mean "our kind of stuff", so that a writer's work may be classified as "within the genre" even though it spans sf, fantasy, vampire fiction, and alternate history, while the same writer's contemporary thrillers would be described as "outside of the genre".