Ian McCullough is neck-deep in troubles.... As a half-mortal descendant of Faeries, he's a Guardian, sworn to protect both the mortals of this world and the Portals leading to the Faerie Realm. After six hundred years, he's confident he knows what to expect in just about every situation and exactly how to handle it. But he never counted on a woman like Sarah showing up in his life; a woman who intrigues and charms him. A woman who turns out to be of Faerie descent herself, although she has no idea of her heritage and no belief in any Otherworld beings....
Used to be, a reader could pick up a book with a fairy on the cover and be pretty sure they were getting a fantasy. If they picked up a book with a ray gun on the cover, they could reliably infer that they were getting a book of science fiction. If they picked up a book with a man and woman locked in an amorous embrace on the front cover, one could be pretty sure one was holding a romance.
However, as the promo above (for Melissa Mayhue's Highland Guardian) suggests, romance nowadays is likely to be mixed up with fantasy, or science fiction, or the western, or a mystery...and vice versa:
So common has this sort of cross-genre fiction become that organizations now exist for writers that seek to cater specifically to fans of such "crossed genres"--e.g., Time Travel Romance Writers; Paranormal Romance Writers; The Aether Guild of Writers (for steampunk writers ... see titles depicted below); and so on:
Is the plain old SciFi book a thing of the past? Will the purity of "the western" remain sacrosanct? How mysterious will mysteries be if they get mashed up with romance or fantasy?
Perhaps genres, as presently constituted, are too stultifying to contain the brave new worlds of fiction that readers are likely to encounter in years to come.
Your thoughts...?
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