Genre is a twentieth century concept (or perhaps a nineteenth century one). It’s going away. (Eventually.)
Historically, genre has been mostly useful as a marketing and publishing tool. Bookstores want to sell more copies of books, so they naturally group them together. After all, someone who’s just bought Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea is statistically more likely to buy Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melnibone than, say, a Rosamunde Pilcher romance or a Louis L’Amour western or a Frommer’s travel guide for Bucharest. Why not make it easy for consumers?
Publishers buy into this idea. Books about wizards are selling well, everybody’s talking about that series about the boy wizard from Hogwarts, let’s keep an eye out for good wizard books. Or books with the same flavor as these wizard books, or books that mock the whole wizarding thing, or books who turn the entire idea upside-down in a clever way.
Readers learn how the publishers and the authors are doing things, and they adapt. They know that if they like A Wizard of Earthsea, they can just head for the L’s in the bookstore’s SFF section and start moving out in a radius from there. It’s very likely that somewhere nearby they can find something for their taste.
Mind you, I’m not saying this is a bad thing. It’s worked very well for decades. It’s produced a vibrant publishing industry and lots of great literature.
But what happens when books are no longer primarily sold on bookshelves? Believe you me, it’s coming. Maybe not as fast as the technorazzi would like, of course — maybe not in our lifetimes — but we’re still headed in that direction. Your children or your children’s children won’t be walking through a two-story megalopolis trying to find the one clump of dead tree they want to take home. They’ll be downloading literature onto some sort of portable device. Or maybe they’ll be ordering up their books from some super-duper POD vending machine, or having them constructed on the spot by some sort of nano-assembler.
The point is that the book may or may not remain a corporal object, but the cataloging certainly will not be. (We’re already halfway there.) Which means the book sellers no longer have to decide on a single section in which to shelf A Wizard of Earthsea. They can file the book under fantasy next to Michael Moorcock, under nautical adventure next to Patrick O’Brian, and under coming-of-age novel next to John Knowles.
Where the business goes, the writers will follow.
No longer constricted by twentieth century publishing, we’ll be free to mix and match genres and still be confident of finding our audience. We can write vampire erotica like Laurell K. Hamilton! We can write novels about 17th century science, economics and cryptography like Neal Stephenson! Hell, we can even write political/gay/fantasy/western/science fiction/fantasy/horror novels with robots and vampires in them, like China Mieville’s Iron Council!
It’s happening already, now that the Internet is changing the way we find things. And it will continue. Genres will break down, form temporary alliances, recoalesce, and bounce off one another in unpredictable new ways. And genre will no longer be a dirty word.