At a party the other night, I asked a writer working on his first novel what kind of novel it was. He said it was a romance, and he said it with that self-deprecating expression that makes you know that he expects you to sneer.

I told him that I thought romance was a fine genre. It’s about hope, renewal, rejuvenation, new life.

All the genres speak to some inner question within us, and this is the first of a series of posts exploring what those questions are. I looked at romance, mystery or detective, thriller, fantasy and horror, science fiction, and mainstream. They divided themselves into what is (including the hidden what is), what ought to be, and what might be, and of those categories I was surprised at how some of them fell.

What is – “What is” stories, including the “hidden what is,” teach us about the world as we live it.

• Mainstream — Mainstream is the look through the lighted window. It’s the reader’s chance to experience life as someone else leads it. At its best it’s compassion; at its worst, voyeurism. We feel the world through someone else’s skin.
• Thriller – The thriller is the lonely stand against the power of evil. It teaches the sacrifice of courage, and usually it ends with the evil set back but not vanquished. This requires the reader or viewer to make a choice: When the evil comes back, how will you respond?

The hidden what is – Fantasy and horror are two sides of the same coin, the hidden “what is.” Both present stories of the hidden reality, the other side of the tapestry, what we would see if only we had eyes. In both fantasy and horror, we experience other worlds that reveal the awe and mystery of our own.

• Fantasy – Fantasy is the bright version of the hidden reality. Fantasy stories end in the triumph of light.
• Horror – Horror is the dark version of the hidden reality. This is the genre where Aristotle’s tragedy has gone. It represents retribution for hubris, what happens to those to violate the cosmos (Greek for beauty, harmony, order).

What ought to be

• Romance – Romance presents hope, rebirth, renewal, fecundity. It ends in marriage (which over the last 50 years is often symbolic). In American romantic comedy, one of the protagonists is always in disguise, and for the couple to come together there has to be an unmasking and forgiveness, permitting the couple to be their true selves.
• Detective/mystery – The detective story (in which the audience knows the answer before the protagonist does) or mystery story (in which the audience discovers the answer as the detective does) represents the triumph of justice. The wrong is righted, the crime is punished; equilibrium is returned.

What might be

• Science fiction – Science fiction, the newest genre, is a social extrapolation. If trends continue, this is where we’ll end up. At its most hopeful, it’s about the difficulty of dealing with change — meeting unimaginably foreign cultures or adjusting to new technologies. At its most dystopian, it’s about the terrible future we’re creating. But no matter how dystopian the story is, the fact that it’s written comes out of an optimistic belief that it’s not too late to change the future. In Orwell’s 1984, the protagonist loses to the State, but the story is told to warn us to prevent the rise of that State.

As I said, the categories surprised even me. Most of the time science fiction, fantasy, and horror are lumped together as speculative fiction, and people who like mainstream fiction will hardly acknowledge that fantasy is a story of “what is.”

Tell me how I’m wrong.