Anyhoo, in my wanderings through the Internet, I came across some idiot who said he didn't approve of the term "Dark Fantasy". He jumped (over a shark, one suspects) to the conclusion that the difference between Dark Fantasy and Horror was that Horror is "for boys" and therefore "serious," while Dark Fantasy (which does have a lot more female writers and readers) is "for girls" and therefore "frivolous" and "mostly about romance." He actually had the temerity to suggest that Warhammer—which he insisted on equating with 40K, the peon—should be "Dark Fantasy", being indisputably both "fantasy" and "dark", as if "low fantasy" didn't already cover it.
Someone just lost his talking privileges. See, "Dark Fantasy", as ten seconds with friggin' Google would've told him, refers to works featuring things originating in horror—especially vampires, but also werewolves and other things—but which are action- or love-stories, rather than horror. Seriously, how 'bout you do a bit of research before you start denouncing booksellers to the Stasi, Comrade?
TVTropes has a good rule of thumb (when you're more simplistically judgmental than tropers, by the bye, I recommend eating the handgun of your choice). It's something like, "If you have one vampire who's feeding on people, it's Horror. If there's a bunch of them, and the words 'vampire politics' are ever mentioned, it's Dark Fantasy."
But it got me thinking about genres and subgenres and all that type of thing. In no particular order:
- Urban Fantasy: this and Dark Fantasy are often so close you can't slip a credit card between them; Dark is probably a subsubgenre of the Urban subgenre. The main difference is that in Urban, other critters, like fairies and elves, show up too—it's hard to say which the Dresden Files is, for instance. I'd blame this closeness in large part on White Wolf's World of Darkness—and you could do worse, as influences go.
- Alternate History SF: this is the lazy man's imaginative fare. You can't be bothered to research science, so you won't write hard SF; you can't be bothered to learn sociology and modern literature, so you won't write soft/New Wave SF (where the S stands for Speculative); and you can't even be bothered to come up with a fantasy world, and write about that. No, you just write something about what you remember from history class—usually vastly oversimplified or just plain wrong. Even having a PhD in it is no defense—Turtledove knows no more about the Orthodox Church than the beasts that perish.
- Steampunk: This is the exception to Alternate History, since many of these stories take place in alternate pasts. Usually it's spared by not going too deep into the history, and when it does it's usually inaccurate, but...well, we forgive a lot when it's as cool as steampunk often is. See also here.
- Clockpunk: the medieval variant of steampunk, only it's always crap. Aside from recycling the same set of ahistorical canards, nobody who does these stories can be bothered to do a lick of research on medieval tech or science—if they had, they'd know it should be Campunk. See, cams (invented in the medieval era), connected to wind/waterwheels and used to drive machinery, were far more typical of medieval tech than clocks, though (as I have said before), the medievals had a perennial hobby of improving their clocks, merely for the hell of it ("because it's there" really only starts, in the West, in the medieval era). Sandalpunk (ancient steampunk) is even worse, BTW.
- Space Opera: being in this subgenre is actually not related to the hardness or softness of a series, but to the particular tone of the plot. Iain M. Banks, incidentally, does not write space opera; he writes Transhuman post-cyberpunk that happens to be set in space. If that sounds like your idea of a good time...please tear up your voter card now.
- Sword and Sorcery: just because a story's action-oriented fantasy, don't make it this. It's also gotta be fairly Low on the scale, though it needn't be completely amoral—more Elia Kazan than Mickey Spillane.
- High Fantasy: this is more a question of tone than of scope. A story about saving one person from an evil wizard with a private grudge is still High, if it's idealistic, while A Song of Ice and Fire, despite dealing with the fate of a continent, is Low. And pointlessly sordid, like Post-Soviet Russian fiction.
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