What genre is the Craft Sequence?

Anyone who loves Craft Sequence has come up against the difficulty of describing what exactly it is in the need categorisations most people expect. Even Max Gladstone has run into this difficulty – so we’re not alone. 

Neat categorisation helps with selling books and persuading friends and family to read the books we love. Fundamental to that is genre. Or at least, the lay person’s idea of what genre is.

(Note that the writer of this piece is very much a lay person in this regard. I love books but I’m not a literary person – never studied literature either formally or for fun, and I just read things I like.) 

Let’s start hopefully easy: what is genre?

To me, genre has always been a general classification of a book (or film, show etc) that gives you a general idea of what to expect. A crime novel will focus on a crime, often the investigation to solve it. A romance will focus on, well, romance. There are many sub-genres within these, but if you go into a high street bookshop you’ll probably see the same genre labels on particular sections.

A more literary friend of mine described genre as the expectations a reader will have going into a piece, and which the creator can then play with. You might stick to those expectations, undermine them in some ways, or completely turn them on their heads – but no matter what, you anticipate a reader will have those expectations when they open your book.

With that in mind, what genre is the Craft Sequence?

For the more casual reader, the answer is simple: the Craft Sequence is a fantasy series. It’s set in a world that isn’t ours, with characters who can use magic, and where gods are real, semi-tangible beings.

That doesn’t sound too complicated – why do you need to write a blog post explaining it?

The answer gets a bit more complicated when you start to dig down: fantasy has countless sub-genres, and if you think you dislike fantasy books it may be that you dislike a particular style. My mum, for example, doesn’t like “war and horrible parts of history” kind of fantasy - which is admittedly not specifically a genre, but does cover quite a large number of fantasy books - but enjoyed His Dark Materials and House in the Cerulean Sea, which are a bit more dash of magic in a broader story. Also not a genre, but you catch my drift. The fantasy books that go into the mainstream become the stereotype of the entire genre, which can be to the detriment of vast swathes of the genre.

Further classifying the Craft Sequence is a difficult game. Gladstone himself struggles with it, as expressed in a Reddit AMA a few years ago:

For the genre questions: Hm, I don't know. I don't think too much about genre before I tell a story, and when I'm telling stories I don't like to be following too firmly in anybody's footsteps. Maybe it's just that I started writing long-form stuff in a fanfiction / mashup fiction culture, where lots of different styles overlapped. 

This resonates with me as a reader. I like fantasy in general, but I especially love it when styles and sub-genres overlap. Three Parts Dead is a murder mystery; in many ways; Ruin of Angels is a heist. Personally, I also love it when fantasy shows inventive ways of grappling with IRL questions - and Craft does this explicitly and exquisitely.

The Craft Sequence draws overt comparisons between our world and the world of Craft. Climate change and diminishing resources; post-industrial cultural turmoil; student loans; the impact of capitalism (rather than epic fantasy’s typical feudalism) on day-to-day life; immigration; police violence; ethical consumerism; credit crises ... you name it, there’s a good chance it’s either in an existing Craft novel or on the cards for a future one. 

So…what does that mean for the Craft Sequence’s genre?

It means, unsurprisingly, that it’s difficult to classify. 

Some parts could be termed urban fantasy – the books all take place in cities, for example, just not cities in our world. However, it doesn’t quite fit that description, and a fair few reviews I found say that they were initially put off as they DON’T like urban fantasy but then loved the books.

Other parts are Pratchett-esque satirical fantasy with very clear send-ups of both the real world and fantasy fiction. Yet more parts take on an otherworldly noir vibe, and I’ve seen comparisons to China Miéville quite frequently. And, in later books, a character goes into space and orbits the plant. Are we sci fi now?

An interesting point was raised in another AMA, where Reddit user Whiskeyjoel asked if Gladstone liked the description seen elsewhere on Reddit: faithpunk. Whether you’re a casual or dedicated reader of fantasy, you’ve probably come across the term ‘steampunk’ and/or its various off-shoots.

What if you have no idea about the punks? What do they mean?

The literary punk genres are akin to the origins of musical punk: they’re stories about the people on the edges of mainstream society; for fiction, this society is in a world that is unlike ours in key ways.

Cyberpunk (the apparent originator, from my limited desk research) has a setting of advanced and invasive technologies; steampunk exists in an alternate history where steam, rather than electricity, maintained its stronghold, and has distinctly Victorian aesthetics. Steampunk in particular has garnered a significant aesthetic following outside of storytelling media, and were certainly my own introduction to the various sub-genres in the later ‘00s. 

(If you’re interested in finding out more, check out this article by Lawrence Person.)

So, what is faithpunk?

Faithpunk is not a widely used term or generally accepted sub-genre, but does it help classify the Craft Sequence?

If we consider a defining feature of the -punks as something infiltrating the world of the story, replacing things from our world, and intertwining with every aspect of the environment and society, faithpunk is indeed a pretty neat classification. 

Faith and belief - whether in gods or via the Craft - create and make, recreate and remake, reality.

In the aforementioned AMA, Gladstone agreed - with some caveats about not being a huge fan of creating new ‘punk’ sub-genres for every possible category, and the fact that most of his characters are not on the marginalised edges of their respective societies.

Does any of this help defining the genre of Craft Sequence?

In some ways, yes. Others, no. Helpful answer, I know. 

If you’re trying to convince someone you know to read the Craft Sequence, or play the games, this means you can pick and choose the headline that will appeal to them. Would they be interested in the humorous satirical element? Tell them about that. Are they more into noir or mysteries? Good news, that is a key part of the plot in almost every book. Are they turned off by the historical war side of fantasy? Great, that’s not here! But what if they like epic fantasy?? Also great, as there are definitely epic story elements here. Will the term faithpunk appeal to them? Use that.

However, if you’re trying to neatly categorise the series in a store, or to someone you don’t know especially well, this doesn’t help.

I wonder and worry if the lack of easily tickable boxes is part of the reason the Craft Sequence is less widely read than it deserves to be. Yet, at the other end of the scale, it would be a different story if it fitted neatly into proscribed categories; honestly, I don’t think I would enjoy it as much.

How would you summarise the genre then?

Ultimately, you could probably describe the Craft Sequence as a post-industrial faithpunk fantasy series, but...does that mean anything to most people outside those who already read and love fantasy?

For me...it doesn’t. I prefer wordier descriptions - such as Gladstone’s from a later AMA, where he describes the Craft Sequence as “[using] fantasy to talk about our weird modern world in the same way lots of books use fantasy to approach the medieval world.”