FOR TWENTY YEARS, Gary K. Wolfe, a Professor at Roosevelt University, has written a monthly column for Locus magazine, in which he reviews a handful of novels or story collections, usually of science fiction, fantasy, or horror. Wolfe has thus been at the coal-face — near the drill-bit where it is loud and noisy, and where the good stuff is seamed with a lot of rubble — for a long time. Through Locus, Wolfe has also interviewed and befriended many of the leading contemporary writers in these related fields. Evaporating Genres, a collection of eleven essays that synthesize some of this monthly shift work into longer and more reflective pieces, is Wolfe’s chance to get up to the surface and reflect on the radical changes in the genre that he has witnessed. He has a fascinating story to tell.

The literary world tends to think of genre fiction in very short-hand terms, defined by rigid conventions, styles, plots, and readerships. These constraints on commercial genres mean that they are intrinsically valued less than literary fiction (which simply does a better job of hiding its own brutal economics). Publishers and bookshops tend to agree: you can usually identify a romance, a horror blockbuster, or a fantasy novel at twenty paces. These short-hands of course still predominate. But Wolfe’s long reviewing career has allowed him to identify a strange process of hybridization going on at the edges of the genres of fantastic literature — in science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Writers have begun to emerge who refuse to conform to rigid rules, who switch between supernatural terrors and geeky hard science gleefully in the same story (sometimes even in the same paragraph), or who write cunning tales that start out with one set of conventions only to subtly undermi...