iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Replies

Molly McGhee @mollymcghee.com · 08/09/2026

I love having this conversation with people; it's so interesting because it basically boils down to an etymological question: did the genre exist before we had collectively agreed upon name for it? And it's like, yes it did—but we didn't have nomenclature to actively sort at the industry-wide level

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Molly McGhee @mollymcghee.com · 08/09/2026

and so we had these works that were being created and were being shelved in adjacent genre-systems (often children's lit, though occasionally romance, thriller, SFFH, etc) And now that we have market-wide categorization we can more easily discuss both the work that pre-dates the labelling

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Melissa Ann Singer @masinger.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

The children's librarian at my local set up a "teen" section in the early 1970s. It was in the "adult fiction" section bc adolescents didn't want to be seen in the children's section. Lots of sf/f but plenty of other stuff.

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Molly McGhee @mollymcghee.com · 08/09/2026

and the work created within the framework of the label ! Often when people say 'it didn't exist' I find they actually mean that the systems weren't supporting the production of material . . . of course readers have always known what they were reading for and publishing systems had to catch up!

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