Okey-dokey, breaking it down:
The retail (trade) book market consists of a non-fiction market and a fiction market. Within the fiction market (general fiction,) every sort of fiction is sold, including SF and fantasy. And it is written in every kind of style, theme, structure, tone, low violent action, high violent action, viewpoint format, etc. In the early twentieth century, literacy widened and the book market solidified and expanded. There were chapbooks, comics, magazines partially or fully dedicated to fiction, digests, etc. There were publishers who put out newspapers, magazines, comics and cheap small paper books, and these were sold in newsstands and drugstores mainly. And there were publishers who concentrated on books, and did most of the hardcovers and larger paperbacks and their wares were mainly sold in bookstores. The division wasn't that rigid and every possible sort of style, structure, tone, etc. were both in the cheap paperbacks and the hardcovers, but society was very rigid, and so cheap paperbacks tended to be associated with the lowly, not discerning masses, and hardcovers with the educated, wealthier elite (more on that in a bit.)
In the middle of the century and after WWII, book publishers began buying up paperback arms while the wholesaler publishers partly shed them. More paperbacks moved into the bookstores, as well as the wholesale market. In North America (and then it gradually spread through the Western English language market and beyond,) over the course of the twentieth century (and for a few ones before that in the late 19th century,) they would notice when general types of fiction (that had a common type of element,) were popular and expanding, and had a readership that was willing to regularly try new authors writing that general type, as well as often magazines or comics in those areas. So they would put out more titles in those areas, the larger presses creating specialized imprints and small presses dedicating themselves to one type of fiction to build a list. And the bookstores, again mainly in North America at first, would take all those extra titles from the publishers and create sections for them in the stores as special display cases to attract readers.
It happened first with fiction meant to target children and help them learn how to read (and behave.) Mystery/suspense fiction went forward because of the popularity of this general type of fiction, all forms of it, in the early part of the twentieth century, and so forth. Eventually, we had mystery/suspense, westerns, romance, and science fiction and fantasy as four regular display sections in the bookstores in the later part of the twentieth century. (More on that in a moment.) Sometimes there were other sections, and the category sections could be created if they seemed useful and abandoned if publishers and booksellers didn't find them useful for selling anymore (which is what mostly happened with westerns and why you will see variations in bookstores.) Most of the titles put out by specialized publishers that went into those display category sections were mass market paperbacks that were cheap for those who read a lot of them and dependent on the wholesale market outside of bookstores. But there were also trade paperbacks and hardcovers, and in general fiction, all of these types were also published in both hardcover and mass market paperback.
For publishers and booksellers, there is no difference between the general fiction section and the category sections in terms of style, structure, etc. They regularly move authors and titles from one to the other and back again. Sometimes they display the title in both sections. They market titles in both sections to all audiences through a variety of venues. All very different sorts of styles, structures, themes, etc. are in the category sections and the general fiction offerings of that type. Additionally, you might have a fantasy mystery published by a mystery imprint and sold in the mystery/suspense section of the bookstore, and it might be any style. It's simply organizing books on the shelves as loosely grouped displays. It uses general elements as types but again it's not much interested in particular styles and themes.
Now, what Fung Koo likes to go on about is about whether grouping by elements sufficiently creates a cultural genre. At some point, a person proposed the term science fiction to describe stories with a certain kind of element, mainly in magazines, and that term caught on and started being used by many to describe very disparate kinds of stories that all shared the common type of element and then became the nomenclature label used by magazines, publishers, etc. And then we also went back to older titles like Frankenstein and said, this has the elements, so it is also science fiction, one of the earliest of the SF stories. So Fung feels that perhaps that sufficiently constitutes a cultural genre since we grouped them as a type. And that is a cultural development -- the development of grouping terms to describe and look at things.
But the problem is that when you try to cohesively put all the disparate titles in a common type into the idea of a genre -- a group of artistic works similar in style, theme, structure, ideals, often reflecting a sub-culture of a particular time period -- it pretty much falls apart, unless you try to shoehorn it all in with big sweeping inaccurate generalizations. (For instance, you have things like Fung trying to say all detective police procedurals work mainly this way, when in actuality they don't and have a very wide range of structure, theme, style and focus. In many works of detective/police fiction, the mystery is an identifying element for type but actually is the least important focus part of the story and usually quite weak.) The Time Traveler's Wife and a Halo tie-in novel are both works of SF containing the SF elements and are in the SF field together. But stylistically, thematically, structurally, even the type of SF element, etc., they aren't together at all. They are both suspense stories, which most SFF is, but again, this does not really unite them stylistically as an identifiable literary genre. The Time Traveler's Wife is very focused on a romance -- so is it in the romance genre or the SF genre or the drama genre or the suspense genre? A Halo tie-in novel is a tie-in, and it's a military story, so is it in the military genre or the SF genre or the suspense genre or the drama genre and it could have a central romance, so then is it the romance genre instead?
Now, people can say, well it's "cross-genre" but that's a term that's very lazily applied. Most SFFH titles are also suspense titles, but we don't run around saying that they are all cross-genre. And we tend to use that term to mean bookselling categories rather than anything stylistic and thematic again (more on that in a bit.) People also try to ostracize groups of titles into being not real SF for one reason or another, usually based on their personal preferences of what a general type of fiction should have in it besides the general element. The SF-nal bullhockey is part of this and probably might be applied to The Time Traveller's Wife. I.e. if you have certain types of SF elements and they aren't deemed sufficiently central or ray gunny, etc., you're not really in the club for some folk. SF-nal is trying to identify a cultural genre in a way, but again, it isn't really based on what it's supposed to be based on. And that approach -- trying to have not-SF SF, mainly based on bookselling packaging, has caused quite a bit of confusion. When Atwood talked about SF squid stories, she wasn't trying to belittle them. She just thought that far future stories were called SF and near future stories such as she'd written were called speculative. That's because in the 1960's and 1970's, speculative got floated as both a name for all SFF and an actual genre movement of style/theme, etc. Cultural naming attempts are part of culture and very interesting, but don't always necessarily have to do with the actual substance of the books being named. So while science fiction is cultural nomenclature developed over time for a very general type of story element, it doesn't really work as a cohesive, articulated literary genre like post-modernism or even romanticism.
But we came up with another meaning/definition for the word genre, which was a bookselling term. It meant types of fiction grouped by using a common type of element and further, those types that they had category markets/extra displays for -- mystery/suspense, romance, western and science fiction and fantasy. Historical fiction is certainly a type genre -- it has the common element of history and it is a bookselling sub-category for publishers within general fiction. But we usually don't go around calling historical fiction "genre fiction." That term as a grouping term went to the most visible groups that had additional sections. Publishers referred to those category market titles to booksellers as genres. They borrowed the term. And we do use it on occasion for historical fiction and other stuff that don't have category markets but when people talk about genre fiction, they're usually talking about just the category markets.
This takes us back to the societal idea that mass market paperbacks often sold in drugstores were for the plebes -- popular, low-brow, high violent action and suspense, cheap, "commercial," and hardcovers often sold in bookstores were for the nobility -- the educated elites -- not popular, refined and high-brow, more expensive, "literary." Genre fiction, as in type, was put out in all the forms, but the category markets again put out a lot in mass market paperback and cover art also developed over time from the magazines. So "genre fiction" -- category markets -- were popular and therefore considered low brow and commercial if they were in the category sections of bookstores. Big sweeping generalizations were made about what all the titles in that category had to have and how they appealed. In actuality, any kind, style, level of violent action book showed up in hardcover and stylistic masterpieces were put out in mass market paperback. The types didn't dictate styles at all and the category markets weren't real barriers but selling tools. Suspense fiction was the most popular type of fiction but suspense had many very stylistic, thematically deep stories to it and was sold massively in both general fiction and the category market. Hardcovers were far more frequent for suspense. So there's been, for instance, a continual battle about whether suspense can be literary or not because of its general content element, since numerous suspense works have been awarded high literary prizes. You get not-mystery mystery, etc.
These designations are cultural, but they don't reflect the actual contents of the books -- they are not analyses of literature but of people. They are reactions to social identities and to bookselling packaging as a reflection of those identities. While this has eased up somewhat culturally, there are still a lot of people who cling to it on both sides of the supposed fence as again a social identity, and try to talk about it in terms of genres, even though it doesn't scan. Additionally, you have various forms of media and media likes its categories simple, so they've continued to love the binary and like to put the genre fiction into that binary and then act astonished at some work that supposedly "transcends" its supposed plebian commercial genre limitations. That they made up in the first place. Again, all very cultural, but not very focused on actually analyzing works of fiction.
Publishers aren't dumb. They've been working the social identities as marketing techniques for awhile. They will take a book, any type, that they feel is sufficiently stylistic and thematically interesting to appeal to those who considered themselves high brow readers, they will package the title in clothing these people deem suitable and they will then go to media avenues and critics who serve those people (think The New Yorker.) At the same time, they'll also just market the title to everybody else, and if it's "genre fiction" to the category audiences/media as well. So we have lots of "literary" bestsellers while still peddling the marketing ad claim that literary isn't popular except to the discerning high brow reader. When publishing folk refer to the "literary genre," this is essentially what is meant -- books that are sold using certain sets of marketing techniques in addition to other ones. The "literary genre" titles don't form a stylistic genre of literature -- they are all different styles. Nor do they form a category genre -- they are all different types. There's no cohesion to it. But people still try to shoehorn them into the connection of being perceived as well-written books, mainly based on packaging designations. (Not that the books aren't well written books, just that the label may not come from people actually analyzing the books.)
But the resulting situation is that category market authors often found themselves "ghettoized" -- because of their publisher, place in the bookstore, book format and packaging, it was assumed that they had all similar styles, themes, etc. -- they were given a social class identity of low-browness and they might be cut off from various marketing venues. You can get out of it easily enough -- targeted marketing to those venues, switch publishing imprint and packaging, etc., but certainly being caught in that has helped in creating the genre social identity, and the idea that the most popular culture types of books are somehow ostracized and niche, when they are not. It's created an idea in the SFF field at times that the SFF titles, for example, sold in general fiction -- in paperback or hardcover -- are in a different land than the ones from category publishers that are in the display section. But again, since publishers move titles back and forth, packaging can be revamped, and general fiction SFF is marketed to the category markets and SFF media and vice versa, this isn't consistently applied and doesn't usually make a lot of sense. It tends to be more about threatened social identities than again the actual contents or writing styles of books.
This idea is sometimes reinforced by other marketing opportunities for the category market types of books. The category markets were able to plug into magazines, conventions, comics, film and television and media that covers all of it with interest full or partial in the general type of fiction. For mystery/suspense and romance, these marketing connections withered as magazines and what conventions there were withered and comics changed focus. Westerns pretty much died off as a category market in the 1990's all together, along with a decrease in film and t.v., and never had much of that cross-medium stuff going anyway. But SFF was deeply tied into comics, and then film and t.v., including animation and anime, and later electronic and other games (D&D, etc.) using SFF through magazines, conventions and media covering it all, so they got to be a continued part of that culture and benefit from what was going on in other mediums, even when their magazine market diminished and the convention circuit sometimes stumbled. Mystery/suspense was a bit tied into that along with SFF (which is again mostly suspense fiction and a lot of SFF is published in the mystery/suspense category market.) And horror had a weird situation where they had a very hard time getting a category book market platform to work consistently, but being mostly SFF, it was tied into all of that and had magazines, film and t.v., etc., and were one of the few groups considered genre fiction without having the category market. Romance used other marketing venues, and also of course writes titles with every other type of element in them, so could tie into SFF, suspense stuff, etc. In recent years, thanks to the Internet and ramped up conventions, there's been a bit of resurgence in media and marketing events for suspense and romance, as well as SFFH.
Now again, that's all cultural. There are sub-cultural groups engaging in sub-cultures within all these marketing venues and general types of fiction and film and t.v. But that culture isn't made up only of distinct literary genres and it spans numerous type genres. If we group things by general content (type genres,) logically we will keep sub-grouping by additional general types of content (type sub-genres.) And we do that in category markets and out of them for all types of fiction. (A legal thriller has suspense elements and involves legal elements -- its style, theme, structure, etc. could be anything.) The publishers develop ones to use with booksellers or use terms floating around and those become nomenclature in media and round it goes. Again, cultural, but not cohesive. Additionally, we do have literary genres within every general type of fiction -- groups of works written around the same time by authors that are similar in style, tone, theme, structure, etc. and become identified as such. Sometimes, publishers take those literary genres, especially if they are popular, and turn them into sub-type genres too.
And that's the deal with cyberpunk. Science fiction authors were writing stories about tech and then computers very early on. And they also wrote about tech dystopias. William Gibson didn't obviously invent the idea of a story about technology, dystopian repressive future societies and rebellion of such. Such an idea developed culturally long ago. And he didn't invent noir nihilistic writing style obviously. That also was developed long ago and regularly combined with SF. But what Gibson did do is write a story with a noir-ish style about cyber (computer, communication tech, etc.) and punk (rebellion against established repression,) that was very popular. And he did so at the same time that several other authors like Bruce Sterling were also doing stories in that style, with those themes, elements, structures, etc. (Some of them talking to each other and others not.) People looked at those titles and saw how similar they were to each other, noticed occasional collaborations between them and grouped them stylistically, not simply content. They identified it as a movement of the time -- the 1980's and its developing PC's and satellites, as a cultural commentary on that time, as a distinct thematic and structural style -- a literary movement, a genre. And they borrowed the term cyberpunk to name it.
And with Gibson and such, it was quite popular. And since the fiction market is symbiotic, publishers were taking anything similar they had at the time and calling it cyberpunk, which had the general content link -- cyber tech, and so cyberpunk was both a literary genre movement of the 1980's and early 1990's, and a type sub-genre for the SF field. Later on, other people of course wrote books in that general area, which weren't part of the original movement but were part of the sub-type category. It is a literary genre tradition identifiable in the world of fiction and a marketing sub-category at the same time. Grimdark (mid-oughts Abercrombie and co,) is another one of those. New Wave SF -- which was a specific set of authors writing in the 1960's and 1970's with similar themes and styles, Weird Fiction (late 1800's to 1930's,) New Weird Fiction (neo-weird essentially, grouped around China Mieville who invented the term, Jeff Vandermeer, and some others in the early oughts) magic realism, steampunk SFF, splatterpunk horror, Afro-futurism, and so forth. Some of them become sub-category types, some do not. Many sub-category types are just general content and don't involve movements. But we like to mash everything up.
As a general type of element, science fiction elements are those elements that don't exist in the real world beyond the made-up fictional sense of all fiction - they don't exist at all in the real world, they are unreal -- but which are imagined as possibly existing or could sometime exist due to natural, scientific causes. An unreal extension of the real world, you could say. This can include things like finding a natural way through physics of time traveling, having multiple dimensions due to quantum theory that might also lead to Earths with alternate histories to our own real one, finding a neurological way to do telepathy, discovering alien races who have natural, science-based abilities that humans don't have, etc.
Fantasy uses elements that are also unreal -- don't exist in the real world, to the best of our evidence knowledge -- but unlike science fiction, the reason those unreal elements exist is due to supernatural causes -- magic, the divine, the ghostly -- things beyond nature and scientific explanation. You can blend science fiction and fantasy elements in a story, but since science fiction is about naturally based unreal, that means you end up with a fantasy story with SF elements. Market sub-categories (type sub-genres) in fantasy are based on setting, which can include atmosphere -- secondary world/epic, contemporary, historical/alt history, steampunk, dark fantasy, comic fantasy, multiverse and portal, futuristic fantasy. We don't sort fantasy into sub-types based on the type of supernatural element. I.e. if we have two contemporary fantasy novels, one with gods, angels and demons (divine,) and another with elves and wizards (magic,) we don't put them in separate groups based on that. They are both in contemporary fantasy because they have contemporary settings.
In science fiction we group novels into sub-types by the type of science that forms the main basis of the story, which may involve setting but isn't ordered by setting. Hard SF involves "hard" physical sciences -- biology, chemistry, physics, astrophysics, engineering. Sociological SF involves "soft" social sciences -- politics, psychology, sociology, anthropology and archeology. Military SF involves military technology. Cyberpunk involves cyber technology, including nano and A.I. Post-apocalyptic SF involves surviving technology and science after a disaster. Space opera involves science only in the background and space travel science. So if you have a story about a rogue A.I. on a colony planet far into the future and you have another story about a developing A.I. in the near future on Earth, both may be cyberpunk, even though the settings are different. But there is some interaction there. Near future SF isn't exactly a sub-category, but it is a description of stories that involve near future science and are obviously set in the near future. But mainly it's type of science.
Literary genre movements like steampunk or New Weird may cross category types. Steampunk can be a SF or a fantasy story and has common elements of setting/tech. We are, in cultural development as Fung likes to point out, constantly playing with these designations, arguing about them, making new ones, retiring old ones, reusing words decades later, identifying types of elements and identifying groups of writers in time period writing similar styles and themes as lit movements. It is a conversation about fiction, and sometimes more about society than about the actual fiction. It does involve bookselling and marketing and what publishers do more than Fung likes to deal with.
It also involves lots of people talking, with no central authority, no consensus and shifting reference points.
Walter was basically saying that he was going to make up his own literary genre movements in SFF -- not really based on the books exactly but on what he proposed groups of readers all wanted together -- sub-cultures of fans. Social identities that he made up based on his preferences basically. So he knows that YA is a bookselling category, based on the children's age group system and having only the common element of teen protagonists and lots of different styles and themes. But what he's proposing is that a large chunk of people reading YA want X from it and most YA authors supposedly supply them with X and that makes up a cohesive tribe, genre movement, sub-culture. It has very little to do with the actual books in YA and a lot to do with Walter feeling that most of YA is commercial dreck with pleasant coming of age tales. Which, you know, is fine by him if you like that sort of thing. Given that authors who write YA titles get enormous dismissive flack for it, and authors who write both YA and adult fiction get constantly told to write only adult titles as supposedly more varied, valuable and real fiction, that YA is often considered a "woman's" area because women found opportunities in it and many have large followings which then renders YA additionally inferior and undesirable for manly attention, and that women YA authors often find themselves facing dismissal and marketing discrimination in favor of male YA authors who are considered more desirable and transcendent thereby, his little attempt at a social identity is just more of the same crap thrown at YA really. It doesn't have much to do with what is going on in YA, a lot of it very interesting. And it doesn't even notice the new category market spun off children's/YA of New Adult.
And then there's his progressive SF, by which he has grouped disparate authors he likes under a very vague heading of visions of the future, mainly eco-fiction (a sub-category involving environmental science and ecology issues.) Those discerning readers including himself and the authors who offer them some sort of vision of the future are the future of SF or SFF supposedly. It isn't a sub-category. He's trying to make it a genre lit movement but he can't really pull it together. And he's ignoring a lot of other people who are getting a lot of attention right now as exciting developments in the field.
Hard SF readers are cranky old readers who like specific hard sf things and whatever those authors are that supply them, mostly probably old ones, and that's supposedly a cohesive tribe sub-culture. Doesn't make a lot of sense except when you see it as him setting up the past movement (cranky old men who like hard SF,) and the future movement (stuff he likes, eco-fiction facing the future.) One is outdated and lost in their own little world and the other group is, you know, forward looking and the future of the whole shebang.
The literary posers thing ties right into the imaginary literary general fiction versus commercial genre category social identity issue that involves a lot of bookselling issues and the very troubling aspect of "geek policing" -- telling folk who is a real geek fan and who is not, when actually there is no such set of requirements and nobody has the authority to police anybody. Essentially, authors who have published non-SFF are welcome to publish SFF (often in the general fiction market to keep touch with their established fanbase,) and be brought into the fold -- if Walter and those so designated who are category fans approve of that person, and if that person's work is not sold in certain ways in the general and category markets.
It's one thing, Walter feels, for authors working with category publishers to do forty million books about time travel, post-apocalyptic worlds, vampires and zombies, etc. But if a general fiction author, especially one presented as literary, publishes a SFF book that is about something done lots of time very well by category authors, and is feted by his publisher and the media as doing something really cool and unusual and "transcending" the genre, (a time honored marketing tactic that is indeed annoying and nonsensical but also still effective due to the media liking those social identity things,) then Walter is considering it a slap in the face to the dismissed category authors, that the author is a poser getting credit by dipping an ignorant, hackneyed toe in the category waters, a noble slumming with the peasants for loot, and fans who like that work are fake geeks who don't know anything about what's good and real SFF and form that ignorant tribe, etc. It's an old grudge. And Walter clearly did not like Cronin's work at all. If we did not have the fake geek girl discrimination campaigns going on and a lot of really nasty attempts at tribalism by self-appointed kings of the geeks, Walter's grouping here might have been funnier. But as it is, he should know better. If you write a SFF novel, publish it and people buy it, whatever it is, you are part of the SFF field and your readers are SFF fans just as much as anybody else. There is no freaking entrance exam.
Another example: "50 Shades of Grey" supposedly started as a "fan fiction" of the "Twilight" series. Therefore, we essentially have Bella and Edward still, but the paranormal romance/fantasy setting has been swapped out for a mundane romance setting. People still love it, because they love that core mechanic of Bella and Edward (... for some ghastly reason, but hey, this is subjective, right?)
Except that her two characters are nothing remotely like Bella and Edward. Maybe the original fan fiction swerved closer (which is kind of scary,) but it was clearly radically altered. It's much more like the glitter novels of the 1970's and 1980's that the author probably grew up with. (Glitter novels is an industry sub-category in general fiction, meaning novels like the ones written by Judith Krantz and Jackie Collins about glittery settings of wealthy and famous people with sex scenes and soap opera drama.) So it's not a matter of just shifting settings. There is nothing stylistically, thematically, structurally, similar between YA Twilight and soft erotica 50 Shades of Grey. But it makes a good origin story for her writing. (Marketing techniques!)
Did I get everything? I'm not even going to get into Fung's music stuff.
