[hildea]

Thanks for starting this thread! I have Opinions but didn't want to derail the other thread.

I read the article, and it didn't impress me. I'd place it in the "insult something popular hoping for rage reads" subgenre of clickbait.

Dieselpunk. Biopunk. Fantasy of Manners. Noblebright. Cassette Futurism. Steampunk. These terms ostensibly describe genres of imaginative literature – but can you name a Noblebright book? Can you name a story of Cassette Futurism?

Sure. For "Noblebright", Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionawar Tapestry series is the first that springs to mind -- an epic tale of fight against a world-threatening evil, with likeable protagonists who overcome personal weaknesses and win through heroism and self-sacrifice, and with a hopeful ending. I've never heard of "Cassette Futurism" before, but it sounds like futurism based on the 70's and 80's, so maybe the comic Paper Girls by Vaughan and Chiang, and Stålenhag's Tales from the Loop?

These terms don’t really describe genres, they describe hypothetical genres by plucking out a few aesthetic or conceptual guidelines which could theoretically be developed into a genre of story. More accurately, they describe settings.

That sounds like a unnecesessarily restrictive view of what a genre is. Some genres describe the setting, like "historical fiction" and "steampunk". Others describe the mood, like "humour" and "grimdark". Some describe the main plot, like "romance" and "crime". And when we get to more detailed subgenres, a lot of them will describe some mix of setting, plot, and mood, like "cozy mystery", "hard science fiction", "sword and sorcery", and "fantasy of manners".

I've read Cherie Priest's Boneshaker, and I'd say the setting is important to both the plot and the mood of the story. You have this huge train thundering over the prairie, with a heavily guarded freight car which the passengers get increasingly uneasy about. I don't think it's much of a spoiler to reveal that the freight car contains zombies, and that they get out. In part it's a story about a powerful company using technology in unsafe ways, blithely willing to risk other people's lives, and when things go wrong trying to surpress the truth to avoid bad PR. If you open a random newspaper the odds are good you'll find some version of this story, and it has probably been told in every setting and genre, from Henrik Ibsen's plays to the latest Netflix hit. The story works really well with the combination of horror elements and weird science in Boneshaker. (I didn't like it because I never connected with the protagonist, but I have no complaints about the setting or genre(s).)

I'd also say that there's nothing wrong with writing in a setting simply because you like it. The author complained about Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan series. The story about the friendship between the fleeing heir of duke Franz Ferdinand and a junior crew member on an airship could probably have worked just as well on a sailship or steamship, but why shouldn't Westerfeld set the story on an airship if he wants to? Is there some artistic or moral merit in avoiding steampunk elements?

The author of the article also complains that people make and buy "steampunk'd objects" that "serve no functional purpose whatsoever beyond ticking all the aesthetic boxes of the setting". Has he met human beings? Decorating ourselves and our surroundings with non-functional stuff because we like how it looks and/or because we want a connection with other people is as human as telling stories.

I see these micro-genres the same way I see all genres: labels which can be helpful in finding what we like. And a narrow term like grimdark or fantasy of manners is far more likely to give useful information than huge overarching genres like fantasy and science fiction. Some genre names may be short lived, but that's fine. And of course, very few genre names will be meaningful and interesting for everyone, but there's no reason they should be. I'm sure there are lots of words and expressions which describe the nuances in poetry, wine, baseball, rap music... Most of those words are meaningless to me, but their existence doesn't harm me, and is helpful to others, so why should I mind that they exist?

There are, of course, some books where you get the feeling that the author doesn't like or respect the genre they are writing in, and is indeed only using it because they imagine it sells well. But that's an argument against those specific books, not against the genres.