For a long time, genre has mostly been treated as a way to classify a story after it has been written: horror, science fiction, romance, mystery, fantasy.
My recent research asks a different question:
What happens if genre itself becomes something we deliberately construct?
That question led to Architectonic Genre Synthesis (AGS), a method for crossing and transforming genre functions into larger narrative architectures. Inspired by the experimental logic of Gregor Mendel’s controlled crosses, AGS examines what happens when genres are combined, recursively recombined, assigned different roles, and transformed through systems such as Mythotechnic Fiction, Meta-Mythic Delphic Fiction, and Ontological Systems Fiction.
The resulting Martinez Architectonic Genre Corpus contains 1,937 formally specified genre architectures, cataloged as MAG-0001 through MAG-1937.
These are not 1,937 story prompts. Each form defines a larger narrative structure, including its central tension, adversarial structure, system logic, symbolic behavior, authority architecture, ontological behavior, and characteristic expressions.
The research has now also become a reference book:
The Martinez Architectonic Genre Compendium: 1,937 Formally Specified Genre Architectures for Writers, Scholars, and Story Designers
For me, the most interesting shift is simple:
Genre does not have to be only something a story belongs to. Genre can also become material from which stories are built.
https://franciscommartinezbooks.com/
Research DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21975417 🧬📚
