By Jay Lake and Ruth Nestvold

Originally published Feb. 2007 on IROSF

Story is not automatically story, especially when dealing with genre and its tropes.  Trope is a rather difficult concept to grasp, seeing as it includes so many different elements in literature, so let us start with a definition:

In literature, a trope is a familiar and repeated symbol, meme, theme, motif, style, character or thing that permeates a particular type of literature. They are usually tied heavily to genre...