The hybrid

The hybrid is an integral element of stories-within-a-story comprising a creative artefact for a PhD in writing by artefact and exegesis through practice-led research. This story partially explores queer theory. Dominant themes are the challenges and possibilities of being different, a breed of 'others': The hybrid explores dichotomy; it is about crossing thresholds. Additionally, the narrative takes on 'cross-genre': it is a short story that crosses borders of genre fiction in order that a reader may approach the work with fewer preconceptions. Having preconceptions leads to breaches in the implicit agreement between writer and reader, where the writer 'clothes' a work by genre (e.g. science fiction or fantasy) and the reader enters the reading seeking elements of that 'promised' genre. As one story-within-stories, The hybrid is attentive to Deleuze and Guattari's (1987) resonating principles of the rhizome: connection, heterogeneity and interconnections.