Breaking the Genre Mould

After reading Dave's post about people not knowing the tropes before they start writing in a genre, it occurred to me that speculative fiction is a rather arcane genre, with many sub-genres.

I was at a convention over the weekend and someone asked me to define fantasy. I said, 'James Bond is a fantasy' and they all fell about laughing. LOL, because it is. In fact, when it was written it was near future SF and now it is retro SF.

So here we have Firefly - which is cowboys in space. And we have Star Wars which is fantasy in space, just swap the swords with the light sabres.

Once it was science fiction, fantasy and horror, and there was a whole sub-genre of romance that dealt with fantasy-romance, futuristic-romance and paranormal-romance. Then paranormal-romance escaped the confines of its sub-genre and became Dark Urban Fantasy (I know DUFs don't offer closure for the romance arc with every book), but they do have lashings more sensuality than the urban fantasies that came before them. And there's steampunk, a whole movement in itself. I must admit I really like the costumes. Simply spiffy. It's a pity we don't dress like that every day.

Now we have genres being twisted and inter-woven so as to challenge definition. Think of Simon Green's Nightside series. (I really enjoy these books). The series is horror and dark urban fantasy but his world also includes science fiction tropes.

Have we reached a point where your average reader isn't too worried about the divide between the genres? I read across a variety of genres. and like to find books that challenge and stretch the genres.

Have you discovered any authors who manage to take a genre and give it a surprising new twist? Does it worry you, if the genres are inter-woven?

Antique Futures -- Dude, where's my flying car?

This 'Fantastic' cover dates from the 'Hush, I hear a white woman scream' era.

But seriously, Amanda brought up the 1960s Space Exploration and books like Heinlein's 'Podkayne of Mars', about settling our solar system.

Here we are forty years later and where are the tourism trips to the moon station? Those books of the 50s and 60s were full of excitement, no challenge was too big, anything seemed possible. Terraform Mars? Mine the asteroids? A colony ship to Andromeda?

Space Opera.Those were positive days, now SF is very dystopic unless it is Space Opera.

What's your favourite classic SF book and what have you read recently that inspired you?

The best way forward may be back

You know, I've been involved in mountain rescue over the years... and so many disasters happen when bright sparks (like yours monkily) take the wrong trail (because it looks better) and then don't have the common sense - or sometimes the self-confidence, to look at the 75 degree scree-slope with the cliff at the base in the dusk, and the mist swirling in on a freezing gale, to say "Okay, I was a plonker. We're staying RIGHT HERE until morning and then we'll walk back and take the other path. You were right, Fred, Mary and the dog." No, we press on, even as the scree gets steeper and more slippery.

Occasionally it doesn't all end horribly.

Humans (me neither, and I'm only distantly related) are not great at admitting we're wrong. At least not at the time or from close up. I was re-reading SHADOW OF THE LION as homework for the latest book, and I wanted take that Dave Freer outside and give him a good kicking. Because... If I was writing that book now, I'd chop a few bits I wrote (not to mention bits the others wrote) get rid of a few subplots entirely, and write it whole lot better. There are still bits (Benito diving for Kat's grey goods, the scene at the Red Cat, the mess that Marco gets himself into marrying Angelina to pay off an imagined debt of honor etc.) that are pretty well done and memorable. At the time it seemed a good scree slope, with the place we were trying to get to not far off. Now... heh. Well THIS ROUGH MAGIC was better written anyway.

Increasingly, however I have come to suspect that whole of publishing is on a steep, steep scree. It's getting steeper, and darker and wetter ahead. I think the industry is determinedly plunging forward even as it loses parts of the party into the abyss. And, actually, I don't think it's going to get better in that direction. There are a few people (Baen Books to name one) trying other routes but mostly it seems relentlessly the same imagined path.

The big question is, well, which direction SHOULD we be going? Well, in my opinion, toward books that have real appeal to massive numbers of readers. They exit. Harry Potter et al proved it. Just what are the kind of books that would get a lot of people reading? Where did the industry go off track?

My opinion - Based on the surprising success of the re-issue of the James H Schmitz books that there is a huge appetite for good old-fashioned space opera, with clearly defined bad guys and heroes we can identify with. And yes, that does mean alien villains who are not just misunderstood, now that you mention it :-)

So let's have some feedback: what authors style/type of story from the dark ages/golden years do you think would work well now in sf/ fantasy?