genre – Tracy Durnell

Replied to When Will Novels Fix Society Already? by Lincoln Michel (Counter Craft)

Fiction can help us understand our world, but that doesn’t mean novels can solve our problems.

I think genre fiction is the place to look. Romancelandia raised $190k for voting rights in February, $45k for abortion rights in May — authors donating their books and services to raise money for freedoms, fans bidding those up because it’s for a good cause 😊 Sci-fi casts visions of the future, good and bad. Romance books are quietly showing worlds of hope and change — and romance has a huge audience compared to literary books. (Still small compared to TV but 🤷‍♀️) These are stories where women have choices and their choices matter, where people of all genders and relationships between all genders are celebrated. (Sure, both romance and sci-fi have their conservative contingents, but the broader fanbase seems to be progressive.) I think change can start in a small but dedicated group and spread outwards.

The Sci Fi That Isn’t

Bookmarked Boundary lines by

Andrew Liptak (Transfer Orbit)

Is that *really* science fiction?

On paper, I’d make the assumption that if a book or author is tackling the subject matter that typically makes up a science fiction book, like newfangled technology or sciences, you’d categorize it as genre fiction. That isn’t the case: you don’t often see the works of Crichton — or for that matter, Tom Clancy and his military thrillers or Daniel Suarez, whose novel Delta-V is explicitly about mining asteroids included in that conversation.

What I think I’ve come to understand is that “Science Fiction” as a label is largely a construct that’s imposed on a body of work by a group of people, and that if you have a book or story that isn’t explicitly marketed to that small group of readers by way of a handful of select publishing outlets like Tor or Orbit or DAW or Baen, they might as well not exist.

I also think about this in relation to romance, and how SF readers will read SF that includes romance as long as it’s not marketed as a romance. And perhaps vice versa – some SF concepts in a romance aren’t enough to market it as light SF (and rightly so given the much larger market for romance books) – but there is the lost opportunity for those ideas to engage with the genre at large. Perhaps because so much of SF is adventure, war, and thriller stories, there’s less room in the genre for quiet stories. Are world changing stakes essential to SF? Vast universes? How subtle can it be and still be considered SF by the community?