Andrew asked Lois McMaster Bujold:

What are the demographics of your biggest fans? Obviously it must vary by novel, but there's probably a strong center of fans who are parents or of parenting age, given how family (and dynamics thereof) is a recurring theme in your work. Indeed, one of the top questions on Goodreads is about your family. Your portrayal of family dynamics makes your stories powerful as well as fresh in the SF market, in my opinion.

Lois McMaster Bujold
I don't actually know the answer to this question. I've certainly seen feedback from almost every conceivable F&SF-reading demographic, but I don't know what proportions they fall in. I've had fan mail from readers aged 11 to 84.

Family, and domesticity generally, tend very much to be spurned in these genres, certainly as positive portrayals or central subjects. I have a theory that this has its roots in SF-as-bildungsroman, where the primary psychological work of the protagonist (and of the identifying reader) is of separation from the family in order to achieve adult autonomy. Romance is the psychological opposite, the work of recreating the family, hence the often-seen antagonism between the two modes. So is romance or the private sphere felt as a threat to that autonomy, rather than its fruition? Good question for a paper, I think. (Not written by me.)

So, yeah, in my search for story ideas that aren't the same as the stories everyone else is writing, these themes recognizing the domestic are certainly under-explored ground.

Mind you, my original thinking was not so developed. It ran more to something like, "It seems as if every other hero or heroine is an orphan. Let's give my guy a family he can't so narrative-conveniently escape, and then see what happens..."

Ta, L.

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