Where to Draw a Line

[Matthew]

Recently a friend of mine got nominated for Indie Author Land's best of Science Fiction. His book made it on the short list next to a number of other independent works that were released in the last year.

http://www.indieauthorland.com/vote-5...

As I sat reading the descriptions of half the people listed on the short list it occurred to me that science fiction, as a genre, is often transcended. There is a lot of work out there that get's lumped in to this already broad genre that would probably be better off in its own category.

I wrote this blog post about it.

http://feetforbrains.com/2014/04/13/c...

So, two things. First, the scifi finalists have not been finalized. You can still nominate. That's a good thing, because, while I'd love to get my book up on that list, I'd even more so love to see only science fiction in the final. So go nominate, winning anything helps authors write more. Awards sell books.

Second, I'd like to open up a discussion about where the bounds of genre writing should be. Does it bother you when you're searching Amazon for a particular kind of book and only end up wading through a swamp of manuscripts that may have a loose alignment with what you're looking for?

[Kathy]

While I agree that the genre has become diluted, I think everyone has a different definition of what Science Fiction "feels like".

[Matthew]

Sure, sure, but when does it feel like angels or vampires?

[[deleted user]]

Matthew wrote: "Does it bother you when you're searching Amazon for a particular kind of book and only end up wading through a swamp of manuscripts that may have a loose alignment with what you're looking for?..."

I think what you're looking at is publisher and author self-classification, tuned to give every book maximum exposure by listing as many categories as possible. (In the old days, a book could only appear in one section of a bookstore, but in this modern era of eShopping, books can sit on many shelves; and the more shelves it's on, the more people see it.)

My book has everything! Fantasy, science fiction, action, romance, adventure, horror, thrills, mystery! It's "50 Shades of Ender's Game of Thrones" the way Mickey Spillane & Stephen King would write it!

[V.W.]

Matthew wrote: "Sure, sure, but when does it feel like angels or vampires?"

I have an old fashioned view of SF. If the story is based on an extrapolation of scientific events or progress (including social), even if it makes some broad assumptions (FTL, Time Travel, Teleportation, PSI) then it is SF.

If the story relies upon things that the author just dreamed up or adopted from folklore (Dragons, Elves, Magic, etc) then it is not SF.

That said, my own SF novel (not under this name) has vampires and werewolves, but there is a technical explanation for their existence all throughout history and into the near future. No curses, demons, etc required.

[[deleted user]]

G33z3r wrote: My book has everything! Fantasy, science fiction, action, romance, adventure, horror, thrills, mystery! It's "50 Shades of Ender's Game of Thrones" the way Mickey Spillane & Stephen King would write it!

I assume it is both text and manga, and is at one and the same time adult only, YA and children's. The publisher is presumably Hogwarts Publishing.

[Jonathan , Reader of the fantastic]

V.W. wrote: "Matthew wrote: "Sure, sure, but when does it feel like angels or vampires?"

I have an old fashioned view of SF. If the story is based on an extrapolation of scientific events or progress (includin..."

I have the same definition. If it has vampires or werewolves I expect a scientific explanation to consider it as a sci-fi novel rather than just something else.

[[deleted user]]

Jonathan wrote: "If it has vampires or werewolves I expect a scientific explanation to consider it as a sci-fi novel rather than just something else...."

I'm currently reading a Zombie novel, World War Z. (Finally. And I'm shocked, shocked to discover it has absolutely no relation to the recent movie at all.)

Zombies used to be supernatural creations of voodoo magic, but somewhere around George Romero they simply became contagious moving corpses, and that version is often framed with pseudoscience.

World War Z frames zombie-ism as a contagious disease, and though Brooks confronts many of the scientific contradictions in that explanation by lampshading it. But since the story emphasis in World War Z is on mundane, logical attempts to contain the outbreak and fight the zombie hordes, I'm tempted to grant it at least partial science fiction status anyway. (I'll give Grant's (McGuire)'s Feed the same SF slack for similar reasons; it's about logical, operational and technological responses rather than horror.)

So in a sense, I'm sometimes willing to grant the SF label to even stories that are partly fantastical, as long as the point of the story is on logical/scientific elements. (I suppose SF with FTL travel or time travel fall into this category, too.)

[Timothy]

I think Science Fiction needs to at least try and present an explanation for anything major. However I think if you set anything in the future ( well as in more than say 50 years forward) it will almost automatically be branded as Science Fiction even if it's major theme is something else...

[Murray]

Sorting the titles is a miserable task. I've been in bookstores where they try to separate Fantasy from Science Fiction, to their own detriment. Once I mentioned to a friend how surprised I was regarding their thin SF section. He told me the Fantasy stuff was around the opposite side of the book shelf. I snorted at some of the titles they put in "Fantasy"...but honestly, I had to admit they straddled a line.

The other extreme is a library I wandered thru while on holiday. There, they had thrown "genre" out the window. There was only the "Fiction Section". Authors by alphabetical order. Which would work fine if one had an author in mind, but for idle browsing for something new...it sucked.

[Michele]

When I was a kid back in the 80s, all 3 of the libraries I sometimes went to put all their fiction together and then had little genre stickers on the spines. I spent many an hour wandering the shelves, pulling out and reading the jackets of all kinds of books - choosing whatever sounded interesting. Maybe that's why today, although fantasy is my favorite genre, I also still read scifi, horror, mystery, romance, historical, thrillers...and I'm very open to genre mashups.

But when I am in the mood for something pretty specific, it can be frustrating to have to use the Amazon or Goodreads recommendations to try and find it. That's usually when I pull out some old favorite to reread :)

[E.D.]

I can accept any "creatures" if they're biological and evolution based as sci-fi. A wizard mixing rootbulbs and incantations to produce a dragon that sounds like Sean Connery is fantasy for me. Although, I suppose biology and evolution could produce such a creature. It might evolve from an iguana that squeals like Woody Allen huffing Helium. It could happen.

Zombies? No freekin' way that could ever happen. :}

[Jim]

I think the thing about zombies, vampires etc is that whilst they're fantasy creatures, they're also 'cultural concepts.'
So in a Sci-Fi setting I can fully see the population within the setting using the terms,but I'd expect a scientific explanation. In space opera I'd not expect the explanation to be as detailed as in hard SF :-)