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It seems to me that fantasy and scifi elements are starting to 'bleed' into mainstream formats. It seems to be difficult to find a vampire novel anymore that isn't just a romance that happens to have people with pointy teeth. Has anyone else noticed this in other areas? Do you think this will help expand our market?
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Actually I think it's going to lose sf readers. The more sf is written to please female readers , the more I think it will lose the old hardcore of male, especially young male readers.
Maybe I'm wrong. Heavens! I hope I'm wrong. But it worries me.
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Something like 80% of the people who buy books are women, and that hasn't changed much in the last ten years.
Publishers will continue to publish what sells. As the young generation of genre (romance, horror, F&SF) lovers grows up, there will be a trend to more genre-influenced mainstream literary fiction.
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So the complain is that the vampire novel genre is diluting? I guess I didn't have a very... rarified opinion of vampire novels.
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I have a friend who thinks he is a vampire. The only books he reads are on vampires and magic, etc. Rommel Fenrir Wolf II Posts: 856 | Registered: Nov 2006
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If you can sell an SF novel without the words "science fiction" on the spine, you'll make a lot more money.
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Two things...one - Spaceman...what the fruit did you mean by your statement?? It confused the bananas outta me...and maybe the coconuts too...
second - I've noticed also that there's also some fantasy/SF bleeding going on too (like in my WIP...I've got "magic" (codenamed psionic...hur hur...real original) in my story, as well as fantasy-like characters)
Just my quarter cent (meaning a fourth of a penny)
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If you think about it, a lot of Michael Crichton's writing can be considered scifi or fantasy, but you'll never find his books in that section. Somehow he is embraced by the mainstream audience, and probably sells more books that way.
When I go to Barnes and Nobles I feel a little stupid going to the Scifi/Fantasy section, like the only people that read that kind of stuff are Trek nerds and people who live in their mother's basement. (Okay, I like Star Trek, sue me.)
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Nothing much in the SF section appeals to me that much anymore---yet I still want to write it. Go figure.
Oh, and vampires-as-villains pretty much died with "Buffy" the series---not that they were all villains-or-heroes there, but that's just the time frame.
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If the words "Science Fiction" don't appear on the spine,then the book is mainstream, regardless of the content.
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I like diversity in fiction. If an author can tell one story in a medieval setting and the next in the future, and manage to slip in a horror or intrigue/suspence tale between, I think it makes the author more interesting, and could introduce some fans to genres that they're not used to reading.
While I like knowing what to expect from an author, that can be done without confining them to a genre. Piers Anthony jumped from fantasy to horror for a novel and it was just as good, although it seemed more real than his Xanth series. Stephen King is known for horror, yet he actually writes Horror, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Suspence. The same is true for Michael Chrichton, Dean R. Koontz, Robert R. MacCammon, and John Saul.
Brian Lumley crosses genres throughout his "Necroscope" Series. He is the DEFINITION of genre bleeding. He is almost so fluent at it that you can't tell what genre it's intended to be. "Necroscope" is Sci-Fi, Horror, Fantasy, Suspense, Spy-Thriller, and Mystery all wrapped up into one. (If you are unfamiliar with the series, it's about a vampire hunter that can talk to the dead. He is emploed by London's ESPionage branch--E-branch. The vampires are sentient aliens that come from another world where there is three "days" of sunlight and three "days" of moonlight. On the Vampire world, Starside/Sunside it is a fantasy realm with "tribes" of gypsies and vampire-mushroom swamps.)
I think that genre-mixing by an author shows the diversity in their imagination, and genre-bleeding (which I would consider Lumley a master of) forces the bar that much higher for the rest of us.
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Robert Nowell said -- Nothing much in the SF section appeals to me that much anymore---yet I still want to write it. Go figure.
Yeah, me too.
For one thing, there are so few sf novels. They get buried in all the fantasy ones. For another...I don't know. Half seem to be repetitive space war sagas and the rest seem to be depressing views of future societies. I find it hard to find sense-of-wonder sf novels. The few I do find... seem awkwardly written compared to the crime novels out there.
The authors I do buy regularly are Iain Banks, Karl Schroder, CJ Cherryh...hm...anyone else? A few on a book-by-book basis -- that is, I read the first few pages and the back cover blurb and decide whether or not to risk the money.
I've always liked vampire stories, if they have a good, creepy, yet still kinda sexy tone to them. Maybe it's because I'm a girl that has never really been adored, but the idea of some powerful male creature choosing you out of the entire world of beautiful young women is ego-inflating, even if he IS pretty much planning to just saahk jour blaaahd.
Not to mention that most of the vampires are beautiful and sexy and mysterious and all that jazz.
HOWEVER, I do NOT like most of the vampire movies out there (buffy excluded because that movie was fantastically funny - gotta love Paul Ruben's death scene! ROFL), especially ones made from books. John Carpenter's Vampire$ Inc. book was pretty darned good, and had a slightly different twist on the whole vampire thing, but the movie SUCKED ROCKS. They took out all the good stuff, completely changed characters, and butchered the story line.
but anyway. I like vampire stories...for the most part. Then again, my greatest weakness is a kiss on the neck.
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I should say that none of the fantasy appeals to me that much, either. About the time I started really getting heavy into Tolkien (probably about the time Christopher Tolkien started releasing the books that detailed "the writing of The Lord of the Rings,") commercial fantasy derivative of Tolkien seemed to lose its thrill. I still like a lot of what I read before that---but little since then has grabbed me.
This while my non-fiction reading has grown by leaps and bounds. I'll go into a mainline bookstore, and come out with a hundred dollars of books (five or six easy). I can't even cut down. I'm drawn to the notion of writing a lengthy non-fiction book ("an interesting history of the United States,") but have not yet done more than block out a few ideas in my head. (I have no qualifications other than writing skills and a searching mind.)
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If I had to do a story on vampires, which I have considered, it would have to be a completely different take. Instead of having them be dark, cool, gothic, and over-sexed, I think I would make them nerdy kids that spend too much time in their mother's basement because they have a serious sun allergy. They drink blood because it keeps them from burning so bad. Their sex appeal is next to nothing, so they have to prey on drunk chicks at clubs.
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Women buy books more than men... So any sf writer who wants to make money will have to make his fiction palatable and interesting to females , that means romance , male stereotypes etc...
Look at the popularity of Star Wars... if it weren't for the cheesy romance it would have been just another SF movie... Though i think i could have written a better script than lucas when i was 12, alot of women i know DID find it a good movie.. ( Ep 3 ) .
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I think the original 3 Star Wars were geared towards men and men made it big. Men probably see more movies than women, women are too busy reading
But in literature, it's possible more women buy books, but there is still a huge male market. I think especially in SF it's a male market, I don't see a lot of women reading it (though I got my wife to read Ender's Game-she loved it). I think fantasy is the market dominated by women in spec fiction. Good thing the MC in my WIP is a woman.
quote:I think the original 3 Star Wars were geared towards men and men made it big.
NOT! Do you know how many teen and pre-teen girls (me among them ) had the hots for Luke or Han? Do you know how many of us swooned over Han and Leia's first kiss? Clear sexual tension going on from the very first film!
You were watching the same movies I was, I presume?
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Sure, there's some stuff in Star Wars for women, but most of it was geared for men. Big glowing swords that cut through anything, space ships, rough guys, bounty hunters, death and destruction. It's a guy thing. Not to say that there's not a lot of material geared towards women, my wife is a Star Wars nut.
If you want evidence that Star Wars are guy movies (who wouldn't want to kiss Leia in episode 5?) look at "Attack of the Clones". George Lucas can't write dialog. The scenes with Anakin and Amadala are just painful.
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Star Wars was the perfect story. It had every element in it. I, personally, don't think it was geared toward any specific gender, or species for that matter. Even dogs and monkeys liked it.
I think Lucas is brilliant, on film. He's a wonderful mad-genius-wizard that creates what he can't find readily available. His writing was brilliant in Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and the Return of the Jedi, but what was truly incredible was his passion. He tapped into the pulse of the populace, and got enough of a grip to quit the Director's Guild, without it effecting his career.
The prequels, however, did not have the same elemets or effect. Even a genius has faults--look at Thomas Edison.
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I remember thinking back then, when I first saw "Star Wars," that it was a great space fantasy adventure movie---at a time when nobody but Buck Rogers serials had done anything like it---but it didn't have quite as much zip! as some of the space fantasy stuff I'd already read. I thought the romance angle a little toned-down.
Remember, too, that "Star Wars" was, then, the one and only movie in that universe---I figured a sequel was planned 'cause of what went down and how, but it wouldn't appear for another couple of years---so none of the stuff that was piled on later was evident or implicit at all.
(I must've gotten over any qualms about "Star Wars," 'cause it's the only movie I've ever gone to see in theaters three times. Several rated two viewings, but this is the only threepeat. (Twice in 1977 when it first came out, once when it was rereleased in the late 1990s.))
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Star Wars came out before John Everyman could go buy his favorite movie and watch it endlessly at home. You saw a movie in the theaters and maybe caught it on reruns on tv and that was it. Oh, you bought the novelization, but...when Stars Wars came out it was in the theaters for over a year! down here! I had a friend who with a buddy used to go every Friday night to see it.
It was a different world back then.
And...I heard that the first two movie screenplays were written not by Lucas himself (he wrote the treatment or something to guide her) but by sf writer Leigh Brackett. Then she died and the third movie wasn't as good, or any since then...in my opinion.
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Come to think of it, I bought the novelization, too. But I never got big into the moviegoing habit, either. When I was a kid, once or twice a year, when my parents dragged me to it. Sometimes a kiddie movie ("Pinnochio"), sometimes something more adult ("The Towering Inferno," "Jaws.")
Leigh Brackett only worked on "The Empire Strikes Back"---she died before it came out. (A painful memory for me.)
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I think of the genre-system as a form of measuring and categorizing books. They shouldn't come into play until after a story is written. If they are having difficulty containing and separating existing works then maybe we need to modify the system. The evolution of kinds of stories we like shouldn't at all be looked at crossing boundaries, the boundaries are just observations and attempts to explain stories into types. Stories don't exist for the boundaries, boundaries exist to categorize the stories. So if there's a problem... the problem's not the stories, it's the boundaries.
On the subject of Star Wars. I don't know why it's so damned appealing, but even I love it. Maybe it's the lack of a central race, or a sense of freedom and adventure that only space can give us. I don't know. I do know that Lucas is a terrible Director though, and that his latest stories (episodes 1-3) are so ridiculously tightened together that it's like a bolt that has start stripping. Terrible waste of a backstory that could have been so much more. That's what a lot of money and security does to you... it makes taking every effort to produce something of quality more expensive. Effort you don't need to take won't be taken. Lucas botched it up.
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) had the hots for Luke or Han? Do you know how many of us swooned over Han and Leia's first kiss? Clear sexual tension going on from the very first film!
