Yet Another Potentially Controversial Column…
…of mine has just appeared on the Internet Review of Science Fiction website. Go forth and comment. http://www.irosf.com/q/zine/article/10569
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Good article, but I think it’s a little optomistic. Many genre novels, such as the horror novels Stephen Kiong and others write, have been moved into teh mainstream category for a couple of decades, largely to get mainstream audiences to read novels they wouldn’t otherwise read, if they had a horror label.
But this is also done to weed out novels the mainstream audience will not read.
I strongly suspect the same thing will happen to SF. Many types of SF novels will fall under a new label, be it mainstream or thriller. . .Michael Crichton come sto mind here. . .but some types of SF will not make the jump, and likely will largely disappear.
Publuishers are pretty good at marketing, despite what many writers think. Moving novel out of a genre and into mainstream, thriller, or mystery, isn’t really a haphazard business. It’s just a way of telling a larger audience “Here’s where you can find genre novels you like without having to wade through all those other genre novels you don’t like.”
The reading public guides what gets moved and what doesn’t.
SF will certainly still be around, but those SF novels that obviously are SF, that really don’t fit in mainstream or thriller or mystery, are, I think, in serious trouble. As part of a larger group,. they have something of a market, but as more and more novels are removed from that group, the market will become so small it won’t be viable.