The Perils of Classification

So, one of the podcasts I'm working my way through is Adventures in SciFi Publishing, and in an episode I listened to recently (I think it's still several years old) they were talking about why Fantasy outsells Science Fiction. As their example, they gave the Lord of the Rings as the best selling fantasy work of all time, weighing in at 150 million copies sold. For the best selling science fiction novel, they gave Dune at a modest 12 million copies.

And my immediate thought was "Dune? Really?"

Here's the thing (this information is coming from Wikipedia):

Dune sold 12 million copies.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory sold 13 million.

But, okay, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory doesn't really have science, even if it does have monsters and weird cultures and fantastically advanced machinery. The "science" is mostly magic anyway, and it's not really integral so much as a set piece and plot convenience. And it's for kids anyway?

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy sold 14 million.

Okay, I mean, sure, it's in space and all, and there are aliens and robots. And it includes both the origin story for the world and the end of the universe. But it doesn't count because it's funny... I guess?

Nineteen Eighty-Four sold 25 million copies, more than twice Dune.

Surely when people think science fiction, Nineteen Eighty-Four comes to mind? I grant you it's not hard science heavy, but this thing is like the patriarch of dystopias.

Here's the big one though. There are two books that have officially outsold Lord of the Rings.

The first, and best seller of all time, is Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. The second is a story about a  travelling alien resident of an asteroid who comes to earth to see the world from an outsider perspective, and to discover profound truths about life: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Le Petit Prince (200 million copies, which, if you're keeping score, is Lord of the Rings plus four Dunes and some change).

Now, that's a children's book, and not per se full of what you would call science, but I'll contend if you line it up next to Doctor Who it's not out of the ballpark. Putting the word "quantum" in front of something doesn't actually make it scientific.

I think part of the problem with BOTH science fiction and fantasy is that they've evolved these really weird distinctions about what's really science fiction or what's really fantasy- borders that are fiercely defended by the more vociferous fans out there, as I'm sure any Urban Fantasy reader will tell you. Nevermind fans of Twilight. And they're not really consistent. Why WOULD you count Dune but not Nineteen Eighty-Four? Why is Star Wars science fiction? Why is John Carter of Mars? Why ISN'T Atlas Shrugged (a book which, mind you, is set in the future, deals with the outcome of societal decay, and has material stronger than steel, a cloaking device capable of hiding a whole valley, a sonic death ray, and an engine that produces limitless free energy, all as major points of the novel)?

The explanations actually given for why Science Fiction (undefined) sold more poorly than Fantasy (also undefined) despite the individual performance of some books were:

1. The market permeation of Lord of the Rings and a desire left in its readers for more books of similar scope and subject (which I think is a fair and excellent point, and demonstrable in authors like Terry Brooks and Christopher Paolini).
2. The science itself is a hurdle many readers either can't or don't care to overcome (this one gets a meh from me, because there's such a wide range in science fiction- there's a lot of it where attention to scientific detail actually hurts you)
3. More women read than men, and women have traditionally preferred fantasy (reasons given for this were the boys own adventure quality of a lot of scifi, the greater representation of strong females in fantasy, the science is hard argument above (grr), and the kind of insular and off-putting elitism found in some of the science fiction fandom).
4. They also kind of flirted with the idea that fantasy tends to be more character-oriented and science fiction tends to be more idea-oriented.

One thing they didn't mention, but which I hope they do as the discussion goes on, is that a lot of the fantasy on the best seller list here is kid friendly. Some of it is out and out FOR kids, but most of it is stuff that both kids and adults can read (Little Prince, Lord of the Rings, Hobbit, Narnia (okay, that one's iffy), Harry Potter, to name a few). Cutting out either kids or adults reduces your audience pool, and let's be honest, if there's any one group that's at a disadvantage, generally, for understanding (or sitting patiently through the explanation of) the science, it's young kids.

History and Alternate History Folk, Have I Got A Thing For You!

WhoWhatWhen is a great little java toy, into which you can input either a person or a year, and it will display a timeline of famous contemporaries, events that went on within that time, wars, inventions, disasters, and major social and artistic movements. Don't say I never gave you anything. 

World SF Blog

Check out the World SF Blog! They do science fiction from around the world. Plus sometimes they post fiction. 

Men's Fiction

Esquire announced its intent to publish straight to e-book anthologies of "Men's Fiction", and I am cautiously optimistic.

I'm actually really for publishing "Men's Fiction" and labeling it as such. The editor hopes for stories "dealing with passages in a man’s life that seem common," which I think is a fantastic thing to do. Let's talk about boys being expected to fight. Let's talk about the draft. Let's talk about fatherhood. Let's talk about not knowing for sure if a sexual partner's offspring is also yours. Let's talk about the expectation of being the breadwinner, or the directionless feeling when that's no longer expected and one doesn't know exactly what is. Let's talk about being expected to be physically strong in the way women are expected to be physically beautiful. Let's talk about the intersections of masculinity and race in our society. All of these are valuable and important and potentially great stories that are generally pretty specific to men.

I think one fantastic thing about directing attention to the idea that there is specifically masculine fiction is that it helps put wedge between masculine fiction and general fiction being masculine by default. I like the idea of there being a gender continuum with delineated poles and a broad neutral ground in the middle where the subject isn't anything gender-particular, but rather the human condition. Not "women's fiction and general fiction", but "women's fiction, general fiction, and men's fiction".

I am, of course, also leery, because often when people say "men's (anything)" they mean either straight up pornography, or a sort of he-man woman hater's club business that tends to be pretty distasteful. But I'm optimistic that's not where this is going.

EDIT: Aaaand it's been pointed out to me Esquire has a long history of excellent fiction. Here's the highlights of the Esquire collected anthology 1993:

"The Snows of Kilimanjaro" by Ernest Hemingway; "The Death of Justina" by John Cheever; "Towel Season" by Ron Carlson; "Parker's Back" by Flannery O'Connor; "Adult World I" and "Adult World II" by David Foster Wallace; "Neighbors" by Raymond Carver; "Fleur" by Louise Erdrich; "A Man in the Way" by F. Scott Fitzgerald; "In the Men's Room of the Sixteenth Century" by Don DeLillo; "Rock Springs" by Richard Ford; "The Remobilization of Jacob Horner" by John Barth; and "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien.

That's a really boss line up and I'd love to see them carry on in that tradition.

Checkhov's Gun Rack

This one was a request by a good friend. I'm on a writing group that engages in a weekly exercise wherein one of us will put up a prompt and all of us will write for one hour and then share the results. I've actually gotten some really fun (albeit unpolished) stories from this, and I enjoy both writing and world building on the fly.

Because I only have an hour, I usually won't spend to much time figuring out what I'm going to do. As soon as I have a vague concept (usually related to the prompt), a character with one or two traits (eg. a shy student, a crabby old woman, an outlaw poet), a goal (eg. to be married, to be normal, to protect a colony of monkeys), and an obstacle, I dive in.

And the first thing I do is start putting in detail completely at random.

Alright, not completely at random. If I want to write a funny story, it will be funny detail; same for horror, romance, what have you. Details will be as in-period as I can make them without research if it's a period piece. Things won't be per se infodumped- in part because I'm not attempting coherency yet- but at every juncture I can without stopping the action, I'll drop in something specific. The heroine has five children, two of whom have died. The garden is full of mangoes and cinnamon trees. The love interest worked in a cigar shop until it burned down. The town's main export is gourmet cheese. Umbrellas have become fashionable even on sunny days. It is religiously forbidden for women to wear shoes. Just, you know, whatever. It doesn't need an internal logic or consistency. I'm building on the fly.

In trying to explain this and grasping for terms, I started calling it Chekhov's gun rack. You know some of them have to be fired by the end, but you can get away without shooting all of them. In improv theater terms, it's called "saying yes"- taking every new idea put forward as true and doing whatever you have to not to contradict it.

By the time I've inserted half a dozen to a dozen details (and I've been writing this whole time), patterns will have begun to suggest themselves. Perhaps our heroine, now a crabby older woman, lost those two children in an epidemic that caused people to radically rethink their faith and adopt all sorts of new, troublesome, fundamentalist practices, like women being forbidden from wearing shoes. This offers up a great potential conflict, since she and her love interest can be of different opinions as to whether or not this is a good thing- which in turn gives them something to believe and reasons to believe it (being righteous didn't save his shop from burning down, did it?). It also presents some additional obstacles for my main character (there are jobs she can't safely do and places she can't safely go without shoes- or indeed, perhaps she's been denied the protection of footwear she has some sort of wound or old injury that results in a limp). What I can't consolidate (mangoes, cheese, umbrellas) becomes background detail and ambiance (in this case it means our setting is tropical, linked to broader trade networks, probably industrialized, and relatively prosperous on the global scale), and what I can weave in starts eventually (hopefully) to support itself and look like it was planned from the start. Occasionally, I'm left with something striking but orphaned (I wrote an alien invasion story where I'd stated there was no more coffee anywhere in the world, but left it unsupported as to why or how it was connected), but distracting little bits like that are pretty easy to delete later.

Just as a note- I'll often throw out the first idea I have for connections or extrapolations (in the above example my first impulse was to write the woman as grouchy about how things have changed and her lost freedom, while the man was a true believer, but I think it's actually more charming the other way around, as the heroine then goes from someone who cannot fight against the overwhelming currents of her times to someone who refuses to engage in acts that would actually benefit her, because they run counter to her convictions. It also makes for a more sympathetic love interest. I envision a gentle, sad old man.) The easiest answer is often not the most interesting one.

The process doesn't lend itself to careful world building, but I find I really like the results, which end up as often as not being kind of quirky and unexpected. Honestly, even when I have world-built, I still do some of this, because I find it much easier (and honestly more fun) than trying to start by making a complete and consistent world and extrapolate the details that logically follow from it.

In my experience, life itself is chaotic, and full of silly little things that don't fit neatly. Like a brutal dictator kidnapping a film director to make his personal rubber-suit monster movie, or a large amount of the red food dye you eat being ground up insect shells. It's not always something you could have come up with logically, but it makes the world a more interesting place.

Best Amateur Underwater Photography of 2011

As judged by National Geographic. Here's to the hobbyist, who don't do it because they have to. The root word for amateur is love. 

Nick Mamatas on Laurel K. Hamilton (which, in retrospect, sounds kind of dirty)

Just an article on why Laurel K. Hamilton commands as much market share as she does, and why she deserves to.