Sci Fi Vs Mainstream

I don’t think this fits your description of specifically aimed at luring mainstream, mainly female, readers towards science fiction. However, Haunted Mesa by Louis L’Mour caught the interest of a few lady friends of mine. But, he’s one of the many good writers I’ve admired.

Somehow I wish we could get the men back to reading. The market has a enormous amount of women reading books that interest them.

Here is a very dull Synopsis of one I’ve finished writing and I have to clean up the first chapter because it is filthy. Sigh.

The story is interesting, funny, and everywhere in between.

“Intercept”

- 21st Century Pleiades, Star Cluster M45 Today -

Asmodeus is Master of Pleiades on the far side of the Universe. Only the United States stands before him. City streets become Battlefields; his wish, to control the Universe.

Six members of Government from a friendly world step in to challenge Asmodeus.

ORDERS - - ‘Intercept Pleiades monarch, Asmodeus in route to America INTENT ON CARRYING THE WAR TO THE UNIVERSE,
...rape, murder, plunder, or take it a prize.’

A stolen B-52 aircraft and a full complement of nuclear bombs by the evil aliens from Pleiades brought an end to the rapes and killings and lead to the six members from a friendly world to step in and bring back the B-52, its crew, and its bombs back home from Pleiades.

Five Russian live Nuclear Warheads had been stolen, the detonation of a nuclear bomb in China, Senate Majority leader, Deborah Johnson kidnapped and carried off to the Seventeenth Century Cuba as the siege began on the town of El Puerto del Principe by pirate Henry Morgan. This brought the six members from a friendly world there to rescue her and bring her home.

The Secretary of Defense kidnapped and carried off to the Ukraine to the year of 1941 to encounter the German Panzers retreating back to Germany. Their attempts upon the Presidents life in DC brought the six members from the friendly world there to the Ukraine and Washington DC to rescue once again.

This caused the President of the United States to honor the six members from the friendly world need of a team of 13 Rangers to go to the alien’s world, to rescue those from Earth that were kidnapped, bring them home, and to train the Rangers on the weapons of combat from her world for the placement, arming, timing, and detonation of three hundred high yield 2.5 Megaton Hydrogen Bombs on the evil alien’s world.

Having rescued those that were from Earth, and destroying Pleiades, those that were kidnapped were returned home, explanations were made to them, their families, and the police on what really happened to them. Having completed their mission, the six members from the friendly world returned to where they had come from, home to their world.




Gad Zooks!

Why did I write that junk above when all I really wanted to say is, it turned out to be a chick lit with two very pretty chick agents and a plain Jane chick that is so funny. All three chicks beet up on the bad guys. Plane Jane is my favorite chick agent. Oh, they are from another world, with normal earth names and look like us. I have fun writing chick heroes in my novels. I like giving the chicks a break, are not a little tired of the men heroes?

However, I don’t want to sit down and read a chick lit love story. No, no! Ugh!

Great idea. I'd say you're dead-on right. Go ahead and write it whether anyone else agrees with you or not. Agreement in THIS society is pretty low-scale. ( Look at what passes for 'entertainment' on the idiot box )

I always admired Heinlein's heoines - Friday, Jill, Dora - et al.

Now, there's David Weber's Honor Harrington. Dang! High integrity and fantastically whole characters. And, the girl kicks butt.

Have you read Weber ?

Point here is, its a GREAT idea, and I think women would like more characters like Heinlen's or Weber's that might otherwise shy away from the 'technical' reputation of Science Fiction. L. Ron Hubbard was brought into the genre in the golden age by his publisher because he wrote about people rather than machines.

So the key would be to write what you want to write to that audience and make your own mark on the genre!

Heroines that Kick ----

Great idea. I'd say you're dead-on right. Go ahead and write it whether anyone else agrees with you or not. Agreement in THIS society is pretty low-scale. ( Look at what passes for 'entertainment' on the idiot box )

I always admired Heinlein's heoines - Friday, Jill, Dora - et al.

Now, there's David Weber's Honor Harrington. Dang! High integrity and fantastically whole characters. And, the girl kicks butt.

Have you read Weber ?

Point here is, its a GREAT idea, and I think women would like more characters like Heinlen's or Weber's that might otherwise shy away from the 'technical' reputation of Science Fiction. L. Ron Hubbard was brought into the genre in the golden age by his publisher because he wrote about people rather than machines.

So the key would be to write what you want to write to that audience and make your own mark on the genre!

Garpy said:

I've noticed mainstream book-buyers tend to vigorously ignore the science fiction/fantasy shelves within a book store. They'll happily browse through all the other genres...Young Adult, Crime, Thrillers, Historical etc etc...but they steer well clear of scifi/fantasy, almost like its the porn shelf of a news agents.

Click to expand...

As a mainstream book-buyer myself, I can tell you that it's nothing against sci-fi/fantasy. Honestly, I don't browse any genre shelves at all. Most often, actually, I buy my books on Amazon.com, so if I did happen to read a genre book, I wouldn't know where it would have been shelved.

I tend to read literary. And because literary books are shelved with the mainstream, that's where I look. I will read (and very often enjoy) literary sci-fi, literary crime/thriller, literary historical, chick-lit... In fact, a lot of literary novels are a mix of genres that just happen to be brilliantly written. I don't classify literary as a genre itself, it's just a way of writing.

For example:

Kurt Vonnegut - literary sci-fi
Stephen King - (literary?) horror/suspense
Will Christopher Baer - literary crime/drama
John Irving - literary, often historical...

And you'll find all of those authors shelved in mainstream.

So, that is the long answer to why I (a mainstream book-buyer) don't browse the genre shelves. Maybe I would find a brilliantly written literary gem in the genre sections, who knows?

But I know what works for me, and I never run out of things to read, so I keep doing it.

How about "Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury or "A clockwork orange" by Anthony Burgress?

We read the former in English class - which kind of "nobled" it as mainstream since my Engish teacher would "of course not" let us read ugly, bad, sinful *genre* fiction. Thus it had to be "utopian" by definition - the corner of mainstream where the genre fiction that gets sucked in remains trapped.

one of my favorite books of all time; Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury

pixiejuice said:

As a mainstream book-buyer myself, I can tell you that it's nothing against sci-fi/fantasy. Honestly, I don't browse any genre shelves at all. Most often, actually, I buy my books on Amazon.com, so if I did happen to read a genre book, I wouldn't know where it would have been shelved.

Click to expand...

Same here. I haven't stepped into a brick and mortar bookstore for a while. I read somewhere that people 25 and under prefer to buy books over the internet. I'm not in that age group, and neither are any of my friends, but we all buy our books online.

brinkett said:

Same here. I haven't stepped into a brick and mortar bookstore for a while. I read somewhere that people 25 and under prefer to buy books over the internet. I'm not in that age group, and neither are any of my friends, but we all buy our books online.

Click to expand...

I find that really disheartening. While I do buy books online from time to time, there's nothing that compares with wandering through the racks, both at the mammoth superbookstores, and at the smaller, specialty bookshops. When I'm buying books, I want all my senses engaged, not just my eyes. I need to feel the covers and the pages; smell the paper and the binding; hear the riff of the pages or the crack of a fresh hardback opening. Hell, if they let me, I'd taste the damn things. I also make it family affair. At least once a month, I take my daughter to a bookstore with me to stock her up with reads for the coming weeks. We have a ball and she especially likes sitting in the big comfy chairs with our purchases and sipping her hot chocolate while I drink my coffee and double check the receipt.

I don't think we should be such luddites as to turn our back on new technologies or experiences, but in the same stead we need to remember where we came from and retain the traditions and experiences from our journey.

Being female and "an all shelf browse except sci-fi/fanstasy", I finally found a thread I'm qualified to respond in!

I do tend to stay away from SFF for a two reasons...1) the names of the characters. While it may seem silly, I like to actually be able to pronounce (or even be able to read) the name of the characters in a book. Its like SFF authors purposely try to choose names that no one has ever heard of before.

2) The descriptions of places and things. Instead of saying something like "a spaceship" so you know what the heck the author was talking about, they'll spend two paragraphs describing something that after you read it, you wonder "what is it?".

Now that's not to criticize anyone here, there's different genres because everyone has their own tastes. These are simply my feelings on the subject.

However, after saying all that, I did accidentally purchase a SFF novel (at least I considered it one) online at Books a Million. It was Masque by F. Paul Wilson and Matthew Costello. Simply put: It was fantastic. If I could find other SFF book this well written, I'm become an addict for life.

Garpy said:

Can anyone here think of any other science fiction/fantasy works that were never really pigeon-holed as such? I'm sure there are more, but being a dimwitted dunderhead I can't seem to think of them right now.

Click to expand...

Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow is an example of a book identified as science fiction, yet marketed as general fiction and picked up by a mainstream readership. I also just got a book for review called The Traveler, by John Twelve Hawks, which is clearly speculative in content yet is being very aggressively marketed to mainstream audiences.

What do these two books--and others, such as Susannah Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell and those you've already listed--have in common? They are not published by SF/fantasy imprints.

The way to escape the SF pigeonhole isn't to market your work as "SF for a mainstream readership"--it's to call the work something else, such as "futuristic chick-lit", and market it to mainstream publishers. If you get picked up by one of the SF/Fantasy imprints, you will be pigeonholed no matter what you do or say--in the bookstore (since books from those imprints aren't shelved anywhere but in the SF/fantasy section), in the library (which will put a rocket ship label on the spine), by reviewers (since mainstream reviewers don't generally look at books from those imprints), and by anyone who looks at the cover (since you'll probably get identifiably SF-style art). Nearly all SF/Fantasy that has escaped the genre ghetto, or has been targeted to a mainstream audience, has been published by a non-SF/Fantasy imprint.

- Victoria

scribbler1382 said:

I find that really disheartening. While I do buy books online from time to time, there's nothing that compares with wandering through the racks, both at the mammoth superbookstores, and at the smaller, specialty bookshops.

Click to expand...

I appreciate that this may be true for you and others, but I simply don't have the time. If I can't find a book I want online, I don't buy it unless I really, really, really x 1000 want it for some reason, and few books fall into that category. When I'm looking for books on a particular subject and have a list of recommended titles, those not available from Amazon or any of the other online vendors are crossed off the list without further consideration. Life is so busy that convenience trumps smelling paper. I'll smell the paper and lovingly caress the book when I unpack the box.

Victoria: Thank you for your post--it's given me something to think about.

scribbler1382 said:

Same here. I haven't stepped into a brick and mortar bookstore for a while. I read somewhere that people 25 and under prefer to buy books over the internet. I'm not in that age group, and neither are any of my friends, but we all buy our books online.

Click to expand...

I find that really disheartening. While I do buy books online from time to time, there's nothing that compares with wandering through the racks, both at the mammoth superbookstores, and at the smaller, specialty bookshops...

I don't think we should be such luddites as to turn our back on new technologies or experiences, but in the same stead we need to remember where we came from and retain the traditions and experiences from our journey.

Click to expand...

I hear what you're saying but I think that bookstores themselves are to blame for this trend with their buying and stocking practices.

I usually find out about books I'd like online - through forums etc. and often I find out about it a month or more after the initial release or the author has already had another book out.

I'd say 90% of the times I've looked for a particular book in one of the major bookstores - they simply have not had it! They either had the latest book by the author (the 2nd or 3rd in the series etc.) or just didn't have any by the person at the moment.

Yeah, I could ask them to order it for me - but why would I? When I can also order it online and have it delivered right to my door! And often for cheaper!

The closer I've gotten to a complete ready-to-submit manuscript - the more I've thought about major bookstores and their "shovel 'em in, shovel 'em out" philosophy.

I see this trend of buying books online only increasing in years to come. I'm just curious how that is going to affect writers and their books...

Most people buy the top 10's on the supermarket rack while they are waiting 5th in line with two items tuck under their pits. What about Pamela Sargent's Dreams of Venus, or Robert McCammon's Swan Song? Swan Song is SciFi and Horror wrapped up into one, and was a NY Times bestseller. Most consider it mass market, mainstream, everybody but the people who read chicklit wants to read it type of book. Oh, and it won the Bram Stoker Award. You mean there are other sections in the bookstore other than SciFi and Horror?

Mainstream vs Literary vs Genre

Here is my own somewhat cranky understanding of these terms after a long misspent youth in English departments (not at all the same definitions most people in those departments would probably give you).

Mainstream means, or should mean, nothing more than "attracted a lot of readers." That's the equivalent to what separates the main river from the tributaries--more water. It is not a type of book; it is a popular book. From this viewpoint there have certainly been countless writers who produced mainstream Sci-Fi/Fantasy including Tolkien, Howard, Asimov, Herbert, Hubbard, LeGuin, Donaldson, King, plenty I'm missing, and most recently J. K. Rowling.

Literary is not to be confused with "well-written." Literary is a genre all it's own, which turns on their heads most of the characteristics of mainstream fiction. I'm thinking of Raymond Carver, Nicholson Baker type of stuff here. Two chief characteristics are a) unlikeable, or anyway, not admirable characters who b) spend all their time contemplating their unlikeable navels. For an example of a work in the literary genre that is the farthest thing from well-written, try the Pulitzer prize-winning "A Confederacy of Dunces."

Genre is a type of story (as in Literary genre). Any genre can produce a mainstream work, generally through being very well-written or very original ideas or great story-telling. The works that we think of as genre are the ones that, missing these qualities, do not make it to the mainstream, and so stay in the tributaries. It is certainly possible that there are mainstream-quality works that are resting on those shelves by reason of poor marketing or whatever, waiting to attract more attention. Most mainstream writers were on the genre shelves in their early years until a number of good books got them noticed.

So in answer to the original question I would say that certainly mainstream readers are waiting for good SFF books, and it's your job to write so well that if they can't be bothered sifting through the SFF shelves to find you, then you get lifted off those shelves and waved under their noses.

mainstream

From a publisher's perspective, a mainstream novel is any novel they think will sell to the publisc at large, regardless of the kind of novel these readers usually buy. As for science fiction, I'd say Michael Crichton might well qualify.

Most of his novels are probably science fiction, but I dont think any of them say "science fiction" anywhere on the cover, and they mostly hit the top of the bestseller lists.

Thank you, James, another good example.
Certainly the Crichton of "Andromeda Strain" and "Jurrasic Park" qualifies as SF. The Crichton of "Great Train Robbery" and "Rising Sun" is a mainstream suspense writer.
Thinking of Douglas Adams, the humor would be a big part. You probably can't formulate specific rules that will cover them all, other than this: the books gave a lot of readers a very good time.

Holly Lisle points out one major reason she feels readers - of any books - should order in at bookstores, and buy there whenever possible. The bookstore's own buying policy, which Uncle Jim details twice in the course of "Learn Writing with...", where the bookstore orders only what actually sold of the prior book. Which leads to diminishing orders, which leads to diminishing interest from publishers. Which kills the midlist.

So far, online sales are so negligible that when considering whether an author still has a viable career, the online sales are rarely a factor. The bookstore sales always are.

As someone who wants to be in a position where sales issues like this matter to me intimately, I do want to encourage people to check bookstores first.

That, and the websites are terrible for browsing for things. I have a good memory for some things, but not necessarily for the comprehensive list of authors whose works I might want to pick up -- moreso, because I browse several genres, plus the remaindered stacks.

Fantasy and SF are full of books with clear writing, straightforward descriptions, easily pronounceable names, and all the other things someone was griping they didn't have. The problem is, it's impossible to tell, from outside a genre, who are the accessible writers, who are the ones who write well but aren't to your taste, etc, etc.

I can't do more than guess at the good writers in Romance, for instance, and I have even less clue about Westerns. Since popularity does not equal good writing -- some of the most popular fantasy writers are on my "shun" list, and some hard to find ones are on my grab and buy instantly -- seeing a huge pile of books on the shelf doesn't help, either. So those occasions when I'm intending to read something outside my genre for some reason, I have to either trust to luck (not easy), or ask someone who is conversant with both genres, and whose taste in the genre I do read doesn't clash badly with mine. Or occasionally, encounter a writer who seems both nice and well-written in-person / online.

I do wonder, do people who dislike unpronounceable names never read books that take place in exotic real world locales, either? Some of those are as bad - especially as the least pronbounceable names I've personally run into are based directly on Irish Gaelic, or Hungarian, or something else from this world -- and exotic real world fiction is less likely, as far as I've seen, to add a pronunciation guide.

Caveat: I realise my tone in every single part of this post probably sounds confrontational or grumpy. I don't mean to, but I can't think of another way to phrase any of this at this moment. End of the week very tired blues...

A lot of sci-fi is mainstream.

mainstream

maestrowork said:

A lot of sci-fi is mainstream.

Click to expand...

Not according to publishers. The last thing a publisher wants on a mainstream title is the label "science fiction." Calling something science fiction seems to be a turn off for mainstream readers.

I might go with the other way around and say that a lot of mainstream is science fiction, even if it isn't called SF.

I know there are some, but I can't recall the last novel I saw that was labelled science fiction, and that still made the mainstream lists.