So Long, Science Fiction

 

And thanks for all the fish! 

This week one of the authors I follow on YouTube had an interview with a literary agent and invited questions. I had one. In my process of sending out query letters to agents, it struck me that even agents who claimed to be open to science fiction, it was fantasy that they really wanted. I am sending query letters from a list of agents who handled science fiction, and in this last batch, when I was filling out the submission form for one of those agents, it did not even offer me the option of classifying my story as science fiction. So my question was, was this apparent lack of interest in science fiction just in my imagination, or was it real?

According to this agent, it is very much real. Editors are far more open to fantasy than to science fiction stories. And indeed publishers who haven’t published science fiction or fantasy in the past are now interested in publishing fantasy. The reason this agent and the writer (of fantasy) suggested was that fantasy had become much more mainstream than science fiction due to popular shows like the Game of Thrones, the Lord of the Rings and more recent streaming fantasy stories. The agent suggested that science fiction still has a sort of nerdy vibe to it, pointing to the TV show The Expanse which had the scope and production values of a Game of Thrones but did not escape that science fiction niche.

Fantasy, it seems, simply has a wider appeal. For example, my 13 year old granddaughter is an avid fan of fantasy, and has been reading YA fantasy for the last three years. And while she is a big fan of the Star Wars universe, she’s even a bigger Lord of the Rings fan. I don’t think she has any great desire to branch out into science fiction. And, as I've mentioned before, YA SF doesn’t sell well, and compared to fantasy, there's not much of it published.

While I don’t write books to sell them, I would like to find my widest possible audience, and fantasy seems to offer a much greener pasture than science fiction. As I have noted in past posting I no longer have any loyalty to science fiction. I was never a true, dye-in-the-wool science fiction fan, in that I never liked SF short stories, and grand ideas don’t appeal to me. It was the exotic locales of science fiction that appealed to me. For my stories, I invent different worlds to tell old fashioned adventure stories. I don’t need SF to do that. I can write them as fantasies instead.

I don’t think I can bring myself to write stories with “real” magic, any more than I can bring myself to write stories with  telepathy, teleportation, time travel, or things that seem no more possible to me than magic spells. Instead, as I have in one story already (Beneath the Lanterns), I will use Arthur C. Clarke’s observation that any science sufficiently advanced might appear to be magic as the basis of my fantasy. I don’t seem myself writing high fantasy, epic fantasy, or grimdark fantasy, but I do think that I can invent worlds and stories that look backwards into history, rather than forwards, like fantasy, but without magic systems and the grand scale that merely suggest magic (advanced science) and secrets, but keep them rare and unexplained. I think we’re talking about the “mundane” fantasy, but who knows?

Not, mind you, that I think it will make a great deal of a difference in either my stories or my success. It is simply a matter of slightly increasing the odds that more readers will find me. We’ll see.