m. c. de marco

I’m hoping to read some of these stories, but for now they’re just a blog post: William Shunn recommends these top ten Podcastle podcast stories; and Pyr passes along Bookgasm’s top 5 books of the year and also collects praise for Diving into the Wreck by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

Not quite as significant as the birth of a genre, the birth of a subgenre really only needs someone to give to airy nothing a local habitation and a name. Schott’s Vocab documents the origin of a new one:

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies has sold over 50,000 copies in the UK and 600,000 in the US since publication in April, sparking a new trend for what [publisher] Quirk has dubbed the “literary monster mash-up.”

Jo Walton asked the eternal question, is Alternate History science fiction? over at Tor.com, and suggested that there may be enough of the stuff now to count as its own genre. I think it’s still just science fiction—not nearly weighing the shelves down enough yet to qualify as a new genre. Perhaps calling it fantasy would help with the sales and the birth of a new genre…

At Biology in Science Fiction, the definition of biopunk, a.k.a. ribofunk:

With the advent of the Human Genome Project and greater focus on biotechnology in the media in the 1990s, there was a natural evolution [from cyberpunk] to stories where it was DNA that was hacked, rather than computer networks. Such stories have been dubbed by some “biopunk” or the catchier “ribofunk”, a term invented by Paul Di Filippo.

At Futurismic: the economics of fiction are not about pensions but about personality.

The point is also raised that fiction can in some cases have intrinsic cognitive value as well, but the central idea - that your taste in fiction is an external signal about the sort of person you are - is an interesting one, especially for fans of genre fiction like ourselves.

Charlie Stross asks and answers the question, Why are SF and fantasy novels the length they are?

In the 1960s, an SF novel was 60-80,000 words, with 80K being considered overblown and long. By 1990 they’d grown to 90-100,000 words.

Via Pyr-o-mania: James Enge at Black Gate asks Can Fix-Ups be Fixed? Fix-ups are pastiche novels assembled from short stories.

Also, this is a very traditional form in sf/f generally and sword-and-sorcery in particular. For some, that may not matter at all. The past is dead. The future is now. The reason to jump off the cliff is that no one has done it yet. But, personally, when it comes to cliff-jumping, I am not that innovative. I like to look down and see a deep, soft carpet of my predeceased predecessors before I leap.