06 December 2011

genre accessibility?

Over at Locus Online, there's been an interesting Roundtable on Genre Accessibility, which asks if contemporary science fiction has the capacity to cross over to a mass audience. I disagree with the implicit premise here which seems to be contemporary speculative fiction is not appealing to a mass audience. Have these people been to a bookstore, the movies, or turned on the TV lately? Have they ever heard of Harry Potter or the Twilight series or the Hunger Games trilogy? Or George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire or Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse/True Blood series? I could go on and on. Of course, some of you might argue my examples are more fantasy than SF, and this is mostly true, but I could also name SF recent hits, like Cormack McCarthy's The Road. As I said, it's an interesting article; check it out.

Some speculative fiction that is very accessible can be found in our recent issue of Electric Spec. For example,


Check them out, too! :)

1 comment:

Martin Willoughby said...

SF and fantasy seem to switch places every so often. For a while it was Star Wars/Trek and others, now fantasy is big.

In time SF will be back in the mainstream and fantasy will be put into the background again. All it takes is a couple of hit movies.