textiplication.com

http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6429710.html

via Andrew Wheeler. Publisher’s Weekly talks to Robert J. Sawyer:

When asked if traditional SF has “jumped the shark,” …Sawyer responds, “If it had just jumped the shark, that would be fine — at least people would understand what that means. But no. SF has instead executed a parabolic maneuver with an exemplar of the cartilaginous order Selachii at its focus…”

I think that this observation is fair but incomplete. It’s a daunting prospect to get a non-genre reader to read some of the best hard SF I’ve read lately. Take Alastair Reynolds’ Chasm City, for instance. It’s not difficult because of any problems with Alastair’s beautiful prose, by any means, but because he’s writing for an audience that’s familiar with genre tropes such as generation ships, cryogenic suspension, nanotech, alien biologies, and bioengineering. He has to assume a certain familiarity with base concepts in order to be able to get to the really mind-stretching stuff he wants to write about. Also, it’s not just the reading that’s challenging; the level of base knowledge required to write effective high-end SF is enormous. Some writers who have excelled at the highest levels of physics-oriented hard SF have embarrassing difficulty writing about elementary levels of computer technology. Those who talk abstruse physics and software equally well are extremely rare. Stross, Vinge, Schroeder? Peter Watts. Not that you have to do both - I don’t get the impression that Kim Stanley Robinson is all that interested in software, for instance, which doesn’t mean that RGB Mars is terribly accessible to people without engineering backgrounds or a lifetime of SF reading behind them.

So if there is a selachian being jumped, it’s a bioengineered human-shark hybrid with carbon-nanotube-reinforced cartilage and a brain augmented with rod logic and protected by a synthetic diamond skull. There you go, a fascinating novel to be written that won’t be comprehensible to the majority of Americans who buy lottery tickets.

The PW article recounts different publisher reactions to the movement of SFF-themed publications out of the genre section. Strategies range from defending the genre by trying hard to keep your best writers in it (DelRey) to leveraging contemporary noir fantasy, particularly for women (Ace/Roc), to working to move your top writers out into the mainstream (Eos, particularly ones named Neil or Neal).

None of the publishers seem to be thinking about the Boingers or Second Lifers.

Fascinating, Captain.

Probably a lot of books with soft-focus covers featuring tattooed bare ankles and backs.  Subgenres I have been calling vamporn and were-otica.  Now Juno Books has identified another subgenre: pornanormal.