Wanda Pedersen’s Reviews > Trace Elements: Conversations on the Project of Science Fiction and Fantasy > Status Update

People often express surprise at the idea of a historian like Ada writing science fiction, as if the past and the future are opposites. But there is nothing more like the future than the past: long spans of time with events happening, societies changing, technologies arriving and disrupting; both are spaces where history happens, and both hinge on the present.

Romance was the first part of the book market whose readers enthusiastically embraced the e-reader, making it the sphere that made publishers and electronics manufacturers take e-books seriously as a model. Romance readers were the perfect market, since they tend to read huge numbers of books fast and once.

Romance as a genre is concerned with the pressures of money, so the genre virtually always features it, just as fantasy basically always features magic, and science fiction virtually always features questions of physics or biology.

And, before we start thinking that it's a sign of a bad writer to struggle with writing the scene after the kingdom is saved, talk to anyone who's been involved in a production of Henry V and they'll tell you how hard it is, after the exciting victory at Agincourt is over, to get the audience to engage with the peacemaking and wooing-the-princess sequence at the end.

When the US split from England in the late eighteenth century, in addition to being separate nations, the two became rival centers of English-language publishing, and developed rival distribution networks, which evolved over time into why today North American rights and UK/Commonwealth rights tend to be sold separately.

One big difference between genre fantasy and magical realism is that the genre fantasy contract promises that the consequences of the fantastic element will be deep and significant, consistent through the world, while in magical realism the fantastic element will not affect the larger world and serves mainly as an allegory to help character(s) undergo character development.

We might compare such novels to gymnastics, in which the mystery with a deeply original structure is like a uniquely choreographed floor routine, while the formulaic mystery is like the athlete doing a specific vault, fun because we are watching a master of the art perform a set of formulaic motions with outstanding excellence.