{"id":2683,"date":"2008-06-09T09:32:32","date_gmt":"2008-06-09T09:32:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/06\/09\/technothrillers-vs-science-fic\/"},"modified":"2008-06-09T09:32:32","modified_gmt":"2008-06-09T09:32:32","slug":"technothrillers-vs-science-fic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/06\/09\/technothrillers-vs-science-fic\/","title":{"rendered":"Technothrillers vs. Science Fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reading Final Theory<\/cite><\/a> last night reminded me of something Patrick Nielsen Hayden said on a con panel once. The question was raised of why thriller-ish science fiction books don’t do as well as thrillers with a thin SF gloss– basically, “Why doesn’t Greg Bear sell as many books as Michael Crichton?”<\/p>\n

Patrick noted that there’s a very different attitude toward the products of science in the two genres. In thrillers, he said, the plot is set in motion by the unleashing of some scientific discovery, and the plot is resolved by destroying or covering up that discovery. In genre science fiction, on the other hand, the discovery is still out there at the end of the book, the world is changed, and things don’t go back to normal. Basically, thrillers see the scientific mcguffin as a menace to be eliminated, while SF sees it as a change to be adapted to.<\/p>\n

I’m not sure this explains the sales figures– after all, people don’t generally know the details of the ending before they buy a book– but I thought it was an interesting remark, and pretty accurate given my limited reading of thrillers.<\/p>\n

Thoughts? Comments? Counterexamples? Anybody else think we could make a pretty good Worldcon programming track based entirely on things that Patrick has mentioned in passing on panels?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reading Final Theory last night reminded me of something Patrick Nielsen Hayden said on a con panel once. The question was raised of why thriller-ish science fiction books don’t do as well as thrillers with a thin SF gloss– basically, “Why doesn’t Greg Bear sell as many books as Michael Crichton?” Patrick noted that there’s… Continue reading Technothrillers vs. Science Fiction<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,37,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2683","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-pop_culture","category-sf","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2683","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2683"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2683\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}