Word: sci-fi
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...while sci-fi may never fully shed its dweeby image, the reality has evolved along with the rest of pop culture. Readers can choose from a wide array of subgenres, including Tolkienesque fantasy, high-tech cyberpunk, horror sci-fi, feminist sci-fi, techno-thriller sci-fi, gay and lesbian sci-fi and even sci-fi erotica. Readership and authorship have broadened too: women now account for a third of the science-fiction audience, compared with just 10% in the '50s, and such writers as Ursula Le Guin and Octavia E. Butler (one of sci-fi's few African-American authors...
...result, the books have moved from the publishing industry's paperback margins to its Big Money mainstream. The number of sci-fi titles has more than doubled since the early '70s, from fewer than 1,000 titles a year to 2,000, with a remarkable third appearing first in hard cover, according to Charles N. Brown, publisher of Locus, the trade magazine and industry bible...
...most popular genre, however, is one sci-fi purists disdain: endlessly replicating paperbacks based on movies and TV shows, notably Star Wars and Star Trek. "Movie tie-ins outsell regular science fiction by quite a bit," Brown says with a sniff. "We don't consider them real science fiction." A bit more acceptable, though still off the point, are traditional sword-and-sorcery fantasies like Robert Jordan's A Crown of Swords (Tor), which debuted at No. 2 on last week's New York Times list...
...longtime readers like Brown, the real sci-fi is "hard" sci-fi. It's the literary equivalent of a whiskey shot: bracing, no-nonsense extrapolation of today's science. And it's coming back after years of neglect. The colonization of Mars, for example--a quintessential hard sci-fi subject--inspired Kim Stanley Robinson's Blue Mars (Bantam). The third volume in his acclaimed Mars trilogy, it's a painstakingly plotted epic that follows a group of pioneers across centuries as they transform the Red Planet into an ecologically friendly refuge. "We're acting as the conscience and subconscious...
Then there's cyberpunk, the Net-based genre whose grim, dehumanized vision of the future dominated sci-fi during the late '80s. Its seminal work was the 1984 classic Neuromancer, by William Gibson, who never was happy being pigeonholed as a cyberpunk writer. "It wasn't our term," he says. "It's one of those labels." And although he did invent the word cyberspace, says Gibson, "I had to spend years and years figuring out what it meant." In the past few years, cyberpunk has lost some of its glitter, perhaps because cruising the Net has become so commonplace...