Timeline for Can I bring back Planetary Romance as a genre?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
13 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| May 8, 2019 at 16:18 | comment | added | Chris Sunami | @wetcircuit Prisoner of Zenda is a fantastically entertaining, quick-paced read. It's definitely mass market fluff, but because it's lasted so long, it has acquired the prestige of literature. | |
| May 8, 2019 at 16:15 | comment | added | wetcircuit | Sci-Fi Soap! Yes, hahaha, that is true. I would need to lean it back the other way in the description. There is an actual plot and the story escalates to a larger frame. It is meant to be pulp, not quite so relationship-y as a soap implies. | |
| May 8, 2019 at 16:15 | history | edited | Chris Sunami | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 365 characters in body
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| May 8, 2019 at 16:12 | comment | added | wetcircuit | @ChrisSunami that's the 2nd time I've seen "Ruritania" in as many days (researching this question). I think this is something I need to look into... | |
| May 8, 2019 at 16:11 | comment | added | Chris Sunami | @wetcircuit --I didn't get that at all from your original post. In that case, what you really have is a science-fiction soap opera. | |
| May 8, 2019 at 16:09 | comment | added | wetcircuit | Thank you @DanNeely … I'm uncomfortable with "literary" pretensions…. It's not a shoot-em-up adventure because it doesn't flatter that character. I'm aiming for something a little more salacious and back-stabby, with a social-climbing femme fatale as the heroine…. There are lofty messages, but most of the character interaction is sexual tension, manipulation, lying and scamming. The core of the story is a trainwreck relationship… If it's ultimately marketed as "trashy women's sci-fi", like if Barbarella had ambition and a brain, I'd be totally cool with that…. | |
| May 8, 2019 at 16:05 | comment | added | Chris Sunami | @DanNeely "My story is character-driven. It lacks melodramatic villains...Feminist and social justice themes were subverted in favor of more complicated, frustrating characters who act in their own self-interest... the socio-political situation is more important than technology, and the conflicts are small and inter-personal..." // Also, yesterday's mass market trash is often today's prestige literature. It's not that long ago that Philip K Dick was considered pulp. (See also Prisoner of Zenda) | |
| May 8, 2019 at 15:37 | comment | added | Dan Is Fiddling By Firelight | I'm not seeing much in the question to make me think the story's going after any of the sophisticated themes/etc that would be expected in a literary story; and something that was seen as a unpretentious massmarket adventure story subgenre at the time is about as far from literary as you can get. I'm not sure what it the story is, but unless wetcircuit's totally off base about what planetary romance is literary sf is going to be wildly off mark too. | |
| May 8, 2019 at 14:51 | comment | added | Chris Sunami | @DanNeely Nothing in the original post convinced me that "Planetary Romance" was actually correct as a descriptor, which is presumably at least part of the reason the original poster was dissatisfied with it. | |
| May 8, 2019 at 13:54 | comment | added | Dan Is Fiddling By Firelight | While it's possible that wetcircuit's story may fit as lit-sf; lit-sf and planetary romance are normally very different styles of writing. I don't think we can tell for sure without reading a sample; but as a long time SF reader I think it's very likely that one of you are badly off in which sub-genre the story is in. | |
| May 8, 2019 at 13:43 | comment | added | Chronocidal | Borrowing from the terms "High Fantasy"/"Epic Fantasy" (Large-scale fantastical elements or scenarios) and "Low Fantasy" (which has less emphasis on the fantastical elements, and typically more on the characters and relationships), this could also be described as "Low Science-Fiction" | |
| May 7, 2019 at 18:36 | comment | added | wetcircuit | Better than making something up, or bringing something esoteric back from the dead. Thank you! | |
| May 7, 2019 at 18:35 | history | answered | Chris Sunami | CC BY-SA 4.0 |