What we're looking for this month

Writers often ask us what we’re “looking for”. Excellent fiction, of course, but what does that mean? This page is designed to tell you. We’ll update it bi-monthly, so visit again.

What We’re Looking for This Month – March/April 2010

The New Science Fiction

Science Fiction was a durable genre in the second half of the 20th Century. In the early 21st Century it is struggling to retain its audience. Novels of first contact, interstellar travel, Mars, robots, dystopias and even cyberpunk seem to have lost their relevance.

While some deny the decline of SF (citing its popularity in movies, games and on TV), the sinking sales of SF titles in the book world is hard to ignore. What will turn that situation around?

Like every durable genre, SF has always reflected its times. Our own time is not one in which the future fills us with wonder. We are focused on the here and now. Even so, readers are open to speculative elements. Urban fantasy and paranormal romance clog the shelves. Novels like The Time Traveler’s Wife can become best sellers.

What do these books have in common, and how are they different from traditional SF? First, they are set in the present. Second, they do not envision a world greatly changed from our own but rather one which is different in only one way. They do not delight in speculation but focus instead on human drama.

So, what we’re looking for this month are the novels in the next wave of Science Fiction. They might be literary, cross-genre or based in other genres altogether. They are likely to be set in the present. They will hinge on one simple but important change in the way things are. They will be less about ideas and more about people.

Some stories I’d like to see:

One day a woman begins to hear her husband’s thoughts. She discovers that he loves her more profoundly than she knew…but he also is keeping a secret she can only partly discern.

A homicide detective can see murders before they happen but there’s a catch: Each victim deserves to die—and his latest vision is of his own slaying a year hence.

There’s a town where time begins to run backwards, but only one man remembers the past. For everyone else, each day happens like it’s brand new.

It’s our world but with one difference: assisted suicide is legal. When a mother decides to die as a political protest, her daughter journeys home to persuade her to live.

-Donald Maass