Oh, dear! I'm ten years older than JMG, but when he starts talking about old-timey SF, I just want to say, "Grandpa, do you want me to see if somebody is streaming Gunsmoke on the TV? How 'bout some Lawrence Welk?" Science Fiction isn't this monolithic "thing" anymore. He's right about that! It's wonderfully rich and diverse, and with the flowering of small publishing houses and self-publishing, there's a niche for just about anything you want to read or write. I have a friend who only reads Amish romance novels! Her library gets four or five new titles every month!

Is there a sub-genre of SF for post-industrial fiction? Absolutely! Is it the only option? No, probably not. You could probably write a post-industrial Amish romance novel and reach readers. Margaret Attwood's The Handmaid's Tale is considered "literary sf". I just finished reading World Made by Hand by Kunstler and it was shelved as straight fiction--and all the while I'm reading it, I'm mentally cross-referencing The Outlander series : Claire had access to a microscope in the Carolina outback in the 1760's and she was growing wild pencillin bacteria on bread on her windowsill. What 's happened to all the microscopes in Kunstler's world? They've got all these real estate agents and bankers and IT guys? Did the high school chemistry teacher die young? And Claire was planning to make her own ether--which, apparently, has an inconvenient tendency to explode in your face, but she found that someone was producing it commercially. And I am thinking I really need to go back and read THAT series because, she was a GW extraordinaire.

I was doing some market research Sunday at Barnes and Noble, and there is a big market for dystopian fiction in the Young Adult section--which now includes teens and readers in their mid-twenties.

You could do it as horror, a la The Stand. --Interestingly, the popularity of horror fictions tends to rise and fall with cycles of economic depression and recovery. But not this time around. Apparently Urban Fantasy has captured a significant share of the horror market. Very interesting...

But let me turn the question back around: if not SF, then what genre would you choose?

As I said, I took time on Sunday to do a little writer research at Barnes and Noble Sunday. I've been out of the game so long that I wasn't even sure if Writers Digest still had a print edition.  Silly me! Apparently there is no shortage of future writers out there who crave hope and direction. And that's great, because writers tend to be readers. I was even happier to find a copy of Orson Scott Card's book Character and Viewpoint on the book shelf. It's  a Writers Digest title, and it's one of the best books on writing that I've come across. Card came up with the MICE Quotient, which lets you analyse the story you are trying to tell. It's also great for talking about stories you've read.

Orson Scott Card's MICE Quotient is a powerful tool to help develop stories. Here's an overview:

In his book Characters and Viewpoint Orson Scott Card writes:

What are the different kinds of stories? Forget about publishing genres for a moment; there isn't one kind of characterization for academic-literary stories, another kind for science fiction, and still others for westerns, mysteries, thrillers, or historicals. Instead let's look at four basic factors present in every story, with varying degrees of emphasis. Balancing these factors determines what sort of characterization a story must have, should have, or can have.

The four factors are milieu, idea, character, and event.

A summary:

MILIEU: A milieu story concerns the world surrounding the characters you create.

IDEA: An idea story concerns the information you intend the reader to uncover or learn as they read your story.

CHARACTER: A character story concerns the nature of at least one of the characters in your story. Specifically, what this character does and why they do it.

EVENT: An event story concerns what happens and why it happens.

Here is the opening for my next Shirleik Hollmer story, now being thought out. In this story, the project almost fails because of human cupidity and stupidity. Technology is not the only thing that gives a gleam of hope. Many stories in real life bend towards tragedy because of human obstinacy and ignorance. So maybe stories can be a way through--but real-life experience in working with groups of people like lodges and community time banks will seal the deal.

Blood Hammer

The demolition and salvage crews working the Back Bay Canals were forever bringing bits, bobs, and buckets-full of slimy metallic objects to our basement door. Mostly, they were wanting Mecklinberg to identify obscure parts of some mechy thingoid they were clawing back from the sea, but occasionally these odourous offerings were intended as barter or thank-you gifts. Once, there was the business end of a reverse action sump ram pump commonly called a chamber-pop.

It had been used by the early pioneers of marine wreckers to temporarily drain flooded chambers by the Dutch windmill method so that salvagers could work in relatively dry conditions. Built well before the ‘Flation of ‘99, even then it would have been considered a costly little number. Well made. Xtremely so. Back then, such a premium gadget would have been deployed chiefly in banks and luxury buildings where there was rich promise of prime pickings: gold, jewels, and off-lined bonds. Even today, it looked nearly new when it was cleaned up: almost unharmed by its half-century of immersion in brackish waters. Mecklinberg promptly re-purposed it as an air-compressor to power some of the kitchen and household appliances: the blender, the knife-grinder, the mini wall-vac.

When she first turned it on, it woke me from a sound sleep. Groggy from jet lag, I had diagnosed myself with a case of Corrigan’s and started up in panic before I realized that the sound was coming from outside my body, not within. Eventually, my opinion of the monster percolated and prevailed among the household; it was decided that the benefits did not outweigh the costs, and the pump was repurposed once more by being sold for a large chunk of cash to the Bridge Engineer’s Guild as a teaching tool. Mecklinberg has always been savvy and lucky with money that way.

But that is not to say she is mean and stingy. Like Hollmer herself, she can be generous without being pretentious about it. For instance, the hours, days, months, yea and unpaid years she spent devising, designing, testing and perfecting her bio-mechano-electro solution to the Indian Problem. Which eventually required a light touch of Hollmer’s services to implement beyond the piloting phase.

Adapting to heat such as the thunder lizards never knew ain’t easy and it was not cheap. What cities in Southern India had to do to survive is akin to miracle in my eyes: little less than full-body resurrection. The scale of the project alone was staggering.

It began with the cooling enclosures for sacred cows. People were more willing to protect the freely wandering animals than themselves. Mecklinberg’s invention of ‘cooler cuffs’ allowed some of the cows to wander outside part of the day. The solar-powered units applied cooling tubes to each leg. The more extensive models also covered the back and breast of the cow. Together with shaded avenues in the markets and the air-conditioned paddocks with stalls, more cows survived than would otherwise have done. The manure collected in the sacred avenues and barns rebuilt the depleted soils in many a community garden.

Similar cooling cuffs began to appear as a human ornament on the forearms, necks and shoulders of independent contractors working as HVAC unit servicemen. The early knockoffs of Mecklinberg’s original design had a tendency to short-circuit and some deaths were inevitable. But once the profitability was established, however marginal, Germany and Sweden and Newfoundland floated improved products. And the race was on: Japan refined the circuitry; China salvaged many tons of metal to make the tiny copper points; Portland plastic whalers hauled in miniature mountains of wild Pacific plastics gyring in mid oceans.

From cows to cowboys to construction crews, mylar-cladding and saline ice took to the fields. Knights in shining bio-electric armor and nights in dehumidified circuses began India’s slow, unsteady turnaround.

After you all finish your convention, would either of you be available to advise on the current science ficion market? Namely, which magazines like which kind of stories, or which magazines either of you like to read. There seems to be a lot of e-zines out there, and some print mags that pay. I am finding it hard to place one particular story; could use another eye on it or suggestions where to send it.

...the dtrammel address at this forum. Thanks in advance for any advice.