I went to hear Hugh Howey speak when he was on tour, promoting the Wool trilogy. He talked about his time writing in a bookshop, and confirmed something I’ve wondered about for years.
The main sellers for his bookshop and any general bookshop he’s ever heard of are the genres: SF, mysteries, fantasy. Once it would have been romance also, but that market has moved on-line a lot.
But, of course, those aren’t the books that get the prestige space at the front of the shop. There always buried at the back in the stacks. Instead the main tables are for the lit fic.
Some people will argue that this arrangement exposes the lit fic to book lovers, who are forced to pass it on the way to the stacks to get the books they actually want.
But Howey was in charge of ordering books for the shop he worked at, and he noticed: he had to fight to order greater numbers of the genre books, even when they were clearly strong sellers. Furthermore, the publishers’ own sales people were never that interested in talking about the genre books. They wanted to make sure the latest lit fic offerings would sell enough to… well, to say they were selling.
So you’ve got producers and distributors openly sabotaging their best-selling items… and then crying no-one reads anymore.
I think that might be partly because we don’t have a better term for near-future tales possible with present-day technology.
Even hard science fiction is generally considered to describe the effects of a technology that doesn’t yet exist; the “hard” qualifier just means the science describing that technology is possible.
It’s been many years, but I don’t remember any technology in A Handmaid’s Tale (or
at least, any that were necessary to the plot) that didn’t already exist at the time.
Future and alternate history stories were staples of science fiction magazines and books in the 20th century so I guess that’s where the label comes from (by the standards of sf fans/writers/editors anyway), regardless of the presence of future tech. I haven’t read “The Man In The High Castle” in decades, but I don’t recall much in the way of such in that story. Similarly, did “If This Goes On” by Heinlein have any future tech that was really important to the story?
Didn’t Arthur Clarke say you’re allowed one unbelievable thing per story? Even 2001 had a stargate. And the Monoliths were Von Neumann machines, which may be theoretically possible, but recall that they supposedly extended into higher dimensions.
