[fjtorres]

Unlike YA or Urban Fantasy or (snicker) "New Adult", SF (like mystery and romance and, yes, erotica) aren't fuzzy marketing labels but rather structurally and thematically defined fields with clear borders. (Fantasy is a whole different creature, though.)

The borders are flexible and mixing and matching is fine but they all have clear guidelines based on what the story is about. A romance might have hot steamy sex or the starcrossed lovers might never touch, but if the story is a romance it has to be about the relationship first and foremost. Action, adventure, even rockets are just stage props around the relationship dance.

Firefly is a great example of SF flexibility: the form of a western melded beautifully with the world building and philosophical a analysis of a well thought out SF story. Individualism vs collectivism playing out in the fringes of an evolving society? Yeah, that's SF. Train robberies and bank jobs were the means of exploring the times and the ethics of the world. And in the end, Whedon made it crystal clear in the movie: "We don't want to tell people what to think, just hie to think." That is what FIREFLY is about. An ideological difference. Ideas front and center, wrapped in good storytelling.

That is what SF is about.
Battling space fleets, robot detectives, plagues and dictatorships, those are just tools to explore the ideas. Take out the ideas or, worse, substitute something else and you end up with a watered down counterfeit.

I'm not talking about new themes, approaches, or protagonists or SF stories that play up non-traditional elements like, say alternate history, or some of the less extreme steampunk, most of those are still explorations of ideas. Well within bounds if executed properly. At worst they might be fantasy (another abused genre) rather than SF.

What I'm concerned with is the outright coopting of SF forms to hide non-SF material in the (misguided) belief it will improve marketability. Heh! SF is one of the smaller genres to start with and many people avoid it like the plague to start with. Flood it with wooden decoys and it'll just send the audience hunting for the backlist.

And that is something we are seeing more and more, especially in tradpub SF. Look to the tradpub SF sellers and they are dominated by long-established authors. Newcomers aren't doing all that well despite the genre's tradition of welcoming new voices and new forms. Some of it is newcomers wisely avoiding the corporate imprints and going indie but there is more going on.

There's a lot of good new SF but it's not all finding an audience...