Science Fiction

NOUN: A subcategory within a particular genre: The academic mystery is a subgenre of the mystery novel.

To have your subgenre thread added to this list, please send me an email with a LINK to the thread, and which main genre it is for (there is more than one thread like this.) Requests that do not include a link will not be added.

• Genetic Science Fiction
• Cyberpunk
• Dystopia/Utopia
• Post-Apocalyptic
• Near Future Science Fiction
• Post-cyberpunk
• Future History
• Social Science Fiction
• Sci-Fi/Romance
• Military Science Fiction

Hey-yo everybody and welcome back to another fantastic year of writing. One of the things I noticed last year was a crop of people wondering if their novel classified as science fiction or not.

So!

Instead of having a million and one threads with questions, just post your story summary here and our wonderful team of scifi veterans will be able to help you classify your novel. Happy writing!

Here is the obligatory introduction thread. So, time to sound off. Who will be writing science fiction this time around, and what sub-genre do you think it will be?

I'll get it started...

Hello, my name is Dreamers Cove [wave].

This year I have two different science fiction novels in the planning. One is a Young Adult Science Fiction and the other is a Romance Science Fiction. Yes, I'm crazy enough to try to write two books in one month. And if I need more I have an Adventure Science Fiction all plotted out and waiting in the wings.

Yay, it's Nano time!

Next?

I need some ideas guys. Now I'm finally getting round to editing, I've discovered a problem. Ny novel's set in in a parallel world (similar to pre-war Britain in most aspects, though not all.) Steam power is in, but a new kind of engine has been discovered, which esentially, is used to make ships fly. I was calling it 'the magnetic engine' in my rough draft, but upon thinking about it, magnets are used in motors, so I'm stumped. It doesn't need to be backed up scientifically- I'm a real dunce when it comes to technical aspects like this. Thankfully my protagonist is too, so I don't have to into too many details. I'm open to all suggestions. :) How can I make a ship fly?

I'm looking to swap novels a chapter at a time. I'll read anything- romance, fantasy, you name it. Just nanomail me or email me directly at opurpledragon@aol.com. Here is a summary of my book:

Assassin Obsidian Ambros doesn’t “exist” according to the scientific definition of existence, but he’s made a hell of an impact with his life anyway. Having pitted the entire galaxy—and the gods—against himself, he’s effectively earned the title “last enemy.” That is, until an unlikely young man takes it from him. Lyon is blind, deaf, and weak, an angel slated to fall. When the gods brand him as a calamity in the wake of a powerful goddess’s death, Obsidian finds himself employed—rivalries with the gods forgotten—with a mission to assassinate the kid.

No problem.

What Obsidian doesn’t expect to find is a reason to keep Lyon alive. And boy, does he find one. Lyon can read time like a book and is able to see the future whenever and wherever he wants, giving Obsidian more control over his destiny than ever before. But Lyon has seen what’s coming, and when the gods become more determined than ever to see his death realized and Obsidian’s with it, he knows setting everything right will cost the very thing they're fighting for—his life.

Thanks in advance!

Well, not time travel exactly...not sure if this question should go in this forum or Sci-Fi but:

I have a set of characters who have their timeline reset; that is, an event happens and due to interference of future characters, that event is prevented from happening (and instead of most of the characters dying, they all live).

So, in my plot, I want everyone's "reset" experiences to be a little different. In particular the main character's experiences diverge at a quite major point - that is, "the night before". He remembers one way and she remembers quite differently.

This is the sticking point - in her "reality" she gets pregnant, in his nothing happens.

So here's my problem: is it ethical for her to keep the baby and not tell him?

So the reformed Soviet Union has alien colonists landing on their territory, hoping to live alongside them and share technology. But the Soviets use them to learn their language, download all the information onto their computers, then "accidentally" kill them all.

So, what information would they find in the alien databases? (HINT: there has to be the technology to make species (Not sentient ones) in a test tube pretty much, just to give you an idea of the tech level.) Other than that, just throw out some ideas that might help the Soviets in a war and completely surprise the US and British and other enemies of the Soviet Union.

For NaNo, I wrote a bunch of short stories. One of them takes place in an imaginary transgender-friendly European country (where children have been allowed to chose their gender roles for thousands of years--examples of such cultures exist all over, throughout history), and I decided to expand it into a short story series that comes together like a novel--a "braided novel."

The story focuses on one family, and three people in particular: M. (male-to-female transgender), A. (M.'s sister), and C. (A.'s son, who identifies as a girl). Over the years, the culture starts accepting transgender people less and less (for a variety of reasons, too complicated to get into right now), much like India and Thailand have in recent decades. The chapters are five years apart; each one is a self-contained short story.

What I'm wondering about is, the story makes almost no use of future technology. Some of these stories could take place in the United States; the difference is that the country, within living memory, accepted transgender people. If I were to publish these as separate stories, it might not be easily seen that they're science fiction, since the "what if" is entirely sociological.

So, at what point does social science fiction simply become mainstream fiction?

Could this concept be published as science fiction? Or is it more like slipstream, which is published under "fiction?" If the latter is true, then (since science fiction is the only real short story market out there) would I need to publish the whole thing as a novel?

As the title says, this idea in my head is my first step into writing SciFi. I was originally considering giving NaNo10 a miss, but this idea exploded into my head and begged to be written. I barely even READ SciFi (Animorphs when I was younger was about as close as I got, and I fell asleep through Star Wars episode 4 when my friends tried to get me to watch it), so I have almost no clue as to how SciFi works.

Complete NOOB!

So I was hoping I could get some help breeding the plot bunnies in my head. Please note that not all of this is official and I have yet to think of names. Tentaitive title is "100 Million Light Years From Home".

The main character in my head is a teenaged girl, almost a woman (TV Tropes: "action girl"), who is abducted from Earth and sold to a slave traders station. During the journey, she makes friends with two others who have been caught - a brutish-looking alien (TV Tropes: "The Big Guy") and a reptile-like one (TV Tropes: "Deadpan Snarker"). Between the three of them, they devise a plan and escape, crash-landing on the closest planet which is inhabited (by what I have no clue yet. I WAS thinking dolphin-like people).

That's about as much as I've thought of at this point in time. I'd like opinions and suggestions because, as stated above, this is my first foray into scifi.

I'm new to writing sci-fi, and I know that to write something you have to know the genre really, really well. I've been doing my best to read all the classics, but (naturally) no one can quite agree on what the sci-fi classics are. I'm sure I'm not the only person with this problem, so I thought it would be good to have a thread where everyone can come on and say what books they think are sci-fi classics, and why.