Aren’t you sick of those author photos - nicely lit, the writer staring wistfully at camera, head rested on hand?

Here’s Keith Brooke.

Keith has just signed a deal with Solaris for his new science fiction novel, The Accord - full details here.

Oh, and nice rack, Keith…

Some people may have missed Brian Aldiss’ letter to The (London) Times on October 16 under this heading. He says:

Sir, At the Cheltenham Festival Margaret Atwood said that writers “are
likely to be compulsive wordsmiths” — presumably a way of saying that
writing is for some of us an expression of the life force.

Her life would have been more difficult had she not cleverly denied that
her early science fiction novels, such as A Handmaid’s Tale, were
science fiction. Had she neglected this strategy, there would have been
for her no more literary festivals, no more reviews, no more appearances
on BBC breakfast programmes.

It is a truth widely acknowledged that SF is not worth consideration by
sane minds. Kurt Vonnegut and J. G. Ballard have adopted Atwood’s
gambit. When Vonnegut grew tired of being a guru, he returned to SF and
wrote such brilliant novels as Galápagos. No reviewer spoke its name.
When — possibly because of my age — I was invited on Desert Island Discs
this year, I was told that SF readers were nerds who were poor and could
not “get a woman”.

(I was very tempted to use that last quote as the heading. Just for sport, of course.) Aldiss raises an issue that has plagued numerous genre writers down the years, from Stephen King to Terry Pratchett, who said that magical realism is fantasy for people whose friends went to Cambridge.

But to be honest, I enjoy that outsider status. One of the roles of genre fiction is to kick over the statues. We should celebrate that.

Fantasy and SF for the connoisseur or for mainstream tastes: which path should a publishing house follow? That’s an interesting debate which the ever-erudite Lou Anders has raised on his blog. When founding the excellent Pyr imprint, Lou and his team took the conscious decision to publish what Norman Spinrad called “science fiction written specifically for experienced and intelligent readers of science fiction, with a bit of fantasy more or less in the same mode thrown in”.

I think that’s an excellent policy for Pyr. It’s certainly a truism that the more you indulge in a particular taste the more refined that taste becomes (which can also be a problem for critics, who, as Stephen King puts it, “lose their taste for pizza”). The core readership of fantasy and SF - the fans, although they probably don’t categorise themselves that way - deserve some gourmet dishes.

But there is a wider debate here. On The Genre Files, Ariel gives a smart overview of marketing genre books in the 21st century, a post that all authors and publishers should read. And in a separate article, editor George Mann writes about Solaris’ choice of traditional covers for their genre titles.

Both these articles get right to the heart of trying to sell books to a fragmented audience in the 21st century, and it’s something the music industry in particular, and TV and Film, are all struggling to deal with. Do you go for the hardcore fan or reach out to the wider audience? There are pros and cons for both. It seems that Lou, Ariel and George are all swinging towards an approach that caters to the dedicated reader, and I think that’s a business model that will work very well for Pyr and Solaris.

But if it was applied to the whole industry I would have real problems. In the music industry, where I worked for a while, the marketeers have struggled. By focusing on the tribalist music fan that has emerged over the last twenty years, they have had trouble gaining breakout hits from genres. Attention shifted to marketing bland fare that would appeal to all tastes to gain those mainstream hits, and sales have fallen dramatically (yes, I know there are many other factors, but this is a core concern).

The comics industry in particular has faced a great many problems because of the loss of its mainstream audience. That was caused by the collapse of its distribution network in the late seventies and early eighties and the shift to specialist comics shops. But the comics producers then found that to maintain sales in this rarefied atmosphere required stories that excited the jaded palates of the core fan - and were nigh-on incomprehensible to the casual reader. Sales fell further, the core fan market had to be shored up to a greater extent, and a desperate retreat from the centre ground took place, that is still damaging the industry.

The issue of covers and marketing is not just an industry issue. I’ve had several readers complain about my move away from traditional illustrative fantasy covers to the latest design-oriented ones. I’ve had just as many applaud the move. These covers are a personal choice. I like design; they work for me. And, I have to say, sales have been much, much better. But I don’t think you can extrapolate too much from that for the wider market. If all covers were designery, mine wouldn’t have had the same impact.

I love fantasy, science fiction and horror. I believe these three genres are appealing to mainstream tastes, if some way can be found to communicate their values to the casual browser. I’m afraid that an across-the-board retreat to the ‘core fan model’ will ghettoize them even further and lead to a long-term decline. The best way for the industry, I think is - to use music industry analogy - hardcore labels for the purist, and general labels to attract new users.

But that is a fiendish and crippling trap for the writer. Once you establish yourself in one pool or the other it will be very hard to crossover and gain, on the one hand, the new readers and wider sales that sustain your career, and, on the other, credibility that is just as valuable a commodity in the internet-empowered world.

A lot of people have been talking about my post suggesting that the more rationalist a society gets, the less it needs rationalist fiction like SF (with poor old Richard Dawkins thrown in as the whipping boy, for a spot of humour). Some have been predictably getting hot under the collar. Others were more receptive.

I grew up reading SF. The first adult ones I remember were Heinleins when I was nine or ten, moving on to Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. During my teens I expanded into fantasy and horror, with Moorcock, Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, and I still read right across the core speculative genres. In those days, SF was the powerhouse of imaginative fiction, influencing mainstream thought, whether high-brow or low. Fantasy as a genre - even with Tolkien behind it - was clutching on to the coat-tails, and horror was barely seen.

But now things have changed. The tribalist SF readers like to proclaim that although influence and sales have declined, they still have the high ground - the better writing, the more rigorous ideas. And the better literary pretension, of course. Yet fantasy is now much more effective at communicating with a wider readership, and reaching out to people from different walks of life.

There are numerous, complex reasons for changes on this scale. One is indeed that people read books to get what they don’t have - new ideas, information, experience, and, increasingly, irrationality. Another is certainly that in some areas SF has grown more insular and inward-looking, like a group of gourmands sneering at everyone else eating pizza. But one important reason is that a significant part of SF has forgotten what is the engine of communication in story-telling - emotion.

I’m also a screenwriter in the TV industry, and at every script meeting, the cry goes up, ‘emotion, emotion, emotion’. The emotional heart of every story is the point of connect for viewers or readers, and allows them to take on board the big ideas, the themes, that lie within. Big ideas alone are not enough. Everybody in TV today understands this. It’s the reason why the current series of Dr Who has been such a success. Russell T Davies, the show runner, received his TV training on soaps, and took the decision to infuse emotion into the core of the new series concept. It’s the reason why Battlestar Galactica is such a success, and the reason why most TV and film SF connects with a wider audience.

Fantasy - which comes more from the heart than the head - instinctively understands this too. So does horror. But SF has always loved its big ideas and these days in the literary world, I feel, is loving them much, much more than the humanity it wants to care about those ideas. This isn’t really a different argument to the ‘rational society needing irrational dreams’ one. It’s about the balance between head and heart. People don’t want an academic lecture. They want to feel why they should care.

I used to get that in my early SF reading - maybe not so much in Asimov, but certainly in the broad thrust of the genre. Or am I misremembering? Or perhaps modern SF really is concentrating on humanity and using emotion to piggyback those big ideas into the minds of the wider population, and I’m just not reading those books. Put me right…I’m sure you will…