Thursday, June 6

The third subgenre I chose was Adventures--Exotic lands because I like to visit unusual places and learn about their stories.  Unfortunately I struck out trying to find some fan sites concerned only with novels written about travel, so I settled for World Hum, The Best Travel Stories on the Internet www.worldhum.com, even though it is really not an avid fan site exactly.  On this site world travelers can share stories of the exotic sights they see, make recommendations, and read interviews.  There is a travel blog, and links to social media. Some of the more interesting stories are written by Clay Shivers, who describes his adventures aboard a train in Bangalore, Andrea Johnson on Australia's Northern Territory, and Tarras Grescoe's observations while traveling the Moscow subway system.  Adventure seekers would really get energized looking around on this site.  The appeal factors would be setting, detail, and learning/experiencing.

Mashups: religious SF.  Religion appears in fantasy novels, but there are classic science fiction ones in which religion plays a part, notably Canticle for Liebowitz, Dune, and Stranger in a Strange Land.  Sometimes in these stories the main character might be a member of a specific religious order, or be making a pilgrimage, or trying to convert mankind in a future world devoid of religion. This is probably not as popular a subgenre now as it was in the seventies.

Here's another, actually a customer request:  mysteries in which a murder does not take place.  These are not necessarily cozy mysteries.  Here are some examples:  Dorothy Cannell's The Thin Woman, and Erskine Childers' The Riddle of the Sands.