For those who don't know, I am writing serial novels here. I post a chapter each day until about half-way through the book. At that point, if a person wishes to keep reading s/he can purchase it on Amazon.
These are all mashups--I combine two diverse genres in each book. Either historical romance and sci-fi or historical mystery and sci-fi. I then, in traditional mashup tradition, take a historical book and re-write it as a science fiction taking place in the galaxy Upsilon Andromeda.
There are usually two things people do not understand when reading the book. First, they wonder why I keep some of the historical language even though the book is set in the future. Primarily, this is because I like the movie Romeo + Juliet. In my opinion, there was nothing better than mashing Shakespearian language into a modern setting. However, there is also the truth that history repeats itself.
One beta reader went so far as to say he did not believe that if we were advanced enough to travel to the stars we would still treat women as second-class subjects (which only the Xiepvuians do in my books), we would keep nobility conventions, and we would still be using such archaic methods as arranged marriages. I find this ironic since in thousands of years of recorded history we have always had these things, and we continue to have them today. I firmly believe one thousand years in the future we will continue to have them--especially if we are starting over on a new planet. Will there not already be a nobility in place when colonizers first set foot on it? You will have a leader and people in specific positions and people in general to populate the planet.
The second question I get is that if I wanted to go with all these conventions, why make it a sci-fi? That is also simple. Here we have specific rules--in societies where arranged marriages exist we don't have women who are the head of militaries or the head of prosperous businesses. In Upsilon Andromedae, a woman (and man) may be subject to an arranged marriage, but that woman was probably trained to fight just as well as the man she is marrying if their position in society requires it.
This is a new venture for me. I definitely have not perfected it, yet. However, I know it can work. After all, George Lucus did something similar in Star Wars--he had futuristic people fighting with swords. He added a magical, religious element to science fiction. There are actually many science fiction books and romance novels that operate off of old-traditions set in future worlds. Now, the mystery series is more like Nancy Drew meets Deep Space 9, and I don't think I have come across anything like that, yet. But someone has to be the first to experiment with it, right?
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