Open Question Wednesday #8

[julieandrews]

Not a question per se...

Invent a subgenre of science fiction or fantasy. Give it a name and include a brief description of it. Here's one to get y'all started.

Picklepunk

Any story that features pickles. They may be characters, objects, the crux of the plot, or even the setting. Most picklepunk stories are about pickled cucumbers, but other foodstuffs have appeared in picklepunk stories, such as pickled ginger, pickled eggs, etc. There is some debate in the picklepunk community whether pickling animals or humans really fits into the spirit of the genre.

Comments

[shweta-narayan.livejournal.com]

Astropunk: The science fiction people would write if they *lived* in a steampunk world. Cannot include anything so banal as pneumatic space monkeys because... well... they have those in real life.

[julieandrews.livejournal.com]

I love thinking meta like this. It can hurt my brain a little, but the result is usually awesome. Like if they did a science fiction scenario in the holodeck rather than constantly dipping into old detective novels.

Shadowpunk

[writerinside.livejournal.com]

Shadowpunk: noir set in the near-future, with shadows and attitude.

Or, if you're tired of the whole "punk" moniker, perhaps neo-noir?

Meh. Been done. Add clowns. Shadowclownpunk. Now THAT could be interesting.

Re: Shadowpunk

[julieandrews.livejournal.com]

No way I'm reading shadowclownpunk. Clowns don't need a reason to be dark!

*shudder*

[keyan-bowes.livejournal.com]

Shelter-spec-fic.

Deals with new paradigms for housing. Several works in this genre are classics, but the genre needs recognition as a separate subdivision within the spec-fic canon, on which new authors can build. May deal with the home itself as in the seminal Heinlein story, “—And He Built a Crooked House—” or with the impact of housing arrangements of the human condition, as in Forster's "The Machine Stops." At least two sub-sub-genres may be recognisable: The fantastic - e.g., people living in trees or tree-trunks; and the sci-fi - e.g., homes consisting of variable force-fields established in appropriate locations.

[julieandrews.livejournal.com]

Bradbury has at least one smart house story that could fit in this genre.

I think maybe I'll write "Pickle Abode" which would be both shelter-spec-fic and picklepunk.

animalpunk, kryptopunk

[jstueart.wordpress.com (from livejournal.com)]

Animalpunk would be science fiction with uplifted animals as main characters, if not the whole cast. Julie Czerneda would fall in here, so would Rafi Zabor's award winning, The Bear Comes Home... add sex and call it Furrypunk

Kryptopunk is the kind of stories that animals would write if they had the ability to write in these alternate/future realities...named after Superman's dog....

Astrolinguistic fiction

[keyan-bowes.livejournal.com]

Stories based on the differences in alien communication. Ted Chiang's Story of Your Life is a classic in the genre. New work includes Let the Word Take Me by my friend Juliette Wade in Analog. The languages do not have to be sound-based; they may include chemical communications; electro-magnetic and other waves; or physical movements like bee dances.