Marketing Fiction in a Changing World Part 25 - Understanding the Shifting Fiction Market

Marketing Fiction in a Changing World

Part 25

Understanding the Shifting Fiction Market 

by

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Previous entries in Marketing Fiction in a Changing World are indexed here:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/05/index-to-marketing-fiction-in-changing.html

We have discussed issues of "Marketing" (a whole profession independent writers have to master) and we have discussed the nature of FICTION (storytelling) in mechanical detail and as an Art Form.  Under the topics related to Theme, we have discussed the everyday world your readers live in and what that has to do with their taste in fiction.

We have looked at these various topics as fairly static in time.  They are not static.  But to grasp the nature and shape of the way they change with time, a writer must first see the static flash-photograph.

If you've got that set of static images in your mind, now is a good time to start animating it.

The world is changing.

Science Fiction can be about the past, the present or the future, and so can science fiction romance or Paranormal Romance.

In fact the most interesting novels, and classics in the making, tend to involve glimpses of how the far past, the intermediate past, and the present combine to generate the future -- how a timeline is all connected.

To create this animated vision for your readers you need to do a lot of detailed worldbuilding that does not appear in your story, and that your characters (and readers) know nothing about.

The world you build for your Characters has to be more internally consistent than our everyday real world.  You achieve that by focusing on a singular Theme, or for a series, a Theme Bundle (set of related statements about reality which can be disproved by refuting any one of them.)

Science Fiction and Science Fiction Romance are genres that feature "science" foremost.  Today, that has translated into "technology."

Star Trek featured the technology of the future by naming devices by their function -- "Phaser" or "Transporter."  We use technology to create tools to do things so we can free up our capacity to do other things.

We, as a world, are in the process of leaping across a technological chasm even the writers of Star Trek could not envision.  In fact, some argue, the advent of that TV Series did a lot to spur the creation of the present world's technology (such as computers, the internet and even the Web).

Today, those who grew up since 1990 have coined the term "inter-web" because they don't have a clue what the difference is between the internet and the web.  They have no idea where the concept "browser" came from or how that concept changed everything about how we use computers -- and now mobile devices more powerful than desktops built in the year 2000.

And change is not "done" yet -- the pace is increasing toward self-driving cars and even autonomous cars.  Everyone I know wants a household robot to act as personal maid, butler, footman, gardener -- all by one walking device.

The flying car is furiously being invented.

We think of these things as the forces that will shape the future, and the readers now growing up on currently published fiction (and Netflix Originals streaming).

But as science fiction writers we have to consider an even larger, more stealthy force, and what that force might yet do to the way our future readers will live.

That force that must be factored into the swirling and conflicting forces producing A.I. and autonomous transportation (there go the truck driver jobs, and ALL the Romances about falling in love with a truck driver).

The entire "Internet of Things" or IoT is a bigger force for the change in the way we see the world and interact with each other, most importantly the way we govern ourselves -- maybe even for Religion as part of the social order.

http://www.nature.com/news/the-internet-of-things-comes-to-the-lab-1.21383?WT.mc_id=TWT_NatureNews  

The IoT is all about your connected Thermostat, household Security cameras and motion detectors, taking care of your kids who are at home while you are at work by being able to see them on your phone and talk over loudspeakers into your home -- being able to track their phones, knowing where your car is at every moment, how fast it is traveling, whether it did an illegal turn.  "Things" will come to include dishwshers, clothes washers, maybe clothes themselves which will tattle on you when you don't exercise enough.

On the one hand, IoT gives you command of many functions with very little effort (other than upgrade-hell and being hacked).

On the other hand, Privacy is a thing of the past.  Already government is claiming rights over your phone's contents.  How many generations until government wins the point because nobody is alive who remembers what it is to "be alone."

We use "baby monitors" to be sure our infant is still breathing.  How many generations until every breath you take your whole life long can become a matter of public record if someone doesn't like something else you did?

The key to understanding human behavior for the purposes of writing science fiction is to understand that the most powerful human survival trait is adaptability.

Even animals do not have the adaptability that humans have.

We are seeing animal species adapt to city life, or life in cages, and lose the ability to survive in "the wild" where the species would ordinarily live.  They are even adapting to a poisoned environment.

Life is adaptable -- but it generations and a lot of death.

Humans can adapt faster.  Not being instinct driven, we produce in each generation a few who can and do think the unthinkable and do the impossible, redefining parameters for the next generation.

But just like animals, we lose previously perfected survival skills.  How many of us city dwellers could walk across a continent without trails, paths or roads, without water fountains and motels?  Who among us is fit to go where no man has gone before?

Yet, humanity does keep producing that sort of person -- and many today are persisting in acquiring basic skills like metal working, quilt making, weaving.

Meanwhile, tides of everyday experience are sweeping toward the computer driven, artificial intelligence, world.

Sneaking up on us from the depths of that world is the tsunami of what is now called Big Data.

As noted  previously
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2017/04/theme-archetype-integration-part-5.html
all our governments, on whichever governing theory you choose, have for centuries been making decisions based on "statistics."

Statistics does not "work backwards."  You can accurately predict the behavior of a large group of people, but you can not discover anything at all about a single member of that group.

In other words, all "prejudice" that we take for granted today, is rooted in a false premise.

1. The Super Rich Do A Lot of Harm
2. Dick is Super Rich
3. Therefore Dick Does A Lot Of Harm

That's a false paradigm, not because of Dick's individual traits, but because it attempts to work statistics backwards -- to infer something about an individual member of a group by attributing a proven trait of the group to an individual member of the group.

Statistics will work well to govern nations provided the governors of the nations are willing to mash, slaughter, violate, and even annihilate pockets of individuals.

The stealth trend that science fiction writers trying to write "classics" that will be readable in the future (worth reprinting) originates at the junction of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence.

Even today, the entire premise of Statistics as a governing tool is being discarded.  So far, we don't exactly have anything to replace it, so a writer trying to portray life 50 years from now has to guess what will replace Statistics.

The current scientific guess is Big Data.

To write science fiction, you can choose a Theme based on "Big Data Will Solve All Human Problems" -- e.g. no more poverty, drug addiction, murderous rage, road rage, sexual jealousy.

Or you can choose to write about the next huge shift, and choose a Conflict rooted in the crusade to replace Big Data and restore Privacy by discovering a new principle on which to govern humanity.

Or perhaps you might choose a premise based on genetically altering humanity to erase the combative tendency?

None of those choices would necessarily show up in your Characters, their Conflicts, or the Resolution of those conflicts.  It would be nothing but background.  If a character wanted to travel from one person's living room to another person's back yard for a barbecue, they might summon an A.I. driven Uber car -- or just step through a "door" projected by their pocket device? Or projected by a brain implant.

Whatever changes you depict as the way your Characters live and procreate, they may seem ridiculous to future readers -- or spookily prescient.

Mostly, science fiction writers working in their "near future" write "cautionary tales" -- depicting a world they really do not want to see realized.

We are currently living in such a world - predicted very accurately in the 1940's and 1950's science fiction novels.  But while predicting much of the difficulties we are dealing with (including global warming), they fail utterly to envision anything like the World Wide Web, or Web commerce.

This absence of smartphones and web commerce affects how a Scene can be framed, what the annoying difficulties a character faces are, and how quickly and efficiently they can discover facts.  Nobody predicted Google in your pocket!  Or Twitter and flashmobs.

A good place to begin thinking about where we are now, as opposed to where we were 50 years ago, and thus where we will be in 50 years from now (when your books will be reprinted if they are classics), is to watch some old movies.

Netflix will surface some of the great ones.  Check Amazon Prime video for old TV Shows.

Then read some of the novels popular at those times.  Science Fiction is not really the best field to read to nail a historical point to extrapolate from.

Romances written 50 years ago as "Contemporary" will give you a lot of information about how the world seemed, but you tend to get a lot of gut-churning cultural static embedded in old Contemporary Romance.  Women had a different self-image at that time, and taught their daughters a different self image (more child-like, to prepare for a life of dependence and perpetual pregnancy).

Humans are adaptable, and women have (since cave dwelling days) adapted to being the victims of their physiology.  Science has produced tools to get a handle on those problems (and we're still arguing over how to use those tools without abusing the power they bestow), and that has changed the world.

So reading old Contemporary Romance is good for learning how vastly birth control has changed the world, but the study is hard on a modern-adapted psyche.  Historical Romance set in the 1950's (or 1800's Europe) written today generally puts a female character with today's attitudes into that old world -- and thus loses verisimilitude.

Do a contrast/compare study between Contemporary Romance written in 1950's and Historical Romance written today but set in the 1950's.

You will see why, when setting your Science Fiction Romance in the future, you must change the Character's self-image to be a product of their time, not ours.

Today's kids, growing up with a phone in their pocket, are going to have a different self-image -- about what they can do, or not do, what they want to do or refuse to do, and whether or not anyone will ever know what they did.

That attitude shift about Privacy will definitely affect how you can plot a Mystery Novel.

Remember how often I've mentioned that Science Fiction writers often moonlight as Mystery writers (or Western writers) because the fields are the same -- and most science fiction readers also read Mystery and Westerns.

Mystery is allied with the 'science' aspects of science fiction and Westerns are allied with the "where no man has gone before" exploration of outer space, meeting Aliens (Indians), dimensions of science fiction.

Here is a very old Mystery series that depicts and reveals the contemporary world of the 1960's (a famous period of social change well captured here).

The Rabbi Small Novels[edit]
Friday the Rabbi Slept Late – 1964
Saturday the Rabbi Went Hungry – 1966
Sunday, the Rabbi Stayed Home – 1969
Monday The Rabbi Took Off – 1972
Tuesday the Rabbi Saw Red – 1973
Wednesday the Rabbi Got Wet – 1976
Thursday the Rabbi Walked Out – 1978
Conversations with Rabbi Small – 1981
Someday the Rabbi Will Leave – 1985
One Fine Day the Rabbi Bought a Cross – 1987
The Day the Rabbi Resigned – 1992
That Day the Rabbi Left Town – 1996

There are by the famous (then) best selling mystery writer Harry Kemelman, and here is his wikipedia page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Kemelman

Read a few of these.  They are in Kindle and very cheap and easy to find (that old Internet Commerce change.)

In the 1960's people had to spend hours and hours in libraries, try to order books via inter-library loan, only to discover they were no longer available.

Revel in today's fingertip availability - understand what it means to the world view and self-image of the current teens.

Pick a few Historic points, draw the line connecting them and extrapolate that line into the future of 50 years from now.  How will Romance happen?  How will people meet each other?  Will "dating sites" turn into something more in the world of Big Data and lack of privacy?  Will marriages always work when arranged by a particular site?

Will a proprietary algorithm be hoarded by that particular dating site?  Will courts demand they give it away so everyone can benefit?

Will government take over dating sites and provide that free service as part of your health-care rights (after all a bad marriage can drive you crazy and stress your body to where you die young!)

What sort of ways will people find to do murder, and what tools will detectives of that future use to uncover the dastardly deed?

Isaac Asimov
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov
 wrote the Black Widdow science fiction mysteries that were extremely popular, and Randall Garrett created the Lord Darcy character, a detective who used Magic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Darcy_(character)

All science is detective work.  And it can be argued that all Romance is detective work - one must "detect" what is motivating the potential spouse.  "What does she see in him?" is the key question.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/what-does-she-see-in-him.html

The answer changes with time and the depth and breadth of knowledge of the other person's behavior.

If you can develop and unfold a Relationship for your readers, you can develop and unfold an entire world for those readers.  The skills are the same, but the material differs.

Watch some old TV, and read some old books, then observe how you solve problems today -- a leaky roof, a car that won't start, a subway train that's late, an internet connection that does not work, a store that's out of a critical item.

What mysteries have you solved today?  Watch your mind problem-solve, and what tools you reach for without thinking, -- then see how your future self will target these problems 50 years from now.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Depiction Part 29 - Depicting The Global Village

Depiction
Part 29
Depicting The Global Village
by

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

The index to previous posts in the Depiction series are here:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/04/index-to-depiction-series-by-jacqueline.html

These days, people are saying that globalism is dead, or that we have to fight back against the protectionism model that is emerging.  Protectionism has been tried, and it has failed abysmally (several times).

How do we explain this argument to a visiting Alien from Outer Space?  Can Love conquer even the chasm of misunderstandings between our visiting Alien and our warring human factions?

If we can't even build a Global Village, how can Earth be allowed to join the Interstellar Community?

Why can't we build a global village?  What would a global village be like if we could.

In other words, how do we depict the Earth of the future that is ready to be invited to join the Galactic Village of a thousand species?

What exactly is a village?

We've all read hundreds of Romance novels set in small towns, or about Characters who come from small towns.

The TV Series Murder She Wrote is set in a small town, in case you want a reminder.  It is a town with an amazingly high murder rate, but that's the story.
https://www.amazon.com/Murder-She-Wrote-Angela-Lansbury/dp/B00E8AVN9U/

A village is smaller than a small town.

It's more like a small Church Community - at most a few dozen families.  And even such a Community generally forms groups or circles somewhat isolated from each other.

Sociological research indicates this phenomenon may be rooted in human physiology -- which if true shows you how to create your new Aliens as people who do not have this limit and can't quite grasp what it is all about.

Here is a quote from a Wikipedia article on DUNBAR'S NUMBER -- some theoretical research from the 1990's.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number

--------quote----------
Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships — relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person.[1][2] This number was first proposed in the 1990s by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who found a correlation between primate brain size and average social group size.[3] By using the average human brain size and extrapolating from the results of primates, he proposed that humans can comfortably maintain only 150 stable relationships.[4] Dunbar explained it informally as "the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar."[5]

Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. It has been proposed to lie between 100 and 250, with a commonly used value of 150.[6][7] Dunbar's number states the number of people one knows and keeps social contact with, and it does not include the number of people known personally with a ceased social relationship, nor people just generally known with a lack of persistent social relationship, a number which might be much higher and likely depends on long-term memory size.

Dunbar theorized that "this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size ... the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained." On the periphery, the number also includes past colleagues, such as high school friends, with whom a person would want to reacquaint himself or herself if they met again.[8]
----------end quote------------

It's a long article with lots of links you can get lost in.

But there is enough to give you an idea of what to change to create your Aliens.

Remember the rule in creating Aliens for a novel is that you can change JUST ONE THING for the whole novel. Just one postulate differing from science as it is known by your readership is enough to support a 100,000 word novel.  In a series, you can add one more with each novel.

So a "Village" of humans consists of maybe 100 to 250 individuals.

The "small town effect" of everyone knowing everyone else's business and gossiping about it might interlace a few multiples of 250 -- and there would be people "out of the loop" on some bits of juicy gossip.

Somewhere between 100 and 250 humans, a group will become aware that they need to "get organized."  They need to choose a leader, form a committee, create a group treasury to pay for stuff the group owns.

Here is a book series about a very OLD small town where a very new, young, Jewish Community is forming, choosing leaders and forming committees.  Everyone who has joined a new church will recognize this social process, but if you like Mystery (and what science fiction aficionado does not!), then you'll love this old series.

https://www.amazon.com/Friday-Rabbi-Slept-Small-Mysteries-ebook/dp/B00ZJZH6XK/

That's the first in the series and there are more in e-book, audible, and paperback.  The Rabbi Small novels are a major, famous series would now be classified as "Cozy Mystery" as it is very domestic and the murder mysteries are more like procedurals (though the detective is a Rabbi who solves mysteries with Talmud reasoning).

So this shows you how a small community "gets organized" while embedded in a larger community -- a village within a town.

Below 100 people, humans do not feel an urgent need to "get organized" -- to operate by "law" (written rules, or agreed on rules).  Below 100 people, humans don't seem to need a formally agreed on "leader" or arbiter.

We don't need a "peerage."  Last week we discussed how Kingdoms get organized and how that basic organization of government is being changed from Statistics based government decisions to "Big Data" based government decisions.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2017/04/theme-archetype-integration-part-5.html

With fewer than 100 people in a human group, you do not need a "peerage."

Above 250 humans, the group will not cohere without an organization core.

And above 300, any Leader will have to appoint or acquire lieutenants.

Think about the dynamics of a group of 100 or so.  I know someone whose family (parents, children, children's children) numbers over 100.  They do an annual group phone call to celebrate the Mother's birthday (as the Father has passed away.)

A family can number over 100 if a couple has 12 children, who all marry and have 8-10 children.  And there can be years when all of them are alive and adult.

It's a family, though, and its organizing principle is likely to be Eldest Rules.

Today, in the U.S.A., that is not always the case, and even large families don't stay in touch.

250 strangers -- such as you might gather on Twitter or Facebook --- will look for some other organizing principle.

For humans, the "village dynamic" is essentially that the culture they hold in common rules them.

A "culture" may be viewed as a set of dynamic, unwritten, non-verbalized laws and rules.  A family has had this set of rules passed down generation to generation -- and it is, "eat your vegetables before desert" and "pick up after yourself" and "don't hit people smaller than you" and "ask to be excused before leaving the table."

Everyone living under one roof (or in the case of a village, the circle of houses next to each other, sharing a commons) knows the operating rules of the group.  And everyone watches out to be sure everyone else follows the rules.

Break a rule of the group, and everyone knows about it before dinner, and you'll never hear the end of it.

In other words, the culture imposes behavior constraints as the price of being resident within that culture and protected by it.

Members may gossip among themselves, but they will close ranks before outsiders.  Before outsiders, no member of the group has ever done a wrong.

We see this all over the world today -- from Chicago gang neighborhoods to villages in the jungles -- humans in small groups close ranks before strangers, but within the group they are savagely strict in imposing the group's rules.

Awash in the sea of humanity, we join our small-group societies, form local communities, and join Facebook Groups.  The first thing you get on joining a Facebook Group is "the rules" (such as no posting self-promotion -- or this group is for self-promotion.  Maybe the rule is no off-topic conversation, or nothing is off-topic here.)

So we're always reaching out and pulling back.  That's how humans behave.

Classically, it has been said the only crime is getting caught.

In a Village community, you know for a fact you will get caught, usually before sundown.  So you don't misbehave.  This is especially true in Gang dominated neighborhoods where enforcement is by violent means.  But in a church community, or say a Masonic Lodge, enforcement is by gossip.

Now, referring to the changes discussed last week as Big Data replaces Statistics as government's source of information on citizens, think about what will be possible with A.I. implementing Big Data.

In a small, old fashioned village, the culture enforces good behavior on individuals because the moment you do something wrong, those you respect and those you despise will all know what you did, and you will be ashamed.

Maybe your Aliens lack the capacity to be ashamed, or to understand how that feeling can deter a human from an otherwise logical course of action.

The human Village is run on statistics, or small data -- most people want you to pick up after yourself, so you do.  "most" being a statistic.

Statistics, as pointed out last week, don't capture information about groups of 250 or fewer individuals.  Government runs the macro environment for the general benefit, and there will be pockets of smaller communities that suffer because of it.

Nobody in Washington D.C. knows who you are or what your problems are, but they say on TV News all the time that they were elected to solve your problems.

What if they did know you?  What if you were friends with them?

That's what Big Data allied with Artificial Intelligence is about to allow.

In that Big Data/A.I. world there will be no criminals who aren't insane.

A mentally ill person will do things that are criminal deeds, but can't actually be held accountable for the criminality.  But healthy people will all behave well.

Why will they all behave well?

Because not only will the people working in government know ALL about everything they do -- but all their neighbors, friends, family, and everyone all around the world will know everything that's going on in their lives.

Facebook already links people like that -- so does LinkedIn, and dating sites, and job search sites.  There will be many other such applications linking small groups of large groups of people.

The moment you step out of line (text while driving, drive drunk, have a screaming fight with your spouse, spank your children in public, fail to show up for a PTA meeting)  -- the WHOLE WORLD will know.

Not that you're a celebrity, but that the deeds will register and disturb everyone.

Already, people post their whole medical drama history online -- gossip about doctors who are helpful (or not) -- chat about hookups, and share political diatribes.

We are becoming a social-global-village.  It is entirely possible that the globalization of business/trade and immigration was just a bit premature, and is now backing off a little to allow the social-globalization to continue.

When we are more aware of what "everyone" is doing around the world, it will be easier to move across borders, work across borders, ship trade goods across borders -- and eventually shift to a globalized currency such as bitcoin or blockchain currency.

So create your Aliens with a trait that humans don't have, an ability to "bond" personally with more than 250 humans and not feel a need to "get organized."

Or perhaps you will genetically alter your humans to be able to bond with larger numbers?

Or maybe your Aliens can bond with fewer -- say 20 people -- before they need objective laws to govern the group?

Take a few thousand Aliens and Humans and strand them on a space station floating between the stars somewhere (maybe they don't know where) and see what happens.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com