Making it easy for your readers to find you, scifi edition.
Starships! Computers! Blasters/phasers/proton torpedoes/lasers in spaaaaaaaace!!!! Toss those into your story, stir, slap on a tag and go right?
If only. (I decided on this before Karen posted her piece, so I’m riffing off of her, plus going a few other directions. No, we did not plan in advance. Pinkie-claw swear.)
Science fiction goes back to Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein’s Monster or A Modern Prometheus, if not earlier. She used state-of-the-art science as it was then understood, with one small piece of handwavium. Then she extrapolated, based on that science and on human behavior. Jules Verne, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and others did the same thing, perhaps with more handwavium. Then along came the 20th Century and whee! Oh, and along came genre tags, and readers who wanted “Something new, but like that book there.” Hugo Gernsback, John Campbell Jr., and others gave readers what they wanted, and the rest is…
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Head Noises 