The Hot Author Report

Guest Author Sylvia Engdahl on The Genre System

I’ve always hated the publishing field’s requirement that all fiction be labeled with a genre and marketed only under that label. This system rules out a lot of worthwhile novels that don’t get written, or are written but not published — or in some cases, are published but never found by most of the readers who would enjoy them.

My best-known Young Adult novel, Enchantress from the Stars, is often described as a mixture of science fiction and fantasy, although actually it’s entirely science fiction and merely has parts written in the style of fantasy from the viewpoint of a character who interprets much of what he sees as magic. It appeals to fantasy enthusiasts more than to avid science fiction fans. It is also liked by many readers who’ve told me they don’t usually read science fiction, yet enjoy mine, and the same is true of my other YA novels.

One of them, Journey Between Worlds, is a realistic romance that happens to take place on Mars. I begged the publisher of the 2006 edition to market it as YA romance, because romance readers liked the 1970 edition better than the average science fiction fan did. But despite good reviews from romance websites, it was marketed as science fiction again and few romance readers have discovered it.

Another unfortunate situation is the rigid separation of Young Adult and adult fiction and the permanent branding of all novels as one or the other. Many adults liked my YA novels, which were intended for high school age; but they were given to children too young to understand them and not seen by the older teens who are looking only for adult novels. More adults are now discovering that they enjoy today’s YA novels, but they must search for them; the editorial and marketing departments of publishers are still separate from those that handle fiction for adults.

But the worst problem is the strict categorization of fiction by genre within the adult field. My adult novel Stewards of the Flame, like all my fiction, is set in the future on another world, so it cannot be labeled anything but science fiction. But it isn’t typical of the genre and it’s enjoyed more by readers who haven’t read a lot of science fiction than by the majority of those who have.

For that reason, I had to publish it myself, which I knew would be the case while I was writing it; publishers do not want books that can’t be mass-marketed to readers of one genre or another. It won a bronze medal in the Independent Publisher (IPPY) Book Awards not in the science fiction category but in the visionary fiction category — and it’s not typical of that category, either. It’s had a lot of good reviews online but they’re usually posted in the science fiction section, where many of its potential readers never look. I hope that now it will be found by more of those readers.

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Sylvia Engdahl is best known as the author of award-winning Young Adult novels, but she is now writing only for adults. Although her fiction is set in the distant future on other worlds, it’s not just for science fiction fans and because it focuses more on the characters than on fast action or strange environments, it is usually enjoyed more by general audiences than by readers with extensive science fiction background.

Engdahl is a strong advocate of space colonization and has maintained a widely-read space section of her website for many years. She lives in Eugene, Oregon, and currently works as a freelance editor of nonfiction anthologies. Her main website is at www.sylviaengdahl.com and the website for her novel Stewards of the Flame is at www.stewardsoftheflame.com.