Crossover SFF for the crossing over of seasons
It’s May, that in-between month where it’s slightly too hot to be spring, but too cool to be summer… the perfect month to think about other in-betweens. One of the great things about SFF is how expansive a genre it is; science fiction and fantasy are such huge, welcoming genres that they can contain other genres inside their own, to the benefit of both. What better way to explore the way people interact in an urban city than to create a novel about two cities, co-existing, where everyone from one city simply agrees not to see the other, and vice versa? What happens when a crime is committed in the liminal space between those two cities? (The City & The City, by China Mieville.)
Romantasy, of course, is the current superstar in the in-between, genre-expanding universe, asking us to imagine how our ideas of love and romance work in a secondary world; T. Kingfisher’s Paladin series being a personal favourite in this area. Michael Crichton was a master at turning a single SFnal premise into a banger of a contemporary thriller (Jurassic Park is still the most exciting novel about chaos theory I’ve ever read), and Adam Roberts is brilliant at using SF tropes to explore everything from historical moments to other genres (Golden-Age detective novels being one of many examples).
SFF authors have also been combining SFF for as long as the two genres have been around; Anne McCaffery in the Pern series, for example, uses science fiction to get her humans onto a new planet, but then starts applying the tropes of a fantasy world to them once they’re there. (Another good recommendation is Stef Swainston’s Castle series.) Those who go so far as to call it “science fantasy” would include Dune, Red Rising (Pierce Brown) and A Princess of Mars (Edgar Rice Burroughs) among many others in this genre – and let’s not get started on the argument about whether or not Star Wars is a traditional space opera or “science fantasy” (or something else entirely).
Why not spend the rest of this month enjoying a few in-between books before we move into the unmistakably summer month of June?
- Science fiction x historical fiction – Esperance by Adam Oyebanji
- Romance x science fiction – This Is How You Lose The Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
- Thriller x horror x fantasy – The Devil’s Playbook by Markus Heitz
- Literary fiction x magical realism – Shark Heart by Emily Habeck
- Fantasy x romance – The Lost Story by Meg Schaffer
- Speculative fiction x dystopian fiction – The Night Field by Donna Glee Williams
- Fantasy x historical fiction – The Scandalous Confessions of Lydia Bennet, Witch by Melinda Taub
Anne Perry
Publishing Director, Arcadia Books
