Alternate Genres of Fiction, More Popular Subgenres, and Examples of These?

I know this sounds vague and I have a specific example in mind, but I thought a more open and general discussion would be more helpful.

On taking requests for my upcoming cultural TL I have run into a lot of people wanting to increase the popularity or cultural legitimacy of certain fictional genres dear to them. Science fiction, Sword and Sorcery, and High Fantasy foremost among them.

I personally would like to see all these, (and add steampunk to the list) however, I feel like there is first of all not enough popular subgenres of each and secondly few opportunities in literary or cinematic history for these to come about earlier and/or with a larger fanbase.

This got me thinking about altering certain subgenres of fiction and examples of said fiction to provide a springboard for them and some interesting ideas came to me that I wanted some feedback on, as well as hearing your own thoughts on alternate genres and more popular subgenres.

Here's my entry:

It seems that Sword and Planet/Science Fantasy could have been a much broader and more inclusive subgenre, and even a bigger genre in and of itself, and could even make way for an earlier steampunk incorporated within it. I thought of having Tolkein become something of a Science Fiction fan and write a very different (but at least equally popular) version of the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings with combined elements of Space Opera, Steampunk, Science Fiction/Fantasy, High Fantasy, Sword and Sorcerer, and Sword and Planet thus creating a new genre which satisfies all the requests I received and catapulting this new hybrid genre into massive popularity. (Who knows? Lucas may get the bug to direct this Space Opera LOTR instead of Star Wars... hmmm...:rolleyes:)

A. What do you think of this example?

and...

B. What are some other examples of alternate fiction genres and more popular or broader subgenres from OTL?

I think, if this OP was clear enough (and it may not be...) we could have some fun with this subject.
 
I've been playing with the idea of Lovecraft's Cosmic Horror becoming truly popular (not just in the OTL way), with the Cosmicist philosophy becoming far more mainstream. This could have profound effects on American society and literature from the 1920's onward.
 
If Forester, the author of the Horatio Hornblower series, had decided to make Hornblower an officer in an interstellar space navy representing a Ruritanian future kingdom, that would have helped. The Honorverse 80 years ahead of time.

If George MacDonald had extended his two Goblin novels into an entire series, with escalating threats from the forces of evil, that too would have helped.

If James Branch Cabell had written for children and young adults....

If H.G. Wells had learned to how to inject real suspense into his scientific romances....

If Doc Smith had known how to create believable characters, not just believable scenarios....

If the writings of the Russian fantasy writer Alexander Grin had been translated into English in the 1930s and developed a following....

If Washington Irving had written more stories like Rip Van Winkle and indeed had specialized in such stories....

If Austin Tappen Wright, author of Islandia, had not died in a car accident....

If Anne of Green Gables had been Annoura of Mars...
 
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If Forester, the author of the Horatio Hornblower series, had decided to make Hornblower an officer in an interstellar space navy representing a Ruritanian future kingdom, that would have helped. The Honorverse 80 years ahead of time.
An interesting idea. Was Forester had been even slightly interested in Verne? Had he seen "From the Earth to the Moon"? Read The Time Machine? (I can almost picture Sean Bean as Hornblower, somehow.;) )
If H.G. Wells had learned to how to inject real suspense into his scientific romances....
:D
If Doc Smith had known how to create believable characters, not just believable scenarios....
LOL. You just wished Kim Kinnison would catch a cold, or something, didn't you?:D That's why it was called "space opera". Somebody had to do it.
If Anne of Green Gables had been Annoura of Mars...
I think this is pushing. OTOH, it could as easily have been Little Dome on the [Utopia] Planetia...;) After all, "What Mars needs is a good railroad!" isn't much but retelling the Union Pacific, & the fate of Mars Hotel was Buddy, Ricky, & J.P. on Mars...

Personally, I wonder about the impact of Poe surviving. His horror & detective could have been combined into a prototypical Harry Dresden, or Angel, or a variation on the film "Witch Hunt" (Dennis Hopper).

That said, these aren't really new genres (unless you count Dresden). New genres are detective (before Dupin), Southern ("Gone With the Wind"), or SF (before Hugo named it?). So what do you get if you mix Gothic & Western? (Hmm..."High Plains Drifter"?) Or Southern & detective? ("Matlock"?:p)
 
If Austin Tappen Wright, author of Islandia, had not died in a car accident....

Perhaps there would have been more Islandia from him. A trology rivaling Tolkien's Lord of the Rings*, maybe? With more exposure the youth movement of the '60s pick's up on the Islandia books and it's utopian themes.


*Yeah, yeah, LotR isn't technically a trilogy.
 

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IF H. Beam Piper did not suicide in 1964. . .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._Beam_Piper


And wrote more books in this Series: Terro-Human Future History, like a sequel to Space Viking. . .or more of this series:paratime series. . .

I am a HUGE H. Beam Piper fan, because the whole series of his books, except for When in the Course . . . and Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen, are up on Project Gutenberg and on Librivox.
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._Beam_Piper


And wrote more books in this Series: Terro-Human Future History, like a sequel to Space Viking. . .or more of this series:paratime series. . .

I am a HUGE H. Beam Piper fan, because the whole series of his books, except for When in the Course . . . and Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen, are up on Project Gutenberg and on Librivox.

Oh, if only Piper had lived another ten years. *sigh* He wrote some great stuff as it is, but I think given more time he would have been up amongst folks like Heinlein.

And, if I might add: it's not right that Piper's work is out of print while John Scalzi has "re-written" Little Fuzzy and is all over bookstore shelves.
 
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Tolkien combining SF and Fantasy? Although I'd like it, I can't see it, because Tolkien made modern fantasy in the first place. In other words: What you want demands not only one big step, but two. By the same person.

Something I thought up for my Chaos TL: Midworld, a big fantasy saga. The special thing about it: It combines a classic good vs evil worldview with a somewhat developed society (that is, a world that's not mostly wilderness like LOTR, but with many cities, and guilds in them, and developed at least at Renaissance level), but before a serious fantasy background - no parody, no deconstruction. I once asked a big fantasy geek about this, and he told me that there's nothing like that around yet.

(A bit more background of Midworld: It was written by a royal historian in New Albion - OTL New Zealand - so you can expect that he gets many things right [like the historical based stuff] but also some things wrong [technical stuff, functional magic - the geeks of TTL will have a lot to complain about this].) Also, being a radical royalist, you can expect several Take Thats against republicanism and socialism, and women appearing as witches, whores, mothers, princesses, peasant women or saints. The story tells of a former street urchin rising to emperor, in twelve volumes.)

Other ideas, same TL:
- "Theobald the Technician": From the German technocracy. Government-approved propatainment (I just made this word up - a mix of propaganda and entertainment). Content: A boy, his twin sister and his friends from school - that is, a special school for technically gifted kids (subjects include things like cryptogrphy - and shooting). A mixture between school novel, kids detective novel and spy novel - Theobald & friends occasionally have to fight a bumbling Socialist spy, too.
- Ordo: The German technocracy IN SPACE! (Also propatainment.) Close to classical Space Opera, with the Germans fighting a collectivist / hivemind state of insect aliens. Features robots which have their own religion, which is based on binary. (I. There is nothing but the Truth, and nothing is higher than the Truth. II. Everything that isn't part of the Truth has to be Falsity. III. The Negation of Truth is Falsity, and the Negation of Falsity is Truth. There is nothing else thinkable. IV. A Conjunction is but True if all of its components are True, otherwise it is False. V. A Disjunction is but False if all of its components are False, otherwise it is True.)
- A mixture between Douglas Adams and Stanislaw Lem, about a galaxy divided into many different states with different political systems - since this is a satire, all of those have to fight with their own incompetence.
 
Oh, if only Piper had lived another ten years. *sigh* He wrote some great stuff as it is, but I think given more time he would have been up amongst folks like Heinlein.
I wouldn't go that far. :eek: I do like Piper's stuff, too, but it didn't have the elegance of style (or in tone, if you like) I found in Heinlein.
And, if I might add: it's not right that Piper's work is out of print while John Scalzi has "re-written" Little Fuzzy and is all over bookstore shelves.
:eek: That's wrong. Have you read Golden Dream? Same story, written from the Fuzzy POV.:cool::cool: Really quite fine writing, too. (Can't recall the author's name, tho.:eek::eek:)
 
Just for giggles Humorous SF

I liked CM Kornbluth, whose career was cut way too short though one might argue he had some cute tricks that would've gotten stale over a couple of decades' more use. He and Frederik Pohl had a chemistry that worked beautifully in making sarcastic SF that no other American writers got even close. Idiocracy owes a lot to his short, The Marching Morons. Words can't express how much fun I'd get in seeing The Space Merchants get its due for predicting the current US political situation.

Harlan Ellison's essays on film and TV slay me. His stories are wonderful, too, but he quit really saying anything new in the 80's, which sucks.
Asimov had fun occasionally.
Alfred Bester IMHO really blew my mind in many pleasant ways.
I would've loved to see his Demolished Man or The Stars My Destination given the big-screen treatment.
Stanislaus Lem's a lot more sophisticated and philosophical satire.

PK Dick had his moments. Clans of the Alphane Moon was pretty broad vs his more psychedelic novels where the line between satire, fantasy, and incoherence almost became more tangled than superstring theory.
Genius, idiocy, or bad editing a la James Joyce? You decide!

Much as I love Robert Asprin/Lynn Abbey's Thieves World series that celebrated and sent up fantasy cliches with every page, it never quite had the success I thought it deserved.

IMNSHO Tolkein's screed about the dehumanization of WWI in LotR hit a nerve in the 1960's and spawned a plague of imitators that I felt had its fifteen minutes and then some by the time I got to fuller literacy.

As a geeky teen, Robert E Howard's Conan and Fritz Lieber's Fafhrd/Gray Mouser series's playful approach to pul -era tropes were all very influential to how I approached fantasy to do something different. I'd have loved to see Lieber's visions of Lankhmar given a lot more room to breathe (imagine Ralph Bakshi or the Rankin/Bass crew or Studio Ghibli animating it) but hey...

I dug the first bits of cyberpunk as something interesting, but it seemed to completely annihilate SF as a source of hope in the waning decades of the 20th century. I thought John Brunner's eco-disasters and JG Ballard's meditations on urban anomie were depressing, wait til you get a load of Gibson's Sprawl series!
Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash and Zodiac are wonderful, but he's definitely gone for epic when he needs to edit, but hey, who am I...

There's some interesting authors out there now. I like Charles Stross, am kind of iffy on China Mieville, and so forth. I just thought I'd toss a few authors and trends into the conversation and see what ensues.

@ InfiniteApe- I love your attempts to bring the cultural aspects of AH into play. We get to replaying how whichever war went awry a lot in AH.com and I like your direction. BZ2U, sir/madam!
 
I liked CM Kornbluth, whose career was cut way too short though one might argue he had some cute tricks that would've gotten stale over a couple of decades' more use. He and Frederik Pohl had a chemistry that worked beautifully in making sarcastic SF that no other American writers got even close. Idiocracy owes a lot to his short, The Marching Morons. Words can't express how much fun I'd get in seeing The Space Merchants get its due for predicting the current US political situation.

Harlan Ellison's essays on film and TV slay me. His stories are wonderful, too, but he quit really saying anything new in the 80's, which sucks.
Asimov had fun occasionally.
Alfred Bester IMHO really blew my mind in many pleasant ways.
I would've loved to see his Demolished Man or The Stars My Destination given the big-screen treatment.
Stanislaus Lem's a lot more sophisticated and philosophical satire.

PK Dick had his moments. Clans of the Alphane Moon was pretty broad vs his more psychedelic novels where the line between satire, fantasy, and incoherence almost became more tangled than superstring theory.
Genius, idiocy, or bad editing a la James Joyce? You decide!

Much as I love Robert Asprin/Lynn Abbey's Thieves World series that celebrated and sent up fantasy cliches with every page, it never quite had the success I thought it deserved.

IMNSHO Tolkein's screed about the dehumanization of WWI in LotR hit a nerve in the 1960's and spawned a plague of imitators that I felt had its fifteen minutes and then some by the time I got to fuller literacy.

As a geeky teen, Robert E Howard's Conan and Fritz Lieber's Fafhrd/Gray Mouser series's playful approach to pul -era tropes were all very influential to how I approached fantasy to do something different. I'd have loved to see Lieber's visions of Lankhmar given a lot more room to breathe (imagine Ralph Bakshi or the Rankin/Bass crew or Studio Ghibli animating it) but hey...

I dug the first bits of cyberpunk as something interesting, but it seemed to completely annihilate SF as a source of hope in the waning decades of the 20th century. I thought John Brunner's eco-disasters and JG Ballard's meditations on urban anomie were depressing, wait til you get a load of Gibson's Sprawl series!
Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash and Zodiac are wonderful, but he's definitely gone for epic when he needs to edit, but hey, who am I...

There's some interesting authors out there now. I like Charles Stross, am kind of iffy on China Mieville, and so forth. I just thought I'd toss a few authors and trends into the conversation and see what ensues.

@ InfiniteApe- I love your attempts to bring the cultural aspects of AH into play. We get to replaying how whichever war went awry a lot in AH.com and I like your direction. BZ2U, sir/madam!

Just got back to checking on this. Thanks for your input and, mostly, for your support and encouragement!

Alternate history is a big thing, and culture is just as important as combat... in some cases moreso!
 
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