Future Friday: All of yesterday's tomorrows...

A bit of news to kick off our Futurific Friday post: I accepted an invitation to The Brass Screw Confederacy (brass-screw.org) in May. Brass Screw is a Steampunk event (not a convention) that takes over the idyllic seaside town of Port Townsend from time to time and has made the town a steampunk destination of sorts.

I'll be presenting a workshop on where ideas come from. The workshop, you might be amused to know, arose from a popular blogpost I wrote here called "Drinking from the font of ideas (Also Lasersharks!)" and takes participants through all the surprising ideas that can be culled from a single day's news feed and seeks to finally answer that persistent question: "Where do you get your ideas?"

Oh, I have hatched a thousand elaborate

heist scenarios dedicated to liberating

this sofa from its home at the Seattle

Museum of History & Industry...

"But wait," I hear you cry. "Howard Carter isn't really steampunk is it? Also, what does this have to do with futurism, Scott. This is Future Friday, so get cracking with the jetpacks and flying cars. I want to hear you rip on Elon Musk for nixing flying cars!"

Not a chance. Musk is basically right about the flying car thing and it depresses me to admit that, so today we're going to talk about Steampunk, and the tomorrows that we dreamt about yesterday.

Because that's what Steampunk is: futurism through different foci. We get so caught up in the trappings of the genre sometimes that I think we forget that part of things.

One important thread of Howard Carter Saves the World is the trouble wrought by a misbehaving family of time travelers whose Victorian meddling accidentally created the modern world as we know it. Their efforts to repair the timeline set up much of the plot that Howard and his friends become tangled in. The modern world as we know it is wrong, they cry. They want their tomorrow back and they're going to get it no matter how badly they mess up our present.

It's a subplot that burbles quietly in the background and will be more thoroughly examined in future stories because nothing fascinates me more than the difference between how we imagined the future and the future we ended up with.

So is it Steampunk if the setting isn't Victorian?

I'm not a big fan of genre restrictions, so for the most part I honestly don't care. However, for my money Steampunk shouldn't begin and end with the reign of Queen Victoria. The interesting bit to me isn't the airship pirates and top-hatted chrononauts. The thing that makes steampunk interesting to me is the idea of imagining a different past, a better past in which the wonders of technological advancement and inventive enthusiasm weren't saddled with the most shocking sexism, racism, and colonialism (among other appalling isms).  And then -- this is the important part for me and my story -- imagining the world of today that would have arisen from that better yesterday.

Because at some point, as storytellers, makers, and musicians, we should to move beyond the dreamy supposition of "What if the Victorians had steampowered iPhones?" and ask what a world would look like further along that timeline. So they had aetheric cell phones and flying ships and snazzy brass goggles... tell me what future that gave rise to. Because I'm not convinced that a more inclusive, more inventive version of our past would necessarily give us the dystopian worlds that most of my dieselpunk friends envision. (Dieselpunk being commonly anchored by a re-imagined World War One...)

Maybe it would. Maybe the chaos and war of the modern world was inevitable and the power of the aetheric phlogistonic manipulator arrays would inevitably give rise to a war machine that would lay waste to the world. Maybe. But one essential elements of imagining yesterday's tomorrows was the optimism that those dreams were based on. And I, for one, hold on to that. Because if you know anything about the real batsh*t crazy inventors of the actual Victorian age, you know that they were generally trying to make the world better, not tear it apart.

And I, for one, prefer that scenario.

Clear cutting the Genre Jungle

We think of science fiction as being a relatively new phenomenon.  Even if you include the works of Jules Verne, that still only makes the genre 148 years old[1].  However, I would argue (as do many others) that science fiction has been with us since the beginning of the spoken language.  When early humans stared up at the stars and postulated reasons that they were up there, who put them there and whether or when they might want them back, the first science fiction stories found their grip. 

Speculative fictions have been used since the dawn of time to entertain and enlighten, to help us to accept and process our fears and hopes as they were reflected by the unknown and the unknowable. 

When Jules Verne put us at the center of the earth, on the moon or 20,000 Leagues deep he was expressing the popular scientific ideas of our time, the potential of the industrial revolution, and the latent fears of his age -- that our technologies were maturing faster than our culture.  During the 1950's, science fiction achieved its golden age in that heady moment when the industrial revolution surged forward once more and our hopes and fears got tangled in a time of cold war paranoia.  In a time when our culture wasn't willing to look inward with clear eyes, some of America's finest writers showed us ourselves in the mirror of the sky.  Aliens and robots infiltrated our world as a stand-in for our fears of communists and flying saucers came to get us because our official narrative was that atomic power was our Great Hope even as school children were taught to duck and cover. 

As the Soviet war machine crumbled, we turned simultaneously to more hopeful messages of Utopian visions and turned to the likes of Gene Roddenberry's quietly subversive*[2] Star Trek even as our fears of ourselves cranked ever inward.  Star Trek's hopeful future was always at war with the apocalyptic and dystopian visions of the cyberpunks and with the dawning of the new century, our fear of ourselves gave rise to shambling hordes of zombies.  With the 21^st century dawning as a time when our greatest fears are infectious diseases, the onus of exploring our fears shifted ever more heavily onto the shoulders of the horror writers who once spent their ink on the spooky and  supernatural.

In some ways, this frees science fiction to return to celestial matters and even though the dystopian continues to infect the culture (see Firefly), we're slowly returning to the idea that our future lies in our hope of a better place elsewhere.  Even when we look back, our eyes have a gauze of the fantastic drawn over them embodied best by the advent of Steampunk.

Science fiction has long been uneasy bedfellow to that other monolith of the speculative, the fantasy novel.  The roots of this lie in the fact that what was science in an earlier time becomes the fantasy of the present.  And is further complicated by movies and novels of the Star Wars variety which use of science fiction as a setting rather than a mission, using it as a language and framework to explore our imaginative realms with little regard for how, or if, the things we’re talking about would actually work in any sort of scientific way.

Many authors and fans of the science factor bridle at this comingling of science fiction and fantasy in the bookstores and movieplexes.  As you might imagine, I personally think that there’s nothing wrong with using an existing framework to just have a little harmless fun.  Howard Carter Saves the Earth certainly swims in that end of the pool.  

I bring all of this up because I firmly believe that the genre distinctions that I’m describing are evaporating far more quickly than we can argue about where the borders lie.  Genre is and always has been largely a matter of marketing and it is an illusory map that we’ve drawn for ourselves to help our fans find our works in libraries and bookstores.  But in a world where the library and the bookstore are virtual, where it would be shelved is less meaningful than what it might be tagged in a database.

“Think of a tag as a keyword or category label. Tags can both help you find items on the Amazon site as well as provide an easy way for you to "remember" and classify items for later recall.”
                                                             Source: Amazon.com

At Amazon, a book like Howard Carter might be tagged with any of the following: young adult, adventure, comedy, humor, science fiction, government conspiracies, time travel, mad scientists, robots, science fiction, giant robots and any one of a dozen or so more.  

Out of curiosity, I went and clicked on those tags and looked at what -- other than any other books I write -- Howard Carter will be “shelved” alongside at Amazon.  I was surprised to discover that Howard, who would live comfortably in either the YA or science fiction/fantasy sections of any bookstore or library, would share the monitor screen with the likes of  The Dangerous Book for Boys and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, both of which I sort of expected, but also Eat, Pray, Love (I kid you not), a boatload of adventure novels I’ve never heard of, and for better or worse, the Wedding Crashers DVD.

Now, I’m the first to admit that the latter half of that list is pretty silly.  I sincerely doubt anyone will ever say “I loved Eat, Pray, Love, let’s go read this book Howard Carter Saves the World.  Never mind the big robot on the cover; I’m sure they’ll be exactly alike.”  But it does illustrate how far the barriers have eroded. 

Readers of books much closer to Howard Carter might stumble across my funny little book from more likely crossover titles ranging from Hitchhiker’s Guide to Harry Potter and even places that wouldn’t normally be on the same floor in a brick & mortar store like Catcher in the Rye.  Not because I think I belong on the shelf next to Mr. Salinger, but because the database doesn’t really care what I or Mr. Salinger might think about it -- a book is a book and a coming-of-age story is a coming-of-age story.

Science Fiction has always been a way of exploring the hopes and fears that lie in the unknown.  In some ways Howard Carter is an expression of my own hopes and fears for what this future world without genre might hold.  In a time when everyone -- myself included -- are bemoaning the death of the physical bookstores, it’s worth it to pause and reflect on some of the other changes that are happening in the shadow of the battle between the real and the virtual.

Just as the clear cutting of any real jungle is not adviseable, I don't think it's necessarily a good thing to just wipe out the delicate ecosystems that have evolved in our bookstores and libraries just because we are transferring to a virtual economy.  But maybe that's just because the most basic concern of all humankind is shelter and at the moment the entire literary world is looking askance at the future and asking "Once this is gone, where shall we live?"

Or maybe it's just time for us to evolve.  Maybe it's time for the literary amphibians, a time for both readers and writers to make themselves at home in more than one environment.  Or is that just my Utopian ideals surfacing again?  Only the future knows for sure...

 

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[1] Verne wrote Paris in the 20th Century in 1863, though it wasn't actually published until the 1990's.  Journey to the Center of the Earth would be published a year later.

[2] Don't think of Star Trek as subversive?  The original Star Trek debuted in the disaffected years of the Viet Nam era, in the heart of the Johnson Administration, after the assassination of Kennedy and what was viewed by my father's generation as the fall of the dream of an American Camelot.  It took place in a future where money was meaningless and the striving of capitalist societies were viewed with distaste.  Which, considering the tone and tenor of the time, makes it pretty darned subversive.

Bandwagonpunk! Is it right for you? (Probably not)

I think I mentioned that at the last PNWA conference I heard several agents ask for steampunk stories and many in the crowd had no idea what that meant.  Because I seemed to know what steampunk was, I was asked by several aspiring authors to explain it to them so they could alter their already-written books to fit this unknown setting.

Allow me to repeat that: alter their already-written books to fit this unknown setting.

I've been pretty immersed in the genre for awhile because I was (at the time) contemplating a steampunk novel.  I answered their questions and asked my own.  Mostly I asked why they would want to do such a thing?

Because it's what they want. ("They" being accompanied by a nod toward the nearest editor or agent.)  I tried to explain that it really isn't, but I'm not sure I got much traction.  In a competitive marketplace, it is tempting to write to the current trend.  But any reputable agent or editor will tell you not to chase the trends.

And then they ask for anyone who has one to step forward.  I know, it's frustrating, but after years and years in bookstores, this much I know is true: There's no appreciable market for Bandwagonpunk.

It just seems like there is because we see so much of it, but not if you want a lasting career.  Because while I have little or no data to back it up, how many of those authors do you think earned-out their advance?  How many of them do you think put up sufficient Booksense numbers to earn a second contract?  Relatively few.

Sure, careers have been launched by following what someone else did.  It's hard to name a fantasy author who didn't get started aping Tolkien.  God knows Harry Potter made the world safe for everyone from Artemis Fowl to Percy Jackson, but those are two among a horde of also-rans.  And note that neither of the two I mentioned is a clone of the author that laid the path that got it into the bookstores.  There's a difference between "Psht!  I can write that, here's boy wizard Number 293" and "That's an intriguing idea, what can I do that's new, but fits?" 

There are probably some good authors who have tried to hook a vampire premise to their novels just to catch the coattails of Twilight and some of them even pulled it off.   But I would wager that those authors would have done just as well (if not as quickly) if they're resisted the urge to graft foreign elements into their tales.

If you are adding things that the story does not demand to fit the trappings of the current setting du jour, then I (and many of your readers) will get bored quickly.  What's more, we'll trip over the things you grafted onto the story because even the most myopic readers will realize that they're not supposed to be there.  But if the story hinges on the death of Queen Victoria and troubles with the accession of King Edward VI, or if you're making some important parallel point using the story world to mirror our own, then I'll have my bowler hat and brass goggles and be flying alongside in my airship the whole way.  (Or space helmet, diving helmet or other headgear as appropriate.)  

Seriously, I sometimes think that "Me Too" should be a genre of its own. 

I think it usually goes something like this...

"I want to write a sort of proto-King Lear with a female as the Lear character."
"That's been done to death; how are you going to make it new?"
"I'm going to set it ON A SPACE STATION!"
"No one writes space opera anymore, Steampunk's really big right now..."

Make sure to oil the axles, that bandwagon squeaks something awful and they'll hear you coming.

Okay, I'll admit that I'm being a bit snarky.  On the face of it, there's nothing really wrong with this.  Putting it in space (or steampunk London, or Narnia, or turning them all into vampires for that matter) might make an old story feel new.  Maybe.  God knows Shakespeare's been cadged in every setting under the sun.  And a good writer could make that work.  But even though making King Lear into a western sort of worked with King of Texas (kind of), it only worked because the setting suited the story and there were enough changes made to the play to carry the western motif.

But it seems to me that someone who does this is actually creating obstacles for themselves that don't need to be there unless there's some compelling reason beyond "because it's cool right now".   Unless you have an angle that demands this setting, you have a longer road to walk than your peer who is telling a story that needs to be told in that setting.  If you're gifted (or lucky) you can make this work anyway.  Unless your reason for taking your story into space or back in time is the story, it's going to feel like a gimmick and you will have to work a lot harder to make it not feel like a gimmick.  Writing is hard enough; ask yourself why you're giving yourself extra work to do.

My guiding light remains true: Elements are in service to the story, never the other way around.  When you're shifting the story to fit the elements, you have a problem.

Mythic Structure :: In a World Without Genre

Genre has its place.  Certainly most readers see a long walk between Tolkien's war of the ring and Tom Clancy's war of the submarine.  Anything thing we can do to help a customer who loves one or more of those find others like it is a good thing.

The other day I implied that genre differences were almost entirely marketing.  I don't want to leave the impression that I think marketing books is a bad thing.  Genre is in the strictest sense, mostly about marketing.  Guiding a customer from the front door of a bookstore (remember those?) to the section most likely to hold books they would be interested in is marketing.  In my view, it is marketing of a mostly innocuous and helpful kind but marketing nonetheless.

Discover new authors + buy new books = happy readers, authors, booksellers & publishers.

Certainly my frequent assertion that bookstores should have a fiction section and a non-fiction section, alphabetized by author from A-to-Z never met with much success in my bookstore days.

Nevertheless, the distinction between the stories I mentioned is largely a matter of setting and macguffins.  The edges of the genres are much fuzzier than most devotees like to think.

JRR Tolkien was writing a war novel blended with a quest to end the war.  Reams of paper has been spilled drawing parallels between the War of the Ring and WWII, the One Ring being the Manhattan Project, etcetera.  Professor Tolkien denied any correlation, but it doesn't matter whether there was or not.  I have an edition of War & Peace featuring a forward that does exactly the same thing with Tolstoy's tale of the Napoleanic wars.  It doesn't matter that Tolstoy would be as surprised and annoyed as Tolkien was by the connecting lines that were being drawn from their tale to world events, the meaning of a story is in the mind of the reader.

Take almost any hero of almost any novel or story that actually resonates with readers (reflected by its success) and you'll find more commonalities than differences.  Change the age or gender of the characters and in strictest terms, there's very little to distinguish Tom Clancy's character Jack Ryan from Ernest Hemingway's Robert Jordan or JRR Tolkien's Aragorn, JK Rowling's Harry Potter or even Charles Dickens's Daid Copperfield and Lois McMaster Bujold's diminutive space admiral Miles Vorkosigan.  Heroes carry a universal tie that transcends genre.  Add just about any great literary hero to that list and you're going to find that they follow essentially the same path, crafted to fit their specific circumstances.

It's possible to write a great book completely ignorant of the universal thematic elements you are employing. The very nature of universal themes is that they are encoded into our collective subconscious.  How much easier would it be to do, though, if you know what you're about?  (JK Rowling has a BA in Classics from Exeter, you bet your sweet bippy she knew exactly what she was doing when she wrote Harry Potter.)

Readers frequently deny this, but any author striving to create characters and explore themes that will stand the test of time won't get far denying it.  If you don't believe me, read Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces.  Or if you prefer, there's a superb re-treatment of Campbell's lessons aimed directly at writers called The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers by Christopher Vogler.  One or both books should be on your shelf (or in your e-reader if you're so inclined).

It's pleasant to think that it's also true in terms of storytelling, stretching much further back into the history of words exchanged around a campfire, an unbroken line from Gilgamesh to Odysseus to Frodo Baggins and beyond.  But how does all of this tie to genre?

I posit that the lines dividing genre are being slowly eroded by electronic bookselling.  Just as there are tags at the bottom of every post on this blog that you can use to explore by theme, so too are books in online bookstores drawn together by thematic tagging.  No longer are you confined to a bookstore shelf holding only the books in your chosen genre, books are linked across the spectrum irrespective of genre distinctions.  Harry Potter is likely to turn up as "You Might Also Like" in a search for David Copperfield because both feature orphan heroes.  In a bookstore an adroit bookseller might know to make that suggestion, but such booksellers are getting fewer and farther between.

If you are unaware of your structure and thematic elements in your writing, then in a world where the reader isn't standing in front of a shelf surrounded by only books by you and people who write just like you, then you're drawing random cards in hopes of getting a royal flush (or at least a straight).  Personally, I prefer to stack the deck any way I can.

It's not the first time I've said it nor the first time it has been said: Writing is an industry that has - more than any other - remained virtually untouched by the last 500+ years of technological advancement.  Usually I say that in relation to the shockwaves still rocking the industry as they try to adjust to the idea of text on a screen instead of ink on a page.  This too is a change that will take a long time to get used to and benefit best those who address it first and those who are aware of it earliest.  I am tempted to trumpet it as the ultimate triumph of the storytelling form, millennia of storytellers who spoke tales to the heart, not the marketplace -- the marketplace coming back around to meet the storyteller rather than the other way around... but that might be too much to say too soon.

Regardless of the ultimate outcome this much I know is true: In a world of bookstores without bookshelves, being ignorant of your thematic ties to other books in other genres is well nigh suicide.

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Edit: Repaired some wonky formatting (gosh, thanks Blogger) and retooled that final paragraph where I wandered a bit.  -Scott

Genre Jungle redux

The conventional wisdom states that you should read widely in your genre or you won't know the conventions and won't be able to hit the mark for the market.  But Genre is a tricky thing and 'Thriller' is less well defined than most.  I like to read thrillers -- or at least what I consider to be thrillers -- and yet I spend precious little time reading the clock-tickers and time-racers that get 'Thriller" stamped on the spine by New York.  Rarely does my "heart race like a meat hammer pounding against a blood anvil*." 

Someone once told me that the difference between suspense and thriller is that in the suspense novel, consequences are personal and in the thriller, the consequences are global.  I disagree.  For a political or military thriller ala Tom Clancy, perhaps that's true, but I think that puts too much emphasis on plot and for my money, it's about engaging in thrilling storytelling.  For heaven's sake, tell me a story.  Give it an air of menace, convince me that there are consequences for the protagonists should they fail, consequences that make me own their peril and take it into myself.  The world doesn't have to be jeopardy; making me worry about the characters is quite enough.  Impending nuclear Armageddon is just icing on the cake if I care about the characters making it through the next scene.

I mentioned Joseph Finder yesterday.  In his address to the PNWA last year, he defined dramatic tension in a thriller as "Characters in peril".  Not necessarily "The World in Peril", the characters.  I have to give a crap about the characters and their arc or I won't care that the world is going to hell behind them.


The recent NPR poll of audience favorites from the thriller genre showed me very few books that New York would plop into that genre. When was the last time you heard Stephen King referred to as a thriller writer? He was the most nominated writerof the bunch, above Lee Child, Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton.  How surprised are you to find Truman Capote? Conan Doyle? Bram Stoker?

For the most part, the takeaway from this is that no one knows what a thriller is except the person reading it.  But I can tell you that it has everything to do with writing and style and little to do with the stamp on the cover.  And I stand relieved to see how little the audience seems to care what section of the store their 'thrillers' are sold in -- they're looking for a good story that thrills them.  And quite frankly, everything else is marketing.

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* Yes, that's an actual line from a "Thriller" handed to me by an excited publisher's rep long ago with the assurance that it would be "The Next Big Thing".  It was less than thrilling and sold less than well.

Submissions :: The Genre Jungle

New York Times bestselling author Joe Finder tells the story of his first attempt at selling a thriller.  He sent it to an agent (back in the hardcopy days of yore) and received it back with a paperclip on page forty.  Joe is the ornery sort and did what you're not supposed to do: he called the agent and said "What's with the paperclip?"  After berating him for being cheeky, the agent finally told him that the paperclip marked where he stopped reading.  He then told him not to bother ever submitting a story to that agency again and hung up.

Joe didn't get any less ornery, but he did learn a lot about where to begin his story.  He cut the first forty pages and sold the book to a different agent, going on to a mostly successful career on best seller lists and so forth.

One of the reasons I began this blog was to chart my path from the slush pile to the bookshelf. This includes some rejections (and more than a little Chinese food) but more often it means listening to crickets chirruping in the form rejections that most of us receive back.  A sterile rejection letter tells you nothing at all.  Agents and publishers fire them off for a whole host of reasons including the fact that they just don't have room on their docket for another (insert genre here) novel or the market isn't right to try to sell (insert genre here) just at this moment.  In all my submissions, I've received only three personal notes and only the last one included anything I could use to really examine whay the book kept coming back to me.
 
Like every other writer (or so I hope), I have a cheering section rooting me on -- family and friends who believe in my ability to fight my way free of the slush pile.  I've been gratified by their response to the aforementioned agent's brutally honest assessment and I thank my dear friends for rising to my defense.  But their love for me doesn't make them right any more than his ambivalence makes him wrong.  The trouble with brutal honesty is that while it is brutal, it is also honest.  And honesty should never be ignored.

The crux of that agent's comment was the same as the feedback Joe Finder got (except that I didn't have to alienate an entire literary agency to get it): I started in the wrong place and he felt no desire to keep reading or ask for more pages.  He likes the way I write but he didn't care for the way I handled the story.  In essence, I failed to meet his expectation for a "Thriller".

So now I can do one of three things...

1. Ignore him and carry on.
2. Re-cut the manuscript to meet genre expectations.
3. Pitch the book for a different genre.

Honestly, my takeaway from all this is that I failed to impart to him what I was attempting to do in The Palimpsest.  Either that or I should have pitched it as a mystery or suspense novel (which it isn't really either). 

For the record, I think that genre conventions are complete and utter horse-puckey (thank you Colonel Potter).  I sold books for a decade and understand as well as anyone can why they exist (to help readers find books similar to ones they already like).  I still think they're artificial constructs and that they do more harm than good.  In a physical bookstore, it was about where to shelve a book and where a customer will go to find it.  Online bookselling has thankfully begun to erode these distinctions and I think that we will eventually be largely free of them even if the publishing industry isn't quite ready to let go yet.

My feelings about genre distinctions aren't the reality.  So I have to decide how to move forward and how to categorize my work within the framework that exists.

I always knew that The Palimpsest was going to be hard to sell.  While I'm a fan of writers like Finder, the writers who set the bar are the likes of Ken Follett, Iain Pears, Amitav Ghosh, Arturo Pérez-Reverte and Carlos Ruiz Zafon.  All of these guys write books that could be described as 'thrillers' but manage to bridge the genre distinctions, creating smart, literate and exciting tales that meet or exceed their categorization.

All of which means that there's a market for a book like mine.  Smart, literate thrillers and mysteries, "Nerd Adventures" if you will.  To pretend that's not what I'm trying to sell would be a lie.  And no one is served by me re-crafting a sales pitch that lies about what the book is (or isn't).  If I cut it and cut it and cut it until it fit inside the cookie cutter, it would no longer be something excite me or my readers and that's a problem for me.

This may sound arrogant, but I don't really care: I did not come here to meet expectations, by God I came here to exceed them.

Scott W.Perkins, Adventure Nerd?

At the recent PNWA conference, I was pinned down by an enthusiastic cohort questioning me about the nature of genre and writing in general.  He was an affable sort and I really wanted to answer his questions and react to what he was saying about his work, but the caffiene needle was hovering around E and he had strategically placed himself between me and the coffee cart.

I'd been listening to others at the conference coin new subgenres for themselves and most of them were incredibly clever.  ("Historical Balderdash" was my hands-down favorite.)  So in a moment when I was desperate for a cup of Joe, I found myself babbling semi-coherently about how what I really write is 'Nerd Adventure'.

Nerd adventure?  Really, Scott?

While in general I have no wish to be held to the sort of things I say on the cusp of caffeine withdrawal, I find that this isn't far from the truth.  Most of my characters have an above-average intellect and below-average social skills. There isn't a Navy SEAL or Green Beret in the bunch, none of them would feel comfortable dancing in front of people and most of them are only gregarious in situations where everyone around this is just as goofy as they are.  Even the one character I have with military experience is a misfit failed revolutionary (ex IRA, actually).

The drama and conflict comes largely from seeing these people yanked out of their comfortable, academic existance and tossed into the fire.  Scene: A bunch of people who don't know one end of a handgun from the other find themselves in a firefight.  Action!

And why not?

Nerds are big business.  In fact, it's beginning to look to me as if the mad scientist will be the meme that supplants vampires.  Old school, retro scifi mad scientists.  It just doesn't get any nerdier than that.

So in a world where a logline is necessary to get an agent or publisher to look at your manuscript, is it such a bad thing that I can walk up to them and say I'm selling "The Big Bang Theory meets DaVinci Code"?  Nope!  And that's the story of how a subgenre was born.