What are your favorites genres to read, watch, or hear?
We all have our favorite kinds of storytelling and our favorite ways to receive them.
Me? I like all three (read/watch/hear). But what I prefer may vary from format to format.
Here are some of my favorites. To voice some of your own, please comment here or on Facebook/Twitter, and/or go to my Facebook group, Polls R Us.
1) Science Fiction
No big surprise there. I like to read science fiction and watch on TV and the movies. Not big on science fiction audio or podcasts.
Science fiction is a very diverse field, with a wide variety of sub-genres. Some of my favorites -
Alternate History - omg, do I love this stuff! It's probably my single most favorite thing to read. Prominent examples include The Man in the High Castle by Phillip K Dick, The Plot Against America by Phillip Roth, multiple novels by Harry Turtledove. Television shows that play with this theme that I love include Sliders, Fringe, Counterpart, Timeless, and Legends of Tomorrow.
Corollary themes to Alternate History include the Multiverse concept and time travel. Alternate histories may or may not include these ideas, but the main idea is to present a what-if imagining if history turned out differently.
Near Future - I like stories that extrapolate where we may be going in the near future if certain trends/threads are followed. Many of these are dystopian and/or cautionary, but they don't have to be. I love classics like 1984 by George Orwell and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. One of my favorite books of all time is The Stand by Stephen King, with his vision of a world experiencing a deadly pandemic. But I also like more optimistic visions of the future, including Star Trek.
Time Travel - wait! Didn't we already cover this one? Well, kind of. But the bulk of time travel stories don't really try to tell alternate histories. Some go to the future. Some deal with more personal stories (Somewhere In Time, Time After Time). Many are self-absorbed in time paradoxes. The most annoying try to demonstrate how immutable and hard to change time is (11/22/63 by Stephen King). I like some of these, but I like them less than the alternate histories.
Space Opera - large scale, melodramatic, epic scale, sometimes mythic in their structure. The very best example is the Star Wars saga. Often, they can have a western overtone, or at other times have similarities to high fantasy (things being centered on quests or versions of royal families). They have to be well done for me to enjoy.
Hard Scifi - this is science fiction that bends over backward to suggest a scientific rationale for what it's doing. Some examples I've read include Foundation by Issac Asimov, World War Z by Max Brooks, and Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke. Movies I've seen in this group include 2001:A Space Oddysey and The Martian (both also books). I'm more selective with this group. As a general rule, I don't pick these up unless the theme and/or author sound interesting to me.
First Contact - the aliens are here. Sometimes for good, sometimes not. E. T.? Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind? - two of the good kind. V? Independence Day? Alien? Oh, just the start of the bad kind. Movies of this theme are legion! My favorite is the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers. "They're here! You're next!"
Don't mess with Mother Nature/Science - the first and one of the greatest works of this type is Frankenstein by Mark Shelley. These range from atomic radiation monsters (Godzilla) to ecological disasters (Outbreak, Soylent Green), and can't forget the new rage - zombie movies/stories (once again - World War Z (hey, some of these overlap!), Night of the Living Zombies, and The Walking Dead. Armageddon/apocalyptic themes abound here, but they can also be in the other subgenres, especially near future.
Military/War SciFi - Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein. That's about all I got. Maybe the movie Enemy. I would say that military SciFi is my least favorite kind.
Okay, I meant for this to cover more genres, but I got carried away. It took me four separate writing sessions to get this far!
The solution?
I'll make this into a series!
Up next time - fantasy!
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