Nathan Farrugia is today’s guest blogger who wrote the below article. Nathan is the author of The Chimera Vector.
There’s something about crossing genres that scares people. No one knows quite what to do with them, how to sell them, how to market them, how to read them. So it’s strange in a way for me to write The Chimera Vector. It’s a thriller that’s science fiction but isn’t. I guess you could say it’s a techno-thriller that teeters on the edge of sci-fi.
But as I was writing it I kind of pushed it over the edge. There’s some stuff in The Chimera Vector that is clearly technology five or ten years ahead of now. But everything else is normal. It all seems like now, like right now in the real world. You could say the same about Batman’s latest batmobile or Whedon’s Dollhouse.
A few years ago I was afraid of my book being shoved away in the sci-fi section and only sci-fi readers would discover it. Unless it becomes so overbearingly popular and unavoidable — like Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Twilight, Game of Thrones and (unfortunately) 50 Shades of Grey. It would otherwise remain hidden away in the crevasse of genre fiction.
And you know what? That doesn’t matter anymore. The rules have changed and there aren’t many actual bookshelves left. At least not for me. So a strange thing happened. With the barriers between genres lifted I stopped feeling uncomfortable about science fiction. I didn’t care if some people took it for a thriller and others took it for science fiction. To me it was both. I learned to embrace the genre because it was a part of me. I love it now.
