Sci-Fi Noir

One of people's favorite questions to ask when I tell them I'm a writer (besides "are you planning to write a book about me?" and "so how many books have you published so far?") is what genre I write in. Usually I just tell them young adult, and they say "what's that?" and I say "like Hunger Games" because now there's finally a series besides Twilight that I can use to explain it. And they just sort of nod and say "I liked that movie," and I resist stabbing them with the nearest pencil.

ANYWAY.

So lately I have been trying to come up with a better explanation of my genre. I used to think I wrote fantasy, but sometime around college I realized that it was actually sci-fi (because all of the "magic" had long rambling technical explanations,* among other things). For a while I tried saying "sci-fi" when people asked what I write, and they sort of nod and say "spaceships are cool."

BAH. Not that I don't love spaceships. But there's more to sci-fi than that!

Then last weekend, I was trying to describe why the novel I'm querying isn't really a dystopian, even though it has many dystopic elements. I went over how dystopian is a sub-genre of sci-fi, which seemed to make sense to the poor normal person I was explaining this to, but they were still confused why my book wasn't dystopian if it was set in a sucky future. So I was like, "well I think the future will probably have many sucky elements just like the present, but that doesn't mean that a single group has overthrown the current government system and built a fake utopia that secretly sucks even more than the former world did."

And then I was like "have you read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" and they were like "is that a book or something?" and I was like "it's what Blade Runner is based on" and they had a blank expression, so I was like "it's that movie with Harrison Ford" and they were like "Harrison Ford is hot" and I was like "right but the movie is like film noir. It's like sci-fi noir."

And then the invisible lightbulb in my head exploded, and I was like "YES! THAT'S my genre!" and the poor person I was talking to was like "... um..." but by then I was already googling to see if I was the first brilliant person n00b to think of this.

Naturally I was not.

In fact, the Wikipedia article on Film Noir has an entire section on it:

"In the post-classic era, the most significant trend in noir crossovers has involved science fiction. In Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965), Lemmy Caution is the name of the old-school private eye in the city of tomorrow. The Groundstar Conspiracy (1972) centers on another implacable investigator and an amnesiac named Welles. Soylent Green (1973), the first major American example, portrays a dystopian, near-future world via a self-evidently noir detection plot; starring Charlton Heston (the lead in Touch of Evil), it also features classic noir standbys Joseph Cotten, Edward G. Robinson, and Whit Bissell. The film was directed by Richard Fleischer, who two decades before had directed several strong B noirs, including Armored Car Robbery (1950) and The Narrow Margin (1952).[130]
The cynical and stylish perspective of classic film noir had a formative effect on the cyberpunk genre of science fiction that emerged in the early 1980s; the film most directly influential on cyberpunk was Blade Runner (1982), directed by Ridley Scott, which pays evocative homage to the classic noir mode."

OMG!!! They even used Blade Runner as an example!

... And nobody else really cares, I know, but yeah. That was my writerly nerdgasm of the month. Back to you, people with relevant posts this Monday morning.

* Disclaimer: by now I have learned my lesson about long rambling technical explanations, no worries.