Same, but different

I went to a great talk by John Berlyne of Zeno Agency last Saturday at the Winchester Writers' Festival. He was talking about SF publishing from an agent's point of view.  And he said something that surprised me.  He pointed out that publishers are very conservative.  They get very nervous if someone pitches them with a radical new idea they've never seen before.

I was surprised to hear that this is the case in the SF genre.  And it's got me thinking.  I've always worried that some of my work is too derivative of other SF writers' ideas.  So to hear him say that originality was a dirty word in SF publishing was encouraging.  He also pointed out that "what we think is original has always a been done before.  Truly original novels don't get published", he said, and "editors live and die on comparisons in acquisition meetings".

"It's fine to write about a well-trodden trope," John said.  "That's what people want.  What you need to do is put your own twist on it.  Don't be afraid of tropes."

Which is all very interesting.  I have a novel called Starfire which I have never submitted anywhere.  It's inspired by Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's War books, but my ship captain stays as a civilian.  Same, but different.  So is this the sort of thing publishers are looking for?

The novel I've just finished rewriting (Combined Cognition) has loads of similarities with Becky Chambers' The Long way To a Small Angry Planet, except that my ensemble cast lives on an orbital shipyard and not a spaceship.  When I look at the characters of my cast, they take similar roles to many of Becky's characters.  And I also have a sentient starship AI, as she does.  Same, but different.  

Becky's second book, A Closed and Common Orbit, features two viewpoints in different time lines that come together at the end of the book.  I'm now plotting my second book in the Darius series, Spaceforce Cyborg, and adopting a similar idea.  I've always had trouble wrangling Brett's story into order, and Becky has now given me the structure.  I'm plotting past and present times lines for Brett.  The narrative with switch repeatedly from past to present and back again, just as Becky's book does.  The difference with Spaceforce Cyborg is that both timelines will be about the same character.  Same, but different, again.

John's talk fired me up and encouraged me more than anything I've heard in a long time.