Genre
As an aside, I started numbering these, too, because it generates unique URLs that are under my control. Otherwise, they do get numbered, but it’s not my numbering scheme. There is no Roman Numeral for 0, so the Introduction must be I, which makes this III.
There are two assumptions that must hold true regardless of genre:
- I don’t suck as an author. There is no getting around just plain bad writing. This is where the Atlas example comes in. It’s just plain bad and still has 491 reviews with over a four-star average. It’s also the author’s first published book (the rest of the series may improve, but I haven’t forced my way through the first book). His second series (Towerbound) is quite good. I will be perfectly happy with this outcome for my first book.
- I get the gay balance right. I want gay protagonists. That was true of the now-dead space opera, too. That’s the book I want to read. I’m writing it years late; I could have surfed the woke wave had I written it ten, or even five, years ago. The trick is making it not so gay that straight young men (the majority of LitRPG readers, I assume) will not read it but gay enough that gay young men like it.
Why LitRPG? Frankly, because I think the standards are lower. There is some really good stuff out there, but there’s also a lot of mediocre stuff. I also get the impression that, like Romance, it is voraciously consumed. It’s a case of “quantity has a quality of its own”.
Why not Space Opera? After years of watching Isaac Arthur, I can’t take classic space opera seriously any longer. For example, no one is going to land on some planet in another solar system and colonize it without first building orbital infrastructure, which adds decades, if not centuries, to colonization efforts. Shrinking a space opera to a solar system opera is a logical alternative (see also Harry Seldon and Trantor), but realistic timelines are horrendously long. I don’t want to write a story that covers centuries. There’s too much background noise: Governments, alliances, technological change, medical changes, etc… I can’t bring myself to handwave it all away and I have no desire to world-build, let alone write, it. Hard SciFi is worse and tends to be shorter – series sell.
Why not Romance? Romance readers are notoriously voracious. Gay romance – even gay werewolf romance – is a thing. It’s even somewhat popular. Romance (these days) means explicit sex. That’s hard to write well (pun intended). There are only so many ways to insert tab A into slot B. While I like p0rn as much as the next guy, it gets boring. It also instantly eliminates any straight audience. I don’t mind driving readers away, but I’d prefer they at least read the blurb and preview before deciding. Romance is also (usually) pair focused. The pairs can change from book to book, but there are generally two protagonists in a book. I want an ensemble cast.
Why not Fantasy? This is a more difficult decision. The line between Fantasy and LitRPG can be blurry. The Code is Mightier than the Sword leans hard into the “RPG” side of LitRPG. Hard enough that I haven’t finished book one because it’s like reading the D&D rulebook. Ithria (14 books and still going) claims to be Fantasy, but it is LitRPG with overly dramatic scenery and no character stats. “Faux Epic Fantasy” is my name for that sort of thing. Ultimately, I made the LitRPG decision because I don’t want to write about cerulean skies and verdant fields in a static world. Fantasy seems to be overly adjective heavy, which is also very difficult to write well. Fantasy settings also never change. After discovering steel, all technological progress stops – always and everywhere. If mithril makes such great armor, why isn’t it used in rocket nozzles? It also tends to be very backward looking. Recovering things or knowledge from the great civilizations of the past is not interesting to me. I want to know about the great civilization being built for the future, hence my interest in Sci Fi. I just want it to happen quickly.
The biggest hurdle for a LitRPG book is the “RPG” rules in it. The author needs to keep track of all of it. Ideally, the reader doesn’t need to care about the details, but they need to be there or the detail-oriented readers will notice – that’s what the genre is about, after all. In some ways, this is very like hard science fiction. The difference is that the author gets to invent the rules, rather than needing to follow the existing ones.
For example, long distance teleportation is very difficult in hard science fiction because there is no simultaneous “now” in the real world. As a practical matter, this is important for even short teleports (see GPS and clock timing), but it’s a huge problem for long distances. Assuming one can get the spatial targeting correct (which is an incredibly YUGE assumption), what happens with time? If I teleport to Alpha Centauri, do I get there now, four years ago, or four year hence? Or do I get to pick a time coordinate in addition to a space coordinate? That blows causality out the window, which I don’t really have a problem with(*), but it gets confusing to keep track of. In a LitRPG world, I can just do it and it works how the plot wants it to work without any further justification.
(*) Nothing to do with this post, but I find “FTL will break causality” to be a very poor reason to assume it cannot exist. Nuclear bombs were going to set the atmosphere on fire. Supersonic flight was going to make time run backward (or whatever stupid thing they thought). There is no reason to assume that causality cannot be broken. It’s very inconvenient and confusing for humans, but so what? If I call past-me and tell myself not to make that call then I later do not, so what if it makes no sense? Quantum Chromodynamics is very inconvenient and confusing for humans, too. Nothing says reality must conform to concepts the human brain can grasp, let alone grasp easily.
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