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Old 04-05-2022, 05:32 PM   #21
whswhs
 
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
Default Re: name that genre

Quote:
Originally Posted by thrash View Post
Ah, I see. I was taking "social" to mean "inter-personal" rather than "pertaining to society as a whole." It seems to me that drama typically occurs between and among persons (or personifications), though I'll give you psychological drama as a counterexample; I agree that physical drama is better termed "action" or "action-adventure."
"Social drama" isn't bad as a descriptive phrase; both the genus and the epithet seem appropriate. But I was kind of hoping for a word or phrase that's already established in popular or critical usage, like "romance" or "dark fantasy" or "bildungroman" or "Menippean satire." Maybe there's a better one that I haven't thought of.

I agree with the point that was made about Bonanza being purely episodic. But I'm going to suggest that better examples could be The Godfather (I'm thinking of the novel primarily) or Upstairs, Downstairs or Courtship Rite or the Vorkosigan novels, especially from The Vor Game to A Civil Campaign (and looking backward to Shards of Honor and Barrayar). All of these have continuity, and all of them focus on a family. Perhaps the span of time isn't sufficient for "saga" to fit, but I'd think there would be some phrase . . .
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Old 04-05-2022, 06:45 PM   #22
JulianLW
 
Join Date: Apr 2019
Default Re: name that genre

Years ago when I was in grad school, I recall the term "sodbuster" used occasionally to describe novels about settling the west - everything from Laura Ingalls Wilder to Willa Cather to Larry McMurtry. But a quick Google turns up very little. Maybe it was only a term that literary agents and editors were using in-house.

Anyway, that's the exact genre I thought of when I read your description of the setting - a sort of Frontier Mars, right?

Maybe you're creating a "Marsbuster" genre. There are a lot of space farmer/space frontier settlers books out there, I'm sure, right? Do they have a name?
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