20 Ways Science Fiction and Fantasy Are Like Mozilla Firefox
David Louis Edelman June 21st, 2006
It’s a sunny day here in the Washington, D.C. area. So in lieu of doing any real writing, I’ve decided to ruminate on the ways in which the science fiction and fantasy genres are like the Mozilla Firefox browser instead.
1. Both are available across multiple platforms. You can install Firefox on your Windows PC, on your Linux PC, on your Mac (though it’s called Camino there), or even on your mobile device. Likewise, SFF spreads across TV, books, film, trading cards, computer games, poetry, and music (as anyone who has ever suffered through Rush’s “By-Tor and the Snow Dog” can attest).
2. Both are infinitely expandable. There are thousands of extensions, plugins, and themes that let you customize your Firefox web browser. And SFF readers often take their favorite fictional universes into their own hands by writing “fan” fiction.
3. Both tend to be fast-paced. Firefox loads web pages quicker than the leading Internet Explorer browser (especially if you crank it up with the Fasterfox extension), while SFF is often characterized by its action and fast-paced plotting. (Which isn’t to say that it’s all like that. But then again, how many fast-paced Thomas Pynchon or Philip Roth novels have you read lately?)
4. Both rely heavily on community. Firefox has proven successful largely because of a vibrant developer community that’s continually improving the browsing experience. Meanwhile, SFF cons, clubs, workshops, blogs, discussion groups, and online communities are the heart and soul of the genre.
5. Both make use of well-known conventions. Firefox uses the standard web browser interface that hundreds of millions of users worldwide know and intuitively understand. SFF often builds on common tropes, themes, and character types that are familiar to readers across the world (elves, dragons, time travel, the heroic quest, etc.).
6. …But both derive their strength from the ways they break with convention. Firefox broke with web browser tradition by offering a tabbed interface, integrated Live Bookmarks, and built-in pop-up blocking, among other things. (Yes, Opera fans, I’m aware that Firefox wasn’t the first.) SFF’s whole raison d’etre is to break with conventions and explore new ideas, be they technological, ideological, or epistemological.
7. Both have a rich and storied history. Firefox is based on the Mozilla code developed by Netscape, which is itself based on code created by NCSA Mosaic, which is ultimately derived from ideas by visionaries like Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, and Doug Englebart. SFF has a long and distinguished lineage that dates back through 19th century pioneers like Jules Verne and Mary Shelley, and even further back to the Middle Ages (Beowulf, the Arthurian legends, etc.).
8. Both are living, breathing entities that change over time. Firefox began as the Mozilla browser, then morphed into Phoenix, then Firebird, and finally Firefox, adding features and security improvements along the way. SFF is constantly evolving, as new subgenres and tropes and techniques sprout into existence seemingly every year.
9. Both can be enjoyed purely as entertainment. You don’t need to be a programming geek to use Firefox; just download it, install it, and you’re on your way. And you don’t need to have majored in epic, linguistics, and symbology to pick up Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings if you just want to enjoy the swords and sorcery.
10. …But both can be enjoyed on deeper levels as well. You can spend your life tweaking browser settings, studying APIs, and developing Greasemonkey scripts to make your Firefox browsing more worthwhile. You can similarly spend your life learning elvish, reading Christopher Tolkien’s history of Middle Earth, and studying how Tolkien’s mythos is at heart a meditation on humanity’s fall from divine grace. (And that’s just one fictional universe.)
11. Both have relatively small audiences. Firefox’s market share is still in the 10 to 15 percent range by most measurements — double that among high-tech sites. I’m not sure what percentage of fiction sales the SFF segment accounts for, but by the purely unscientific method of gauging the relative number of shelves your local Borders devotes to SFF, I’d say it’s a comparable number.
12. …But both are growing rapidly. The fantasy genre has gained a massive influx of readers recently as a result of the successful Harry Potter, Narnia and Lord of the Rings film franchises. Similarly Firefox has leapt to about 10-15% market share among web browsers in the space of three years.
13. Both are very evangelical and welcoming to newcomers. The Mozilla Foundation encourages users to spread the word about the Firefox browser through buttons, banners, and simple word of mouth. SFF communities are famously inclusive and eager to recruit new members and readers.
14. Both are popular in colleges and universities. Do I even need to back this up?
15. Both have disproportionately male audiences. As indicated by the current row over sexism in short story publishing that began in Charles Coleman Finlay’s blog, there is still a gender gap in SFF. The evidence for a Firefox gender gap is purely anecdotal, but if you examine the user names on the MozillaZine forums you’ll conclude that such is the case here as well.
16. Both have avid international audiences. In the week since this SFF-oriented blog has gone live, users have signed up from domains in Australia, Germany, the UK, Canada, and Norway. And Firefox, of course, is available in several dozen languages all around the world.
17. Both sometimes wear disguises. Firefox is only one of dozens of products based on the open source Mozilla Gecko platform, sometimes without the user even knowing it (e.g. the Netscape browser). Meanwhile, elements of SFF are embedded throughout our popular culture and literature, even though readers, critics, and even authors don’t like to admit it. (Who says The Lovely Bones and The Time Traveller’s Wife and The Plot Against America aren’t genre novels?)
18. Both can be enjoyed for free. Read contemporary, award-winning novels and short stories from the likes of Chris Roberson, Cory Doctorow, and Charles Stross for free. (Or, dare I suggest it, read excerpts from my own forthcoming novel Infoquake). Firefox, of course, is released under the Mozilla Public License and can be downloaded and distributed without charge.
19. …But there are plenty of products available to buy as well. It’s a given that you can find a zillion SFF products. (Harry Potter tie-ins alone probably rival the GDPs of many Third World nations.) But less well known is the fact that the Mozilla Foundation runs an online store with software and quick start guides, as well as books of tips and tricks.
20. Both the browser and the genre are really secondary to the content they contain. Having a nice browser is all well and good, but what really matters is the content you’re accessing with it. (”Garbage in, garbage out,” as they say.) And whether you’re reading science fiction, fantasy, weird fiction, horror, or alternate history, a bad book is still a bad book.
Damn it, guess this means I should get back to work. Have I missed anything?
You put a smile on my face with that one. Cheers.
You seem to have discovered blogging’s potential as a procrastination tool. Beware!
12. …But both are growing rapidly. The fantasy genre has gained a massive influx of readers recently as a result of the successful Harry Potter, Narnia and Lord of the Rings film franchises. Similarly Firefox has leapt to about 10-15% market share among web browsers in the space of three years.
That was a pleasant side-effect of the movies. I’d never managed to persuade my middle son to read before he saw Lord of the Rings. Now he is incredibly grateful. He’s a Canadian soldier in Afghanistan and one thing a soldier can do in down time is to read. That interests me because he is of the generation who find more entertainment in computer games. And yet, computer games do encourage a certain amount of reading in the fantasy and sf genres, because a lot of these kids want to write their own games, and once they discover the joy of writing they go on to read.
I had to sit on my third son to read Harry Potter, because he’d seen the movies and couldn’t be bothered to read the books afterwards. I don’t regret doing that. It was about halfway through the series. He started reading and big sighs could be heard of a bored child and then, suddenly, silence. “All right is it, son?” I asked about an hour later. “I’m on page 100. Go away.”
Now, if we go on a trip I buy him a book.
So that comment of yours, from a publishing pov, I found interesting and sparked these thoughts. I’ve often wondered if I’m wasting my time writing, but I don’t think I am.
Both go well with chocolate, pizza, chips, and coffee.
Throughout my software engineering career, almost everyone in my labs read fantasy and sf. And, because I worked in a Unix lab, we were Mosaic and then Netscape and then Firefox geeks.
Carol
Good list. My kids use Firefox. I should, too, but have Netscape set up because that’s what I’m used to.
One question, though.
Is sff as a whole really enjoyed by a primarily male audience? What kind of stats do we have on that?
Again, purely from the anecdotal evidence… my guess would be it’s somewhere in the 60/40 male/female range. John Joseph Adams recently linked to a statistical analysis of women’s publication rates in the major SFF mags, and it was running closer to 75/25. The numbers are a few years old by now, but I suspect still generally accurate.
Which leads to another, follow-up question… how much of a gender separation is there between fantasy and SF? It seems like women gravitate towards the former while men gravitate towards the latter. But who knows how much of that is just dated stereotyping?
After Charlies’ remarks, one of my writing friends conducted her own poll through her blog. She took thirteen snippets of 250 words from both genders and asked which gender wrote them. It was virtually impossible to tell. I’ve read Charlies’ stuff and I still didn’t recognize his and I think the ratio on my own work was: eight thought I was female and five male. The interesting thing there was that the guys came out as hermaphrodites. Half and half in other words. The point being, without a name very few people could tell who wrote what. So why is there a bias at all in that case? Granted this was only snippets and only thirteen people, but it was still interesting.
As a reader I’ve always gravitated to female authors. Not to say there aren’t male authors on my bookshelves - George RR, Michael Stackpole and Steve Erickson to name a few, but one does wonder if a particular editor from a mag or a publishing house likes one or the other, if they go towards a bias without even realizing.
My own small sampling: My emails run almost exactly 50-50.
Carol
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I am reading this blog on Firefox for Win2K and I just installed Fedorda Core 5/KDE with Firefox for Linux. As a diehard Rush fan, I bristled at your use of the word “suffered.”
–Scott
I, too, am a Rush fan from way back. Don’t mess with Signals, Moving Pictures, or Grace Under Pressure. (Even Power Windows.) But, c’mon… “By-Tor and the Snow Dog”? That one’s mighty tough to defend.
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