Ep 3.11 - Psychological Sci-fi The Genre Hustle

This week on the Genre Hustle, we invent a new subgenre of science fiction with guests Cody Sisco and Allison Rose! Psychological science fiction is sci-fi that’s told from a shaky point of view due to a character’s mental state and the way it affects how they understand the world. Science fiction opens up so many possibilities and can make an unreliable narrator that much more intense and interesting. When mental health issues are paired with a dystopia, a surveillance state, a world drunk on technology, or the farthest reaches of medical possibility, conflicts have an ability to multiply from man versus society (as in a typical dystopia) to man versus a number of elements, including self, nature, society, technology, and the supernatural. Our guests Cody and Allison describe their writing process for each of their series, The Broken Earth Series and the Tick Series, and discuss the challenges, opportunities, and lessons for working with the depths of psychology in science fiction settings.