The genre positioning. Why these books belong on the literary fiction shelf and the science fiction shelf simultaneously. The comp titles. The readers these books are for.
Literary science fiction is not a compromise. It is not science fiction that has been softened for literary readers, or literary fiction that has been spiced up with science. It is a genre in its own right — one that takes both the rigour of hard science and the rigour of literary character work seriously, and refuses to subordinate either to the other.
The Comp Titles
When I describe my work to people in the publishing industry, I say: Ted Chiang, Richard Powers, Andy Weir. These are the three poles of the territory I am working in.
Ted Chiang is the master of the form — the writer who has shown, more clearly than anyone, that science fiction can be as formally and emotionally rigorous as any literary fiction. His stories are built on real science and real philosophy, and they are also built on real human feeling. The science and the feeling are not in tension. They are the same thing.
Richard Powers is the literary novelist who takes science seriously — who builds novels on the actual science of neurology, ecology, genetics, and music, and who treats the science not as background but as the substance of the human experience he is describing. His novels are about what it is like to be a person who knows things, and what that knowing costs.
Andy Weir is the hard science fiction writer who takes the science so seriously that the science becomes the character. The Martian is a novel about a person solving problems, and the problems are real, and the solutions are real, and the character is the person who can solve them. The science is not decoration. The science is the story.
My books are trying to do all three things simultaneously. The science is real (Weir). The character is real (Powers). The form is rigorous (Chiang).
The Readers
The readers these books are for are the readers who have always felt that the genre distinction between literary fiction and science fiction is a publishing convenience rather than a meaningful aesthetic category. The readers who read Ursula K. Le Guin and Kazuo Ishiguro and Kim Stanley Robinson and Richard Powers and Ted Chiang and feel that these writers are all doing the same thing — taking the human condition seriously, using whatever tools are available to illuminate it.
Those are my readers. Those are the books I am trying to write for them.