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Genre Fiction: the medical thriller
Genre fiction includes detective fiction, thrillers, romances, sci fi, and other popular forms of the novel. One of the reasons these novels are so readable is that they have strict rules about plot, character, time, irony, etc. Readers come with highly specific expectations, and readers respond in terms of the writer's skill in playing with those rules.
Writers find their skills challenged by the tightness of the conventions. It's difficult to escape these rules without losing your audience. Of course, the other side of the coin is that ALL fiction is controlled by conventions, and that the specificity of the conventions gives new writers a stronger likelihood of success.
The list below outlines some of the broad features of the medical techno thriller. We'll approach some of our tasks through this model, and we'll read The Master Cure so that we share a common experience with the genre.
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General Features of the Medical Techno Thriller
Themes
- Show an important social issue, e.g. stem-cell research, nanotechnology, abortion, AIDS, electronic surveillance
- Large scale conspiracy threatens the status quo
- Evil is one that, from a certain perspective, we can almost accept -- a "rational" solution to a perplexing problem
Protagonists
- Male-Female relationship
- different backgrounds
- out of sync romantic interest in each other
- Denied or forgotten relative [Joe's son, Gloria's grandmother]
- Emblematic employment or interests [time oriented]
- archaeology, literature, medicine, photog.
- possibly: anthropology, geology
- Attitude toward the future
- become able to imagine themselves as parents
- fear of intimacy
- dependency issues: drugs, work, alcohol.
- Character change
- stymied by the burden of the past
- unresolved past relationship
- maturational impasse
motivated by the memory of the lost relative
resolve tension by demands of the crisis
- General features
- well educated [as distinguished from trained]
- intelligent, "quick"
- quirky interests and mannerisms
- minority aspect [black, female, Jewish, Hispanic]
- underdog position
The protagonist-thematic connection
- Saving society as emblem for the redemption of the characters
- Saving the characters as emblem for the redemption of society
Antagonists
- Father figures (split, and then each half split again)
- paired: one good, the other evil
- the "good father" with evil within
- the "evil father" with good within
- At least one absolutely evil character
Technical Material
- symbolic of quest to synethesize the individual and the social
- "how to" aspect
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