Topic: Need help with a genre

[Lumi Kløvstad]

I'm refreshing work on an old novel project and essentially starting over from scratch, just informed by what I learned about the story on my last attempt.

I cannot for the life of me figure out the genre though. The main character, Jack Shaw, is kind of a blue collar working for Colonial Affairs on a new world mankind is trying to establish a foothold on in the somewhat near future (2198 AD). He's not a soldier (or even a person given to particularly violent thoughts), just a kind of "does everyone's damn jobs" bureaucratic grunt caught between his boss, the politicians, and the scientists who all have vested interests in the colony and differing agendas when the story starts -- and humans discover the remnants of an ancient Martian Empire who have already claimed that planet. Eventually, humans and the martians discover something they equally prize, and race to obtain it (my notes refer to this thing as "The Prometheus Engine", and the working title of the story is "The Empire Cycle", if that helps)

Even if this was an action story (and for the love of god I'm trying to avoid that kind of science fiction), Jack Shaw wouldn't have much to do in the way of conflicts -- he'd be more of a witness to catastrophe than a person with agency, and most of the action would involve Jack trying to escape a crisis rather than defeat it or avert it.

So I need a genre, can't decide what, so take what I just posted and combine it with the opening page and tell me what you think it sounds like.


Nobody had expected to find something like it on Mars-- that now famous shard of obsidian blackness jutting out of the ground for 100 meters, pointing towards the sky.
They called it the Obelisk, and it was beautiful.
It had taken us about a month to discover it was a data cache. It had taken us two years to learn how to access and translate the data, which led us to an abandoned city called “Zii”.
It had taken us almost a century to realise it was pointing towards something in the skies.
Like Stonehenge on Earth, once a year, at a very exact time, the Obelisk pointed at a moving star in the Martian sky. A planet which had never appeared on any of our scans, never visible to our probes and prying eyes.
Planet X was real, and the only way to reach it was from Mars.
After we spotted it, we knew what had to be done.
Mars had been colonized, and terraforming was well on its way. We used the city of Zii as our colonial capital.
The Final Frontier had finally begun to be tamed. But now there was a new frontier-- we’d barely made our first steps into a new world and were soon scrambling in a mad dash for more.
We’d named the new planet Stamen, a word in one of our dead languages meant to describe the threads of fate, to describe destiny, as we knew it would be our destiny to spread to this new world and make it ours as well.

Destiny, it seems, is not without her tests.

And in the year 2128 AD, 10 years after Stamen’s discovery, we faced the very first.


Seriously guys, I have no clue where to take this next. Help me out.

[X]

Believe me that every writer goes through this. In fact I'm going through it myself. Aside from outside help, the best thing you can do is leave the story where it is for now, take a step back and naturally let some form of inspiration come to you. It may take a long while or it may not. It all depends. There are some stories I've been working on and have not gone back to for some time. However, later-on I get back to them and I suddenly know what to write down next. Also what would help is to stop writing on your computer, pick up a pencil and piece of paper, and write with that. This simple--more intimate--interaction will actually help to stimulate your creative processes better then a computer ever would. It's not faster but that's not the point. Writing is like art. It's best to work in an analogue perspective to help stimulate your creativity and get past whatever is blocking you.