io9 posted a round-up of sci-fi book trailers, including the one for Sly Mongoose I showed you last month and this trailer for The Digital Plague, the second novel from Jeff Somers. Neither of which, as Annalee Newitz observes, “give you much of a sense of the plot, but you do get a feeling for the world where it’s set. I wonder if this means book trailer makers think that scifi books sell based on world-building rather than on plot or narrative structure?”
It’s an interesting question, and a compelling challenge to my theory that book trailers live or die on their storytelling capabilities. The two ideas are not necessarily incompatible, though—let’s go back to the notion that science fiction is cultural criticism, or, as I put it last month, “the entire point of science fiction is to imagine social and cultural changes and then work out their ramifications on people’s lives.” What Newitz identifies as “world-building,” then, is essentially laying down the story’s parameters… setting up the dominos, let’s say, pulling back to show you the pattern, and then cutting away just before the first one gets tipped over. Want to see how they fall? Read the book. When you look at it that way, giving you a peek at the environment isn’t that much different from giving you a peek at the storyline.