CROSSROADS: Are police procedurals and speculative fiction incompatible?

Welcome to Thursday! Okay, for those of you in the US, welcome to Thursday afternoon (I’ve been running around like mad today and haven’t had a chance to get this post up until now). Considering today’s day of the week, it’s time for another Crossroads post over at Amazing Stories. This week, we kick off June’s month-long exploration of how police procedurals intersect with speculative fiction.

And for the first time in the Crossroads series, I’ve found a genre intersection that may be difficult. Noir, romance, westerns, comedy, and literary fiction could all integrate with SF/F, could all easily exchange aesthetic approaches, narrative techniques, structural conventions, and character archetypes. Yet it seems from some of my initial research that police procedurals may be in greater tension with the conventions/devices of speculative fiction. Which is cool, because that gives us the rest of the month to explore why and how!

I hope you’ll stop by and join the conversation!

CROSSROADS: The Difficulty of Police Procedural Speculative Fiction