As you may have guessed I'm not that good with respecting traditional boundaries. It took me a long time to find an academic field that addressed the issues I'm interested in on the scope that I'm interested in. I'm interested in the identity vis a vis the cultural construction of memory, and because identity is a subject that is so often addressed by personality and social psychologists, I thought, of course that's where I should be working. Wrong. Turns out, all the cool work on the subject is being done by developmentalists who work sort of at the confluence of linguistics and anthropology, more or less. That's not something they teach you in Psych 100, alas--it might be something I would teach you in Psych 100, however.
Similarly, in my (science) fiction writing, I often say that I write pretty straightforward and unabashed space opera, much in the same way that I used to say that I wanted to be a social or personality psychologist. But as I'm planning out this new book, I'm realizing that that's not strictly true.
The novella, was probably about half way between cyber-punk and space opera, except that all of the story is set on Mars and Earth, which is about the extent of human occupation, and it still takes 6-12 months to get between Mars and Earth. Not exactly star trek, even though it's theoretically set a few hundred years after Captain Kirk.
The project I'm working on now, is more in space, and while I'm going to be playing with a few cyberpunk ideas/settings, it's still not very Captain Kirk-ish. Earth to Saturn takes about 3 weeks, and for interstellar flights, figure pretty damn close to lightspeed, but not there. While this sounds more like a space opera, I think my general tone is much less... romantic. I think I'd generally agree with Debra Doyle's assertion that SF is a genre of romances, I'm just less, bright and shiny about.
Maybe someday I'll find a happy home for the fiction projects. In the mean time. I have things I should be doing. eek.
cheers, t.