Grand Masters of Science Fiction
Via SF Signal and well worth every minute:
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Science Fiction
Gardnerspace
Gardner Dozois, in Locus July 2009:
“…although I like a well-crafted dystopian story as well as anyone else, the balance has swung too far in that direction, and nihilism, gloom, and black despair about the future have become so standard in the genre that it’s almost become stylized, and almost default setting, with few writers bothering to try to imagine viable human futures that somebody might actually want to live in.”
Well?
Science Fiction is Dead! Long Live Science Fiction!
So writes Paul Goat Allen in Unabashedly Bookish, the B&N Book Club blog. He quotes Orson Scott Card as saying that science fiction is “no longer a cutting-edge genre – the edge is now in fantasy.” Then Goat praises Ken Scholes’ Psalms of Isaak saga as being “actually post-apocalyptic science fiction cloaked in grand-scale fantasy.”
I’m not sure I’m onboard with Goat’s position, though I agree with his conclusion, that, “the hybridization of genres that I blogged about a few months ago – It’s the End of Genre Fiction As We Know It – and I Feel Fine – has affected science fiction just as noticeably as fantasy, mystery and romance. But it’s a good thing. It’s bringing the originality, the sense of wonder – and, most importantly, the readers – back to science fiction. Science Fiction is dead. Long live Science Fiction!”
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What He Said
Reading Clarkesworld Magazine’s round-robin interview with short fiction editors, I was very struck by something Patrick Nielsen Hayden said, which dovetails with my own feelings (bold emphasis mine):
I think the biggest change in SF’s overall readership is that it’s become much less dominated by hardcore SF buffs whose reading consists largely of SF. Compared to a generation ago, a lot more of our readers are just plain middlebrow readers—people who read a little SF along with a little of a lot of other things, and who don’t necessarily regard the SF as alien to the rest of literature, or below the salt, or any of that stuff.
[Today’s readers] are probably not connected to the SF social scene, they don’t assess their SF and fantasy reading against a huge backdrop of inside-baseball industry lore, they may not have read all of the classics, but they’re pretty good at making sense of fairly sophisticated SF storytelling because, guess what, in 2009, hundreds of millions of people are good at making sense of sophisticated SF storytelling. The problem for SF writers and publishers today isn’t that there’s not a mass audience for high-end SF storytelling; it’s that there are immense numbers of other diversions on offer for those hundreds of millions of people.
China Miéville in the Wall Street Journal
From the Wall Street Journal:
When skeptics ask him, “How did you get into sci-fi and fantasy?” he has a response. “My answer is: How did you get out of it?” says Mr. Miéville. “Because if you look at a roomful of kids, huge numbers of them will love aliens and monsters and witches…and at a certain point, some of them will start to leave that behind and go on to what they think of — wrongly — as more serious stuff.”
Amen.
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Dreams with Sharp Teeth
Via SFSignal, with the news that the Harlan Ellison documentary Dreams with Sharp Teeth will air this month on The Sundance Channel.
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Buy Books Like Life Depended On It! (Maybe Not Yours, But Someone’s.)
So, if you haven’t heard the news, or seen Andrew Wheeler’s rundown, yesterday was publishing’s “Black Wednesday,” with layoffs and changes at Random House, Thomas Nelson, Simon & Schuster, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, others. Prompting in part this good advice from John Scalzi:
Buy some damn books.
Fortunately, this advice is well-timed: Books are inexpensive yet valued objects, which means that they make lovely gifts for whatever holiday festivities you subscribe to this time of year. Now is a fine time to introduce friends and loved ones to some of your favorite authors — and in doing so, you’re boosting that author’s sales, which will make his or her publisher marginally less liable to dump their shivering ass onto the street. You’re giving a gift a loved one will appreciate, you’re doing your favorite authors a favor, and you’re doing your part to keep editors and publishers from hurling themselves out of high-rise windows. Truly, everybody wins.
So, go: Make this a bookish holiday season. You know you want to anyway. I, my fellow authors and a grateful publishing industry thank you in advance for your cooperation, and for your seasonal purchases.
Amen.
For our part, my wife and I have decided to give everyone books and bookstore gift cards this Xmas. It has the added bonus of making our shopping really quick and easy too.
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Is There a Silver SFnal Lining to the Recession?
Been talking about the economy as relates to SF with Mark Chadbourn, whose Age of Misrule trilogy we’ll be publishing in a few months. He kindly lets me repost his thoughts here:
My joint major at university was economics, and the upshot of that is I’m always out-of-cycle with everyone else. I’m worrying six months ahead of an economic downturn when everyone else is smiling, and I’m smiling when everyone else is miserable, which sometimes doesn’t win friends.
It seems we’re on a cusp now: a couple of months to see if the measures all Governments are introducing actually start getting people spending (which is the key in any recession – if people save everything goes into a downward spiral). But in six months we should be seeing the very early stages of an up-tick. Any company which weathers the next six months should be in a good position.
Somewhere I’ve got a talk I occasionally give about how genre is the marker for great social and political events. One of the strands is how SF/F/Crime always does *exceptionally* well in economically difficult times – if you plot it out on a graph, it becomes very clear. But just think with SF in the thirties and seventies. Horror, incidentally, does well in boom-times.
If I was on the stock market, I’d be advising investors to put their cash in SF/F for the next few years because, as you’re finding, it’s going to do really well. It would be good if someone could pitch this theory to the major chains, because if they got behind it, everyone would benefit (and it would become self-fulfilling).
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Should We Be Sending Pyr Books to the Oval Office?
The Telegraph recently released Barack Obama: The 50 Facts You May Not Know. Among them, the facts that he collects Spider-Man and Conan the Barbarian comic books and that he has read all seven Harry Potter books. And we’ve all seen the MSNBC clip (on YouTube and below) where he admits to being born on Krypton.
When you remember that JFK’s remark that From Russian, With Love was one of his Top Ten favorite books was what launched Ian Fleming’s James Bond to widespread popularity, having a president that is genre-friendly is fantastic.
New Pyr author Mark Chadbourn agrees about what having a Geek-in-Chief could mean for genre fiction:
A new president always sets the wider cultural tone for a country (and in America’s case, the world). Look how Bush spawned all those testosterone thrillers, in novels, and on TV, like 24. Obama is already likely to have a much wider cultural impact than Bush, purely because his election was so much more iconic. Knowing that he loves genre stuff is bound to leech into the mainstream and give it a certain kind of cachet, at the very least.
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Mind Meld: The Future of Written Science Fiction
SF Signal is back with another one of their “Mind Meld” round tables, this one on the future of written science fiction. The respondents this time around include Jeff VanderMeer, Liz Williams, Allen Steele, Mark Newton, Jay Lake, Elizabeth Bear, Paul Di Filippo, Sean Williams, Chris Roberson, Dot Lin, Alexis Glynn Latner, and Yours Truly.
I particularly liked Jeff Vandermeer’s assertion that:
“…the real challenge is writing near future SF. Stross I believe said near future sf is impossible. I respectfully say that is bullshit. To be relevant that is exactly what SF needs and how SF is falling down on the job right now. SF can do escapism just fine right now. But dealing with things head on? Not so well. SF has to get down in the nitty gritty of the horrible position we are in right now or it runs the risk of being just as irrelevant as the next medieval based fantasy trilogy. Yes it is hard to do. Who ever said writing was supposed to be easy? Show some guts.”
And I particularly liked Chris Roberson’s exact opposite reaction:
“I’d love to see more people playing what Rudy Rucker calls the ‘power chords’ of science fiction. He describes these as ‘those classic SF topes that have the visceral punch of heavy musical riffs.’ The list includes: Blaster guns, spaceships, time machines, aliens, telepathy, flying saucers, warped space, faster-than-light travel, immersive virtual realities, clones, robots, teleportation, alien-controlled pod people, endless shrinking, the shattering of planet Earth, intelligent goo, antigravity, generation starships, ecodisaster, pleasure-center zappers, alternate universes, nanomachines, mind viruses, higher dimensions, a cosmic computation that generates our reality and, of course, the attack of the giant ants. I want more of that stuff. The good stuff, the fun stuff. The mind-expanding thought-experiments and heady adventure stories.”
And I loved Jay Lake’s analogy, which explains how I can reconcile both of the above:
“Literature is like rock and roll…new movements come along, but the old ones never die. Reader tastes change, writers and publishers adapt, or they don’t. I for one hope to keep writing what I love, and keep adapting at the same time.”
Amen.
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