Roundtable: SF vs. The Future
I found the responses by Paul and Cecelia to be very illuminating, both of them raising issues I had been half-formulating myself. And I will certainly use their cogent arguments as springboards.
But first I have to ask this question: Is fiction broken?
Maybe it is. Maybe we are finally seeing some John-Barth-style “exhaustion of the novel” that applies not just to modernism, as Barth saw it, but to all forms of fiction as well. The death of fiction as a medium of human expression.
Look at this article about a vicious loop among the current college generation of decreased reading leading to decreased empathy, and so on:
Or this think piece about why universities are abandoning the humanities:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12136511
Not reassuring. If these studies have larger scope and are not just cultural blips, then there is little SF can do to prevent its own demise, however good its storytelling might be.
But if we assume optimistically that fiction is not broken, and cannot in fact be broken–“They heard the call and they wrote it on the wall, before there was even any Hollywood,” Steely Dan, “The Caves of Altamira”–then science fiction, as a subset of fiction, cannot be broken. The genre’s practitioners and readers might be stymied, bereft temporarily of vision and inspiration, bored, frantic, despairing, trite, or lackadaisical. But the centuries-honed tools to accomplish their goals, or to formulate new ones, remain in place, available to any artist with the willpower and wisdom to accomplish great things.
I tried to address this Roundtable’s very question recently in a sampling of the field at the Barnes & Noble Review:
http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/The-Speculator/Beyond-the-Horizon-21st-Century-SF/ba-p/3847
I still stand by my conclusion that top-notch work of significance and relevance to our 21st-century condition is getting done.
But having said that, I think we still must admit two points from Raven and Holland.
1) The old SF metanarrative and modes are indeed dead or dying. This was driven home to me a few years ago when I had to review the Harry Harrison collection 50 In 50. Great, classic stories, but the voice was utterly and inextricably mid-twentieth century, as were, somehow, the very story constructions, the way they were plotted and enacted. I said as much to Mister John Clute, who replied, “The world is not narrated that way any more.” QED.
2) Prose SF has always been a minority pursuit. We allowed ourselves to think it could appeal to the masses. But it can’t and won’t. Trying to slant your book for focus groups of subliterate “sci-fi” media fans will kill the genre faster than anything. Here’s a little piece I did for Blastr, the official site of the Sy-Fy Channel, trying to excite the audience about some good books coming out in 2011:
http://blastr.com/2011/01/11-sci-fifantasy-novels-w.php
Read the comments if you can. While there are some literate responses, most of the audience awaits the new Dresden Files or Wheel of Time volume. How are we going to advance the genre with those? My god, what if instead of John Scalzi I had recommended Delany’s Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders?!?
Read Laura Miller on “Why we love bad writing” and contemplate the limits of the audience we can reach.
http://www.salon.com/books/laura_miller/2010/12/14/docx
When Analog regularly sold 100,000 copies, the USA’s population was about 125 million. If my generally poor math is correct, I make out the percentage of hardcore SF readers to be .0008 of the population. Feel free to round up to .0010, or one-tenth of one percent of humanity.
As Ceclia Holland says, “Whatever happens next, it won’t be anything we’re prepared for.” The future is unpredictable by definition. If science fiction can be said to be predictive surely it is the broken-clock-showing-the-right-time sort of blind luck. Being predictive is a story we tell ourselves about science fiction after the one of the blind luck ideas becomes real.
The future arrives in fits and starts, one halting step at a time, and when we glance backward we see that “the past is another country” and that we are transformed. The science fiction community goes through periods where it narrows its view of tomorrow and is susceptible to groupthink, before eventually breaking out in new directions. Always, writers need to shrug off yesterday’s tomorrows and find their own way. Never mind prediction. Offer a vision of a possibility and readers will gather like moths to a flame.
Pingback:Cheryl's Mewsings » Blog Archive » Busy Elsewhere
With regards to the previous comments as to the future being unpredictable (which is true in the science sense) it is possible to make assumptions about trends etc. (And so for example we have the UN global population forcast for the 21st century.) Meanwhile SF is a bit like a blunderbus that sometimes points at a target called the future but with many shots missing but a few hitting the target.
As a bit of fun we (a team of mainly scientists and engineers who run a website) make some predictions for the near and medium term future at the beginning of every other year. We have done this for the best part of a decade. Our latest New Year prediction snippet is here (and we do seem to have quite a few hits).
See http://www.concatenation.org/news/news1~11.html#predictions
And the gamey lovers e’er rest in a quandary on how to have the unloose minecraft accounts.
It also features some interesting caves and rock formations, so if those are your thing then check this out.
You would possibly be wondering, Random Mobile phone industry’s.
As Ceclia Holland says, “Whatever happens next, it won’t be anything we’re prepared for.” The future is unpredictable by definition. If science fiction can be said to be predictive surely it is the broken-clock-showing-the-right-time sort of blind luck. Being predictive is a story we tell ourselves about science fiction after the one of the blind luck ideas becomes real.