Let's put the future behind us
There's always a bloody force five hurricane making landfall in the little teacup of a genre that I inhabit. Last year it was the Mundane SF manifesto (short form: they don't believe inKristine Kathryn Rusch, who is old and distinguished enough to know better, wrote a critical essay for a book (titled "Star Wars on Trial") in which she attempted to make the case for the defense, and which was republished in Asimov's SF magazine. She lit a match (thus: "First, the promised answer: to what extent is current sf writing influenced by Star Wars? The answer is simple: Not enough"), then tossed it in a pool of petrol (and so: "In order to make my case for that answer, however, I must address #3: Star Wars and the battle for SF readers and shelf space. There is no battle for shelf space because of #6: to what extent does SW define how the general public sees SF or, as I like to call it, the definition of SF") before generously carpet-bombing the area with the reductionist napalm of genre categorization (which sticks to everything like a label, and burns, baby, it burns!).
To try and paraphrase (or parody) her argument: SF is of declining interest (and has declining market share) to the general public because it's not true to its pulpy roots. So let's all go write media tie-in novels, because they attract readers, and if we attract lots of readers, we'll reinvigorate the ghetto. In other words, the past forty-odd year long project of trying to inject some quality into the stuff our dreams are made of is not merely a failure, but counter-productive.
All of this would be messy enough, but she managed to phrase it in such a way that it got right up various noses (That's Paul McAuley and Ian McDonald, in case you don't know them in drag), not to mention the sinuses of large numbers of other hoity-toity folks who think that what they're doing might possibly have some literary merit to it. (Like me.)
Now, it's not my purpose to whack on Ms Rusch. Being dogpiled by Hugo winners is not terribly funny, it's unlikely to change anyone's mind — this whole thing boils down to a matter of tribal identity, really, because the exclusionary origins of SF as a literary field injects a powerful side-order of identity politics to what would otherwise be issues of critical analysis — and it's not dignified. But I would like to take it as the starting point for some observations.
SF and fantasy literature accounts for a declining proportion of fiction sales. KKR is absolutely correct to raise this point:
"In 2004, romance novels accounted for 39.3 percent of all adult fiction sold. Mystery and thrillers came in second with 29.6 percent. General fiction, which is what most of us would call the 'literary mainstream', was 12.9 percent of all adult fiction sold, followed by 'other fiction' a category that includes such things as Western and Men's Adventure, at 11.8 percent. SF came in dead last at 6.4 percent."
I believe the Katrina-in-a-cupcake issue we're talking about and that's responsible for all the raised emotions and vitriolic denunciations here is summed up right there, in one damning paragraph. Everybody who works in the SF/F field is asking themselves, pace Lenin, "what is to be done?" After all, we don't want to go the way of the Western genre, which dried up and blew away like a dead tumbleweed, some time during the 1960s or thereabouts. (Note: I use "the 1960s" as a general short-hand for "way back in pre-history, before I was born". Don't take it personally if you remember them.)
Everyone agrees on the problem, but there are multiple proposals for how to bell the cat. On the one hand, we have the populists, the back-to-the-pulp-era advocates of writing more Star Wars tie in books and doing more TV work. On the other hand, we have the erudite literati; Ian McDonald and Geoff Ryman brilliantly attempting at reinventing SF for a 21st century that isn't dominated by whitebread euro-americans: John Barnes' discourses on memory and regret and alienation: Peter Watts questioning the very existence of consciousness — and so on. We have Clarke award shortlists that feature Kazuo Ishiguro and that don't tempt you to play "Where's Wally". We have literary academics studying us (and as a jobbing writer, I can tell you there are few things as terrifying as discovering that some poor bastard's dissertation depends on a misinterpretation of one of your books).
So. What is to be done?
Firstly, let me tackle the reason for the decline in the SF/F readership over time as a proportion of written fiction. I don't have quantitative data to hand, but I believe we can attribute it to the fact that the civilization we live in is changing so rapidly that we're all exposed to rapid technological change all the time. SF as a genre evolved during a period of industrialization and standardization and rapid linear progress. It was both an escapist literature and a didactic form that lent its readers some exposure to new ideas about how they might live in future. But things have gone non-linear, and a lot of the future has arrived today, albeit in bastardized form. Want to go live on Mars? Tough, you can't — but you can download travel albums from the red planet til you're blue in the face. Want to go live on an alien world? Go visit Japan — it's not that expensive — or explore the Goth night club scene in Ulan Bator (I'm informed it has one). We don't need SF for pre-adaptation to the future: the future is now.
Meanwhile, we're competing in the special effects stakes with TV, film, and increasingly, computer games. Back in the 1950s or even 1960s, special effects were so poor that, for real sense of wonder, no visual medium could compete with written literature. But today, if you're a writer who strives for versimilitude or believability, you can't compete with film! (After all, you know damn well you can't hear explosions in space, even if those bloody franchise productions insist on putting them in ...)
The gap between the visual imagination of things, and the literary imagination of the universe, has narrowed.
Of course, we're seeing reactions in a number of directions. Some folks are going all-out to create new fine art within the field (most of the authors I cited, and many others besides). Some are writing spin-off fiction, hoping it'll work as a gateway drug and lure new readers into the genre: and some are writing what they view as good old-fashioned pulp, albeit better structured and more polished than the likes of E. E. Smith or Edgar Rice Burroughs would have bothered to make it. We have no less than three Hugo winners or nominees vying for the crown of being the second coming of Robert A. Heinlein, circa 1950 — John Varley, Spider Robinson, and John Scalzi are all writing Heinlein juveniles, the classic gateway drugs of the 1950s that captured the interest of the baby-boomer generation of SF readers.
Now, don't get me wrong. I still like traditional SF — hell, I sometimes even write it! But the underlying assumptions of much of it are so questionable that these days we need to approach them with the proverbial three metre barge-pole. Meanwhile, the real world has moved on. If we start re-writing Heinlein's 1950s novels, we will appeal to Heinlein's 1950s readers, who are nearing retirement, not to new readers who are the age the older cohort were when they first met Heinlein's work. "It worked for granddad: let's try it again!" never worked for music — why should it work for fiction?
Maybe Heinlein's 1980s readers would be a different kettle of fish (once you strip out the effects of the brain eater, and the pathological discursiveness, self-indulgence, and tendency to wander all over the map, the later Heinlein is a fundamentally more interesting writer than his youthful incarnation), but they're still stuck in the 20th century. To address the ills of SF, we need to do something new.
So let's take five ...
First, an axiom: we read fiction for pleasure, not to be clubbed over the head with a fistful of insights. If the fistful of insights is coming anyway, it needs to be decently clad in a velvet glove lest the casual reader take fright. But while part of the pleasure comes from a rolicking good story and/or interesting characters, we need a bit of fibre in our dietary sugar — and what we're debating here is where the roughage of ideas comes from.
I believe the problem is not definitional (is Star Wars spin-offery SF, or not? Is SF literature, or pulp?) but semiotic. What does SF mean? And more importantly, what does it mean to the readers?
There is a very large tranche of younger readers who perceive SF in general as boring. (There are exceptions, and I'll deal with them shortly.) The complaint is that it's old hat, it's the stuff their grandfathers read, and it talks to the grandfather's attitudes and outlooks. SF is predicated on a modernist political program. It was, in fact, the fictional agitprop arm of the Technocrat movement, and it carried on marching in lockstep into the radiant future even after Technocracy withered in the 1930s. These days, the beliefs that form the bedrock of this medium have a curiously quaint, archaic feel to them. Technocracy was about central planning, enlightened rational leadership, and utopianism. SF as we know it is descended from a literature that reflects these values, either by amplifying or adopting them, or by explicitly contradicting them — but either way, Technocracy's ghost lies at the core of a multitude of genre conventions.
We've been writing technocracy-influenced fiction for eighty years, whether we knew it or not. You can catch its reflection in the mirror if you don't turn round fast enough; the belief that technological progress cures all ills, that progress is always good, and that rational, educated people will come up with the best solutions to problems are all hallmarks of technocracy. I have some sympathy for these views (I wouldn't be writing what I do if I didn't!), but these days only a lunatic would still argue that a panglossian faith in Technology as the Simple Answer to All Human Problems is a reasonable ideology on which to build anything other than a pile of bleached skulls.
Moreover, the vision of technology that was prevalent in the 1920s and 1930s has changed. No more Mme Curie working in her lab: instead, we have CERN and ITER and the other huge enterprises of Big Science. No Frank Whittle tinkering with a prototype jet engine in the back of a semi-disused foundry. No more lone inventors creating revolutions in their toolsheds: the nearest we've gotten to that in twenty years was Google, and even Sergey and Larry's great idea took $1.1 million to get off the ground. The increasing complexity of the modern technosphere means that the low-hanging fruit have been plucked, and the era of the two-fisted lone gunman engineer uber alles is no more credible than any other wish-fulfilment superhero.
The political and ideological concerns that lay at the core of the original SFnal project don't interest the very people they used to appeal to in the 1940s and 1950s, because they're obsolete. And the outward trappings and glitz that were used to sugar-coat the politics have been adopted with glee by the purveyors of mass visual entertainment. Thus, the emperor has been robbed of his suit.
We've arrived in a different future, and central planning doesn't work. Things are fast, chaotic, cheap, and out of control. Ad hoc is the new plan. There's a new cultural strange attractor at work, sucking in the young, smart, deracinated mechanistically-minded readers who used to be the natural prey of the SF movement. It's geek culture. You can find it in the pages of Wired (although it's a pale shadow of what it used to be) and on Boing!Boing! and Slashdot. You can find them playing MMORPGs and hacking their game consoles. These people have different interests from the old generation of SF readers. And unfortunately they don't buy many [fiction] books, because we aren't, for the most part, writing for them.
This isn't to say that they don't read. There is a literary culture that switches on the geeks: it started out as a branch of SF. Yes, I'm talking about cyberpunk. But while cyberpunk was a seven day wonder within the SF field, which subsequently lost interest, the geeks recognized themselves in its magic mirror and made it their own. This is the future they live in, not the future of Star Wars and its imitators, of the futures of Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. And in addition to cyberpunk — the golden age SF taproots of their field — some of us are beginning to address their concerns. Among the quintessentially geek authors, the brightest names are Neal Stephenson and Cory Doctorow and Douglas Coupland and (in his latest incarnation) Bruce Sterling. (I'd like to append my own name to that list, if only to bask in their reflected glory.)
The authors I listed above are not writing SF for your traditional SF readers. They are writing something quite different, even if the forms are similar, because the underlying assumptions about the way the universe works are different. There's no need for the readers to internalize a bizarrely rehashed bundle of strange ideological preconceptions about the role of science and technology in society, which have accreted remorselessly since the 1930s until much modern science fiction is incomprehensible and alienating to the outside world; that's because they are writing fiction that is based in the world-view of the present day. You don't need to study golden age SF and its literary conventions to get Neal Stephenson, because rather than constantly referring back to it, he references (a) the science fictional zeitgeist in popular culture, and (b) the cultural milieu and outlook of WIRED's readership. Which is why he managed to write a 1100 page novel about cryptography with a plot that didn't quite join up in the middle, and it still outsold everything else on the map. He's got your audience, right here, buddy, right here in the palm of his hand. Thanks to generation slashdot.
The audience I'm talking about is today's successor to the traditional SF readers of yore. They're smart, not brilliantly well socialized because their energies have been going elsewhere, and they increasingly self-identify as geeks. We are competing for their attention time with computer games, video, the internet, and fuck-knows-what new bleeding edge media that haven't made it our event horizon of self-absorption yet: anime, manga, machinima, your guess is as good as mine. They don't, yet, have a separate section in the bookstore, but they know what they like to read and they get it from the fringes of the mainstream and the edges of the genre and the core of the slipstream. And their time is coming. If you're a writer and you still want to be in business in something vaguely resembling SF in thirty years time, study them.
Meanwhile, my answer to KKR is: if your market share is collapsing, it seems to me that the thing to do is to stop doing whatever it is that didn't work, and pioneer a new field. Going back to the 1930s doesn't work because the pulp era relied on certain underlying cultural and political assumptions that are at odds with the modern zeitgeist. Going back to the 1950s will work only insofar as it clutches on to the conservative and change-phobic old farts who are nearing retirement age. What we need to do is to go forward to the era of dot-com 3.1415926535 ... (an infinitely receding string of irrational optimism in the procedurally generated but chaotic future) and grab hold of a new audience by the short-and-curlies.
As for me, I am going to ignore my own advice. (As an author I feel absolutely no need to maintain a false facade of consistency! This isn't a literary manifesto and I'm not a politician. So there.) May 2007 is the hundredth anniversary of Robert A. Heinlein's birth. I am therefore going to celebrate the year by writing a Heinlein hommage. Not a Heinlein juvenile, but a late-period Heinlein novel (I like a challenge). And I'm going to try drag it kicking and screaming into the BoingBoing era.
See you in 2008!
(The title of this piece, "Let's put the future behind us", is also the title of Jack Womack's brilliant and vitriolically funny apocalypse geek novel about life in Russia in the 1990s. Buy it, minion!)
Comments
I'd like to begin by questioning whether KKR (whose work as editor and writer alike never impressed me) is even correct. She alleges, "SF came in dead last at 6.4 percent."
But is that so, or is it as truth-deficient as a Bush press release? How much of what sold last year is in actual fact SF, whether ghetto-labeled or no? James Patterson and Nora Roberts are both writing SF, albeit packaged as mysteries; and the list of "prestige" names who do the same continues to grow. Maybe we instead need to be debating whether it is worthwhile to pin the yellow atom-and-rocket to our lapels nowadays?
Posted by: Michael J. "Orange Mike" Lowrey | October 20, 2006 8:05 PM
Before I try to think of a comment on your writing, thanks for the Moorcock link - what a great essay! I'd never read that. It's a brilliant summary and denunciation of the values explicit and implicit in "mainstream" SF.
Posted by: Clifton Royston | October 20, 2006 8:23 PM
Things may be different in the UK, but in the US I find it really odd what's considered SF/F and what's considered general fiction.
At my local library, books like Letham's "Amensia Moon" and "As She Crawled Across the Table" are classified as general fiction, while I clearly see them as Science Fiction. Miéville's books and Suzanna Clark's "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell" are both classified as Fiction as well, compared to Robert Jordan's books which are Fantasy. What gives? It seems that there's a great deal of subjectivity here, someone saying "this book's too good for SciFi, lets make it general Fiction". If that's the case, do sales numbers really mean anything?
Posted by: Andrew G. | October 20, 2006 8:28 PM
Michael, it's worse than her figures suggest, for ghetto-identified work: her figure of 6.4% is for SF and fantasy combined, and fantasy outsells SF 2:1.
Meanwhile, her point was, deconstructed: is Star Wars SF? And a lot of people don't see eye to eye on the answer to that one, any more than they see eye to eye on whether 1984 is SF, or Kafka's Metamorphosis is SF, and so on.
You're right, lots of stuff with science fictional premises are published outside the genre -- but whether you can classify them as part of the SFnal ideological project, with a lineage going back to the 1920s Gernsbackian continuum, is another question entirely.
Posted by: Charlie Stross | October 20, 2006 8:30 PM
"May 2007 is the hundredth anniversary of Robert A. Heinlein's birth. I am therefore going to celebrate the year by writing a Heinlein hommage. Not a Heinlein juvenile, but a late-period Heinlein novel (I like a challenge). And I'm going to try drag it kicking and screaming into the BoingBoing era."
So it will go boing rather than spung?
Posted by: Harry Payne | October 20, 2006 8:35 PM
"I am therefore going to celebrate the year by writing a Heinlein hommage."
I do hope you'll refrain from having your main character shtupp his mother, however. That aspect of later Heinlein is, you know, kind of creepy.
While I of course cheerfully admit to structuring "Old Man's War" in the manner of a Heinlein juvenile, I'm not entirely sure I agree that the appeal of that style is largely for older readers. I have no sales data to back it up, but anecdotally I seem to have as many young(ish) readers as old(ish) readers.
Also, I'm not entirely sure that what worked for Grandad doesn't work for the kids when it comes to music, either: I seem to recall a fairly big swing revival within the last decade, and the 80s had its rockabilly moment via Stray Cats and etc. And then there's the Dresden Dolls and their updated cabaret.
In both the cases of Heinlein and cabaret, I think the issue is not to slavishly recreate what's come before but to use the structure these tropes provide to do something that speaks to a modern audience. Which is, if I grok correctly, what you hope to do with your own Heinlein pastiche.
Posted by: John Scalzi | October 20, 2006 8:48 PM
Too many responses to too many interesting points in Charlie's post come to mind for me to even attempt to handle them in one or two posts. So let me just say 2 things right now:
First, one of the (fewer and fewer, seems like every year) advantages of having been there and done that is that you get to say "Yep, I saw this before, so I don't think I'll step in it this time." We must have these "We're going under, man the lifeboats" firedrills in SF every decade or two. Anyone remember the New Wave? (I bet Michael Moorcock does, he was in the thick of that :-) Some of those arguments (both directions) were more obnoxious than the venom that was spewed out over Cyberpunk. And in every case, that I've seen (I admit I missed the Futurians debacle in the 40's) most of the angst was because one side or the other had narrowed the definition of SF down to something that left a lot of what was being written at the time out.
So the Old Wave was pissed because Chip Delaney worked outside of traditions and used tropes that weren't invented by Gernsback or Campbell; that's precisely why SF survived the 60's and 70's. So the New Wave was pissed because the cyberpunks had dived back into using real technology, even if their world view was sort of noirish. If you don't think they can be fused in one writer (even in one story), you haven't read Michael Swanwick's work. Looked out even half-way objectively, I think the same thing is happening here: if you define SF narrowly enough, yes, it is dying. But writers like Doctorow and Stephenson, et. al., are writing something different precisely because they see the audience there. so some genre, whatever you want to call it, will survive to cater to that audience.
Second point: one of the things I always missed about the Old Wave was how rare humor was. Sure, there were people who wrote occasional funny pieces, many of which were rather ponderous, but there weren't many who had the slightly cockeyed view of the world that leads you to grin everytime God gets in a good one on you. In fact, I can only think of two offhand: Randall Garret and Eric Frank Russell.
Personally, I was sold on Stephenson when I read the first few pages of Snowcrash because he could see the humor of cyberpunk, and could be both serious and humorous about it at the same time. I think if some of the writers who are taking up the cudgels over the fate of SF right now had some of that humor the whole argument might even be worth having.
Side note: Charlie, I've been having trouble all morning keeping a connection to antipope long enough to display a page. Have you been slashdotted?
Posted by: Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers) | October 20, 2006 9:33 PM
John: I do hope you'll refrain from having your main character shtupp his mother, however. That aspect of later Heinlein is, you know, kind of creepy. Yeah, that's exactly why late-period Heinlein needs re-writing. Not in a mood of Bowdlerisation, but in exactly what you go on to note -- because the older Heinlein, despite the weird icky fetishes and the barking political rants and the self-indulgent shit was nevertheless a more interesting writer than his younger self, and did stuff that would have had really humongous merit, if it had got the editing his earlier self received.
(If I say I'm thinking of playing with the toy-box he developed in "Friday", would that surprise you?)
Posted by: Charlie Stross | October 20, 2006 9:36 PM
Bruce: seems to be a sick router at my colo host. Watch the skies.
Incidentally, I used to get "Cheap Truth" in the mail, back in the early-to-mid eighties; I remember the whole Cyberpunk thing first hand and grew up in the messy echo chamber left over from the New Wave, so this isn't news to me (more like third time round the block). That's why I said, up front, "this is not a manifesto". I'm not recruiting for a movement, I won't join one, and I certainly won't be conscripted to lead one. Movements by their very nature are exclusionary and I don't want to Do That ...
Posted by: Charlie Stross | October 20, 2006 9:43 PM
Charlie Stross:
"(If I say I'm thinking of playing with the toy-box he developed in "Friday", would that surprise you?)"
Nope. And good for you. Friday was always my favorite of the late-era stuff.
Posted by: John Scalzi | October 20, 2006 9:51 PM
"And I'm going to try drag it kicking and screaming into the BoingBoing era."
Heh. I devoured Gibson's sprawl trilogy, Stephenson's Snow Crash, and about a dozen other classics in the cyberpunk subgenre. I'm sorry to see where that literary movement ultimately went. (Some of the newer writers haven't grabbed me.)
The only Heinlein novel I ever finished was The Number Of The Beast. Couldn't stand his earlier works, and I confess most of his later stuff was just didn't quite get over the top, but I remember liking NotB. You manage to do an homage to that kind of writing and drag it "kicking and screaming" into the cybersf age, and I'll be very interested to see how well the market responds to it. I think you might break some ground there.
Or not. At least... it can't hurt.
Posted by: j h woodyatt | October 20, 2006 10:30 PM
Posted by: Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers) | October 20, 2006 10:35 PM
I started to read "Starship Stormtroopers" that was linked in the original post on this thread, and was irresistibly reminded of
Howard Zinn and Naom Chomsky review the "Lord of the Rings" movies.
It's worth a giggle or two no matter what you think of Chomsky's politics (or his linguistics, for that matter).
Posted by: Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers) | October 20, 2006 10:50 PM
Charlie wrote:
"If your market share is collapsing, it seems to me that the thing to do is to stop doing whatever it is that didn't work, and pioneer a new field."
I have a suggestion. Stop using the "SF" label altogether. Margaret Atwood had the right idea. (*Gasps of shock and outrage in the audience*)
See, the only way to get out of a shrinking ghetto is to GET OUT OF THE FREAKING GHETTO. Or burn it down. Keep writing what you want to write, about aliens, time-travel, all that jazz, but just... ignore the label. It's not your "identity".
Call it "Speculative Literature" or the Russian "Fantastika", just don't use... That Word. It's obsolete.
We have spent too much time building walls around a ghetto. Tear down that wall! Start writing speculative literature. Write Fantastika. Write about intelligent robots, mutants, alien planets, the future, alternate futures... whatever.
As long as it's not "SF".
Kill "Science Fiction."
Posted by: A.R.Yngve | October 20, 2006 11:34 PM
Well, as an older reader... I don't think it even works for older readers.
If I want something new, I want something new. OTOH, I find myself dismayed at how often I'll go back to read an old favorite...and find I no longer like it. I'd been attributing this to getting older, but it may be more basic. Lsat time I tried to read the Skylark of Valeron I just STOPPED half way through. I couldn't make myself read his version of the trip through the 4th dimension. (That was never my favorite part, but never before had it bothered me too much to finish the book. This time I couldn't even just skip that section.) It's been 10 years since I read the lensman series. "The Mightest Machine" and "The Incredible Planet" (John W. Campbell, Jr.) have held up better that that, though I used to think them much inferior.
It's been a over decade since I've read "When World Collide"/"After Worlds Collide". That was the first time I noticed how shallow and racist it was. The adventure was still there, but the plot kept falling apart.
Heinlein has held up better, but it's been a long time since I read most of his work, also. (Well, truthfully there were several I never did like, e.g. Friday.)
So either I have changed drastically, or I'm reflecting my environment. I think (hope) you're right.
OTOH, I remember several periods before when SF went through a doldrums or a pessimistic phase. The same dreams may recover...or some of them. Still "The future isn't what it used to be".
Posted by: Charles Hixson | October 20, 2006 11:57 PM
ARY: The trouble is, genre isn't a self-adopted badge of pride; it's a marketing description. If you stop calling it SF/F, it won't stop Borders and similar from calling it SF/F -- it'll simply confuse your readers.
Posted by: Charlie Stross | October 21, 2006 12:38 AM
Just remembered what this discussion - and the linked discussion on Paul McAuley and Ian McDonald's blogs- was reminding me of. I now have had an overpowering urge to reread my battered and disintegrating ccpy of Harry Harrison's Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers. That was simply the best ever send-up of both the silly tropes and the fascism and racism of the "old school" SF. "The accumulators are crackling with barely restrained power, Chuck!"
Unfortunately (fortunately) my copy of Glasshouse just arrived, whee!
Posted by: Clifton Royston | October 21, 2006 3:32 AM
Charlie writes: "The trouble is, genre isn't a self-adopted badge of pride; it's a marketing description."
Yes, and the fucklefest over defining SF/F as a genre has always been an intellectual cyclone-in-a-blackbox, mostly interesting to academics and the circus geeks who love them. The business end of this discussion is where you ought to focus your attention.
As a marketing category, SF/F just sucks. The booksellers make their SF/F customers slog all the way to the back of the store, where the racks are farthest away from the information desk and the cash registers. The shelves get the least attention of any section in the store, so the product is haphazardly sorted, there's fifteen copies of the latest Forgotten Realms title, with its N+1 authors named on the spine, and you can just forget about finding the latest Prometheus Award winner in hardcover.
You know of what this reminds me? What it was like to be heavily invested in Mac OS computers before Apple had its own retail stores. (Now, I happen to be employed by Apple Computer, and I'd rather not sound like advertisement, but you have to admit: the retail buying experience for Apple customers sucked before they opened their own retail stores, and it's substantially better now.) I mention this, because I strongly believe the cure for lousy retail visibility for the SF/F category is not to be found by making the product less differentiable from the stuff in the rest of the store. It's to open nice, clean, well-lighted stores that specialize in it.
Like Borderlands Books, for example. In San Francisco, traditional retail booksellers aren't growing at nearly the rate of their specialized competition. All the successful stores in my neighborhood have some kind of special focus.
Until most of your readers have a reasonably convenient way to avoid the indignity of browsing for books in the SF/F ghetto at Borders by going a few extra minutes out of their way to a store that specializes in SF/F, there's going to be a limit on how much market share growth you can reasonably expect to see. You can write the most mind-blowingly cool literary experience ever, but if your readers have to skip past all the tables up front next to the cash registers with all their hard covers face up and go hunting for it in the back with their head tilted over ninety degrees just to find a mass market paperback, then your share of the market is going to continue to suck wind.
Of course, I don't expect authors, or even publishers, to be able to do much about the retail visibility of SF/F books. That's why I, personally, have limited patience for the ongoing pissing match over defining the genre. We benighted hillbillies out here in the literary weeds can't really do much of anything about the poor treatment of the SF/F marketing category— because it isn't our job. The things we can do, which amount to building yet more walls around our particular wing of the genre studies department, are pretty pointless by pragmatic standards.
I suppose if you really wanted to help make a difference, you'd try to form an alliance of independent SF/F book retailers and start building a brand for it. Who would have an incentive to do that? It would be hard work, wrangling all those independent book sellers (unnaturally weird people, it should be noted), getting them all to sing out of the same hymnal, hooking up their online presence through a professionally engineered web portal, blah blah blah.
Don't look at me. I'm not going to do it.
Posted by: j h woodyatt | October 21, 2006 4:54 AM
Hi, this is my first time posting. I'm a big fan of Mr. Stross. I read Accelerando online, then bought it as well as Iron Sunrise. Just FYI, I am in the 18-25 demographic. I read Slashdot and have 2 Linux computers sitting beside my workstation/gaming box that runs a pirated WinXP. I write software and play computer games and probably won't gainsay someone who labels me a "geek". And yes, I purchase and enjoy the SF-genre works of Mr. Stross. Forward this to your publisher's marketing dept. ;)
On the topic of this delicious blog post specifically, I may be missing the point, but do most good authors really *choose* their genre or niche? Can they really engineer their works for a specific demographic? I mean, its art. I understand things change somewhat once you write novels professionally and for a living, but is creative output really that much of a malleable commodity to most writers?
Also, one problem from where I'm sitting (in Canada) is that the American market (a large population of consumers with disposable income) is currently reputed to be at war with Science (and Thinking in general). The current social atmosphere discourages intellectual pursuits; hence the proliferating bodice-ripper market and the "withering" of SF.
Lastly, to Charlie: Thanks for sharing your work with the world. It has expanded my mind, and for that I sincerely thank you.
Posted by: Frenetic | October 21, 2006 9:45 AM
Confusing the old readership? Yes. Absolutely.
But if it's shrinking anyway (Note to self: the surest thing about old readers is that they're not getting any younger), then it's a NEW readership that should be focused on. So a measure of confusion is practically inevitable, if you're going to have change.
Frenetic made two good points.
1. "Do most good authors really *choose* their genre or niche?"
- There's no straightforward answer to that, but I think most writers start writing in their favorite genre. The choice of genre is determined by an early passion, rather than a business calculation.
(When I picked up my first book from the SF shelf in the local library, I wasn't thinking "One day, this could become a lucrative occupation" -- more like "Wow, spaceships and aliens and women in skintight clothing!")
2. "The current social atmosphere discourages intellectual pursuits; hence the proliferating bodice-ripper market and the 'withering' of SF."
- On the other hand: here we are having an intellectually stimulating debate (in realtime) between people on different sides of the Atlantic -- definitely a positive social atmosphere.
Maybe part of the problem is this: We won. The world is now a science-fiction scenario (or rather an incoherent mix of various SF tropes and themes). "Science Fiction" isn't so futuristic anymore, hence it has lost much of its promise and glamor.
Thought experiment: imagine that there was a literary genre that focused on one theme: manned expeditions to the Moon. For hundreds of years, the Lunar Fiction genre produced nothing but stories about this futuristic dream.
Then, in 1969, reality caught up. What were the Lunar Fiction writers to do now? They could still call themselves "Lunar Fiction" writers, but the term would carry too much baggage and seem antiquated. Or they could discard the term.
Posted by: A.R.Yngve | October 21, 2006 10:16 AM
The trouble is that the American market is where the money is.
Points that caught my eye: the misleading use of the SF label in book marketing. It fits with Frenetic's point; Nora Roberts writes hi-tech crime thrillers with a dash or eroticism (under the name J.D. Robb, if anyone didn't know), and they're not that icky science stuff. But, except for the eroticism, I could see them in the sci-fi pulps. They're adventures.
Charlie's latest, "Halting State", has the same mix of hi-tech crime and policing, with more thought given to what effects the tech has. It's even got some of the elements of genre romance: the guy and the girl, thrown together by circumstances, misunderstanding each other, and yet finishing with a climactic realisation of True Love.
(Pauses for Charlies to pick himself up from the floor.)
Of course, Jack isn't ultra-studly, and the book doesn't have the standard sex-scene I am told is a part of the Modern Romance. And has been part of thrillers for decades.
So, which genre will that book's sales be allocated to?
Posted by: Dave Bell | October 21, 2006 10:52 AM
I target the US market because, as the bank robber said (when they asked him why he kept robbing banks), "that's where the money is".
Now to get to Frenetic's question ... yes, you can decide which genre to work within the constraints of. Broadly: if it's got wizards and dragons it's fantasy, if it's got space ships and talking squids it's SF, if it's got a detective and a murder it's crime, and so on. (Romance can bracket all of the above tropes, as long as it's also got "... and they lived Happily Ever After" as it's primary obsession. Horror can bracket all of the above tropes, as long as it's also got a sense of dread. And so on.)
Once you're selling books in one of these areas it's hard to do something very different because your readers expect more of the same; if you drive off the beaten track you'll confuse them (this is common knowledge among publishing folk) and therefore authors are encouraged not to spread themselves around too much.
As for targeting the slashdot generation ... if I say "fork bomb", it will mean one thing to you, and something very different to a 1950s vintage traditional SF reader who doesn't have a computer. So yes, I'm writing fiction that relies on a common culture that is shared by the computer-literate generation but not by the generation that were born with propeller driven aircraft and lived to see manned spaceflight. (And whose yardstick for measuring progress was therefore very different to ours.)
Posted by: Charlie Stross | October 21, 2006 11:24 AM
Or take Michael Crichton, for that matter. Does he NEED the SF label?
Crichton is one of the most commercially successful writers ever. His name has become synonymous with hit movies (WESTWORLD, JURASSIC PARK, etc.). He consistently uses concepts like cloning dinosaurs, robots, nanomachines and other such familiar tropes.
His books are not marketed to the "SF market". And never, not once, have his sales suffered. His vast readership has never complained that the lack of a "genre label" is confusing them.
Crichton must be doing something right. Invite him to the label ghetto if you want, but... he will probably decline.
Am I getting through? Our readership is shrinking because we are working too hard to shut out new readers. The problem is not the ideas in the books. They are NOT "too demanding" for a wide readership, not amymore. That's just self-congratulation.
A paradigm shift is needed.
Posted by: A.R.Yngve | October 21, 2006 11:29 AM
I read this very interesting and insightful post with delight. I am myself a huge fan of this "new geeky SF" movement (esp. Neal Stephenson, Cory Doctorow, and the present author's Accelerando). I was (and still am) a great fan of cyberpunk, and got introduced to science-fiction with Neuromancer, which to me remains a must only recently challenged by the incredible Accelerando.
I guess I'm the prototype of the "young geek reader" described in this blog post (early 20's, CS student, slashdot reader), and I really identify with what was said here. However what the point I wanted to raise is that I often feel quite alone, being a french-speaking SF fan. I know many science-fiction readers and writers, most of whom usually only read french translations of novels. AFAIK, most of the "geeky SF" discussed here remains untranslated as of now (apart from Neal Stephenson). Going to the Utopiales convention in Nantes in two weeks ; Cory Doctorow will be there, but I bet most of the participants (*including* the scene of contemporary french writers) won't have a clue about his works.
As an amateur writer (in french), I am also left wondering whether geeky stuff isn't too marginal for people who have not yet been exposed to that new facette of SF and who probably don't know about Slashdot, BoingBoing, Wired, SecondLife and the likes...
So I have a few questions here:
(1) Charlie, are there Accelerando translations to french or other languages in the works (assuming it's even doable and someone dares to commit to the task) ? I will ask Cory about his own novels..
(2) Has a sexy buzzword been coined for the new evolution of "geeky SF" ?
(3) Is the young, "slashdot geek" audience really broad enough to support this trend (I am still wondering how older, long-time science-fiction readers react to a work like Accelerando) ?
Anyway, thanks to Charles Stross for taking time to sharing his insights in this blog and writing such mind-blowing novels!
Posted by: theefer | October 21, 2006 11:44 AM
Hmm late Heinlein?
Lots of incest?
Self-referencing smugness?
Or (and?) lots of questions as to why peolpe BELIVE rather than think?
The famous "Lazarus Long" quote on "What are the facts, and to how many decimal places"?
Could be very interesting.
A lot more so than the "merchants" stuff, anyway ......
Posted by: G. Tingey | October 21, 2006 12:32 PM
theefer: "Accelerando" is currently doing the rounds of French publishers right now, and hopefully a translation will show up in a year or so. Meanwhile, you might enjoy "Le Bureau des Atrocites", and the forthcoming sequel (they haven't told me what they're going to translate the title "The Jennifer Morgue" into yet). I'm being translated into French; it's just the translations run a couple of years behind the English language originals.
G. Tingey: buried within the bloated and self-referencingly smug carcass of almost every late-period Heinlein novel you can find a classic of the field screaming to get out. He lost the economy of prose and efficiency of visualisation that characterised his early work, but he wasn't a simple writer, and his ideas weren't all simple (or dumbed-down) either.
(I'm not going to comment on my Merchant Princes books other than to note that in #4 the hard-SF underpinnings begin to show through the costume drama ...)
Posted by: Charlie Stross | October 21, 2006 1:29 PM
Here's a kinda sorta response to this, Charlie.
Posted by: gabe chouinard | October 21, 2006 2:42 PM
Theefer,
I an a 63 year old lifelong SF reader and I loved Accelerando. Still dwell on parts of it months after the first reading. It seems to me that modern SF that includes developments in sciene seems to be too much work for many modern readers, young or old. I have loaned books to friends who were avowed SF readers only to have them returned unfinished with the comment "I just couldn't understand what was going on."
Posted by: Stargeezer | October 21, 2006 5:48 PM
Gabe, thanks for quoting me out of context in such a way that it makes me look as if I'm issuing a manifesto.
Really. (Shakes head in irritation.)
Posted by: Charlie Stross | October 21, 2006 5:58 PM
Hey Charlie, I just sent you an email hoping to clear up the confusion here, but I think I'm getting an idea of what you're talking about.
Apparently wires are crossing at all points here, because I didn't approach your post as any kind of "manifesto". To wit, there is a lot you say that I agree with, as I said several times in my post.
What I take issue with is that the thrust of your post isn't inclusive enough for me. Taking an exclusionary stance by deriding anything *but* 'pioneer[ing] a new field' is just downright silly, like saying I can only eat oranges if I want fruit. To hell with that, sometimes I want a mango!
What, exactly, is so wrong with pulp attitude SF?
Posted by: gabe | October 21, 2006 6:22 PM
Although he was a bank robber, [Willie] Sutton had the reputation of a gentleman; in fact, ... Sutton simply replied, "Because that's where the money is." ...
http://www.fbi.gov/libref/historic/famcases/sutton/sutton.htm
Mr. Stross is likewise a gentleman, with a more nuanced yet pragmatic take on Capitalism.
This is a fascinating thread, as are many of the comments.
I cannot tell if Kristine Kathryn Rusch believed her manifesto, or was being provocative in a useful way.
The statement that "SF and fantasy literature accounts for a declining proportion of fiction sales" is probably true, based on figure that I see for the North American market. But probably false for Japan and China, among other important markets. Indeed, Romance more than takes up the NA slack, as I have examined more comprehensibly in
http://www.magicdragon.com/RO-authors.html
I do remember the 1960s, and the 1950s, for that matter. My understanding on Science Fiction is deeply influenced by this, as well as by my Science Fiction book editor father, who had a professional connection with Hugo Gernsback and remembered the 1920s.
To a first order, I accept the Strossian claim that "the future is now" -- albeit unequally distributed. I agree that this affects the role and marketing and raison d'etre of Science Fiction.
I consider it important that "we have the erudite literati" in that the purpose of radicals is to move the center of the mainstream. I think much of the arguments in the commens deal with, sometimes at cross purposes, what are at the fringes and what is at the (moving) center.
I strongly agree with the Strossian: "we're competing in the special effects stakes with TV, film, and increasingly, computer games." Yes, but it is a chaotic combination of competition AND cooperation, typical of market forces in a robust early to mid-aged industry [Mathematical Economics references omitted to avoid obscure tangents].
Axiom 1: "we read fiction for pleasure, not to be clubbed over the head with a fistful of insights." True, but Science Fiction has a significant didactic component, as Stross agrees in: "the fictional agitprop arm of the Technocrat movement." This may have been more extreme in the deep past (i.e. Gernsback's proselytizing for home-brew electricity and radio hacking), Asimov (preaching Science and rational suasion and Secular Humanism), Heinlein (in his juveniles, explicitly and successfully trying to propagandize the generation who would build the actual space program), and recent examples such as Crichton preaching the Frankenstein gambit and influencing the anti-Science White House, or Singularity authors either pushing towards or away from what the utopianate or dystopianate. Religion is the utopianate of the people.
Axiom 2 (hard to keep track of the count): "fast, chaotic, cheap, and out of control." Yes, as applied to robotics, spacecraft, and many things netcenteric. But that would seem to apply more to fanfic than to books and magazines. And to blog disucssions such as this.
Axiom 3: "There is a literary culture that switches on the geeks: it started out as a branch of SF." Yes, and may be found in allegedly mainstream and award-winning authors, and in the The Yorker, perhaps more than near the core of Science Fiction. That itself confuses the foundational and definitional issues, which Chip Delany postmodernistically (in NYRoSF) argued were an irrelevent waste of time.
Lost count completely. But, yes indeedy. Spider Robinson and John Scalzi (I LOVED "Old Man's War", and so did my web-centric 18-year-old son). Mary Turzillo also wrote a good neo-Heinlein juvenile in Analog. John Varley does so brilliantly, but with an updating of reference frames. Jay Lake does an even more subtle transmogrified webulated ironic neo-Heinlein juvenile.
Finally, I agree with the Strossian insistence that late Heinlein is "more interesting."
See also the discussion about readable/unreadable SF at
http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2006/10/the_cranky_book_meme.php
"With the Heinlein Centenary celebrations scheduled for July 7, 2007, more and more stories about sf writer Robert A. Heinlein will start to surface."
http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/16663.html
The Stross neo-late-Heinlein will probably be a controversial and exciting and contradictory and popular novel. I await it with tremendous excitement.
Posted by: Jonathan Vos Post | October 21, 2006 6:35 PM
Wires crossed over authorship of that bit in the Vector blog ...
Sure, geeks aren't the sole future of the SF readership: I could equally well make a case for romance readers as being the future of the SF readership. (Certainly there are many more novels with SF plot trappings being sold as genre romance than those of us outside the romance genre generally recognize!) But I stand by my prediction of a serious short-fall in new 1930s (or even 1950s) readers coming down the pipeline, by and by. And if we want to stay in business, we need to identify new sectors. (As it happens, the geek sector is my subculture, so I'm naturally going to pander to them. But it doesn't follow that they're the only entree on the menu.)
As for the diminishing corner of the popular mentality that we occupy ...
I reckon that the viewers of a single episode of a daytime soap opera in the UK outnumber all my readers, of all my books, in all editions and languages -- possibly by as much as an entire order of magnitude. Let's keep this in perspective.
Posted by: Charlie Stross | October 21, 2006 7:15 PM
I'm with Yngwie. Your first priority is to write well. Your second priority is boost sales of your books. Your distant last priority is to boost sales of Genre X. Especially if you are thinking in terms of refloating SF rather than replacing it with something better. If the books are good they'll make their own genre, assuming that you need one. 70 per cent of current SF is dated space opera wankology, a delivery system for the kind of cover art that makes me embarrassed to read the book in public and the kind of sick onwards'n'upwards cowboy bullshit/Spengler-on-the-Seelow-Heights western elite declinism that Moorcock essay laser-kebabs so viciously.
Creative destruction, baby. Joseph Schumpeter, Presente!
Posted by: Alex | October 21, 2006 7:28 PM
And if we want to stay in business, we need to identify new sectors.
Now THAT is a credo I can totally get behind.
Posted by: gabe | October 21, 2006 7:28 PM
theefer asks: "Has a sexy buzzword been coined for the new evolution of "geeky SF" ?"
We have buzzwords coming out of our wazoos— it's a defining characteristic of the subgenre. I suggest "hashbang" here, but I'll probably have another one tomorrow. (NB, Charlie: I make a point of saying you're not in the manifesto business.)
Posted by: j h woodyatt | October 21, 2006 7:31 PM
I cannot tell if Kristine Kathryn Rusch believed her manifesto, or was being provocative in a useful way.
KKR wasn't writing a manifesto; her original context was a book of critical essays on the topic of the role of Star Wars in genre SF, and she chose to put the case for the defense, of Star Wars as being integral to the health of the genre.
I wish we could make accusing someone else of issuing a literary manifesto an arrestable offense. We could probably cure world poverty with the fines we'd raise ...
Posted by: Charlie Stross | October 21, 2006 8:32 PM
Conversely, we could have a designated ManifestoMaker whose only role is to create manifestos for nonexistent movements.
Having done so once, I refuse to be that person.
But maybe someone else will volunteer.
Posted by: gabe | October 21, 2006 8:48 PM
Sincere apologies hereby manifested to both Charles Stross and Kristine Kathryn Rusch. In lieu of fines, I hereby surrender one clone and one avatar to the carbonite freezing chamber. I was once hired by an opera company to write a manifesto for 21st Century Opera, which I did, but that's another aria.
Posted by: Jonathan Vos Post | October 21, 2006 9:26 PM
Warning: Inadequately caffeinated ramblings follow:
That table Gabe linked to on US book production... if it's vaguely accurate, then KKR's notheestimated 6.4% would be about 1800 titles F & SF combined out of 28,010 titles (2004). Assuming your estimated 2:1 F:SF proportion (might be a little low on the Fantasy side?) that would be about 600 SF titles hitting the market in 2004. To me, that's a huge number, if I think about trying to read it all. (To you writers it may seem like too little room - how will I ever make a living at this?!)
If 1800 F & SF titles had been published in 1993 (when 7,721 fiction titles were allegedly published) that would have made 23%, nearly a full quarter of the US fiction in print, with 8% going to SF. I could now extrapolate backwards in time a la Mark Twain, and conclude that in the '70s (for which I had no data) enough F & SF titles were published to consist of more than 3 times all the fiction published each year. (Perhaps they were all published in alternate universes, the barriers between them being weaker in the '70s due to widespread use of psychedelics.)
I think I'll speculate, instead, that my foregoing reasoning might be faulty, that the total SF books published were smaller in previous years, and that the SF niche is still growing, though much more slowly than the general market. If this is the case, I think some of the usual genre-centric brow- and breast-beating is a wee bit misplaced. (Much like my own periodic bursts of angst about why I didn't get rich in the Big Internet Boom.)
Now when it comes to which way Charlie takes his own writing, that's a completely separate question - I heartily applaud writing more stuff that appeals to me and my kind of person. I first found out you were now writing SF via the geekiest and most frighteningly intelligent mailing list I'm on (a lot of email admins and antispam people) where they were raving about your books and talking about the Grubor/Boursy in-joke in Singularity Sky. When you did the BOFH + Lovecraft fusion of The Atrocity Archive stories I was fully sold; Accelerando had me going around waving it at all the geeks I knew (especially thanks to the free download I could point them to.)
Whew! Excuse me, sorry for the fannish outburst there, but my point is that it seems to me that in writing what you want you are reaching the people you want to, whether or not the NYT buys into it.
Posted by: Clifton Royston | October 21, 2006 9:48 PM
Damn.
Nice essay, Charlie.
Now I'll read the comments.
Posted by: guthrie | October 21, 2006 11:47 PM
Well, first, if you look at the demographics, our audience IS largely confined to whitebread Euro-Americans (and other types of Americans).
In fact, it's largely confined to Americans full stop, with some minor outliers in Britain and the Antipodes.
SF in other languages is a hobby, not a business. Anglophones don't read much fiction, per-capita, but there are so bloody many of them that they dominate quite handily even so. Rapid population growth in the US -- it's the only developed country whose population is steadily growing at 1% a year -- means that this will _remain_ the main SF market, too, for the rest of our lives.
Posted by: S.M. Stirling | October 22, 2006 1:44 AM
Howe and Strauss "Generations:The History of America's Future" argued that we have a four generation cycle. So we shoud be writing fiction of our great grandparents time. Discuss.
Posted by: wkwillis | October 22, 2006 1:53 AM
Whenever politics comes up, Moorcock's ability to discuss books rationally vapor-locks, dies the death and goes face down in the rice pilau with an audible _splat_.
In the link Charlie gave he's actually, seriously trying to argue that SF written by people whose politics he disagrees with is somehow _bad_ SF -- not just morally but in literary quality. And that the writers are bad people whose writings are pernicious.
Didn't this sort of Stalinist nonsense go out with Auden and the 30's? Christ, the man should wash his mind out with some Orwell.
Tolkien was a reactionary Tory romantic. His works are classics which will probably live as long as the English language. Moorcock is a lefty anarchist. His early fantasies are also good.
So knock-knock Michael M! Political orientation has ABSOLUTELY NO EFFECT on literary quality!
Posted by: S.M. Stirling | October 22, 2006 2:42 AM
SF has never been a very big share of the fiction market; never as large as Westerns used to be, for example.
If you look at what _is_ selling, you'll find that ringing changes on the technothriller -- by bringing in something like time-travel -- seems to be attractive. John Birmingham has had some very encouraging results.
Alternate history sells very well; my sales have been heading steadily up and I just broke into the NYT list (admittedly the extended version) with the latest.
I also used things which are attractive (serendipity strikes) to the New Age market in that series.
Folks, the NA types are _numerous_ and they buy a _lot_ of books. The number of neo-Pagans in the US went from a few thousands in 1970 to over a _million_ in 2006, with a less committed penumbra of something like ten million, and they're still growing by 50% per decade or more.
And as I said, they read compulsively -- five to ten times as much per-capita as the general population.
Posted by: S.M. Stirling | October 22, 2006 3:10 AM
SF is a form of adventure literature; it's the Tale of the Wondrous Far-Off Place, like pirate stories or chivalric romance or the Western.
It's a form of the adventure story adapted to the period after the scientific and technological revolutions in Western Civ.
The "Tale of the Far-Off and Strange" type of story has timeless basics; it just has to be reinvented periodically. (Our culture's predominant form of it could also be called "The Romance of Western Expansion".)
And it's actually a fairly significant type of literature, apart from giving a lot of pleasure. We live in the physical world, but we also live in history and in our shared fantasies.
Before something can be done, it must be dreamed.
Take this example: read Bernal Diaz del Castillo, the conquistador who was with Cortez and later wrote a chronicle of the expedition to Mexico.
As Cortez and his little band of ruffians in rusty armor came toting their Toledo swords and arquebuses over the mountain passes and looked down into the vale of Anahuac, with its huge teeming cities bigger than any in Spain and gigantic blood-stained pyramids and skull racks and glittering palaces and tapestries of hummingbird-feathers...
... they exclaimed to each other "This is just like something out of _Amadis of Gaul_!"
In other words, they were demented fanboy geeks who'd been raised on their era's equivalent of heroic fantasy.
They were living out a real-time live-action D&D game or an SCA tournament; that was the script in their heads, the valiant knight who overcomes evil infidel enchanters and wins the kingdom and the princess. They came looking for Morgan le Fay, as well as 'to serve God and the King, and to get rich'.
And of course this fed back into the literature of adventure in turn. The fight scene in one of R.E. Howard's best stories -- "The Phoenix on the Sword" -- is taken almost word for word from the best account of the death of Pizarro, right down to the fatal wound caused by lack of time to lace up the side-plates of the armor.
Except that Pizarro was 66 when he killed 3 men half his age in hand-to-hand combat. They made 'em tough in those days!
Posted by: S.M. Stirling | October 22, 2006 3:33 AM
An example: I'm currently doing a Planetary Romance series, recast as alternate history. Mars and Venus were terraformed back in the Jurassic by absent aliens or possibly their AI's, who periodically seed them with species from Earth; we discover this in the 1950's(*); we go there.(**)
THE SKY PEOPLE, (out next month -- buy! buy!), the first one, has Venus -- hot jungles and savannahs, dinosaurs, sabertooths, cave princesses menaced by Neanderthals, and a tiny little base (New Jamestown), plus hidden relics of alien super-science.
The second, IN THE HALLS OF THE CRIMSON KINGS, does Mars -- a slowly dying world with decadent survivors of a high civilization living amid unthinkably ancient ruins, swords, sand-yachts, needle-guns, airships.
Sure, this will appeal to people who've read the field... but there's no reason it won't appeal, I think, to people in their own Golden Age (adolescents of all chronological periods). After all, they like "Pirates of the Caribbean", too, even if they've never heard of Farnol or Sabatini.
What's not to like? The writing is, I hope, way better than the pulp average (tho' you'd have to be very good indeed to be better than say Sabatini), and the approach to character and incident is more modern, but that's just the periodic reinvention that the overall genre has to go through.
(*) which is when we'd really have found out, tho' there would have been ambiguous hints in the 20's and 30's.
(**) but everything after the premise done straight -- real science using our physics for the interplanetary travel, etc. Why should the old Big Bull Gorillas get all the interesting settings?
Posted by: S.M. Stirling | October 22, 2006 3:45 AM
Mr. Stirling, it seems to me you are either attacking a straw man or have seriously misread the Moorcock essay, and should re-read it. At no point does Moorcock say Tolkein writes badly; like many before and after him, he criticizes the implicit values of the LotR - the faithful forelock-tugging gardener, etc. If you believe that literature does not implicitly communicate some set of values - even when it is not explicitly preaching values - I think you are seriously mistaken. It does not follow that all literature whose values disagree with ones own is worthless, nor does Moorcock say that; I suspect you appreciate Orwell's writing even though he was an avowed socialist and you avowed against socialism.
Posted by: Clifton Royston | October 22, 2006 4:51 AM
My comments?
I have just read that 3 of my favorite authors will continue to write incredible, interesting, and entertaining books.
I don't care if anyone else reads SF. I will continue to read you guys until the day I die. Reading SF and fantasy has enriched my life beyond words. If I may say so, I would rather be dead if it did not exist.
I love all you guys.
Thank you for putting in the blood, sweat and tears it takes to write well.
Posted by: fracskul | October 22, 2006 6:36 AM
I was going to post a nasty reply to S.M. Stirling here, but my "mature" side kicked in, and I deleted it.
Suffice to say, by the volume of text he's written here in a two hour period, it's easy to see how he can churn out the quantity of titles he currently has in print.
To our host, I'd like to say that I just finished The Atrocity Archives in two nights of before-bedtime reading and I loved it. I pre-ordered The Jennifer Morgue on amazon.ca just this evening.
I am currently into the third chapter of Accelerondo, and I haven't been this excited by anything I've read in SF (or whatever we're going to brand it!) since Ribofunk [Paul Di Filippo] and The Diamond Age [Neal Stephenson] (and Snow Crash before that, and Schismatrix [Bruce Sterling, one of my most re-read books!] before that, and Count Zero and Burning Chrome and Neuromancer [all William Gibson, of course] before that...)
I am so into Accelerando that I went back to the store where I bought the other two books to pick up Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise so I can just keep reading Stross for the rest of my vacation...
thank you!
Posted by: bud | October 22, 2006 9:51 AM
Just remember: it's about writing and reading stories, not upholding the walls of a rigidly defined ghetto.
I think Charles Stross, writer, is going to do just fine.
Posted by: A.R.Yngve | October 22, 2006 11:37 AM
SMS: Well, first, if you look at the demographics, our audience IS largely confined to whitebread Euro-Americans (and other types of Americans). In fact, it's largely confined to Americans full stop, with some minor outliers in Britain and the Antipodes. SF in other languages is a hobby, not a business.
My royalty statements call bullshit on that :)
Seriously, I get bigger book advances per capita in France than in the UK, and bigger book advances per capita in the UK than in the US. My advances for non-English speaking countries, combined, for SINGULARITY SKY, are closing in on the size of the original US advance for the book. (It takes time to sell and I'm still opening new markets, which is why I don't have a definitive figure.) Now you may argue that this is proof of your point -- if the rest of the world was a market for SF on the same scale as the US, then the non-US advances should be fifteen times the size of the US advances -- but I'd like to point out that (a) selling into a non-English market entails the additional cost of a translation, and a decent translator costs near-as-dammit as much as an author per unit time spent on the job, and (b) genre SF is substantially an invention of the anglosphere because of [see long discursive political ramble about the effects of technocracy on the origin of golden age SF as agitprop fiction].
Nope. The non-US markets are my bread and butter, and I can't afford to ignore them.
The neo-pagan market thing is interesting. Now that you point to it, it makes a lot of sense: I've never seen a new age shop that didn't have bookstands coming out of the eaves, and they're not selling the usual stuff. Hmm.
Bud: planetary romance is one of the poles of our genre, predating the ideological trappings of the whole Gernsbackian project and, as SMS points out, harking back to stuff that goes all the way back to antiquity. Remember that adventure fiction outsells SF/F by about four to one! Again, another field some of us can usefully plough is the readership who want, well, entertaining adventure stories. And before you turn your nose up at that, just ask yourself how long the Illiad and the Odyssey have been in print ...
Posted by: Charlie Stross | October 22, 2006 1:11 PM
This debate is a subtype of what appears to be a major theme of the times - It's All New And Only I Know What to Do vs People Don't Change, The Stuff Does. (See the so-called "Technocrats vs Warriors" debate in the US defence establishment)
Upthread, Charlie remarked that the founding myth of SF, the lone inventor, had long been obsolete because of the growth of the capital requirements for basic scientific discovery. I disagree. If there's a key to the geek culture, it's that the barriers to entry are falling for a whole range of things. Cheap general purpose electronics and bandwidth mean that value migrates to software and applications. Cheap access to knowledge means large epistemic communities. Invention is being redemocratised. (If this is the BoingBoing era, MAKEzine is its cutting edge.) The next wave of basic innovation, which remains capital intensive, seems to be heading for three things quite quickly - distributed energy generation (cheap solar power, ultracapacitor/fancy battery storage), rapid prototyping, and changes to biotech analogous to the changes in IT in the last 20 years. You can buy a used DNA synthesiser for $1,000.
For most things, basic research will get ever more capital heavy, but technological development progressively less so. In a sense, technology - and more fundamentally, writing - are ways of transferring evolution from the physical layer to the memetic layer, thus accelerating it. The stuff changes faster than we do. How will characters similar enough to those in the Iliad, or the Epic of Gilgamesh, that they can commonly identify with them, behave in a world of highly distributed and ephemerised technology?
Frank Whittle needed a major industrial complex (British Thomson-Houston) to prototype and test his jet engine. Another, much bigger, got involved (Rover) and buggered it up. Eventually Rolls-Royce got the job done. Tomorrow he might have run the prototype parts off his RepRap on the kitchen table.
It's not as if science fiction hasn't engaged with Big Science. The research institute setting is almost a cliché (Ballard, Vonnegut, Clarke among others), as is the Couplandesque computer company. In fact I seem to recall Vonnegut saying that he was inspired for Player Piano by the GE Research Labs engineers, physicists and mathematicians he knew when he worked at Schenectady. Bell Labs is of course the archetype, although I'm not aware it has ever appeared in a work of fiction. (Are you as horrified as I am that some fool wants to knock down Saarinen's building there? We could make it the Wewelsberg of a worldwide technocratic cult.)
If there is a reason why we need SF/its replacement, it's as the literature of a culture of fact, opposed to a majority literature that essentially doesn't examine the realities surrounding its characters. Can anyone write completely about the February 15th, 2003 demonstration in London without the OC-192 fibreoptic lines from the foot of the BT Tower that looks down on the protestors, north to the NSA Menwith Hill facility in Yorkshire, an infrastructural token of the USA and UK deep states' Siamese relationship buried under feet of tarmac and unexploded Luftwaffe bombs?
And if the geek culture means anything, it's the technological empowerment of the citizen as against organisation.
Posted by: Alex | October 22, 2006 2:29 PM
Translations into other languanges usually have the advantage of knowing how well the book sells in it's native language before they print it in another. Your books may be getting higher advances in France because you've already proven that you've written a book that people want to buy. There's less risk than your UK & US publishers are taking on by printing the book for the first time.
And if books are marketed well, the US will be the #1 market for English language books for a long time. 300 million English speakers vs 115 million or so in the UK, Canada, and Aus/NZ. Of course, there might be some differences in taste -- it seems to be that triumphalism is more common in US SF/F.
Posted by: Andrew G | October 22, 2006 3:01 PM
"Classic" Sf was totally steeped in the GI Generation mindset and Cyberpunk, in the GenX. One has long passed (though as one poster mentioned the Millies may revive it as they have swing) and the other will dominate for a while and then fade as have their hippie predecessors. So instead of getting into they style of whoever is on deck at the moment, just do your thing. I've been gobbling down the Hidden Families series. for instance.
You mentioned Barnes. I have also been gobbling down his Thousand Culture series and want to see the last book in it! No, not "Armies of Memories", which ends in a galaxy-wide cliff-hanger, its sequel.
And Lois McMaster Bujold, whether it's SF or fantasy, space opera or (some of you fellows cover your ears and make a sign against evil) romance.
And I gobble down Brin, who has been crusading for the "Modernist" viewpoint since he first picked up a pen.
What do I look for? A rattling good story, with vivid and memorable characters I can care about. A plot. That's right, that old-fashioned Beginning, Middle, and End. Worldbuilding - a vivid and coherent and interesting world.
Another poster mentioned Nora Roberts' futuristic police procedurals. She does great at everything, encluding the flavor of a long postwar (The Urban Wars - what we're at the edges of now) austerity (tastes like soy dogs and fake coffee). Her only failure as a worldbuilder was when she took the action offworld into one of Roark's resorts - and it could have been a conference center here on Earth. (She didn't even have her cop & husband try out the zero-G rec room, or indicate that one existed. And knowing the cop's husband..... but then, she is not primarily an sf writer.
OTH, a certain Canadian writer who tells a very good tale indeed has often let his current ideas of the good send a totally unintended message. As in the first book of a trilogy which showed - vividly (sorry for the repetition!) what was wrong with affirmative action - and the author didn't even seem to know this, so committed was he to the concept. Because the 'villain' actually had been given the shaft, totally.
Anyway, enough rambling.
Posted by: Patricia Mathews | October 22, 2006 3:48 PM
It seems obvious to us.
What do geeks want? We want worlds that appears complex and chaotic in which only our hero (Hiro?) can identify the patterns. Why do we want this? Because this is how we see ourselves interacting with the world. Let's take it meta. Charles' article and the resulting comments can be seen as an example of what people desire from the SF genre.
How many of you read his comments, searched for information on the books he quoted, followed the predecessors and successors to this article, branched out and created a fragmented, but inter-related web of information that you then attempted to parse into simple statements of power and persuasion. How many of you needed, needed to post a response to expand the conversation--to control the flow of information. This is the audience that Charles describes.
Information is a drug; this we understand. Information with which we can interact and evolve is the most potent form of that drug.
And he identifies the problem. We're getting it here, on blogs, on SlashDot, on MMORPGs, on Wiki, along all the "tubes" of the internet. Those of us who are hopelessly addicted even create our own quests, our own conundrums, devising our own linked paths to the final resolution. It's emergent gameplay. So if SF still wants to describe itself as the genre of ideas, to lead this pack, to inform us about ourselves and the society we perceive, it has to deliver something shinier than the worlds each of us has already created.
We appreciate the efforts of writers like Charles. We know this isn't easy, and we know most people fail at it. We wouldn't want it any other way.
Posted by: Jeff Carroll | October 22, 2006 3:56 PM
Charlie,
KKR is right in everything she wrote in her essay.
- Write what you love, publish for the money.
Write what you love, but publish the book in the marketing category where it makes the most sense money wise.
You are now finishing up a "near future" novel, why not publish it in the marketing category "fiction" rather than in the marketing category "SF/F"?
- I don't need an answer to that question here in the comments area. I'm suggesting that you sit down with your agent and address the issue.
In today's market, if your agent took the book to one of the big publishers, like Random House or Simon & Schuster, it would sell and be snatched up by a large number of readers who are hungry for Story. You will make more money with that one "fiction" book than you've made with all your other books and stories combined, and that's not a bad thing.
Write what you love and publish the occasional book in the marketing category "fiction" to help pay the bills. If you come out with a "fiction" book every couple of years, you can have a successful career as a writer in the "fiction" marketing category.
Allyn Edgar Hughes
Helping people accept the things they cannot change.
Posted by: Allyn Edgar Hughes | October 22, 2006 4:39 PM
Andrew, if election figures are any guide, Charlie's politics means he can write off half that market. They also suggest that somebody such as S.M. Stirling can write off half the market, but they're different halves.
It may be more realistic to suggest that the loss attributable to politics is less than half, and it isn't just going to be about a certain sort of Americanism. Still, that apparent even split doesn't seem to be so likely in the rest of the world. So maybe the American market isn't such an overwhelming share of the total.
Posted by: Dave Bell | October 22, 2006 4:56 PM
Charles,
According to Wikipedia, SM Stirling lives in New Mexico, the heartland of American New Agers, so it makes sense that he's hyper-aware of the pagan/Newage market.
But any writer who sits down and thinks, "I'm going to program my story and characters and tone to appeal to market segment X!" is more hack than artist. Maybe I'm naive or uninformed about the writer's game, but both the inspiration of this thread (Kristine Kathryn Rusch) and SM Stirling strike me as more the former than the latter, based on their statements...
We could spin off a whole discussion about the great works-for-hire that have been made through the centuries (the Sistine Chapel, anyone?) -- and it now occurs to me that perhaps KKR and SMS both see themselves as artists-for-hire, and their patron is the "audience," out there. They're writing to please their patron so they can continue to earn a living from writing. Fine. But in my opinion that doesn't give them a right to tell those who are following their muse (artists who aren't pandering to their audience) what the should be writing about to "save the genre!"
I used to listen to Mocean Worker's dark drum and bass music and enjoy it. It was, IMHO, good but not great, but interesting enough to seek out. And I even liked his "Aural and Hearty" album, which changed direction into a feel-good "house-ier" vibe. It wasn't great, but it was good. And then I read an interview where he "admitted" that he had changed musical direction because "well, d'n'b isn't selling anymore...and house is." Well, call me an "Intention" fascist, but that kind of soured me on his work. All of his work.
Posted by: bud | October 22, 2006 5:33 PM
Mr. Stross and Alex are onto the key change with "the founding myth of SF, the lone inventor" and its mutating chronology.
Reference: the 125th anniversary issue of Nature, a journal founded in 1869 by Sir Joseph Norman Lockyer, an astronomer. They detail how their original 19th Century readership reflected that Science was a creature of amateur gentleman of means puttering about, and local curates, and curators of museums.
The 20th Century was an anomaly: science dominated by the triumverate of corporations, universities, and government funding.
The 21st century is in part a pendulum swing back to (in its best sense) amateurism -- "Write what you love." But the geeky infrastructure changes everything. "'Wikiscience' is leading to perpetually refined papers with a thousand authors."
EDGE: SPECULATIONS ON THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE By Kevin Kelly.
In my own experience, I was necessarily an amateur as a child: unincorporated, unemployed, nonmatriculating, grantless. My career was then over 3 decades in universities, corporations of all sizes, and federal contracts.
Finally, the past decade, I more and more am managing a distributed network of coauthors and colleagues rarely if ever seen face to face, and have over 2200 (twenty-two hundred) publications and presentations and broadcasts to my [over 10,000 to our] credit -- a great percentage in prestigious on-line edited venues (not blogs or my own web domain, but gold-standard entities such as the Online Encylopedia of Integer Sequences and MathWorld).
Our grandparent's working world assumed that one stayed in a job a very long time, barring disasters, with mutual loyalty between Management and Labor. Today's working world is overlapping short-term compilation of a Skillset through an employment/consulting Portfolio, changing not just jobs but entire industries repeatedly, where Management wants to squeeze and discard you, and Labor wants to enhance the skills and networking, until one reaches the Promised Land of Liquidity Event. Stross nails this again and again.
Stross, Doctorow, Gibson, Sterling, Vinge, Brin, Egan, Walter Jon Williams, others are holding up the mirror of Science Fiction to show this revolution in its full glory: the Virtual Corporation, the Robust Distributed Conspiracy, the disinformation wars of the wikiworld. Founding myth becomes multiverse shuffle.
Single inventor morphs towards Singularity.
Posted by: Jonathan Vos Post | October 22, 2006 5:39 PM
Don't write them off, Dave. (/hal) If they hear it's like Heinlein they might read it - and then our memes can infect them.
Posted by: Alex | October 22, 2006 5:43 PM
Oh, and it seems to me that it's pretty easy to keep The Illiad and The Odyssey in print -- no artist to pay, no book tour to support, universal seal-of-approval on their value as art, etc.
And the cynic in my wants to know (like Ulysses or Finnegan's Wake, among others in the Western Canon) how many purchased copies actually get read?
Posted by: bud | October 22, 2006 5:50 PM
But any writer who sits down and thinks, "I'm going to program my story and characters and tone to appeal to market segment X!" is more hack than artist. Maybe I'm naive or uninformed about the writer's game, but both the inspiration of this thread (Kristine Kathryn Rusch) and SM Stirling strike me as more the former than the latter, based on their statements...
Bud, all writers cut their stories to fit their audiences -- if they want to eat. I do. If you're a member of my natural audience, then you may be less inclined to notice this than if you're sitting outside of J. Random Other-Writer's target audience, but it amounts to the same thing.
Of course, the process of how you tailor your stories is an interesting one. The dirty secret of story-telling is that ideas are cheap; in fact, they're ten a penny. So those of us to whom ideas are cheap simply pick and choose the ones we invest time and effort fleshing out and turning into a novel. For example, I have a couple of ideas for Mil-SF alternate history novels -- but I'm probably not going to bother turning them into books any time soon because that's not where my existing audience lies, unless I can come up with an angle that's so compelling it forces me to write it. Ditto cowboy stories, police procedurals (heads up: I just wrote one!) and so on.
Perhaps KKR and SMS both see themselves as artists-for-hire, and their patron is the "audience," out there. They're writing to please their patron so they can continue to earn a living from writing.
I can't speak for KKR and SMS, but that describes me, dude.
Hint: once you get far enough into this game to have sold your second novel, the scales drop from your eyes and you realize that at best you might be able to earn half what an upper middle class professional can expect -- an accountant or an airline pilot, maybe -- and you'll never be rich. Those "hacks" who you're denigrating are working like crazy to tell stories so they can continue to tell stories in front of an audience, not so they can get rich.
Any damn fool can starve in a garret and tell stories to their pet rat. But there's a common public delusion that great art has to be created through suffering and deprivation, and that art running on a reasonably comfortable budget, art tailored to suit an audiences desires, commercial art, is intrinsically derivative and second rate. This is, to put it bluntly, pernicious rubbish. Goal #1 for any artist, with very few exceptions (and most of them were mad) is to find an audience for their work. And failing to consider your audience isn't a sign of great artistry -- it's a sign of stupid pig-headedness.
Posted by: Charlie Stross | October 22, 2006 7:11 PM
As usual, Charlie, you've only got it half right. Man, am I sick of writers proclaiming that their way is the right way. So your presumption of audience and the way you go about writing to it works for you. Maybe it doesn't work for somebody else. It's not an either-or proposition and it's not in the kind of black-or-white contrast you seem to want to paint it as. (The only alternative to your scenario is to be...mad? Geez.)
Basically, you took offense because you felt you were part of a group being pissed on by the person who posted. End of story. The rest is just heat lightning.
JeffV
Posted by: Jeff VanderMeer | October 22, 2006 7:17 PM