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 in
having
sex standing up because it might lead to dancing using
classic science fictional tropes because they might lead to
fantasy). This year it's the back to basics thing. When will
they learn?
Kristine 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!)
