Being on vacation (more or less) has given me a lot of time
for reflection. It's also given me a little time to catch
up on my reading — beach books, or what passes for them in
my universe. I'm quite capable of immersing myself in trashy
brain candy — indeed, of wallowing in it to excess — and
that's pretty much what I've been doing (with a few notable
exceptions).
Actually, that's a little bit unfair. "Trash" is probably
the wrong word for any kind of literature; it's just a
convenient (and somewhat condescending) shorthand for easy
reading — stuff that is undemanding, and doesn't expect too
much of the reader. Within any given genre, there's a
certain body of work that conforms most closely to the
expectations of the readers — the normal patterns and
preoccupations of their particular field. It's not
transgressive, it doesn't question the normative
expectations, it shares the collective cultural outlook,
etcetera. Nevertheless, it performs a vital task for those
of us who aren't content to go with the flow: it tells us
where the flow is.
Talking about genre ... I work in three roughly overlapping
areas: science fiction, fantasy, and horror. (I also
occasionally make excursions into the undergrowth of
technothrillers and even romance, but those aren't my main
stomping grounds — they're not how I'm perceived by
readers.) Of these fields, fantasy out-sells SF by a factor
of 2:1, and has done for most of my life. Horror used to
sell well, but crashed and burned around 1990. There's
recently been a tenuous recovery. Where you draw the
dividing line between these fields is a matter of some
debate, especially among the more tiresomely
obsessive-compulsive fans — the rest of them (myself
included) just go with the old judicial definition of
pornography: "I know it when I see it".
So what can the lightweight normative exemplars of these
genres tell us about the state of the reading public?
For starters, the strange rebirth of the horror field is
quite illuminating. We used to know what horror was about —
it was about Killer Whelks menacing a quiet English seaside
town, from which a strong-jawed but quiet fellow and a
not-totally-pathetic female lead might eventually hope to
escape with the aid of a stout two-by-four and a lot of
whelkish squelching after trials, tribulations, and gruesome
scenes of seafood-induced cannibalism. Then Stephen King
came along and transcended, becoming a mini-genre of his
own. Attempts were made to replicate the phenomenon, but
instead the bottom dropped out of the market.
The new horror isn't about whelks, killer or otherwise: it's
about vampires, werewolves, and middle America. With police
and detectives. Hell, you could even call it cop/vampire
slash and have done with it, except that you'd be missing
out on the tedious Manichean dualist drivel into which all
these series eventually descend (unless they end up as soft
porn instead — a very lucrative market, as Laurel Hamilton
and her imitators have discovered — call it the fang-fucker subgenre). For the sad fact is,
there seems to be some kind of law about contemporary
American horror getting into furry sex by volume three then suffering a fit of remorse and going all god-bothering and Jesus-fondling
by volume six. It must be all the crosses and holy water
they need to fend off the blood sucking fiends, I suppose,
but the endless re-hashing of tired old religious-sexual
neuroses is getting to be a stereotype of the genre, and
it's not healthy. Horror isn't about being born-again: it's
about bloody screaming catharsis, not a warm security
blanket of belief that blocks out all menaces. But in the
new horror, if the bloodsuckers are remotely sympathetic the
story turns into some kind of supernatural redemption epic,
and if they're not, the protagonist eventually goes
all googly-eyed and born-again. (Or the author does — I'm
thinking of Anne Rice here, you understand.) It's enough to
make this old-time atheist throw the book against the wall.
I mean, these are meant to be horror novels!
Where's the sense of dread in living in a universe where
there's a cuddle and a warm glass of ambrosia waiting for us
all in heaven?
(Parenthetically speaking, one of the reasons I'm so pleased
with Liz Williams' recent foray into the supernatural
detective field is that her two novels, The Snake Agent and
The Demon in the City have nothing whatsoever to do
with warmed-over Christian theology. They're straight
Confucianism all the way, and when one of her demonic
protagonists discovers that he has a conscience this is
cause for regret rather than redemption. The result is
oddly like Chow Yun Fat trying to make a supernatural kung
fu action movie version of Miss Smila's Feel for Snow. If
the rest of the pack would follow suit, my vacation reading
pile would be a lot less predictable ... but I digress.)
Enough about the crap new horror, now for the crap new SF.
Probably the fastest-growing sub-genre in the swamp is
alternate history. I've been known to dabble in it myself, I
hasten to admit: it can be fun and educational, a
desert topping and a floor wax. But mostly floor
wax these days, I find, because a lot of authors who should
know better are turning to it in a mad collective
ostrich-head-burying exercise rather than engaging with the
world as it is.
Science fiction is almost always a projection of todays
hopes and fears onto the silver screen of tomorrow, and so
you get such excesses as the cosy catastrophe genre in
British SF, 1947-79 (in which all those annoying Other
People get put away in their box — six feet under — while
the protagonists have post-fall-of-civilization adventures,
all with a bone china tea-set: John Wyndham was of course
the master) or the sixties counterculture and lysergide
fueled paranoia trips of Philip K. Dick and William
Burroughs — and the deafening silence about the future that
is radiating from the United States today.
Oh, there are exceptions. Vernor Vinge is swimming strongly
against the flow in "Rainbows End", where he envisages a
future just a couple of decades hence where the machines
dance. Peter Watts is doing stuff with the genre that just
shouldn't be possible (evolutionary biology, exobiology, and
vampires in spaaaaaace — all done with a deft
touch of plausibility and a refreshingly pleasant dose of
bleakly nihilistic existential despair). And there are a few
others. But for the most part, the loudest movement in the
genre has been the buffalo stampede over the cliff of
historical might-have-beens. Our field's strongest
energies are going into tiredly re-hashing the US Civil War,
the Second World War, the War of the Triple Alliance, and
the Russian Revolution. And they're not even Doing It in
spaaaaaaace. Well, some of them are: if I see one more
novel about the US Marine Corps in the Thirty Seventh
Century (with interstellar amphibious assault ships and a
different name) I swear I'll up and join the Foreign
Legion. Folks, the past is another country, and you can't
get a visa. Ditto the future: they speak a different
language and they get capitalism and the war on terror and
the divine right of kings confused because they slept
through history class. (Just like half the folks writing
alternate history epics — and the other half ought to know
better.)
This turning away from the near future is going to be
remembered as one of the hallmarks of the post-9/11 decade
in American science fiction, as the chill wind of change
blows through the hitherto cosy drawing room of the American
century. The Brits aren't drinking the Kool-Aid — well,
some of them are serving it up in pint glasses, but
most of them have got better things to do with
their time — and this is why just about all the reviewers in the
field are yammering about a British Invasion or a British
New Wave or something: it's not what the British are doing,
but what the American writers aren't doing that is
interesting.
American SF was traditionally an optimistic forward-looking
genre, the marching music of the technocrat movement (which,
thankfully, withered up and blew away before it got a chance
to build any mountains of skulls, thus providing us with the
luxury of a modernist movement that we can remember
fondly). Now the whole space exploration thing has
dead-ended and the great American public have shuddered in
their political sleep and realised — crivens! — that not
everybody likes the way their lords and masters have been
carrying on for the past five decades — the fragile
optimism is lacking. So where better to flee than into the
nostalgic past, to fight Nazis and communists and
slave-trading aristocrats?
Finally, there is the blasted heath that is fantasy. At
least the two decade long post Lord of the Rings hang-over
is mostly over, and the post-movie-trilogy bean fest has
faded somewhat. There's some really interesting stuff going
on there (paging Paul Park, Paul Park to the white courtesy
phone — or Steven Brust, at a pinch). But fantasy is,
almost by definition, consolatory and escapist literature.
Pure fantasy doesn't really tell us anything about the world
we live in, and I fail to discern any huge new movements
sweeping the field as symptoms of the cultural neuroses of
one country or another.