Is true SF really dying?

Cafe Society
1

Based on this post by Exapno, I wanted to start a new thread on whether (and why) real
SF (which I define as anything toward the hard end of the spectrum-no fantasy and/
or “psychic” aspects need apply) might be becoming a more and more niche market
than it used to be.

It’s certainly news to me: the SF sections at the likes of Borders and Barnes & Noble
appear to be healthy, there’s plenty of cyberpunk novels (and graphic novels) and
the like out there (which I would indeed include underneath SF’s broad umbrella).
Perhaps the future has indeed arrived and there’s no need to read about technology
when we are currently living it. Maybe all the good themes (getting away from tech
for tech’s sake) have been done to death, all the old masters are gone (well except
for Bradbury and Clarke who are getting towards their 90’s), and there’s nothing
left to say? A commentary on the general decline of literacy among the masses?
Or something else?

2

[rrr please add edit capability already…]

MTA: this is for written SF (tho I would include graphic novels in that), not screen SF
(tho what was the most recent hard SF blockbuster film?).

3

^ Episode 3?

4

Look again. The sections are smaller than they were ten years ago, and the space is taken up more and more by spinoffs and media based books. Fantasy is a much better portion of the section, too.

Hard SF might be a bit more prominent, but that’s partly because soft SF is almost impossible to find. Science fiction originally had nothing to do with science, but the absurd belief that only hard SF is SF has limited the field.

The field is definitely aging, and the young people who would have entered the field years ago are now more attracted to gaming, media, and the Internet. SF as a genre will continue to exist, but so far, there’s has been very little sign of growth. Until a J.W. Rowling comes out in the SF field (and there may not be one), younger readers just aren’t going to be interested.

5

[informatious hijack]

It’s not that they haven’t gotten around to adding edit capability; it was disabled so that people couldn’t go back and change their arguments in a debate, for example. A few typos are a small price to pay to have board where people have to stand by what they’ve said and can’t “take it back.”

[/informatious hijack]

6

True to Biblical prophecy, the Geeks have inherited the Earth. So they don’t need the escapism of SF like they did before Asperger’s was a career booster.

7

Nancy Kress (a well-known writer of biological and other hard sf) is mad at me because I keep telling her the field is dead. (It’s not truly dead, merely shrinking to insignificance, but that comes to very much the same thing. Like sharks and cities, either you grow or die.)

We, along with several others, were in a giant B&N and started going through the shelves to divide the sf section into sf and fantasy. She started at the beginning and got to Bear and Brin and Benford, sf’s 3 Bs (ala Beethoven, Bach, and Brahms) and she kept saying, see, it’s about even, maybe even ahead. Go to a different part of the alphabet, she was told. She did. There the ratio was much worse, with hardly any sf to compare with the miles of fantasy.

And Bear and Brin and Benford are 55, 56, and 65. Nan herself is 58. If this is the field, then the field is in as much trouble as classic rock.

Why? My pet theory is that sf was part and parcel of the age of technological and scientific optimism. That age ended in the 1950s, was subverted and commented on by writers in the 1960s and 1970s, and started falling into serious disrepute in the 1980s. People no longer look to science as a force of total good. In fact, they see science as the cause of most of our problems. We can talk all we want about the Internet and health care and other technological triumphs, but the truth is that when people hear science they think of radiation and DDT and cloning and plagues and all the things wrong with society.

Not coincidentally, movie sf took over the torch of optimism right around that same time. Star Wars and Star Trek had all the optimism that print sf lacked. About a billion SW and ST books were written and sold to back them up. That filled the niche that sf played in most people’s reading. The core audience, however, wanted more than such lightweight books could give, but that core audience was comparatively tiny.

At the same time, more and more women moved into the field, both as writers and as readers. They were as disproportionately disposed toward fantasy as male writers and readers were disproportionately disposed toward sf. Fantasy has become the greater half of f&sf.

And there seem to be a zillion and one reasons why youngsters no longer enter the field. In the old saying “the Golden Age of SF is 13,” meaning that readers used to start reading sf at around that age and never gave up a love for the field. But sf is like cigarettes: if you don’t start as a young teen the odds are extremely high that you’ll never start at all.

So everything is going against classic sf. It’s disappearing up its own ass. It’s dead, Jim.

The one light on the horizon are the Brits. They’re writing terrific stuff and the British culture has always held sf in a totally different light than U.S. culture. Literary sf and fantasy is accepted as simply good writing there and not shunted off to a ghettoized niche. Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell is pure fantasy yet was a mainstream success there (and marketed as totally mainstream in the U.S.). Christopher Priest’s The Prestige won a World Fantasy Award yet was made into a movie that was marketed without a hint of its being sf here in the U.S. Geoff Ryman’s Air and M. John Harrison’s Light are terrific books that got good reviews and much attention in the U.K. and are essentially unknown in the U.S. Both are sf, with Harrison’s even being a far future. And of course the two best selling writers in the U.K. are J.K. Rowling and Terry Pratchett.

But there seems to be no hope for the U.S. Several excellent small presses (Tachyon and Small Press predominantly) are publishing amazing work by amazing writers and hoping to sell 1000 copies of a book, none of which are ever seen in B&N or Borders. None of which ever go into a mass market paperback edition either, another reason why sf can’t flourish. I started with 50 cent paperbacks from the Ace Science Fiction Specials line, meaning I got the very best 1960s and 1970s books and authors for a pittance. That experience is not possible today for people who wish to get into the field. You can’t ask them to spend $25 on a hardback by an unknown, much less grab a pile of them the way I once did with paperbacks.

First person to say it’s a perfect storm gets a phaser in the face.

8

What about Frederik Pohl?
As to your main point, I don’t know. Is it because Science hasn’t given us any really good fodder for fiction lately? Is it because the conditions that made people like Heinlein and Asimov into SF writers no longer exist? Does the Death of the Short Story have anything to do with it? Is it because movies and TV, with their greater-than-ever-before sophistication and special effects, have taken over much of the audience for SF, but they aren’t as good as print SF in addressing the abstract ideas and technical issues and hard science that characterizes “real” science fiction?

9

[quote=Exapno Mapcase]
Why? My pet theory is that sf was part and parcel of the age of technological and scientific optimism. That age ended in the 1950s, was subverted and commented on by writers in the 1960s and 1970s, and started falling into serious disrepute in the 1980s. People no longer look to science as a force of total good. In fact, they see science as the cause of most of our problems. We can talk all we want about the Internet and health care and other technological triumphs, but the truth is that when people hear science they think of radiation and DDT and cloning and plagues and all the things wrong with society.

[quote]

Thanks, this paragraph in particular expresses what I was wondering about while fixing dinner, but coming from you it’s informed speculation, and from me would be WAG at it’s worst. (Besides, I’m too young to know anything about the world of SF before Star Wars except through other people’s reports).

That’s not to say that one couldn’t have a rebirth of “true” SF, especially if one breathed new life into the space program, or had various other things happen which got people excited about peering into the future again. But I’m not sure that it’s likely in the short run.

10

All this is IMO:

  1. SF is a subset of fantasy.
  2. A lot of what is/was labeled as SF was Space Opera.
  3. Good SF extrapolates where we are now into where we will be then.
  4. Since 2K, it seems to me, people aren’t looking towards the future anymore, neither with fear, nor anticipation. The future is happenng now and it wasn’t such a big deal.
  5. So SF is looking for a raison d’être, and it hasn’t found it. Maybe it will.
  6. It’s all Peter Jackson’s fault. He revived a nerdy sub-genre of fantasy - sword and sorcery - which made the public switch focus from SF to monsters and goblins.
  7. And maybe the time was ripe for PJ. The turn of the millenium induced a fin de sèicle atmosphere, where Hobbits and Elves were hip, and starships and lasers were not.

I was eight when the Eagle landed on the Moon and fully expected flying cars, colonies on the Moon and bases on Mars when I was an adult. What cosmic vision does an 8 year old have today? Global warming, gas shortage and the quagmire that is Iraq. WhenI was 8 there was a quagmire called Vietnam, but there was also a promise of the stars.

11

I think Exapno makes a number of good points, but I’d also like to throw this out for his (or anybody else’s) consideration:

The SF fans killed SF.

I once liked reading books and stories about spaceships and time travel and lasers and such. They were fun, and not too different from the Westerns that I also liked: there were good guys and bad guys and plenty of action. Didn’t matter that the authors were Clarke or Asimov or Silverberg instead of Short, Grey, and L’Amour, they were a fun read.

But, according to a couple of folks I knew who were die-hard SF readers, I was stupid for enjoying such common SF. Because everybody knows (usually said with rolling eyes) that in Altair 2: Planet of Quests (a totally fictional example), they manage to get the ship going by substituting Quadrophonium for Whosnextium. And you just can’t do that if you accept Pournelle’s hypothesis that Quadrophonium lacks the necessary properties as regards energy-matter conversion, especially when placed in a Mark XIV Kemblian warp drive. Just ain’t gonna happen. What you should be reading for a correct and proper use of Whosnextium is… And you should attend the “con” at the Memorial Auditorium next April to learn more–come dressed as an alien for free entry… And don’t forget the Blablabla website, where it is explained that…

Screw all that. Obviously what I should be reading is my old friend, the Western. (Which is itself dead as a genre, but I digress). Or perhaps I should try that King fellow’s horror, or that Grisham guy’s law stuff, or that Clancy dude’s military stories. If I’m reading for entertainment and SF requires so much work, why bother?

Why couldn’t SF fans just accept that cheap SF paperbacks were damn good stories and leave it at that? Why rail, bother, bug, piss off, complain, and basically turn off a potential audience because of nerdy, geeky nitpicking that really doesn’t matter in the long run?

12

I think much of the creative energy that made written SF the greatest genre ever back in the 40s-60s has expanded into other media, such as video games, movies, comic books and websites on the Internet. The written SF is dying largely because print publishing is dying. The Internet is simply far too attractive a venue for both readers and writers – print publishers can’t compete.

13

You know, it’s true: people don’t seem to look forward to the future like they used to. I would say the age of techno-optimism lasted through the Sixties, until the space programs petered out. Then the rise of computers and the Internet created the Cyberpunk movement, which at least made the potential future seem cool if not particularly optimistic. But today? Who still thinks that by the year 2100 something really fascinatingly wonderful will come along? No one seems to think that technologically the next hundred years will be anything more than a somewhat improved version of today. The Gee-Whiz ain’t there anymore.

Consider what it was like to be a futurist or science-fiction fan in the Fifties. In an adult lifespan, people had literally gone from horses and wagons to jet airplanes. With the exception of computer tech and a host of largely invisible things like materials technology, how different is 2007 from 1967?

14

SF has generally underestimated the timeline of certain inventions (and implement-
ation thereof), for the most part. We get caught up in the tension between the
things we saw coming, which never came, and the things we didn’t see coming,
which did.

I think this Mother Goose and Grimm cartoon sums up both sides of the argument
well: it’s funny because we’re talking about 23rd century SF tech which didn’t
anticipate easily transmittable multimedia data in the humble year 2006. Yet in
the 23rd century, when Kirk and Co. ostensibly will be buzzing around the galaxy
in a FTL starship, we likely will actually just be embarking on manned exploration
of the outer planets (frankly I doubt we’ll get to the two outer blue giants before
2500, much less Pluto).

In other words in a lot of ways the future has arrived quicker than we thought,
and we now take it for granted. In other words the future seems a heckuva long
way off, and irrelevant to our present concerns for the most part.

But that’s the tech end of the equation, while there seems to be a similar
impoverishment of the other end: what happened to the Cogent Social
Commentaries a la Philip K. Dick et al.? SF has been as much about ideas and
vision as much as it’s been about technology and starships. Is today’s society
just not introspective enough for such visions and insight to ring true anymore?

15

I think this is worth turning on its head for a minute.

SF, as opposed to fantasy is selling fewer and fewer books. Fine. In the end who cares? There is worthwhile stuff out there and will continue to be. It’s not that SF is dying so much as that it’s going into remission and becoming a niche market. In a fragmented marketplace such as the modern book market that shouldn’t be a surprise at all.

And, I’d suggest that by niching up (so to speak) the average quality of what’s out there should be heading up. Like folk music today (a decent parallel, in my mind) those who will be creating in the field and those who truly love to do it instead of those attempting to cash in.

Will it be more difficult to make a good living at it? Sure. But no one ever said creative endeavors were out there to make a good living. Far more musicians, writers, painters, actors, what-have-you, wait tables and file paperwork during the day than EVER make any form of living in it at all.

16

Print publishing isn’t dying: it’s doing quite well thank you.

And genre publishing is doing even better. Mysteries are in fine shape, but the talk of the entire industry is the boom in romance novels. Romances, which have eight or ten major sub-genres and many additional variants, are now over 50% of all popular fiction sales. This percentage seems to grow every year. Total sales, average sales, average advances, by every conceivable measure romances are in their best shape ever and in almost as good shape as mysteries were in the 1940s and 1950s, during the years of the paperback boom. Chick lit is even respectable as the mainstream version of romance.

If genre is doing this good as a whole, then the yearly drop in the percentage that f&sf holds can’t be explained away merely by the state of the industry. It’s the state of the fans that is the problem.

Spoons, what you say is a common complaint and has a great deal to recommend it. It’s certainly true that hard, extrapolated sf is an order of magnitude denser and less comprehensible to the average reader than the comparatively simple space adventures of the 50s. And it’s also true that writers have had a tendency to incorporate previous notions as shorthand so that one almost has to be knowledgeable about sf just to begin to read modern sf.

Fantasy clearly does not have this issue, and I myself argue that it is the simplicity and accessibility of fantasy that drives much of its popularity. The only extrapolation in fantasy is the world that is being built, and word-building is itself the draw for much fantasy. It’s the reason that fantasy series go on forever: people like to live in these worlds. At length. At very, very, very, very great length sometimes.

It’s the utter simplicity of classic science fiction that makes it readable today to people whose interests are in “ideas.” There are no “ideas” in classic sf that aren’t either rot or clichés, but very little mainstream fiction has those kind of ideas at all and something almost always beats nothing.

I don’t agree that it’s the fans’ fault, though. Fans have always been a small fraction of the total readership. As I’ve said and as RealityChuck said in the other thread, the number of core fans is in the thousands. Readers have always outnumbered fans by huge percentages, and that percentage just gets bigger with time. Not that many writers use fans’ input as a basis for their writing, either. Most writers love the adulation rather than the people.

I have a institutionalist bias in most things: the times rather than the people create the culture and create cultural changes. (I’d rather use structuralist, but that’s been taken over by definitions I don’t want applied. It’s the structure of things rather than the influence of individuals that I’m emphasizing, though.) I really do think it applies here as well. The writers didn’t abandon fun spaceships and lasers because the fans drove them to it. Those writers just started writing tie-in books.

The field abandoned simplicity because what good writers do is write about the times, the culture, the world they live in. Those got far more complicated. The simplicities of the 50s, both the simplicities of science and the simplicities of society, were impossible to write about after that world became as obsolete as Wells. The future as seen from 2006 is infinitely more complicated than the future as seen from 1946. The western went through the same process. After the 1950s it became literally impossible for any but the basest hack writer to do a simplistic cowboys good, Injuns bad book about the west. We knew too much more about how much more complicated the world was back then. The audience may not have wanted to hear it, and left in droves, but simplicity was literally impossible to write.

That’s happened to sf as well. People want simplicity, and get it from the artificially constricted worlds of Star Trek and Star Wars. But it has become literally impossible for even the most tech-friendly writer to put that in a real book because we know too much about the modern world, and it isn’t simple at all. Try to write any realistic future and that world has to manifest itself.

Believe me, the fans want the same books that you want. They can’t get them because there’s no way to write like Heinlein and Asimov in today’s world. And sf is dying as a result.

17

Much too simplistic. Remember, fans were never more than a small subset of SF readers.

The reasons are complex, of course. First of all, original mass market SF paperbacks have been dying for several years. Part of this is that the mass market paperbacks were genuinely mass market – you’d see them in grocery stores, drugstores, and airport spinner racks. Now you’ll be hard pressed to see any at all.

A second factor is the rise of spinoff novels. There were plenty of straight SF adventure novels out there (I published one myself), but their niche has been replaced by spinoff novels. The type of book that you describe are in the various Star Trek, Star Wars, etc. books, but original SF like that is rare. This has several disadvantages. One, the readers of spinoff novels tend to stick with their favorites and are not interested in anything that doesn’t tie in with the familiar. Second, when there was a mass market, there was much more variety, and some books were more than just straight adventure.

There’s also cost. It was one thing to get a mass market paperback for $0.75 in 1968 (when I was starting to buy SF books); it’s now about $7. That’s greater than the rate of inflation (on inflation alone, the same book should cost $4.15). But that aside, there’s also a psychological affect: at a certain point, the price of a book is such that buyers become reluctant to take a chance on the unknown (this also affect movies and plays). I used to buy interesting sounding SF paperbacks, since if I spent a buck or two and discovered it was no good, it wasn’t a great loss. But when you’re spending $7 (or $15 or $25), you want to make sure that what you’re getting is worth your money.

This is one reason why most fantasy seems the same: by using familiar ideas and tropes, it helps assure readers they’re getting something similar to what they’ve liked in the past.

Science fiction also is heading for sameness. I find it rare that I pick up an SF novel and not feel like it’s just an old concept redone: the alien empire, the cyberpunk world (a 20-year-old theme). But it takes a ton of talent to do original concepts that will sell in today’s conservative market.

And there’s an attitude that it’s only SF if it’s hard SF, and the harder the better. It’s a foolish belief – even the hardest SF of the past deliberately ignored scientific facts when convenient. Hard SF came somewhat late to the genre (Hal Clement pretty much invented it). It can be good, but the attitude is that it is the only real SF is detrimental to the genre. I’m seeing practically no soft SF; when Kit Reed put out Thinner Than Thou, a brilliant work of soft SF speculation, no one seemed to notice, which was a shame.

18

No. SF is, at its core, about ideas, with a lot of conventions used to embed those ideas in dramatic fiction. Fantasy is conventional drama set in a world where magic works, and often in a cod-medieval world with mutated folklore characters and lots of blunt-force drama.

In the 1920s maybe. That changed in print SF in the 1950s, however, even if it hasn’t really changed in screen (movie and TV) SF.

A lot of it does. A lot of it has nothing to do with the future, or at least with our future.

Everyone looks towards the future. Taken out a loan recently?

See above.

Possibly.

Everyone’s childhood is better than it was, and is by definition better than it is today. Today we still have space (and fairly strong evidence of current liquid water on Mars) and we also have nanotechnology, biotechnology, and the ever-present possibility of making a computer network that is, collectively, smarter than we are. We have more to get excited about now than we’ve ever had before.

19

Uncle Hugo might have disagreed with you. The first sf was all about science - bad science, perhaps, but a lot more science than character.

I don’t believe it is optimism either. The New Wave was hardly optimistic, but it was sure vibrant. Is there any controversy today about sf remotely as intense as that was?

I’d guess a lot is spinoffs. Blish wrote, in some of his Star Trek books, about floods of letters from new readers asking for other books. Anyone introduced to sf through Star Wars or Star Trek today need not even visit the non-spinoff parts of the bookstore shelves.
Maybe it’s the decline of engineering as a field of entry in the US, and maybe it is increased busyness of engineers and scientists. In the old days when you came home from work you came home. Today, do you work on a story or check your email for some crisis that sprung up halfway around the world? And look at science and engineering grad students today. They’re plenty smart, but I see their writing in my conference and journal work, and they are far from being capable fiction writers.

20

Wait, Star Trek isn’t real SF? Star Trek is what I base SF on.

What the heck counts as real science fiction then? Stargate? Contact? Battlestar Galactica?