Well, that’s one way at thinking about the future. Another is to imagine flying cars and I think the latter is what ignites the minds of young tokes and get them reading SF.
Everyone* was space crazy in the 60’s. There was a lot of really bad SF on tv and some that was OK. The toy stores were full of plastic models of real and imaginary space ships. If I had a battery in my camera I’d post a pic of my Eagle lunar landing coffee mug from '69.
Sure there are things to be excited about today, but as a kid in junior high, I actually thought that the future of crappy SF shows would arrive in my lifetime. I doubt a random 12 year old gets excited about the ISS, the Shuttle, biotech, nanotech and water on Mars. When I grew up, I read about ancient Martian civilizations. What’s a few drops of water compared to that?
Star Trek and Star Wars are not SF. They are mostly fantasy stories with a few SF trappings. Just about EVERYTHING that you see on TV is either not really SF, or really bad SF.
When I was in grade school, Star Trek (TOS) was in its first run. In those days, we had one TV set for the family, and I got up, sneered, and said something to the effect that “EVERYONE knows that there’s no sound in a vacuum” after the Enterprise shot off its weapons. If a gradeschooler can point out scientific flaws in a story, it’s not SF. Or at least, not GOOD SF.
As for what I consider to be good modern hard SF, I generally think of John Varley or Vernor Vinge as good writers. I’m mostly on a fantasy kick these days, but I’ll read good SF if I can find it. I think that the spinoffs of TV shows, movies, and even games have increased the number of writers who are simply in the field to make a buck. I have to admit that I read a couple of “novels” based on the Magic: The Gathering card game, and they were even worse than I had expected. Still, some people must have thought that there was a market for these books.
A big problem is that publishers think that there’s a magic formula to plots and genres, and if they can just get the perfect formula, they can plug in various elements and have a best seller every time. While this might be the case for some genres (I’m thinking specificially of romance here), it won’t work in SF. If I read a book about a generation ship, fine, I’ll probably enjoy it (as I enjoyed Universe the first time I read it). But the next generation ship book that I read had darn well better have some new twists on the last one.
I think that SF is in a slump right now, but that it will come back stronger than ever. I’m doing my part by buying the good SF books that I can find.
I question whether it works all that well in Romance, either. Which isn’t to say that there isn’t a niche or two within Romance where magic formulas work, and sell well. But on the other hand, even if I didn’t read Romance I’d have a hard time believing that the vast number of sales of Romance novels all truly hinged on one plot. And Romance shows up at just about every concievable price point: I’ve got a series Romance here which I bought at Target for $4.12. And over in the other room, I’ve got a hard cover Romance (acquired at the local library). When I buy the $4.12 ones I have different expectations than when I bring home the hard cover ones.
I suppose that it’s possible that romance readers are more all about the journey rather than the destination and will put up with repeated plots as long as the dialogue and the details are different, whereas SF readers insist on new ideas described differently . . . but I think there is more to it than that.
This is pretty much a classic case of the perfect being the enemy of the good, here.
If you’re going with a very strict definition of what is ‘good’ SF then naturally you’re going to be disappointed and disdainful a great amount of the time. A looser, more relaxed view towards such things will find a great many worthwhile stories and books and such that are worth reading.
There is good SF being written today, both hard and soft. Significantly less than two or six decades back, as the market for short fiction has shrunk to the size of the Sahara’s water budget, and the competition for novel-length book publication has become somewhat more competitive. (The point that mass market paperbacks have far fewer venues than they used to is generally but not totally true, as well – I first found Callahan’s Con at an airport kiosk, but I could not have found it in the drugstore or in the revolving rack at the corner store where I often found new books in my teens and young adulthood.)
As for what “true SF” is and whether series spinoffs, etc., fall into it, Theodore Sturgeon has been dead for years after a rich full life, and, in response to a sneer about space operas, formulaic series books, and the like, that “90% of SF is crap,” he coined the classic rejoinder to such arguments: 90% of everything is crap!. I think it’s singularly apropos – and ironic – to raise the point in this particular discussion.
Nothing about media sf is real sf. Media sf is as totally different a genre from sf as fantasy is. Unfortunately, people have come to think of media sf being the real thing and expecting print sf to live up - or down - to it. Which, as I’ve said, is impossible.
There is good sf in media. The Truman Show. Being John Malkovich. Memento. The Prestige. Eternal Sunshine. What, you say? None of those were marketed as sf. None of them have robots and spaceships. None are about the future.
Right. They’re about ideas and consequences. That’s real sf. If the public ever learns the difference, sf has a chance to come back. I’m pessimistic.
Lynn, Varley is 59. Vinge is 62. If they’re modern sf, then Pynchon and Roth are modern literature. They’re not. Eggers and Foer are modern literature. If you can’t name equally young writers as exemplars of modern sf, the genre is dead, or might as well be.
Poly,JC, name some of these people who are writing good sf today. I’m very curious to know what names come up.
> 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.
I don’t much like Peter Jackson, but it’s clear that he had nothing to do with this supposed decline. It started well before his versions of The Lord of the Rings came out, and it doesn’t appear that they accelerated it.
Incidentally, this isn’t the only time that there has been a general exclamation of “Science Fiction is dead.” In the late 1950’s it was popular among science fiction fans to make this complaint. I’ve heard that at, say, the 1959 Worldcon you could hear panels with titles like “Is science fiction dead?” (or so I’ve been told, but I was only 7 years old then so I have no direct knowledge of this).
Well, there may have to be a ref’s call on that one. Lynn was stating an easily-referenced scientific fact (“there is no sound in a vacuum”). My example was pure fiction, using substances and machinery that do not exist.
But I do want to say “thank you” to both Exapno and Reality Chuck. Great explanations, gentlemen–you brought up a few things I hadn’t thought of. Thanks again!
Bujold. Michael Flynn. Spider Robinson (when he isn’t being self-indulgent). John Barnes. Stephen Barnes. Stephen McSomethingorother, whose work I haven’t seen for a decade but who’s young and was quite active. Vinge, Niven, and Pournelle are all three up there in years, but still have at least a decade of productive work ahead of them. (Hell, Jack Williamson was the only SF writer I know of to have published during both the Harding and GWB Administrations – who knows how long they’ll last?) David Drake and Kevin Anderson are both writers I have no taste for personally, but so far as I know are still publishing good stuff of their particular subgenres. Somtow Sesquipedalianname. Harry Turtledove, ferpetesake, can about name his contract, and alternate-universe fiction has been a staple of SF since “Elsewhen.” And that’s with my buying of SF sharply curtailed the last four years.
Not so much the technical nitpicking, but the fact that these sci-fi fans area trying to kill (or at least drive out of the genre) two of the three pillars (I’d call Dr. Who the third) that have supported continued marketing of sci-fi material for the past three decades.
These fans may not love SW and ST, but if it weren’t for their popularity, much of what they like that has been released since 1978 would not have found a publisher.
China Mieville (fantasy/steampunk/alien cultures)
Cory Doctorow (pop-culture futureforward)
Charles de Lint (urban fantasy)
oh god! I almost forgot Dan Simmons!!! Illium: my favorite Greek mythology/proust-quoting mech/far future Earth/Shakepearean/Mars-colonization novel.
Kim Stanley Robinson (hard SF planetary colonization, post-apocalytpica)
Charles Stross (FTL travel/political)
Richard K. Morgan (slightly trite but entertaining cyberpunk/noir future thrillers)
Once again, I have to make the point that ST and SW are not sf, but a different genre. They have done nothing whatsoever to support sf, and by every account inside the field they have all but destroyed it.
It is not true that without them other books would not have found a publisher. Quite the contrary. Without them far many more real sf books would have found publishers, some of them original enough to have sparked fan bases of their own.
Polycarp, thanks for the list. However, except for the mysterious McSomethingorother I believe every single person you mention is over 50. This would not have been true of a similar list in the 40s, 50s, 60s, or 70s when the field was thriving.
Wendell Wagner, it’s quite true that the late 50s were a horrible time for the field and that many said the field was dead. At LACon in August I picked up a copy of The Best of Xero, the legendary fanzine edited by Dick and Pat Lupoff from 1960-1963. There was much discussion there of how writers had to turn to other fields to make a living and a reprint of the classic kiss-off to the field by a Young Turk named Donald Westlake, who though he could do better in mysteries.
What saved the field in the 1960s was an enormous influx of young new writers who invigorated a field made stale to death by the very names that are venerated today, like Asimov and Heinlein. That’s why I keep asking who the young stars of today are. Without those young writers reinventing a genre, a genre dies. Writers over 50 can turn out superlative works, but they can’t transform a field and make it new and exciting. There is no sign of these new young writers in any number. The two hottest new writers of sf are John Scalzi, 47, and Charles Stross, 42, both of whose first novels were from the past three eyars. Where are the 20-year-olds? Everyone from Pohl and Asimov to Samuel Delany broke into the field in their teens. Where are they now?
It was tongue in cheek, but I still find it amusing that LoTR was realeased in 2001. So we celebrated this brand new millenium by flocking to the theatres and watching trolls and dwarfs, when we should’ve been on our way to Jupiter.
Hello Again and I simulposted so I didn’t see that post earlier.
I know the authors on that list, but how many are read by the rest of the people in this thread?
Mieville is 34, Doctorow is 35, and Morgan is 41. A start, at least, toward a younger group. The rest are over 50.
For comparison, though, when I went to Clarion in the 70s the instructors there were towering gods, not beginning writers. They included the 35-year-old Terry Carr, the 37-year-old Harlan Ellison, and the 38-year-old Robert Silverberg. Ursula LeGuin was all of 43. The oldest? A doddering ancient named Frank Herbert, at 52. He was as old as Asimov, for Chthulu’s sake!
Neal Stephenson is 47, but he was already quite well known & popular with the release of “Snow Crash” in 1992.
Jacqueline Carey made a heckuva splash with “Kushiel’s Dart” – she’s 42 this year, but was 38 when it came out.
Nick Sagan is an up-and-comer, he’s 36
As to who reads these authors, I did my best to spread the word when I was in a position of influence to do so (I used to write the SF/F email newsletters for Borders & Waldenbooks).
A quick look along my bookshelves yields the following not-quite-geriatric authors:
Alastair Reynolds - 40
Ken MacLeod - 52
Tad Williams - 49
Greg Egan - 45
Neal Asher - 45
Iain M. Banks - 52
Peter F. Hamilton - 46
John Meaney - 49
Simon R. Green - 51
Brian Stableford - 58
Ben Jeapes - 41
Linda Nagata - 46
Paul J. McAuley - 51
A longer look would probably turn up others. None of them are exactly spring chickens, but all of them have a few years left in them, I think. And all of them write undeniable SF. (Some of them write other stuff as well, but hey, nobody’s perfect.)
I think you’d need to factor in the aging of the population to make a age-analysis work on this one, folks.
And am I the only one who really digs Jack McDevitt?
Xap, I understand what you’re saying. But again I think you’re railing against the wind, here. MOST artforms go through plus periods and minus periods. Rock and Roll had to go through the wimp rock phase to get to the punks and so forth. We had to go through boy-bands to get to the Everclear (Art was 35 when they broke big!) and such.
If it’s in remission then it is. But to pronounce is ‘dead’ is to ignore the cycles of history.
(I used to write the SF/F email newsletters for Borders & Waldenbooks).