Is true SF really dying?

Cafe Society
41

Sorry, but no. Leaving aside the problems of definition, Science fiction is just a subset of fantasy where the fantasy elements are presumed to have a scientific basis. Science fiction says “what if we go to Mars”; fantasy says “what if magic existed?” Both genres describe fantastic events, and both are equally about ideas. You’re trying to win a victory by definition by defining fantasy to suit your point.

Then Heinlein didn’t write good SF, I guess. Nor did Bradbury. And neither did Harlan Ellison. Or Robert Sheckely. Or Alfred Bester.

I strongly object to this characterization of SF being scientifically accurate. That always took a back seat, and wasn’t even a concern until Hal Clement began to invent hard SF. To say that “hard SF is the only SF” ignores 75% of the field for a sort of science fiction racial purity that never existed (even Hal Clement was willing to ignore scientific fact if it got in the way of a story).

Explain the difference between “Buck Rogers” (which Hugo published) and Lord of the Rings. We see Buck going on an adventure filled with scientific wonders in order to defeat a villain; on the other hand, we see Frodo going on an adventure filled with magic wonders in order to defeat a villain. You could easily do The Hobbit as science fiction (Pat Murphy has – see her There and Back Again). You just see magic vs. science and don’t note the underlying similarities.

On the issue of the age of authors, one point is that SF writers break in later than they used to. Other then Ted Chiang and, further back, Terry Pratchett, there are no teenage SF authors like Asimov, Pohl, etc. Chip Delany broke in around the age of 20; William Gibson – who Chip has called his literary grandson – broke in around 40. As Delany said, “Grampa and Grandson are almost the same age.” Since SF writers break in later, they are generally older.

As far as good news, there is a chance that the real place for science fiction is in the mainstream. Look at Jasper fforde’s Thursday Next novels – popular, and clearly SF (unless you want to be tightassed about your definition). He uses SF tropes along with fantasy tropes and creates a wonderful amalgam. There’s also Christopher Moore, who isn’t listed in SF, even though some of his books (most notably Fluke) clearly are. Neither author is shelved in science fiction or fantasy, but they seem to be doing quite well.

So the long run salvation would seem to be entertaining stories that use SF as a basis for their plots, but which don’t insist on being 100% scientifically accurate, and – like Heinlein or Bradbury – are willing to ignore science in order when it gets in the way of a good story.

42

It’s already been mentioned that we’re considering written sf, not visual sf. Nonetheless, ST is real sf (or was at TOS time). There was a very complimentary article about it in Analog during the first run. But someone limiting himself to ST or SW books is getting a very, very limited exposure, and to necessarily minor writing. Series books are limited in background and in that the characters can’t really change, since they have to be pretty much the same for the next person writing a series book.

If ST is what you base SF on, you need to get to a bookstore or a library and expand your horizons. You’ll be happy you did.

43

Oh good grief. You wouldn’t be able to see the phaser beam also. BTW, cars going down a cliff don’t explode in a giant fireball either. There’s a difference between the needs of television and getting the science wrong. To his credit, Roddenberry eliminated the whooshing of the Enterprise moving through space he had in the first version of the credits.

ST was the first show on TV, to my knowledge, that recognized that you couldn’t achieve FTL travel by pushing harder on the accelerator. It was also the first set in a real future society - of which the military parts were better drawn than anything else. Not perfect, but an order of magnitude better than Lost in Space or Time Tunnel.

Star Wars, on the other hand…

44

I quote from “Armageddon 2419 A.D.” the paperback version of the Buck Rogers from Amazing (Ace F-188) which I opened almost at random:
p. 116

I can’t go on - there are pages and pages of this stuff.

I’m not one to get bent out of shape about the difference between fantasy and sf, liking the logical fantasy of the Unknown era - deCamp, Heinlein, even L. Ron. But the scientific wonders of the early Amazings were supposed to be educational (complete with footnotes, remember). Some scientific wonders in sf are no more scientific than magic, but some limits itself to what is scientifically feasible - perhaps given a few advances, and work out the story within those limitations. The fantasy stories that have a well defined set of magical laws, and build the story around them, are more like hard science sf than the sf stories that let anything happen, or the fantasy stories that can magic up anything - like Gandalf’s return, for instance. The latter is a cheat, not limited to any sub-genre.

45

A different genre? It seems to me that they’re more on the order of a fenced enclosure, where there are a bunch of people who get fed fast food. Those inside never go hungry, since there is always more of the swill coming, but few get up the initiatives to wander outside the gates to sample the four star restaurants close by. Those who do seldom come back.

I’m a collector, but I don’t buy ST and SW books. They’re empty calories, all the same, and do nothing but get you ready for the next one.
I don’t think we can kick them out of the genre, but I agree on the damage they’ve done.

46

Your history is bunk!

Most artforms go through cycles, do they? How is classical music doing? How about painting? I’ve already mentioned the western. Jazz has never regained its audience or its prestige. Ballad singing, crooning, swing music, disco: the history of popular music is littered with dead ends. And hey, how’s poetry doing? Can the general public name any living poets?

Go through the world of 1906 and look at all the arts there and then. Once you can find what was popular and what was barely a thought in peoples’ minds (vaudeville vs. movies; broadway revues and follies vs. radio; opera and ballet vs. recorded music), then you tell me it’s all cycles and that everything comes back.

It doesn’t work that way. In art, there are few if any cycles. There are periods of glory and then inevitable decline. I’ll go just as far as you in the other direction: I can’t think of any artform that has come back from a near death experience. Rock music is way too young to say anything about. It’s a horrible example for your purpose. (Besides the 70s had a huge number of great acts and punk was a shallow and temporary diversion. I’ll go so far as to say the history of rock would be far improved if punk never happened. Oh, I’m an iconoclast today!)

Bunk, I say. Bunk!

47

I remember someone (Heinlein?) commenting that a great many space ships of early SF were propelled by various applications of the Doubletalk Drive – by which he meant that if you make up plausible technical terms, you can pass them off as something real and complex.

There is one convention in SF – you can make one assumption contrary to known theory, basing it on the fact that new theory leads to new inventions. Lord Kelvin, superb physicist though he was, would have considered the transistors and integrated circuits of modern computer boards to be on a par with the doubletalk drive. Yet we’re all operating on devices based on a principle of quantum physics, to even connect to the Internet.

And I remember Mr. Kelly, in 8th grade science, scoffing at the idea of ray guns – you cannot make anything in the electromagnetic spectrum, short of X-ray and gamma rays, do any damage to anyone. (Oh, I suppose you could give them a bad sunburn if you could aim a UV gun at them and get them to hold still long enough for it to work.) Yet laser technology is a commonplace today, and we have laser cannon in reality, or so I’m told.

48

You crazed iconoclast, you!

Yes, cycles. I’m not saying that art forms go through cycles. I’m saying that there’s nothing new under the sun and ALL things go through cycles.

Swing? Popular again as a niche less than 10 years ago.

Classical? Still being written and performed around the world.

You seem to be assuming that because something has changed or moved on it’s dead. It might not be what YOU want it to be but it DOES exist. Many of the golden age authors would have flinched heavily at the dystopian writings of the Cyberpunks but they’re still SF, God knows.

Would you, then, speculate that the lack of youth in the market (and I still think you’d need to correct for the aging population in general for that to stick) is due to a lack of outlet for youth-written stories at the retail or starting-out level?

49

Of course. It so happens that most modern poetry is set to music, but it’s no less poetry for that. Poetry didn’t die, it just evolved.

And you’re citing disco as an example of a style which has died, but then claiming that rock and roll isn’t yet old enough to make a good example? I’m not sure what the standards are, here.

50

Nonsense. Music lyrics are distinctly different from poetry. Not just a different genre but a different art form. (I’m old enough to remember the effort professors put in to declaring rock lyrics poetry back in the days when “relevance” mattered. They were interesting efforts, but they failed to make the case, except in the rarest of exceptions.)

The same standard that says that cyberpunk died and will never be reborn. Admittedly, that is a side issue in the larger question of whether sf has died but I’ll save the formal rigor of the argument for the dissertation committee. :slight_smile:

You get the same eyeroll that I gave Chronos. Swing had a one-year blip, never had true widespread popularity and is now dead as a doornail.

Classical music has the same problems that sf does. Nobody wants the new stuff, and orchestras, music labels, and performers are dying for lack of funds. Classical music has been dead for years. It’s just that the corpse is still twitching.

51

And yet there you are, living it, boy!

So the question I placed: Is there sufficient places for younger SF aspirants to get their material out to the public?

52

I don’t think SF is dying, I think it’s both changing and going through a bit of a slump due to some of those changes. It’s also simultaneously becoming more mainstream and more fragmented. It might not survive as a separate genre but get swallowed up by fantasy and regular fiction.

Publishing was changed quite a bit due to pretty much all the publishing houses restructuring and redefining how they did business in the 80s and 90s. Quite a lot of smaller or niche publishers were bought by bigger ones, which means that there were fewer publishers to shop work out to and fewer places with targeted book lines. Then the internet hit, and online stores like Amazon fundamentally changed how things worked.

We’ve also got a world where a lot of things postulated in the past have already come to pass and where some of the dreams have had their legs cut out from under them by the realities everyone is familiar with as a result of living in a high-tech society. Yesterday’s cyberpunk is today’s pop culture, except we don’t have the killer interfaces. Body modification? Done. Corporate culture taking over the streets? Done. Corps becoming more powerful than governments? Arguably, partially there.

Exploration is not as attractive and not as feasible as it was in the old days. There are probably a bunch of people who think, “Go to Mars? Why, so we can #^¢* up another planet as badly as our own?” Besides, most of us youngsters weren’t even alive when people went to the moon and back, and we all have pretty vivid memories of the Challenger and continuing failures of the space program with nothing big or spectacular to show for it. FTL drive? We all know that’s bullshit or at least out of reach without an enormous shakeup in physics. It’s a fun idea, but on some level it’s old and tired.

What I’ve seen happening is more of the “soft” SF. It’s more about future societies, people, what kind of changes technology makes in society. A lot of it is more chick-friendly. Heck, a lot of it is written by and for women. I’ve seen books like Stardoc that’s marketed as SF but is nothing more than romance with SF trappings, and is put up next to things like Primary Inversion which has a core of hard SF inside a puffy wrapping of psi with romance elements. SF is more mainstream and it’s attracting more authors who are competent and who tell entertaining stories but who don’t have the vision or innovation necessary to do new things. Not so surprisingly, competent but unoriginal sells better than cutting edge and brilliant. (Asaro’s interesting ideas lost out to her market instincts in later books, IMO.)

Some things that would have been marketed as SF 20 years ago are in the regular fiction section now. SF is mainstream. Smallville, Battlestar Galactica, the X-Files, and Dark Angel are all TV shows that are relatively popular and that have SF elements. Since it has become mainstream, and all the entertainment companies involved in the book, TV, and movie venues of the genre have been more involved in making it a money-maker, truly new ideas have been given scant attention. Firefly, an overt return to the adventure-oriented roots of SF from the serial days, should have been given more of a chance than it had. Ironically, it was one of those cases where executive shot themselves in the foot. It had the potential for genre- and audience-crossing appeal while using new-old tropes of storytelling that could have revitalized the “people colonizing worlds” and “strange future societies” aspects of SF.

There’s also a whole bunch of stuff that crosses genres, from SF to F and back again. How do you classify L.E. Modesitt’s Recluse series? He’s got an overtly Fantasy world, but his system of magic has rules that are as rigid as the laws of thermodynamics, and the origin of his mages is directly from SF. Other authors, like Walter Jon Williams and Tad Williams, have done SF bending Fantasy (or is it F tinged SF?) too. It’s probably the case that technological progress has progressed so quickly and scientific explanations (and the attendant restrictions on possibilities) have gotten so extensive that interesting technical ideas are hard to find.

I think it’s appropriate that authors are devoting more time to social SF, exploring SF tinged adventure, or crossing over to technofantasy rather than trying to find something new in hard SF. Most of the good old ideas have been used to the point of cliche, and the possibilities of new stuff, like nanotechnology, are getting to the point where advanced versions of the tech could be indistinguishable from magic anyway.

53

Nosense right back atcha.

It’s my firm belief that poetry existed becuase no one had invented the music industry. It was a way for trooubled young men to get laid and get free drinks. Music lyrics might not be on par with poetry as literature (although the best lyrics certainly beat out bad poetry), but without the music industry, those troubled young men in black turtlenecks would still be writing poetry and putting the effort of making music into making better literature.

I was looking around to find out the etymology of Science Fiction*, when I found a facsimile of an article from a 1952 issue of Popular Mechanics, featuring a tour of Heinlein’s Colorado house.

I think it’s clear from context that we’re not talking about shuttle pilots.

  • Couldn’t find it pinned down. The honor might go to Hugo Gernsback.
54

True SF is not dying … it is merely pining for the fjords …

55

OK, so this is a long and rambling thread, covering a lot of topics that I am interested in, so I will respond with a long and rambling post. I think that’s fair.

I have been a science fiction and fantasy fan for about 30 years now. 20 years ago I read mostly science fiction. Even at that time, most of the stuff I was reading had been written 20 years before. Nowadays, I mostly read fantasy.

Drawing a line between “science fiction” and “fantasy” is a waste of time, since so much lies in a grey area in between. I don’t even know what the difference is between “hard science fiction” and everything else. The proponents of the terms “hard science fiction” seem to be talking about an empty set–nothing is hard enough to qualify.

There are science fiction writers working today that I follow, but it is a pretty small number–Walter Jon Williams, John Varley, Lois McMaster Bujold, and Vernor Vinge. Bujold seems to have moved over to fantasy, and all of the rest of them put together publish fewer books than Terry Pratchett all by himself, so I really don’t read a lot of pure science fiction.

The publishing channels have changed a lot since the early 20th century. Most of the “giants” of the field got started in pulp or pulp-like magazines, writing short stories. Those markets were desparate for material. These days there is practically no market for anything except novels. One effect is that authors start much later than before, and their journeyman efforts mostly stay in a drawer somewhere.

I guess that I do think that science fiction as an independent genre is drawing to a close. I think that we might as well choose dates for its lifespan–I vote for 1934, when Jack Williamson published “The Legion of Space”, to 2005, when Jack Williamson published “The Stonehenge Gate”. All right, all right, nobody likes those dates. Whatever. Pick some of your own.

This is pretty funny, inasmuch as this is the attitude of the entire genre from outside the genre. I imagine that fans of Star Trek tie-in novels identify some subgroup–TOS stories?–as the ghetto.

So, in summary, I will continue to read the authors that I enjoy, and will discover a few old gems that I have overlooked in the past (I recently read The Stars My Destination for the first time–wow!) New authors will appear that I will like, but I doubt if I will see a revitalization of the science fiction genre, and I doubt if I will ever see a time when SF fans don’t argue about the definitions of “science fiction” and “fantasy” on rec.arts.sf.written, or heap scorn on Star Trek (Original Series) tie-in novels.

56

It’s definately the case that some of the best genre fiction isn’t shelved in genre fiction these days, but is that really a bad thing? I mean, is M. John Harrison’s Light sci fi or fantasy? What is steampunk, and does China Mieville write it? For that matter, is Whale Rider fantasy or regular fiction? And what about those Horror shelves - what on earth is supposed to go on them? I’m definately not having any sort of hard time finding things that I like to read, and some of them have definately been what I’d consider “new sf”. So the new thing is the “New Weird” - the new thing used to be cyberpunk, and it used to be shiny spaceships, and it used to be lots of stuff. Frankly, I think hard sf is boring if it isn’t about ideas and people, but then I think anything is boring if it isn’t about ideas and people. I recently read Maria Doria Russell’s The Sparrow, which I found in the general fiction section, and I don’t think anybody would call it anything but sf, which it would be if you took every single “hard sf” element out of it. The speculative fiction genres (or genre, if you like) are really just “idea fiction”, and in that sense they’re doing just fine, I think.

57

Yes. Absolutely.

58

I think Zsofia has a very real point - a lot of interesting things that could easily be considered sci-fi (or fantasy for that matter - I’m a bigger fantasy reader so I notice it there more) are marketed and/or shelved as something else.

It’s gotten to the point where, when I’m browsing my local B&N or Borders, after I finish up in their Sci-Fi & Fantasy section, I take a turn through all the other genre fiction sections, too. As an example, my local B&N had Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series shelved in the “Mystery” section. It’s about a wizard for the love of Pete!

Lately, I find more interesting sci-fi and fantasy stuff housed in other genres - or in general fiction - than I do in their proper section.

Possibly it’s not so much that sci-fi is dying, but that the younger authors you’re seeking are having their work marketed or shelved in a section you’re not expecting. Nobody will bother to market or shelve works by well-established sci-fi authors as anything other than sci-fi - it won’t help sell those books and is likely to actually hurt. A younger author - even one who’s writing is pure sci-fi - is more likely to be flexible about what the publisher calls his or her work. I submit it could well be said that not marketing it as sci-fi (even if it is) is even to that author’s benefit. If there’s enough romance (and believe you me there doesn’t need to be much - I picked up a really decent fantasy novel in the Romance section in which the romance constituted two fairly tepid kisses and three passing comments), market it as a Romance rather than sci-fi. Your potential audience is a lot bigger.

My theory about why the romance genre is growing like a well-watered weed is because it’s been vigorously expanding the types of books it’ll take under its aegis. At this point, crossovers and/or exceptionally questionable romances (as in, the story is fundamentally something other than a romance - there’s just some random passing reference to romance) outnumber traditional romance novels. For example, lately I’ve been reading the J.D. Robb In Death detective series - and actually really enjoying it. It’s all shelved with romances (probably because the author is one of the leading lights of the romance genre), but the “romance” is limited in most books to the fact that the lead character is married and her spouse insists on helping her with her investigation in various non-police sorts of ways (primarily research and logistical facilitation). That series is a pure detective novel series - but that’s not where you’ll find it.

59

Did you also note that EVERYONE knows that orchestras don’t follow people around and play ominous music when something dangerous is about to happen?

60

Not just from outside the genre. A while back there was a big fight about sf writers who didn’t want to be called sf writers because of the limitation of the title. Vonnegut was one, but there were some who were really sf writers who felt the same way.

However, I think there is a difference, which I mentioned before. Series tie ins, or any novelizations, are limited in what you can do with the characters and plots. In the old days mainstream critics assumed that all sf was about BEMs, and thought the same thing. I haven’t noticed this kind of bias in main stream review journals lately, which is I guess from younger critics having actually read some real sf, and from people like leGuin getting critical attention. Maybe some of the disaffected authors feel better that it is possible to get on the best seller lists with sf now, so maybe that helps.

As for the question - when I was in college we had a standing order to buy every new sf book published, which was not all that overwhelming. I’m not sure there are more stories published today than there were back then - more titles, yes, but not more stories. So, perhaps the good stuff is getting lost.