Science Fiction

Future Events Such as These Will Bore You in the Future

“Science fiction writers were once a pack of wild pigs, feral and ranging, trampling over the landscape of extant ideas, digging up the soil, setting the stage for new things to develop and grow. To engage with these grunting razorbacks when they were on the move was to take a risk: you might be trampled or, better, drop snuffling to all fours and become one of them. But the hogs were captured and the wildness was bred out of them. Tamed pigs are now farmed in great foul complexes. The meat of the domestic science fiction writer is freely available everywhere. Thick and uniform slices of grey pork are marketed as the meat of an unbroken and raging creature, but they have lost all of the gamey wild flavor.

What is the story of the taming? How were the pigs captured and domesticated? The explanation is multiform, best expressed as a matrix of narratives, allowed to coincide and intermingle in time.

All of these fables are true. None of these fables are true.

The Great Prophet Asimov, He of MENSA

With the technological forwardness of the space program and the growing dominance of computation and automation, the new science fiction writers of the 1970s and 1980s saw the previous generations in oracular terms. A group of brilliant men, now old and wise, had, through their keen sense of the future, predicted and encouraged these vast technological changes from their shadow society of conventions and magazines. To honor this success and continue the program of shaping the world to come, science fiction writers and readers abandoned unbridled imagination and began to pretend to be scientists, or at least what they imagined scientists to be: hardened pedants concerned mostly with the accurate representation of real science in created worlds, as gleaned poorly from pop science books and interpreted by a group of people who largely aren’t very good at mathematics.

The Temperance of Horselover Fat

In the afterword of Philip K. Dick’s 1977 novel A Scanner Darkly, he reflects on the harmful effect that drug misuse had on his life and the lives of his friends, many of whom were now dead or permanently disabled. Dick had written a beautiful and heart-rending novel about the relationship between social expectations, mental health, and the war on drugs, which would only heighten in the following years. In that famous afterword, Dick misidentified the root of the problem as choice, rather than circumstance. Having read Dick’s words, burgeoning science fiction writers everywhere were suddenly and determinedly engaging with reality unmediated, practicing their craft completely sober.

The Uncurious Case of Francis Fukuyama

The decline and fall of the USSR led to a loss of polarity in global culture, unbridling the purer of the two dominant forms of capitalism, and establishing a world with few alternatives. History had famously ended, and neoliberal capitalism was declared to be the ordering influence of all the days to come. As our world became increasingly uniform, so too did the underlying worlds of science fiction become first hopeless and then uncritical in their acceptance of the inevitability of capitalism: the characters in Neuromancer are miserable, but they never try to change their world, and they certainly don’t suggest that another world is possible. A review of the literature mostly shows us a choice between some form of continuing capitalism and total societal collapse—only in death might we be free.

Sex in the Moonlight

In the 1960s and early 1970s, Barry Malzberg and Robert Silverberg each wrote dozens of science fiction novels and stories, while simultaneously moonlighting as pseudonymous writers of erotic novels—sex books—to pay the bills, or, in Silverberg’s case, to become wealthy. In their most frenetic years, each of them wrote ten or more novels. Silverberg ultimately had more success as a writer of erotic fiction. Malzberg too often refused to subvert his work with marketability. Consider Malzberg’s novel Cinema, about a young woman, Susan, who begins to work, rather neutrally, in pornography. When Susan has a nervous breakdown, it isn’t due to the sexwork, but due to the controlling and repressive framework in which that sexwork occurs. Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press published the book he had commissioned, but complained that while the book was certainly sexual, it wasn’t sexy or erotic.

The modern reader is tempted to dismiss the sexually-focused fiction of these two writers, and many others, as an embarrassing sideline, but this would be a great loss. Both Malzberg and Silverberg took sexuality and desire seriously as sites of experimentation and as worthy of the same playful attention they offered to imagined future societies. Both men and women are frequently represented as unabashedly and routinely horny creatures in their novels. The views of sexuality available to writers of science fiction are, in some ways, more open in terms of the range of genders and sexualities available to the characters, but there is much less experimentation, and sexuality has become a special separate thing, not a routine part of life.

The Burning of the Library

The key to a consistently profitable business is the elimination of risk. In the management of a back catalog of books, publishers eliminate risk through the establishment of a canon of simple, understandable books. Any book that truly requires something of the reader can be safely set aside, to be forgotten. Over a period of long years, the streamlining of the canon of science fiction has meant a great ignorance of the lineage of truly experimental science fiction among the average reader of Foundation, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, or The Three Body Problem. If we wish to free science fiction writers to be the howling and unsettling creatures they once were, we must start by moving past the canon and establishing ourselves as esoteric scholars of Barrington Bayley, Norman Spinrad, Jane Gaskell, D.G. Compton, Anna Kavan, Josephine Saxton, and dozens of others. With patience and luck, we might hope to uncover the secret ritual that will transform us into the unsubdued creatures we seek.”
—Siobhán M. La Grippe

“After spending some time away from it, going back and looking at science fiction is far from appetising. Science, and its upstart avatar technology, dominate the surfaces and spaces of our lives. It is possible that no one who will ever read this has worked in agriculture, been ignorant of the shape of the planet or the chemical make-up of water, or spent a single day that has not been marked or marred by science and technology. In a sense, any fiction that seeks to engage with the moment-to-moment texture of our lives today would look like science fiction to people who lived even just half a century ago.

So what sets science fiction apart? Does it try to elucidate scientific knowledge? No—that work is generally done by non-fiction writers and communicators. Science fiction, supposedly, is based on using scientific concepts to create imagined scenarios, and then dress these in the trappings of narrative.

Historians of science fiction have found its roots in everything from Lucian of Samosata’s satires to a Gothic novel by Mary Shelley. The most perfect example of what defines science fiction is found in Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics. Each story begins with some cosmological fact or speculation. Say, about the formation of the planets. Then, the narrator, old Qwfwq, tells us about the experiences of himself and his community of primal entities back in that eon, and how it has changed now. These short tales often begin as whimsy but end on a forlorn note.

All too often, I have seen ‘science fiction fans’ dismiss these stories. The science is absurd, they say. Because faster-than-light spacecraft and time travel are such sober possibilities. There is no characterisation, no plot in Italo Calvino’s tales, they yell. In contrast to the archetypal Mary and Gary Stus, or worse yet, relatable characters, and firmly Campbellian story engineering of science fiction.

The science fiction they like comes from the pulp tradition and holds the airport bookshop bestseller as its finest external exemplar. When this kind of science fiction has not been told purely as an adventure story, no different at heart from one set in the American wild west or colonial India, it has been an allegory. Allegories are fine as far as they go, but they aren’t all or most of what we should demand from an imaginative genre. And then there are the simple gadget or high concept stories, with a dusting of adventure or suspense on top.

So why should science fiction even exist except as a marketing category that writers, publishers, booksellers, filmmakers, and merchandisers benefit from, and consumers spend time and money on? Well, while Calvino’s Cosmicomics were neither allegory nor earnest speculation, they are delightful stories that probably would not have come to be told in any other way. The uneasy insights about reality Philip K. Dick wanted to share with us are probably best set down in fictional form, and the genre trappings are almost inseparable from the nature of his insights. William Burroughs, who paralleled some of Dick’s insights, approached the state of science fiction in writing about them. Octavia Butler could have pursued her ideas about consent, ethical choices, coercion and conformity in societies in the form of essays, but by writing the Xenogenesis trilogy she was able to explore and elucidate these ideas in a way, say, a historical novel, or a spy thriller would not have as easily allowed for. There needed to be that tension between human and truly alien. Samuel Delany, who has worked in many genres, used the semiotics and landscape of science fiction to help him generate unique, probing stories. Adam Roberts parlays an encyclopedic knowledge of the genre to play with and quietly rearrange its tropes, and to generate stories other genres cannot.

Still, as noted further above, much of science fiction didn’t really need to be science fiction. There’s room for that sort of thing, if it has verve—the planetary romances of Jack Vance come to mind. As well protest they’re not really science fiction as complain that, having secured a gig with Disney, Carl Barks told adventure tales using a family of ducks as the protagonists. Style and a light touch are worth a lot—but so few science fiction authors have ever had either.

All this actually amounts to a kind of rearguard defense of science fiction, and by design. Because most of what passes for science fiction doesn’t reach the levels of any of the things I’ve praised here. There is much use of long-established settings and situations, but that doesn’t make the stories science fiction in any fundamental, necessary sense. Worst of all, these stories are written by and for that insular, anti-imagination, rule-obsessed (but only their particular genre rules, not the general rules of sense, reason, and taste, or a truly willful rejection of the same) community known as science fiction fandom. All fandom is a hell, and pandering to it is a truly demonic pastime.

And there’s the crux of it all. In this case, Sturgeon’s famous (and optimistic) law isn’t just describing the normal chaff-to-wheat ratio of any creative endeavor. Because science fiction grew conjoined with its readers and viewers, because fandom has become a part of the process, science fiction has trapped and suffocated itself. The circle is too small. The frame of reference is insular, and at the same time, fans only consume the worst mainstream books and films and television (in many cases these are science fiction anyhow) and apply these yardsticks to science fiction. People are rewarded for positing a spaceship traveler who doesn’t look like William Shatner, or for having once watched an anime and copped some of its imagery and mannerisms, or for raiding South Asian myth cycles for story forms rather than Nordic or Greek ones. The expectations are low, or crass, or meaningful only if you have already dedicated years of your life to consuming science fiction and your entire frame of reference lies in-genre.

Science fiction—the American pulp magazine-spawned genre that now dominates that phrase I have tried to refamiliarize myself with—grew along with its fandom. But fandom is a state of mind that refuses to grow up. Even when science fictional media properties are the most lucrative entertainment out there outside of the discography of the latest overrated pop diva, even when science fiction and superhero (a genre rooted in pulp science fiction) franchises rule the box office, fandom still behaves like a collection of awkward, entitled, stunted outsider-adolescents. And this is why, worldwide, science fiction, dominated by the whims of this parasite that has grown larger than its victim, continues to behave as if its key audience is a puerile, demanding, whimsical teenager with added spending power. Worst of all, the creators of science fiction themselves tend to have ‘come up’ through fandom, still participate in it, and carry all its assumptions and in-group myopia into their creative work.

The bottom line: either science fiction or fandom must die. It is possible, of course, for both to die. But if you want to read some new, good science fiction before the century runs out, leave fandom and urge others to follow you.”
—Jayaprakash Satyamurthy

“At the start of the 2010s I considered myself an SF writer (as in SCIENCE fiction, not ‘speculative’—Ellison was great but the science part was always the point). I’d grown up with my father throwing Cordwainer Smith, Roger Zelazny, Philip K. Dick and the Dangerous Visions books at me: even James Tiptree Jr., who he helpfully explained was really a woman named Alice. He couldn’t make much of Delany…but had still read everything by him. And he had strong views on things like Dune that departed significantly from consensus. As an immigrant, he’d taught himself to read English from old SF mags found in the local library, so this material was a personal canon for him.

In my late teens and early twenties, when I started writing stories and submitting them to mags like Interzone and Postscripts, I assumed that there was almost certainly a thriving contemporary SF ecosystem in existence, carrying on the work of the New Wave; my only ambition was to make it in the door. If I had any concerns at this point, they were simply whether or not I was radical enough to write SF. Had I done enough acid? Lived in enough countries? Worked enough different jobs? And, more importantly, did I really understand science? I made it a point to keep up with then-current news in fields like biology, particle physics, and molecular engineering (which sort of doesn’t exist; nanotechnology is mostly a scam, as Scott Locklin has entertainingly pointed out on several occasions, but it was still considered vastly important at the time, especially in SF). Also, I regularly read Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, Burroughs etc. since the New Wave writers like Ballard and Aldiss thought of Modernism as equally important to Golden Age SF material. I considered SF film and TV stuff a distant second at best to the literary tradition: entertaining and with a few important classics, but nowhere near as important as the novels and stories.

Although I had stories and even books published, as the decade wore on, I gradually realized that the SF scene as it existed bore no resemblance to my naive fantasies. The great and still under-acknowledged writer Lawrence Miles has written of undergoing a similar process, in which he initially assumed SF writers were urbane, cutting-edge types living socially experimental lives while regularly meeting and drawing inspiration from actual scientists. Then, after coming in contact with reality, he realized they were insular nerds who were more interested in corporate media franchise products than in pushing literary or scientific boundaries. My own ‘awakening’ followed a similar trajectory, although it took me much longer than Miles to become completely disillusioned.

To start, I realized that almost everything being published in places like Strange Horizons was more properly fantasy than science fiction, and a particularly low stake form of fantasy at that. Stories repurposing fairy tale and folklore content were the norm, but tediously ‘updated’ and ‘corrected’ to include anodyne modern morals. Angela Carter wrote a lot of amazing books, but was she really the best model for writers billed as SF? Any real interest in scientific extrapolation had been thrown out the window. Worse, the prose was usually remedial, relying on a trivial sort of ‘poetry’ that could throw up a few evocative phrases without ever fully cohering. The narrative facility on display was often choppy and lazy. I tried to learn who the genuinely important and cutting-edge writers were, only to be told that THIS WAS IT: these were the people winning Hugo and Nebula awards.

For me, every year of the 2010s was another gut punch of dispiriting reality. I saw that I had nothing in common with anyone who bothered to actively participate in the SF scene: people who prioritized things like getting into the Clarion workshop. If these were my peers, if this was the audience as it existed, what was the point of writing for it? The esteem of these types meant nothing to me.

In the second half of the decade I met a few people who were publishing regularly in places like Clarkesworld. Every time, from within the first few seconds of greeting them, I felt as if I’d made a terrible mistake. These were the least adventurous people I’d ever met. Most of them could barely meet my gaze, much less discuss anything important. Many of them were unemployed, on welfare, or relying on trust funds and a never-ending stream of publicly sourced handouts. They didn’t seem to have been anywhere or done anything with their lives. Many had enormously complicated personal identities (of the ‘rad-alt-poly-non-binary-queer-flipped’ kind) but were extremely staid and conventional in person. They were aware of the writers of the past that I considered important but seemed uninterested in them; more often the conversation turned to film, anime, tabletop games and other things I thought of as worthless distractions for children, not serious writers.

I saw that attendance at conventions, participation in organizations like SFWA, and immersion in the various trivial controversies of the scene (usually an older writer or editor saying something that could be construed as mildly racist, sexist, or otherwise offensive; this was the 2010s, remember), was the focus of their empty-seeming lives. The occasional publication of a short story in something like Clarkesworld was the highlight of an entire year. In a morbid character study sense, these people were usually more interesting than anything they’d written—they could have starred in an early period Daniel Clowes comic.

Worse, no one seemed to be noticing this or doing anything to develop an alternative. The real self-declared and acknowledged nemeses of these people were clownish reactionary caricatures like Vox Day and Larry Correia: people writing trivial genre slop of the ‘Starship Troopers except the bug aliens are now space Muslims’ kind.

I now have less than zero interest in anything emerging from the channels I used to monitor. It would seem now that AI is rendering genre fiction of this sort a redundant exercise, if it hasn’t already thoroughly done so. The readers under 30 I know who bother at all with SF seem to be mostly reading…the same writers I started out on 30 years ago. In other words, young people would still rather read old paperbacks from the 1960s and 1970s than anything produced in the present.

Clearly the problem hasn’t been solved.”
—Justin Isis

“The visions of modern science fiction authors are anything but dangerous. Part of the problem is the definition of danger. The avant garde has been drained of life by the specters of its own past—we’re still stuck in a phase in which the cut-up techniques of William S. Burroughs are considered radical. Incorporating other genres is nothing new. Science fiction mingled with noir, social realism, poetry, pornography—all of this was demonstrated in the first new wave of the 1960s and 70s. Much of it appeared in the two-volume collection of Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions, yet still people lean on this time-worn crutch under the pretext of exploring new ground. What we need is genuine creativity, not new combinations of established forms.

Science fiction that predicts the future is becoming less and less relevant as technology advances and we move into a new phase of civilization in which we struggle to comprehend the present. Even aside from the fact that the genre has grown stale (and has been since at least the 1980s), it’s beginning to outlive its usefulness as a potential guide to what lies ahead. A number of changes in direction are needed, each of them fueled by unlikely innovations, each of them focused on aspects of experience that are largely ignored by the modern world. I can imagine a purely aesthetic science fiction that eschews the notion of the ‘fiction of ideas’ altogether, adapting the techniques of Marcel Proust or even James McCourt. This would be vaguely in line with the direction taken with some of the authors of the first New Wave, a movement that arguably reached its peak with Samual Delany’s Dhalgren.

Extraterrestrial life in science fiction is particularly disappointing. Stanislaw Lem had the right idea in books like Solaris, Eden, and His Master’s Voice, postulating species so thoroughly different from anything we know that there’s absolutely no basis of understanding on either side. Rational thought is given far too much weight in this phase of human history. Why even make it part of the alien mind? It would be far more interesting to try to imagine something completely outside of all human parameters—beings, for instance, that exist on multiple planes and which can only communicate through typographical anomalies, erotic dreams, statistical inconsistencies, and the most baffling cases of déjà vu, spread out over several different periods of time through which they move in ways that we can never understand. Their ‘language’ might comprise a complex web of coincidence and inference, falsifying history to nourish their bodies and pursue their opaque agendas. Direct contact might consist of an obsession with polygons or a sexual attraction to Piranesi’s prison etchings. The list of heretofore unexplored possibilities is endless.

One might argue that this would be a subset of surrealism. The accusation is a common one among those too lazy to entertain new ideas. Aside from the fact that the surrealist movement had a specific definition and specific aims and doesn’t just equate to ‘weird’, there are ways of circumventing this accusation. One could write like Lawrence Durrell or Anaïs Nin, keeping the focus on the interplay of emotions among a group of artists, Kabbalists, spies, or administrative officials, the most radical ideas, while crucial to the narrative, unfolding entirely in the background. The stories of Izumi Suzuki embrace this kind of subtlety.

I could imagine a novel that opens with the exposition of a scientific discovery providing indisputable proof that continuity is the result of a perceptual flaw; that we come into existence complete with a lifetime’s worth of memories every billionth of a second, passing away just as quickly before reformulating again in a brand new context. The subatomic interactions that give rise to this phenomena are impossible to understand in anything but the most abstract way. Knowledge of this condition has no effect on the illusion of causality or the perception of memory. This initially gives rise to an almost universal wave of apathy and violent crime as the populace internalizes the notions that a) there are no consequences for any of their actions, and b) by the time they’ve decided on any given act, the situation will have already collapsed and hundreds of millions of new ones will have arisen in its place. Over time, the shift in culture becomes increasingly subtle. Knowing that nothing even remotely matters leads to an organic reorientation in values, leading people to do things not for personal gain or even hedonistic pleasure, but purely for the sake of doing them. Living in the moment becomes akin to an art form in which everyone participates as a matter of course. People converse like they do in Marguerite Duras novels, speaking in quixotic, disconnected fragments, emphasizing sparsely comprehensible insights. At some point, several decades later and two thirds of the way through the novel, a second scientific discovery is made that contradicts the first, yet it’s far too late to turn back at this point, a fundamental change has taken place at the very roots of society. The human psyche has transformed into a completely different animal, no more recognizable to past generations than Lem’s unfathomable aliens. This quasi-coherent setting could comprise a subgenre in itself.”
—Damian Murphy

“I have often wondered why God bothered with science fiction. Although I suppose one could, if so inclined, cherry-pick numerous examples of science fiction books, films, and video games as groundbreaking exemplars to prove that the genre isn’t totally aesthetically worthless, really, the whole subject fills me with such a sense of crushing ennui I can’t even be bothered to muster up the required energy to do so. In many ways, I find science fiction writers to be a thousand times more repellent than fantasy writers, in that the latter tend to be more often than not harmlessly unpretentious scribblers who are under no delusions that their books are anything other than a bit of cheap thrills and mindless entertainment, unlike their starry-minded brethren, who tend to be self-important charlatans convinced in the moral superiority of their literary endeavors, which more often than not are but gimmicky, thinly-veiled treatises, nonfiction transparently vizarded in the jester’s motley of fiction. In this way, they seem to mimic that almost unbearably smug specimen of modern humanity, the hero-scientist: I can’t help but think about that nauseating line uttered by smirking beardo Paul Rudd in Ghostbusters: Afterlife, about how ‘science is punk rock,’ or, even more darkly amusing, the way in which gutless sensitivity readers have altered a Roald Dahl text so that a witch posing as a cashier is now magically transformed into a top scientist (because according to contemporary social mores, a female character can only be ‘strong’ if she is either one of two things, a scientist or a superhero warrior-princess). I’m also reminded of the almost religious devotion that large segments of the population of the Soviet Union felt towards their atomic scientists and pioneers of nuclear energy, and their blind belief that such technocratic men and woman would lead them to a glorious scientific future, so long as people trusted them unconditionally and did as they said (a terrible lie finally put to the sword by the Chernobyl disaster). Parallels may also be drawn to a similar delusion acting out in real-time in our own age, with the nascent proliferation of A.I. and the belief put forth by its parasitic demiurges that it will lead to a brave new world. When the lips of a scientist tout the words ‘progress’ and ‘utopia,’ what they often really mean in their heart is ‘social enshittification.’ I myself believe that Huysmans was more on the mark: ‘The past seems horrible to me, the present gray and desolate, and the future utterly appalling.’

Much of science fiction, stripped of its stylistic conventions and genre tropes, can be seen as nothing more than colonialistic wish fulfillment, the logical dénouement of the 4X gaming mechanic (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate), a conquistadorial wet dream of spreading our foul and debased civilization to other corners of the galaxy, and all that goes with that, including the violation of the void by phallic FTL starships, and the despoliation of virgin planets yet untainted by the tread of our footsteps, heavy as they are with the gore-encrusted millstones of our collective history. Proponents of this manner of cosmic manifest destiny argue that they’re trying to save the human race from its own preordained extinction, and that we should all bow down and be grateful for their noble intentions. But I say, much like the faddish longevity fanatics and the tech bros eager to download their consciousness into software, that such people are desperately afraid of death, and that this ‘colonization of the stars’ is nothing more than some febrile bid for a whorish and anile immortality. This is, I think, one of the things that made C.S. Lewis’ book Out of the Silent Planet such a breath of fresh air, in that it’s one of the few science fiction novels I can call to mind that takes the position that perhaps mankind shouldn’t colonize the stars, but instead be content with the home world gifted to us either by God or Nature.

(The other most popular type of science fiction story, that of the alien invasion, can be safely dismissed as the reverse of the above, by which I mean, the perverse desire of the colonialist to be punished for the sins of the past and the transgressions of his ancestors: the UFO attack, then, can be psychologically defined as a sort of symbolic act of extraterrestrial flagellation, white guilt with rocket ships and ray guns).

While on the subject, I cannot ignore the dropsical subgenre of science fiction that devotes itself to the subject of ‘virtual reality.’ What amuses me about the champions of virtual reality is that they often portray it as some sort of utopian paradise beyond our wildest dreams, where one can let one’s imagination run wild. When in actual fact, usually it merely holds up a mirror to the utter paucity of imagination displayed by those who would partake in it, and just recycles the same tired old neckbeard fetishes: ‘pew pew’ outer space ship battles, lightsaber duels, massive PvP battle royales, etc. The end result is like some malformed stillbirth generated from the chance meeting between Sheldon Cooper and a Cirque du Soleil performer on a gaming table at Comic Con, and the resulting act of abhorrent unholy congress between the twain (see in particular the film Ready Player One for a demonstration on how this theory can turn into sickening fact). The genius of George Lucas was that he was able to assimilate his influences yet go beyond them, and his greatest special effect illusion was showing people old things in new ways. Sadly, many of his followers were content to make Lucas himself the horizon of their own little worlds, beyond which they could go no further.

That science fiction is experiencing something of a cultural resurgence now is hardly surprising, when one factors in the rule of attraction, or the theory that like attracts like; for in a society where the great majority of the human race walk around with vacuums in their skulls, is it any great surprise that they would in turn be drawn moth-like to the ponderous void that is outer space, the matriarchal demon-goddess of all vacuums?”
—James G. Champagne

“Wider-culture science fiction has always seemed to me a lot like—and I’m going to be telling on myself a little here—porn that slaps a set of Rivers Cuomo frames on an otherwise extremely vanilla person and insists that they are now fuckable, or interesting, or a nerd, or a gamer, or whatever. It’s tacky. It insists on itself. It misunderstands, on a base level, who it claims to be its target audience. But the content tells the truth where the insistence lies. From Star Trek to Stranger Things, Grateful Dead to Weezer, R’lyeh to The Wardrobe, vanilla culture is sold some version of the same basic missionary thing, repeatedly, with the pastiche of incomprehensible evil, or magic furniture, or nerd culture, or otherwise entry-level edgy-ness, body wrapped to the story, to sell the repackage as cool or somehow different than other iterations. Marketing entities use the smack of weird, or alien, or strange, and the implication that their product is somehow niche or genre, as means to ironically widen the target market.

‘But Neo-Passéism’, you’re saying, ‘Asimov and Heinlein are different’, you’re insisting. No, the fuck they’re not, okay. They were perverts (Weezer) and took 500,000 words to express 3 good ideas when anyone with any self-awareness would have the sense to distill those ideas down to something less like what a tweedy, old, juniper smelling, grizzled, handsy, professor would write. We got it, Issac (Rivers). Predict the behavior of the group, not the individual. Gods are professors and professors are Gods. Robots live a long time. One of us! One of us! Fuck outta here, Fire and Ice. And don’t look at me like that, babe. You don’t actually like Pinkerton, this is herd behavior. Don’t be like Pitchfork, you got it right the first time, it sucks. It’s Matt Sharp you like. Rentals? During Pinkerton, the creeps in the band and management were trying to cage him and push him out, but his fingerprints...I’m getting off topic.

Science fiction as a modern genre is a good bit older than Rock and Roll music, by my count, though my more literary friends may have other ideas about that. Sci-Fi, anyway, like Rock & Roll, was legacy by the time the Boomers got hold of it, and when Boomers ruin something, boy do they fully ruin it. All we ever got was the tattered refuse remaining after the capitalist time hole did its vampire thing. We will have to burn what remains to get any use out of it. And I’m sorry, I may have been yelling at my Boomer dad a little in that last graf. I don’t know if that came off endearing crazy or Rivers Cuomo crazy. I didn’t mean to fuss at you, darlin’.”
—Ryan Pitchford

“SF is now an unamputated diabetic foot and is seemingly no longer creative enough to imagine a cure for diabetes. It is running out of possible futures; reality should’ve never been in a position to outpace the content of SF. Nor should it have ever been in a position where even middle-grade Golden Age fare outwrites Hugo winners. It’s quite incriminating that there was massive outrage over the WFA bearing Lovecraft’s likeness but there has never been a mass boycott of the Hugos over their ties with Raytheon. ‘Slipstream’ sounds like a fish expelling urea. The potential for genuine greatness in cyberpunk died with Yoshitoshi ABe’s Texhnolyze. The same could be said for his Haibane Renmei per steampunk. Both are the grunge of SF. SF itself dying with the New Wave would’ve been preferable to what has happened to it now. So why, despite all this, is SF a useful vehicle for Neo-Decadence, namely in works like Blue on Blue by Quentin S. Crisp, Welcome to the Arms Race by Justin Isis, and numerous pieces in my own short story collection The Universe as Performance Art? Because the sorry state of SF gives precedence to explore possibilities that the passé SF reader and/or publisher would otherwise be allergic to, with our greatest inspiration being the New Wave. It is, despite our myriad grievances, the one ‘genre,’ more than fantasy or horror by some margin, that most organically corresponds to our aims. Can Neo-Decadence save SF? We don’t want to. Merely to be leeches used to treat it.”
—Colby Smith // YUUGENPRAXIS

“Science fiction (in a nutshell) is just taking the the long march to the same destination as fiction—it’s really no different structurally. For example, in fantasy some author may boldly declare ‘in my fantasy world, furries are real.’

But in science fiction that same author would instead say something like ‘The Federation used technology Captain Kirk stole from the Romulans to genetically engineer cat girls into existence, for diplomatic reasons.’

What Sci Fi really is, is instead of seeing how magic affects politics and human behavior or how people can use magic to solve some issue—instead it’s a wish fulfillment fantasy, just with futuristic shit and words to fill in the gaps instead.

Now, there’s a scale of science fiction that people like to use to differentiate it from fantasy or even speculative fiction. Now, that spectrum of hard to soft science fiction? Well, that’s just how many physics buzzwords the author can shove into the gimmick which drives the whole story, frankly. It’s how ‘sciency’ the words sound, and maybe how grounded Sci Fi is in actual science and technology—but if you get too close to actual science, it just turns into speculative fiction of the future 50 years from now (boring!)

For all the aspiring science fiction authors on Substack—if you want to write some good science fiction, honestly: picture your story first, worry about the worldbuilding later. If fantasy works better, all the best. If Sci Fi is the setting you want to use, you’re going to be standing with giants (and there is some very, very good Sci Fi out there). Chances are though, your Space Opera epic will be verbose as fuck and jam packed with as many sciency buzzwords as you can fit in. Try not to do that: reading shouldn’t be a chore, and honestly—Sci Fi is better when it’s story driven.”
—Nurgul Jones

“This is a genre that has had its wheels stuck in the mud for quite some time; it really is depressing to see how predictable it has become; I can’t remember the last time sci fi really blew my mind like Valis and Illuminatus! did when I read them in my mid 20s. I mean goddamn.

Here are my thoughts on the various subgenres of science fiction:

Apocalyptic/Post-Apocalyptic Sci Fi: As much as I love Fist of the North Star, there’s way too many of these; it wouldn’t be so bad if they weren’t trying to be super serious like The Stand or Swan Song. The nihilism is also not fun anymore as it’s become serious nihilism as opposed to the fun aspects of Mad Max or Violence Jack. We want fantasies of an anti-hero who will kill the scumbags, not out of some moral duty, but because he has a natural disgust of rapists and marauders. And yes I want him to know martial arts and have advanced weapons training and knowledge of gun use. He’s supposed to be surviving, remember? Why would you have some inept oaf bumbling through the cities? Come on, I wouldn’t buy that guy surviving, unless it’s a comedic story then maybe it would get a pass.

Climate Sci Fi: This shit is so fucking annoying. Yes we know climate change is real, it’s happening every second of every day. These stories are very predictable. An ecological disaster is about to happen, a single scientist tries to warn his colleagues, they don’t listen, the horrible disaster happens and all of humanity is doomed. I haven’t gotten around to reading Ballard’s climate stories but I have a sneaking suspicion that those are the only ones you really need. These are supposed to be reflective of our current reality, right? Then how come it doesn’t look like what I see in reality? The warning is constant, so constant that it’s become background noise, background noise that demands to be in the center of discussion. It’s as annoying as rad lib veganism.

Comedic Sci Fi: We need more of this. LIKE RIGHT NOW!!!!!!!! No seriously.....WHERE IS IT!!!!!!!!??????

Dying Earth: Pretty much the same thing as Post-Apocalyptic Sci Fi.

Dystopian Sci Fi: Serves as a moralizing fairy tale to keep division amongst people. Keep various groups of people in fear of being kept down. The governments have no use for Big Brother when annoying little siblings are biting at your ankles for a spot of recognition.

Feminist Sci Fi: Fuck off, Margaret Atwood, Joanna Russ is the shit. Gender has been destabilized, therefore this becomes unnecessary.

Grimdark: This was funny for a couple of years.

Inner Space: You could just call this Psychological Sci Fi but i guess you need cheeky names like this.

Libertarian Sci Fi: Guilty pleasure of mine.

Mecha: I fucking love giant robots.

Mundane Sci Fi: How in the fucking shit can Sci Fi be mundane? Sounds boring. Does Infinite Jest count as Mundane Sci Fi?

Military Sci Fi: This needs to look more like Mobile Suit Gundam, Metal Gear or Doom instead of what Baen Books has been cranking out (yes I mean that as a double entendre).

New Wave Sci Fi: An old movement that seems to be getting a new recognition, mostly from millennials from what I’ve seen. Maybe it’s just me. Either way, it’s cool as fuck.

Science Fantasy: My favorite. Less cringy than most of the sci fi subgenres, Final Fantasy is the shit.

Space Opera: Basic bitch sci fi. I’m sure at some point it’ll get some sort of revitalization but not anytime soon.

Space Western: a more tolerable form of space opera. I’m a sucker for westerns. Cowboy Bebop and Trigun fucking rule.

Spy Fi: ‘Sir will you be needing your exploding dental floss, or maybe your interrogation vibrator to use on one of the women you’re going to seduce on your next mission?’

Superhero Fiction: Overblown genre that could have some potential for future storytelling, you know, if they can stop playing with Batman’s dick for 2 minutes. Ultimately if they shed the capes and cowls, there’s actually potential for genre evasion all together. I mean superhero fiction is essentially a mish mash of the following: Action/Adventure, Alternate History, Alien Invasion, Alternate Reality/Multiverse Fiction, Biopunk, Body Horror, Coming-of-Age, Conspiracy Thriller, Cosmic Horror, Crime Fiction, Cyberpunk, Dystopian Fiction, Epic Myth/Mythology, Espionage/Spy Fiction, Fantasy, Gothic Fiction, Hardboiled Detective Fiction, Horror, Legal Drama (sometimes), Martial Arts Fiction, Military Sci Fi, Monster Fiction, Noir, Paranormal/Supernatural Fiction, Planetary Romance, Political Thriller, Post-Apocalyptic Fiction, Psychological Drama, Romance, Science Fantasy, Space Opera, Satire, Teen Drama, Steampunk, Swashbuckling Adventure, Techno Thriller, Time Travel Fiction, Tragedy, Vigilante Fiction, Western and many others. If you ditch the silly costumes for a while (not forever but just for a while) it might be interesting again.

Tech Noir: Blade Runner, anyone?

Techno Thriller: This super duper serious subgenre needs to be made fun of, like yesterday, like last week, like 20 years ago, okay?

Time Travel Sci Fi: ‘Marty, we need to go back in time to bang some chicks, Marty!!!!’

Tokusatsu: More please. Come on man, I need my fix. I NEED IT NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Parallel Universes: This needs a better representative.

Planetary Romance/Sword and Planet: This is stuff like Dune, Gor, John Carter and such. I’d like to see more interesting takes on this.

Underwater Sci Fi: blub blub blub blub. blub blub blub blub. blub blub blub blub. blub blub blub blub. It’s sci fi…but it’s underwater. blub blub blub blub. blub blub blub blub. blub blub blub blub. Jules Verne or something. I don’t know enough about this.

Utopian Sci Fi: (Shows a scene of a man masturbating) Yeah I couldn’t think of anything for this one.

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Punk variants

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Atompunk: This is Fallout and stuff like that. 1950s sci fi but given a gritty revisioning.

Biopunk: Hey man, i grew a second penis!!!!!! Awww man, it’s only 3 inches. Also apparently Resident Evil counts as this...cool.

Cassette futurism/Formicapunk: 80s cyberpunk basically.

Clockpunk: The Thief games. I like what I’ve seen from this.

Cyberprep: (snickers) Seriously? Why? Sir, why would you make this? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!

Decopunk: Bioshock, Batman and The Shadow. This shit looks cool, look it up. Seriously, do it right now. I’m watching you from your closet, why aren’t you looking it up. DO IT NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Dieselpunk: Dirty Decopunk or perhaps Decopunk is clean Dieselpunk. YOU BETTER LOOK THIS ONE UP TOO MOTHERFUCKER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Nanopunk: My nanobots are not working right, I’ve been constipated for a couple of days.

Nowpunk: What the fuck is this? Bullshit is what it is. Bruce, this shit isn’t funny anymore, can you tell them you were joking? Bruce!!!????? MICHAEL BRUCE STERLING, YOU GET BACK HERE AND TELL THESE IDIOTS YOU WERE JUST KIDDING!!!!!!!!!

Postcyberpunk: more serious cyberpunk...yeah, how about we don’t do that.

Raypunk: More please. Can i have a toffee, mum? Can i have a toffee, mummy

Rococopunk: 1700s steampunk I’m guessing?

Solarpunk/Lunarpunk: Hiyao Miyazaki already did this, can we not?

Steampunk: What can I say here? Seriously, it’s just gonna stay here forever.

Hopepunk: Hopeless.”
—Carrion

“☆TIERS OF DIGNITY IN IMAGINATIVE WRITING☆

1. Scientific Romance (SR)—You’re both scientific and romantic. This is the ideal place not only to write from but from which to live out everyday life. You can perform titration activities in a lab and then write a sonnet immediately afterwards.

2. Scientifiction—Your willingness to simply jam words together regardless of neologistic euphony is a sign of vital strength and courage. You’re probably a Sagittarius or a Taurus. You get things done and you can probably assemble furniture in a way that doesn’t suck. Your fiction clanks and hums and pillages the future.

3. Sci-Fi—The basic standard of dignity. If you tell adults at a party that you write Sci-Fi, they will immediately understand what you are implying, and they will treat you properly. This is the baseline.

4. Speculative Fiction—You attended a workshop and you think and write in tautological cliches (ALL fiction is by definition speculative). You are operating at below your full potential. Stop caring about gold stars from the teacher and gold awards from Raytheon.

5. Slipstream—Apparently refers to the pathological inability to piss straight. Look, whatever it is, just consult a professional and have it properly seen to. Then start writing Sci-Fi.”
—Neo-Passéism

science art by Aaron Lange