Excellent piece that captures so much of what's wrong with science fiction today. Since you seem so much more knowledgeable about Sci-Fi than me, I must ask who inside/outside the genre do you think is doing great work ? (Open to anything) Where would I find places to discover the remains of what's left ?
To me genres don't matter and people shouldn't have to stick to only one kind of writing. You get an idea and you think of what form will best express it. So then you are left with the question: does the story use science fiction as a vehicle for literary inquiry or is it just reverse engineering money?
And well, fuck me, I wrote a Sci-Fi story that drops in two days, so hooray for my timing.
It will either be an example of what you're talking about or the exception that proves the rule. Either way I hope you'll read it.
What I've gleaned from this is that the grievance isn't with science fiction but with sci-fi fandom, and how writers have capitulated to their petulant demands. The commentators here acknowledge the excellence of those writers of the 60s and 70s who pushed boundaries in the direction of narrative and prosecraft, so I guess "sci fi sux" isn't the thesis so much as "fandoms are cancers fed by consooomption culture", which I would wholeheartedly agree with.
I personally have no issue with genre as a narrative format, much in the same way as I have no personal issue with using heroic meter for poetry. Forms have scopes and limitations, but they can also lead to excellence, due to mastery of technique, which may compound with each generation, regardless of the fact that genre exists as a function of market forces. Unfortunately, it's logical end-state of those markets themselves which have caused these forms to stagnate and then decay. Neoliberalism consumes at ever-increasing rates so that, with all its reboots and sequels and rehashes, it will eventually run out of culture to vampirize.
Now here's where I come to a conclusion, whereby I believe I'm in alignment with the neo decadents. Genre has since outlived its usefulness. Even if mastery of the form could theoretically extend long into the future, fandom expectations will only continue to fester and compromise any good faith attempt to push genre literature to new heights. I'm afraid there will never be another Aasimov or PKD for this reason. Perhaps one who's worthy to carry the torch will come along, and then the publishers will say, "This is well written and I thoroughly enjoyed it, but unfortunately we can't find a market for it."
We’d agree with all this—fandom was always a problem (look up Walter Breen and the “Breendoggle” for an example of fandom sheltering/supporting an active pedophile for years, besides things like actual Raytheon funding the Hugo Awards in the present) but at this point it’s utterly choked the ability of anyone to do anything with the original genre premises. And Clarion gets a lot of (unearned, in our view) respect but in practice it’s also been captured by the usual agent/workshop logic which has led to circumstances we can observe all plainly.
Science fiction in the present has no meaning because we now live in a thoroughly “science fictional” everyday reality, but neither mainstream writers nor SF writers have kept pace with what this means. There are a few extreme exceptions like Greg Egan that are still shamefully unknown even by the sort of people who would be expected to be aware of them. In other words, there is no one doing what J.G. Ballard was doing in the 60s and 70s, even as we need at least twenty writers doing exactly that. Cyberpunk had promise but is now just a tired video game aesthetic.
The only possibility of anything interesting emerging resembles the sort of thought @Damian Murphy discussed—writers making use of premises that would traditionally have fallen broadly under the SF heading while approaching them from orthogonal angles that discard all prior “genre logic.”
Funny that you bring up Cyberpunk. I've been playing the hell out of 2077, and I noticed in a lot of the in-game lore and side quests that most of its capitalist horrors are no longer hypothetical scenarios but things that already happen, just scaled up. This is, as you said, the science fictional everyday reality we live in. The man-made horrors are being created in real time, and in that way Cyberpunk 2077 says nothing new or important. Even so, it's really fun to murder-hobo everyone with a katana
This is sort of why — it’s late so I might not articulate this thoroughly— why I think a reclaiming of the old standards and aesthetics of the golden age or early new wave edit: or even the 80s is fine. They didn’t happen and thus people won’t touch them and instead default to really hack safe things that kinda might maybe happen still.
Current writers will use the art and design of retro sci-fi or retro futurism in like, their social media posts as a sort of lol wasn’t this wacky way, and might use these tropes “as a joke” but they won’t seriously engage with the actual spirit of the era or what was interesting . Some of those old stories had insane suspension of disbelief. You just open it up and it’s “ as you know Jim since we all got 3/8 of our brain removed and the city has been under control of the great ruler” and you just accept it, now everything gotta be tastefully plausible or magical realism😩 oh with found family of course
Well, read Damian's piece in here and apparently I have to go burn some notebooks because he put too many concepts I'd been thinking about into the noosphere, thanks a lot brobro.
My wife was a managing editor at St. Martin's/Tor for a quarter century, and she saw the old guard of editors who had been fans, who'd collated zines in their living rooms, "retired" in favor of woke twenty-somethings following orders from the MBA's who took over the company after Holzbrinck ate it. Which is an anecdotal way of saying, the problems of SF/Fantasy have less to do with the writers and readers and genre and more to do with the flattening of all culture under giant corporations.
After two years of having his work rejected by prestigious online SF zines he actually wouldn't have deigned to read, Jacob Rabinowitz founded (about 6 years ago) 96thofOctober.com, which consistently showcases material too good for the mainstream, e.g., interviews with filmmakers like Jack Plotnick (Space Station 76), Larry Blamire (Lost Skeleton of Cadavra) Doron Paz (JeruZalem). 96 offers a mix of scholarly, literary, decadent (serializing a previously untranslated novel by Jean Lorrain), and whimsy-core, with music and visual art thrown in.
Two highly pertinent facts. I am their book reviewer, so adjust for distortion. We are very actively interested in seeing non-ordinary new material. Because our editors employ high and valid literary criteria, you'll know if your work is accepted or not, usually within a week.
96th of October is engineering a renaissance of decadence. Send us your work. join the October revolution!
Big shoutout to Aaron Lange for once again providing fantastic cover art
Excellent piece that captures so much of what's wrong with science fiction today. Since you seem so much more knowledgeable about Sci-Fi than me, I must ask who inside/outside the genre do you think is doing great work ? (Open to anything) Where would I find places to discover the remains of what's left ?
I grew up reading science fiction in the 1970s. Stopped around 1990.
Contemporary science fiction is unknown to me, mostly. I read The Three Body Problem and thought it was pretty good.
Currently I am writing a novel that can be called science fiction. I like it, some others might also.
Science Fiction, like anything, is only as dead as the last bad book or story, and it will spring to life with the next good one.
Harlan Ellison was right, science fiction is the most optimistic genre, because it assumes there will be a future, even a dystopian one.
The book I am reading now is The Voyage of the Space Beagle by A.E. van Vogt, an oldie! Enjoyable and entertaining.
Love this!
To me genres don't matter and people shouldn't have to stick to only one kind of writing. You get an idea and you think of what form will best express it. So then you are left with the question: does the story use science fiction as a vehicle for literary inquiry or is it just reverse engineering money?
And well, fuck me, I wrote a Sci-Fi story that drops in two days, so hooray for my timing.
It will either be an example of what you're talking about or the exception that proves the rule. Either way I hope you'll read it.
What I've gleaned from this is that the grievance isn't with science fiction but with sci-fi fandom, and how writers have capitulated to their petulant demands. The commentators here acknowledge the excellence of those writers of the 60s and 70s who pushed boundaries in the direction of narrative and prosecraft, so I guess "sci fi sux" isn't the thesis so much as "fandoms are cancers fed by consooomption culture", which I would wholeheartedly agree with.
I personally have no issue with genre as a narrative format, much in the same way as I have no personal issue with using heroic meter for poetry. Forms have scopes and limitations, but they can also lead to excellence, due to mastery of technique, which may compound with each generation, regardless of the fact that genre exists as a function of market forces. Unfortunately, it's logical end-state of those markets themselves which have caused these forms to stagnate and then decay. Neoliberalism consumes at ever-increasing rates so that, with all its reboots and sequels and rehashes, it will eventually run out of culture to vampirize.
Now here's where I come to a conclusion, whereby I believe I'm in alignment with the neo decadents. Genre has since outlived its usefulness. Even if mastery of the form could theoretically extend long into the future, fandom expectations will only continue to fester and compromise any good faith attempt to push genre literature to new heights. I'm afraid there will never be another Aasimov or PKD for this reason. Perhaps one who's worthy to carry the torch will come along, and then the publishers will say, "This is well written and I thoroughly enjoyed it, but unfortunately we can't find a market for it."
We’d agree with all this—fandom was always a problem (look up Walter Breen and the “Breendoggle” for an example of fandom sheltering/supporting an active pedophile for years, besides things like actual Raytheon funding the Hugo Awards in the present) but at this point it’s utterly choked the ability of anyone to do anything with the original genre premises. And Clarion gets a lot of (unearned, in our view) respect but in practice it’s also been captured by the usual agent/workshop logic which has led to circumstances we can observe all plainly.
Science fiction in the present has no meaning because we now live in a thoroughly “science fictional” everyday reality, but neither mainstream writers nor SF writers have kept pace with what this means. There are a few extreme exceptions like Greg Egan that are still shamefully unknown even by the sort of people who would be expected to be aware of them. In other words, there is no one doing what J.G. Ballard was doing in the 60s and 70s, even as we need at least twenty writers doing exactly that. Cyberpunk had promise but is now just a tired video game aesthetic.
The only possibility of anything interesting emerging resembles the sort of thought @Damian Murphy discussed—writers making use of premises that would traditionally have fallen broadly under the SF heading while approaching them from orthogonal angles that discard all prior “genre logic.”
Funny that you bring up Cyberpunk. I've been playing the hell out of 2077, and I noticed in a lot of the in-game lore and side quests that most of its capitalist horrors are no longer hypothetical scenarios but things that already happen, just scaled up. This is, as you said, the science fictional everyday reality we live in. The man-made horrors are being created in real time, and in that way Cyberpunk 2077 says nothing new or important. Even so, it's really fun to murder-hobo everyone with a katana
Everything I've wanted to see in sci fi has not come to fruition, and I'm very pissed off.
This is sort of why — it’s late so I might not articulate this thoroughly— why I think a reclaiming of the old standards and aesthetics of the golden age or early new wave edit: or even the 80s is fine. They didn’t happen and thus people won’t touch them and instead default to really hack safe things that kinda might maybe happen still.
Current writers will use the art and design of retro sci-fi or retro futurism in like, their social media posts as a sort of lol wasn’t this wacky way, and might use these tropes “as a joke” but they won’t seriously engage with the actual spirit of the era or what was interesting . Some of those old stories had insane suspension of disbelief. You just open it up and it’s “ as you know Jim since we all got 3/8 of our brain removed and the city has been under control of the great ruler” and you just accept it, now everything gotta be tastefully plausible or magical realism😩 oh with found family of course
This was so great to read when I should have been working on my sci-fi novel instead ✨
Well, read Damian's piece in here and apparently I have to go burn some notebooks because he put too many concepts I'd been thinking about into the noosphere, thanks a lot brobro.
Excellent piece, as (near)always.
My wife was a managing editor at St. Martin's/Tor for a quarter century, and she saw the old guard of editors who had been fans, who'd collated zines in their living rooms, "retired" in favor of woke twenty-somethings following orders from the MBA's who took over the company after Holzbrinck ate it. Which is an anecdotal way of saying, the problems of SF/Fantasy have less to do with the writers and readers and genre and more to do with the flattening of all culture under giant corporations.
After two years of having his work rejected by prestigious online SF zines he actually wouldn't have deigned to read, Jacob Rabinowitz founded (about 6 years ago) 96thofOctober.com, which consistently showcases material too good for the mainstream, e.g., interviews with filmmakers like Jack Plotnick (Space Station 76), Larry Blamire (Lost Skeleton of Cadavra) Doron Paz (JeruZalem). 96 offers a mix of scholarly, literary, decadent (serializing a previously untranslated novel by Jean Lorrain), and whimsy-core, with music and visual art thrown in.
Two highly pertinent facts. I am their book reviewer, so adjust for distortion. We are very actively interested in seeing non-ordinary new material. Because our editors employ high and valid literary criteria, you'll know if your work is accepted or not, usually within a week.
96th of October is engineering a renaissance of decadence. Send us your work. join the October revolution!