Where has the vision of science fiction gone?

[FizbansTalking_Hat]

I was searching a website for some science fiction reviews and I found this little essay someone posted. Wondered what people have to say about it, cheers.

Where has the vision of science fiction gone?

This is not just a polemical question. One of the Awful Truths about science fiction is it's internal irony of being by nature a fiction which is absolutely dependent on vision of the most imaginative sort, yet in whose works is found very little truly visionary output. The Real Literature folks have a point when they say that science fiction is basically a formula driven, derivative genre that exists to sell familiar concepts to a fairly narrowly drawn demographic. While there has been much ballyhooing of science fiction's broadening readership, it's still pretty much kids (flexibally defined, say, into their twenties) who make up the bulk of the readership, and adults of a certain fannish persuasion. It is unusual to run across a science fiction generalist; many readers are series hounds who read two, maybe three authors, and rarely venture into the Terra Incognita of the more Edge City writers, or the diversity of the many one or two book wonders. This is true of a lot of litery genres, detective fiction being a particularly well-defined case, with it's demographically and regionally based author series. Readers find something or someone they like, and they stick with it.

And what of visionary writing in this scenario? What about the really original thinkers who broaden the scope of our world through their work, and have a horrible time being economically viable? The science fiction publishing industry isn't in the business of rewarding good ideas, unless they sell well. The critical infrastructure that could build a philosophical forum to explore literary concepts and achievement in science fiction simply doesn't exist in a really coherent form, what there is being enslaved by the fan and publishing industry worlds; and this in an environment (the Internet) that seems made to order to create a loosely drawn Academy of great democracy and potential scholarship.The magazines have never served this cause (notwithstanding the dogged flogging of the British New Wave by such rags as New Worlds and Interzone). The myriad small journals and associations work their corner of the puzzle, but you just don't see discussion of speculative fiction in newspapers, in mainstream magazines, on the radio, or on television. And yet many milliions of folks happily read the stuff, in all likelihood caring little about the critical aspects of their favorite genre. This is the rub: science fiction, and genre fiction in general, is considered an entertainment, and not a Literature. Every once in awhile a Tolkien comes along, or a Bradbury, and genre as an entertainment converges with a literary curiosity about the work; the creaking doors of Literature open a crack, and the escapee from genre shuffles stealthily in.

So much for infrastructure. There remains within science fiction a cadre of visionaries, writers whose books send ripples of influence through the genre, and sometimes beyond it, Eureka guys who create Universes so original, so compelling that they inform the work that follows in profound ways. The dream logic of the work of A.E. Van Vogt, with it's sometimes slight stories drifting through a vivid sea of the Unconscious, or the deconstruction of life in the American Midwest into tales of colonizing Mars in Ray Bradbury's fiction, or Asimov's preturnaturally innocent Robots, carving out a civilization from the consequence of three Rules, are some examples of the power of vision in Big Picture science fiction literary history. There are also the emerging movements, like the British New Wave of the 1960's, or the Cyberpunk fiction of the 1980's, that gave a forum to small groups of writers exploring narrower areas of social criticism and discourse through often highly stylized genre works.

But it gets down to those writers. The Usual Science Fiction Story is at it's most boring a vehicle for speculating on the gee-whiz implementation of shiny Technology, and at it's more interesting a sharp-edged tool of social criticism. Emerging from the ordinary are the brilliant crackpots who can imagine weird tech, or cast a jaundiced eye on society, but manage to do so in created Universes that have few commonalities or touch points with our own. Van Vogt wrote pulp; superman stories, weird worlds, the usual trappings of Golden Age sci fi, but there was something a little off about his fiction. What might have been completely forgettable stories are layered within a world of Unconscious strangeness, shot through with a dream logic that gives them a power beyond their basic tropes. Olaf Stapleton is the archetypical visionary. His vast, millennia-spanning epics create a true future history that involves the evolution of the organism and consciousness in ways that other futurist writers only scrape the surface of. There is the barely remembered work of the Frenchman C.I. Defontenay, whose Psi Cassiopeia from 1854 is a fully realized space opera that is startling in it's brief glimpses of a modernity, years ahead of it's time. And then there's Cordwainer Smith. The Instrumentality of Mankind stories are Stapletonian in their breadth, Van Vogtian in their strangeness, and cohesive in a seductive, implied way that makes the reader wonder why most writers have to spend so much time on exposition. The Corwainer Smith universe is a place glimpsed in it's shadows and reflections, in anecdotes; hints take the place of explanation, and the reader becomes the engine that fills in the blanks in a future history of mystery and wonder.

Word? What's up with science fiction is that the Usual Suspects are telling the Usual Stories, but hidden in the dark hollows of the literary Forest are strange and interesting writers who will never be rich, well-known, or always in print. Put down that hard sci fi and be a True reader; there are treasures to be sought that can change the Universe. Or re-imagine it.

[Bucky OHare]

ooo interesting post, though i did get confused in the middle and skipped to the end. i am not very bright. i disagree with the bit about keeping to the same author and its only kids that read SciFi, i personally like to get a very broad range of authors (though i do read more from authors i love).

[Per7]

Reading the 1st post I want to summarise it as “why is most SF stories junk? Why aren’t there more SF stories about things that really matter?”

I actually think most books are junk, you have your formula love books, formula detective stories, most drama books tell a good story but leave nothing when you are done reading… same goes for most SF and fantasy. Maybe detectives, love stories, SF/fantasy have more then their share of meaningless books (that you read “just” for entertainment) but even there the gems do exist. SF actually have one other dimension where the books can be meaningful, and that is the science part. Books like Contact (Carl Sagan) and Murder in solid state (Wil McCarthy) gives you not just a good story but also ideas about physics and science you didn’t have before you read them, the fact Carl Sagan gives the ignorant Christian right in the US a big smack in the face doesn’t hurt either…

Or read Stephan Baxter, he knows his science but also has something (depressing usually) to say about society and human nature…

Don’t condemn the whole genre as lacking vision just because you have a big chunk formula driven entertainment, its like saying Hollywood don’t produce any deep movies just because most are shallow.

/P7

[judith]

I think that the vision of science fiction is where it has always been. I also think that peoples expectations of science fiction have always been much higher than for other genre. Because it deals with possible futures, there is always the need to ask... "could that happen in the future?" "Is the science sound?" No one bothers to ask that about the latest romance novel! (where... lets face it.. anything goes) {not that Ive read any... YUCK } The general populous is alot more technically minded now and our views on life alot broader... but that goes for the science fiction writter also... so the genre can only get stronger as they run with the ball!

Science fiction writters are just like other writters in the sense that it is their skill with language that compels the reader... after all they are writting fiction not a science text book. Visionary ideas are important, but of what use is a visionary idea in a book that is unreadable? Science fiction readers grow up... and continue to read science fiction and enjoy it. It does contribute to who they become. The 'They' who judge literature have some pretty weird ideas of what it is, in my opinion, but when I think of the 'They' of society, I always think of what 'They' thought of Monets impressionist sunrise at the salon in paris in the 1870's. And we all know how wrong they were. What the people enjoy is whats important. Although we may not make all the authors rich. We keep them in printer paper and coffee... and thats important!!!

I agree that the reader of sciene fiction does not 'just stick with two or three authors' We may be 'series hounds' But we are always on the look out for that new author or the one that we never read befor... that could be our next good read. And I do think that the genre is widening in the sense that we now have science fiction authors who are branching out into the contemporary writting scene with much success. (ie Wiliam Gibson, Pattern Recognition) And alot of our more compelling contemporary authors have alot in common with science fiction writting of the past. They are usually fast paced and witty and full of social commentary, with an emphasis on the tech world we live in. (ie Douglas Coupland)

Maybe we have caught up with the science fiction writters of the past but the ones of our present and future are alive and kicking and bringing us the goods. I think they have alot more to offer than anyone gives them credit for. Perhaps the trick is... to stop expecting them to write the future and just enjoy the futures that they write

judith

[Myste]

It seems to me like there's a number of questions here: Why is sci-fi crap? Why doesn't sci-fi break into the mainstream more often? Does genre fiction have any merit whatsoever?

Here's my

Sci-fi is not crap, but there's lots of crappy sci-fi. There always has been. There always will be. Mainstream fiction is not crap either, but there's also lots of crappy mainstream fiction out there. There always has been. There always will be. You get the idea. The answer is, there's just as much visionary sci-fi out there as there ever has been. It's just harder to find because the number of crappy sci-fi books being published gets bigger each year. The same thing goes for mainstream fiction.

As for why sci-fi doesn't go mainstream more often: the NEA tells us people don't read anymore. If all those 16 year old boys playing video games would put down their controllers and pick up a book, it's likely they'd read more sci-fi. And genre books go mainstream only when enough people read them, talk about them, and pass them on to friends who don't normally read sci-fi. The vision just has to have a broad enough appeal to reach out to everyone. Since a lot of sci-fi is written directly for a pre-existing fan base (cf. above, on "crap"), it lacks a broader appeal.

As for whether or not genre fiction has any merit whatsoever, you know the answer, or you wouldn't be checking out this board.

[Variol Farseer]

I know that when KW crashed and lost all recent posts, it was the weight of my post in this very thread that sent it down for the count. (I know there is no evidence to support this theory. But it's my fault, I tell you, mine, all mine! — and only a jealous nincompoop would try to take it away from me!)

In the interests of science, I'm going to repost what I said earlier, just to see if it brings the board down again. Here goes:

The thing that strikes me about that essay is that it's twenty years out of date. This is how people were moaning and kvetching about SF in the early 1980s. (I know; I have on my shelf a book by Norman Spinrad consisting almost entirely of such moans and kvetches. It's called Staying Alive: A Writer's Guide.)

Nowadays, SF is in much more serious trouble. Of the Big Three, Heinlein and Asimov are dead, Clarke has more or less retired, and none of the writers who came after them have managed to fill more than a corner of their capacious boots. In the early 1980s, it was a regular occurrence for an SF novel to spend weeks or months on the New York Times bestseller list. All of Frank Herbert's Dune books were massive sellers and earned critical acclaim in the field, yet he was never ranked with the Big Three. John Varley is another author who had an enormous popularity at the time. Nowadays, the only SF writer who regularly puts out bestsellers is Michael Crichton, and he is sneered at and considered 'not real SF' by the fanboys who act as gatekeepers to the Sacred Tradition. The action has moved on to fantasy, and if there is a Big Three today, it's probably Robert Jordan, Terry Goodkind, and George R.R. Martin. (Martin wrote excellent SF before ditching it for A Song of Ice and Fire. He knows which side his bread is buttered on.)

So the question now is, what killed SF? Oh, yes, science fiction books are still being published and read, but it's been nearly 20 years since the last time a major innovation in the field caught on with the general readership, and it's a common lament among SF authors that the demographics for their books grow older by one year per year. Young readers, though insatiable for Harry Potter and Lemony Snicket, are virtually unaware of SF except in video games and movies. SF is not precisely dead, but as Mark Twain pointed out, neither is an octogenarian in a wheelchair who used to be able to jump thirty feet on level ground. But compared to what each of them was in its prime, they may fairly be called dead.

Some people blame the badness of modern science education for the lack of interest in SF, and I can understand their point. Young people today are indeed very badly taught in the sciences (and everything else, but that's another rant). But there's more to it than that. The heyday of SF was roughly from 1940 to 1980. Consider what the top issues in the science journalism of the time were. Atomic bombs! Computers! Robots! Lasers! Television! Silicon chips! Moon rockets! Satellites! More scientific progress was made in those years than in all of previous history, by many orders of magnitude — and it showed, in real products and events that made an obvious difference to everyone's life.

Today, the biggest science topic in the media is global warming. Nobody can agree what, if anything, to do about climate change (the Kyoto Protocol, if rigorously enforced, would reduce the man-made component of climate change by all of six percent in the next 100 years); and the science is so obviously motivated by politics that it's questionable whether we really understand the phenomenon at all. (Recent research indicates a very close correlation between world temperatures and the activity of the sun. If 'global warming' is really solar warming, there is nothing any of us can do about it except adapt. But that idea is anathema to the people who want to outlaw fossil fuels and force the world to accept a life of righteous poverty.) How do you make interesting fiction about a problem that nobody can understand, nobody can solve, and that may not even exist?

Where modern science is successful, the case is little better. Some of the most important technological breakthroughs of recent times have had little or no visible impact in daily life. For instance, a cluster of technologies — onboard computers, electronic fuel injection, lightweight composite materials — have made today's motorcars two or three times more fuel-efficient than the cars we were driving a generation ago. But none of this shows. You still put the key in the ignition and tread on the gas. And since the new cars and new engines require specialized and expensive equipment to service, you can't even learn about these technologies by getting under the hood and mucking about, as you could in the old days. Only the mechanics know what a marvel a modern car is. Telephone systems have undergone a change of a similar magnitude; but to the average person, who pushes eleven buttons and gets an answering machine or a voicemail system on the other end of the line, it doesn't mattter whether the telephone company's innards work by fibre-optic switches or by peanut butter. Modern technology tends to be invisible in application, and therefore intensely undramatic.

Basic research, meanwhile, grows ever further removed from daily life. I could tell that the hardest sort of hard SF was in trouble when Larry Niven started writing about 'integral trees' floating in an oxygen-rich 'smoke ring' in deep space. I thought 'cute concept,' but I wasn't convinced (what keeps the 'smoke' from blowing away, if not a planet's gravity? And why isn't the 'smoke ring' mostly hydrogen, like everything else in the universe?) — and I never heard anything about characters or plots that made me want to read the books. I used to have an acquaintance who sneeringly defined fantasy as 'any work of fiction without diagrams'. But the average reader doesn't read fiction for diagrams; Heaven knows we get enough diagrams without it. Strange thought-experiments in astrophysics, or small but important discoveries in the biochemical machinery of life at the subcellular level, or the spectral and ominous collision between particle physics and metaphysics that expresses itself in ideas like 'the anthropic principle' — these are not the stuff of stories. Real human beings just can't relate to them, or care whether the problems are ever solved or not.

There remains yet another problem. Once in a while, you find a technological advance that has an obvious impact on people's lives, that can be described dramatically, that the average person can hope to understand in a general, non-technical way. The Internet is an excellent example. So what happened to all the SF about the Internet? We had reams of it in the 1980s: we called it 'cyberpunk', and a lot of today's computer jargon is taken directly from those stories. But the real Internet has moved so fast, and so far, and in such unforeseen directions, that stories about 'virtual reality' from the Eighties are now as quaint as the flying cars and atomic toasters in 'The Jetsons'. We know the technology doesn't work like that, and the stories were obsolete almost before they were printed. (It doesn't help that the authors of these stories were, on the whole, hopelessly bad at predicting other events in the real world. Not one major work of SF published in the 1980s, as far as I know, predicted the downfall of the Soviet Union, an event that any sane and unprejudiced observer could have seen coming.)

Fantasy escapes those traps. You can imagine a new development in magic without the fear that it will be obsolete in two years' time, because magic doesn't in fact work and your idea will never be put to the test. You can set up a fictitious society at any stage of technological (or magical) development you choose, and it will never seem quaint or dated, because you're not trying to make believe that our own future will be like it. There is more genuine SF being written in the guise of fantasy, using magic as a substitute for technology and fantasy worlds as a substitute for distant planets, than there ever was in the old rocketship-and-raygun pattern of the Golden Age.

Fantasy, it turns out, can tell truthful stories about changes in society and in the tools people have to use — which was supposed to be the exclusive province of SF. And it can do it without subjecting the authors to ridicule in a few years for failing to keep up with the inconceivable torrent of real scientific discoveries. From where I stand, the sudden and massive switch from SF to fantasy among readers, authors, and publishers is entirely wholesome and beneficial. It lets us ignore trivialities (like the idea that our job is to 'predict the future', as one tries to predict the weather) and concentrate on fundamentals: the real and probable reactions of human beings and cultures to the conditions of a changing world.

[dANdeLION]

Hmmm. Those posts sure are intimidating. I'm just gonna put off reading them for the moment, and say my $.02 worth, before I see it's all been said before. Sci-fi in movies is prolly doing great at the box office, due to CGI and other fancy things. In fact, sci-fi movies may be influencing the current vision of sci-fi. Maybe it's now more profitable to write a book that will look good on a big screen. Or, maybe we're just so used to technological change right now, it's hard to write anything that will stay futuristic without falling into the same familiar paths beaten by the forefathers of the genre....plus, nobody ever gets their proper due until way later.....

[Variol Farseer]

Hmmm. Those posts sure are intimidating. I'm just gonna put off reading them for the moment, and say my $.02 worth, before I see it's all been said before. Sci-fi in movies is prolly doing great at the box office, due to CGI and other fancy things. In fact, sci-fi movies may be influencing the current vision of sci-fi. Maybe it's now more profitable to write a book that will look good on a big screen. Or, maybe we're just so used to technological change right now, it's hard to write anything that will stay futuristic without falling into the same familiar paths beaten by the forefathers of the genre....plus, nobody ever gets their proper due until way later.....

You're right about nobody getting their due at the time they're published. Part of the trouble is that the average SF novel nowadays is out of print after about 30 days on the racks. It's virtually impossible to build up a reputation in the field now. With SF selling as little as it does, scores of good SF writers have given it up for fields in which they can make a better living. A writer's gotta eat, you know.

(SRD notes that The Gap sold about 15% as many copies per volume as Mordant's Need — and yet The Gap was unusually successful for an SF series. It just didn't sell enough to make back the money Bantam spent to acquire it, because they based the advance on SRD's numbers for fantasy. This, I think, bears out my case.)

[Edge]

VF - re. your earlier comments about SF books dealing with the Internet: have you read Tad Williams' glorious, nonpareil 'Otherworld' series?

[Variol Farseer]

VF - re. your earlier comments about SF books dealing with the Internet: have you read Tad Williams' glorious, nonpareil 'Otherworld' series?

Not as such; I've dabbled in the first volume a wee bit. Actually I think it supports my point. At the late date of Otherland, Williams could only approach the idea of a VR setting for science fiction as a fantasy idea, writing the story with tropes and symbolic devices typical of fantasy rather than hard SF. I understand it's a grand fantasy trip, but as a prediction of what would (or could) come out of the Internet, it's several billion light-years wide of the mark.

In Silverlock, John Myers Myers did something vaguely similar (though on a much smaller scale, and with very different thematic intent). He presented his story as pure fantasy, without any attempt at scientific or technological justification; and for that reason among others, I'll back it to outlast Otherland by generations. When you tie your fantasy to a specific technological mcguffin, you run the near-certain risk of looking awfully silly when the technology goes off in a different direction.

[duchess of malfi]

George R. R. Martin is not the only science fiction writer who has moved on to writing fantasy...Lois McMaster Bujold, who has won so many Hugo awards for her wonderful science fiction novels, has also switched over to writing thoughtful, character driven fantasy novels...as has David Zindell....

It has struck me lately (and I have made some posts over at the Hangar about this) that the most innovative science fiction books I have read in the last few years have largely switched their emphasis from the traditional space opera to more biological themes...such as genetic engineering and human evolution...

A couple of examples of this:

Stephen Baxter
Evolution

Robert Sawyer's Neanderthal Parallex books:
Hominids
Humans
Hybrids

Even Kim Stanley Robineson's award winning Mars trilogy can be argued to be as much about biology as space colonization:
Red Mars
Green Mars
Blue Mars