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Response to Spider Robinson on the State of Sci-Fi
Garund writes "A day or so ago Slashdot posted a story on Spider Robinson and his lament for Science Fiction. Well, other people, including Mark Oakley, publisher of one of my favorite independant comics, posted a response to Spider on his Thieves & Kings website (scroll about a third of the way down the page). Interesting take on it, I thought."
What makes Spider Robinson a commentator on SF, Sci-Fi or anything else other than pablum?
He doesn't write science fiction, he writes fantasy staged in the non-existant future.
And as for the 'Speculative Fiction', well, he isn't a writer of that either.
hand him back his toke and send him on his way.
he's done.
Any community is going to experience points of stagnation and critics who bitch about it. I think people need to face the facts that community as a whole loses that shiny interesting effect on them. Everything is no longer "WOW!", it's "Oh I've seen that before". This has happened with Anime. Miyazaki said the state of anime was critical and that less and less worthy series are being made. Well the same can be said for movies. The same can be said for Sci-Fi. The same could be said for alot of things. The thing is instead of bitching about it, he needs to get off is ass and go right some create some new great genre defining novel, or whatever.
...that the genre of SF (as many other artistic endeavors) is having creative difficulty. Walk into a bookstore these days, pick up an interesting-looking book, and see that it is 12th in a series of 18. Come on, if the authors cannot deal with new character development, like they did 40 years ago for virtually every novel, something is wrong!
Nice response, and far more sensible than the whine that sparked it off.
However, he is describing hard science fiction, ie technology extrapolation and the use and abuse of physical laws, SF is much bigger than that. There are also all the other parts of the science fiction field- for instance PKD is still completely out there. A Scanner Darkly is a technology proof novel.
I like his point that we are living in the future. I've always extended it to "We are living in the future and it is slightly crap". My cell phone is often out of range. My whizzy looking car has a 30 year old chassis. Passenger aircraft got bigger, and less comfortable, not faster. 'We' fly to the moon. But not often. (Damn these anti-curmudgeon pills are wearing off).
I have never considered him a science fiction writer. His work is much more on the order of screwball comedies. He usually starts off with with some urban legend type material a bunch of crazy characters, and he finishes up with see how good things are when we get along ? In the callahans stuff he generally winds up with in the future people will be alot nicer and regularly violate the laws of physics because of the fact.
Its not science fiction, its very good, I enjoy it a heck of alot and have bought just about everything he has written.
His rant about science fiction dieing was annoying the first time it had been done back in the 60's when hard scince fiction writers griped about the new wave kids.
Theres alot of great science fiction being written today more than I have ever seen before It just doesn't look like what it did 50 years ago. Theres a reaon The future isn't what it used to be. Look at the recent works out there by Greg bear, Greg egan,Ian macleod, Rosemary Kirsten, Vernor Vinge, Charles Stross, Dan Simmons, The list goes on. Its very high quality stuff and shows a greater understanding of underlying science than 90% of the golden age authors could manage.
What Mr. Spinrad misses is that there are things that just won't fly in the genre anymore. It's no longer possible to take a crap story toss in a few bug eyed aliens a spaceship and a girl in a brass bikini and expect people to read the story. Its also not enough to do a techno gimmick story anymore. As much as I loved George O Smiths stories, they don't read well anymore.
Elves and mythical pasts don't compete with science fiction. Theres always going to be a future and theres always going to be people speculating about it. How well the genre does will depend how well the authors bring the future to life.
BSD on the other hand is a actually dead of course... a hundred thousand troll posts can't be wrong!
A couple of other things that occurred to me as I started thinking about it.
1) The notion of reinventing humanity has mostly died out, after the most popular schemes accomplished little and killed 100 million or so people. On the whole that's good, but visions like, "Overalls seem practical. In the future, everyone shall wear overalls! Gray overalls!" are gone with them.
2) There was a logical progression from airplanes to spaceships to space travel that made up a large part of the future vision. We followed that path to the moon, at which point the real obstacles that had been brushed off in fiction ("Mr. Sulu, warp 3!") came into play.
I'm sure there's plenty more.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
...for Spider Robinson to be saying this. I don't really consider him a sci-fi author, and I don't much care for his books. Indeed, to the extent that there is a decline in sci-fi, I've always thought of him as a prime exhibit. His stories are so...soft. Fluffy. Fantastic (in the very litteral sense).
That being said, I don;t think there's really any crunch coming for sci-fi. What Spider is saying is that the type of sci-fi he likes (and that he writes) is disapearring. This is true! But sci-fi is the reflection of tomorrow on today, and is constantly changing. In times past, post-apocalytpic wastelands, or psi powers, or laser printers, or time machines, or Martians, or portable phones almost as small as your fist were fantasies that appealled. Sometimes the world moved on, sometimes we learnt they weren't plausible, sometimes they happened - but in any case, they're now no longer suitable for sci-fi.
There's plenty of great sci-fi being written today (Baen Books publishes several good authours (and should in any case be supported for pioneering a content distribution model that doesn't rely on DRM. They give away some titles on their website, sell others cheaply, and include CDs with some hardbacks with dozens more.)
But it's not the same kind of sci-fi as was being written 20 or 30 years ago (and it would be pretty worrying if it was). For some, that puts it beyond the pale - it isn't "real" sci-fi. It's space opera, or military sci-fi, or too soft, or too hard, or whatever. For these people, intent on living in the past, I suppose the appeal of Fantasy isn't too surprising. But that's not the same thing as saying sci-fi is declining. Sci-fi is where it's always been - slightly on the edge, asking question some people would rather ignore.
Most hard-core SF was written during and in the aftermath of World War II and the Cold War. All of it escapist, much of it focusing on how humanity carries on after the dawn of the 21st century and presumably civilization as we know it has been destroyed.
For people looking beyond the horrifying news on the television, SF was a ray of hope.
Unfortunately (for SF), the Cold War ended and the world as we know it was utterly changed - but not because of world war or nuclear conflict. It was changed largely by the collapse of Communism (outside China and its satellites), removing the immediate threat, and thus the foundation for much of the SF we've all grown to know and enjoy.
Lacking the need for escape from our current situation into the future, and given the high-tech world that has been thrust upon us in the past decade (as has been noted elsewhere), it seems not unreasonable that Fantasy fiction, especially that espoused by Tolkien and Rowling, would take the fore over hard SF, at least for the moment.
Someone will probably point out that 9-11 and its aftermath are in fact World War III (or IV, depending upon how you count it), and this should be driving us to some sort of outlet that frees us from the daily drumbeat in the news.
But instead of Heinlein and Asimov, we're getting Harry Potter and a fish called Nemo... And it works, because these depict simpler themes of good and evil, courage and fear, and the ability of ordinary people (or young wizards or, well, fish) to overcome incredible obstacles placed before them.
This is not the first time such a thing has happened. During the peak of the Industrial Revolution of the late 1800's, amid motorcars, steam-powered factories, and crazy folk attempting to fly like birds, there was counter-revolution of sorts where people looked for craftsmanship and simplicity in their homes and furnishings, first in England, later in the U.S. It banished the sameness of mass-production and replaced it with objects that had the appearance of being, or were in fact, unique.
We live in similar times - only now the personal computer and the internet are the invading technology. It should come as no surprise that people have had enough and need an escape to simpler, less stressful things.
But I would also predict that this is only temporary. We're taking a breather as the next phase of technological development gathers itself together. When it will happen, I don't know, but when it comes to Sci-Fi, I would suggest that a gentleman and his team working in the Mojave desert of all places may unleash the next wave. Or maybe not. We'll see.
The T&K website response reminds me of that teacher. It says that stories are tools to share and explore ideas, and then seems to go on to say essentially 'Science fiction serves only one purpose, to explore ideas related to all the emergent technology of the 20th century.' The T&K website is speaking out of its ass.
Granted, I'll agree with the statement that stories are tools to share and explore ideas. They can be used for other things. They're often used to inspire emotions, or to entertain, which is essentially the same thing.
T&K seems to take the position that the paltry foray's we've made into integrating new technology into our lives represent some sort of plateau, if not pinnacle of achievement. Its as if to say, we've got cell phones, we've got GPS, we can occasionally send a probe to mars and not have it crash, hoorah, the future is here.
Sorry, the future is NOT here. Never will be. We will always remain in the present, always, because if we start living in the future, we stop trying to get there. Sure, cell phones are nice, but wouldn't a subcutaneous direct neural link to all of human knowledge and all other humans be nifty? Or perhaps dangerous. I'm not sure. Lets explore and share ideas. What? You say the future is here and this is the way it will always be? Oh, perhaps I should write a book about navel gazing then.
I don't know about the author of this statement, but I've definately experience a thrilling rush reading about engineering on a scale I never imagined before, like a gigantic spinning ring around a sun. Or how about one of the myriad ways of defeating death, poverty, and inequality I've read about, couched in science fiction terms.
100 years ago no one could have imagined the way the world would change with the automobile. 50 years ago no one could have imagined the way the world would change with computers. We can't imagine how the world will be in 50 years, but we can try.
Sure, today's technology is growing mature, but science fiction is like a nebula. For those who don't know, nebulas are the results of a star exploding, and are the birthplace of new stars. The remnants of a pervious generation giving birth to the next. That works for ideas as well. Maybe some of today's technology was born in some science fiction writer's mind, and maybe the next generation which we can't even imagine yet is being born right now, slowly drawing itself together.
The idea of readers defecting to 'fantasy'. Trying to draw a line in the sand between science fiction and fantasy is like trying to nail jello to a tree. Most people call Star Trek science fiction, but its not. Not to me. Star Trek has always been about people, at least when its been good. If you watch the 5 series you'll see that they're each set in the era they were produced in. Watch the original and look at the way people act and interact and try to believe you're not in the 60's. Look at 'Enterprise' and try to believe you're not living in an America that is living in fear of terrorists. The fact is that technology molds society just as much as socie
Jherico
What can the average user can do to ensure his security? "Nothing, you're screwed"