SF's Death Greatly Exaggerated

This li'l essay grew and grew. If you want to skip around, feel free.

How to Find New Authors

Why They Say, "It's Dead, Jim."

A Modest List of Authors

I was surprised to read the SF-is-dead thread on Rayne's blog. Most of my friends write/read sf. I attended an SF book discussion group last night, where people moaned about how hard it is to read a book every two weeks, but there are so many books that don't make the list. My husband's often said that once upon a time, it was possible to read all the science fiction published. When that wasn't possible, he tried to read all the Hugo (fan-voted) and Nebula (writer-voted). We don't talk about that any more. But we do buy Gardner Dozois' and David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer's year's best anthologies. We have many non-conversations that start, "Have you read the [___] story?" "No, but I liked this other story. Have you read that?" "No." (Repeats many times.) Then it's time for the new anthologies to come out.

The fact is, in science fiction you can have any kind of reading experience you want--the highest art of the word, pure escapism, rattling good stories, dreamy tea drinkers musing on matters of great significance. Explore your favorite political/moral/religious stance. It's the literature of ideas, isn't it?

But is there any good stuff? Sure. Depends on what you want. You'll get a different answer from every reader. It's amazing to me that I constantly meet people who like or did like science fiction, and when we compare notes on what we like to read, there are only two responses:

• They read lots of books, like me--none of which I've ever heard of.
• They like Asimov and Heinlein.

I like Asimov and Heinlein too, but there's an inherent problem with being devoted to dead authors. I feel this keenly when I reread my beloved Jane Austen, Dorothy Sayers, and others.

How to Find New Authors

Why They Say, "It's Dead, Jim."

Some of the links on Rayne's site mention that science fiction is no longer predictive. Was it ever? Sure, there were spaceships and other planets (still are), but underneath it all, science fiction was talking about us as we are now. Or how we wished we were. I don't think it's an accident that robots starting appearing just after women got the vote and some uppity attitudes about education and work, and that hard on the heels of the Civil War and other incidents that drove a stake through the "loyal servant/slave" mythology. The privileged Western lifestyle seems to have to be built on someone else's backs. (Since the household robots have not arrived on time, you can check out the nominee for the next scut worker who likes it in Barbara Ehrenreich's Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy.) I see the robots as an attempt to solve this problem, and all the post-apocalyptic stories of the 50s and 60s, like the horribly beautiful Ted Sturgeon stories, as a reaction to the discovery that yes, we could blow up the earth. Maybe we'd better think about this...

Jim Gunn opened the 2002 Campbell Conference by saying something like, "We've spent over 50 years writing about how technology was going to save the human race, and since September 11, 2001, we've known it isn't true. What do we do now?" Of course, the handwriting had been on the wall for a long time. Wonder drugs caused side effects. Everything has a side effect--if it works at all. We need to think about this...

Even the consumer magazines of the 50s were full of the wonder of technology. Today, we expect technology to be wonderful and ever more wonderful each year, and that's a key difference between this time and then. When I received my first transistor radio, I was amazed and overjoyed: I could carry my music with me everywhere! Except to hidebound places like school and church, but I could; it was physically possible. My son has always been able to carry his music; just the form has changed: Walkman, CD player, MP3 player. He expects to be able to do this and considers it an infringement on his inalienable rights if an employer or similar dweeb tries to curtail the privilege. The refrigerator, dishwasher, freezer: every new gadget made a difference in the way we lived back in those distant days. And the TV! Glory be! We were amazed, truly amazed, and our lives were forever changed. The TV has changed and acquired accouterments, but it's basic nature, sitting in front of a visual presentation in your home, remains the same. And we expect that something new version of the toy will be released in time for the Christmas season, or what will we give for presents? The folks in the Northeast who experienced the black out would probably advise us to think about this, about how much we want to lean on technology. Or maybe they'd just say, "Fix the grid!"

Genre literature has its messages. Romance readers order their books by the box--all with the plot of girl meets boy and maybe they won't get together but in the end they do--to keep being told that love is all important. Mysteries all say that there are actions we will not tolerate and justice must be done. Science fiction asks, "What if?" In earlier days, that sentence went on to say, "What if we went on spaceships to other planets and had great adventures," or "What if we were all in danger , but some really smart engineer/scientist think up a cool way to save us," or similar versions. Today, "What if?" could be finished in any way.

• What if all the men died and women learned how to reproduce parthenogenically and they formed a culture? ("The Day Things Changed," Joanna Russ)
• What if there were a race who were sexually neuter 3/4 of the time but became either male or female--a person could turn either way--one week of the month? And what if a "standard" human fell in love with one of these people?" (Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula LeGuin)
• What if the South had won the Civil War? (Harry Turtledove, several books)
• What if Europeans had not taken over the world? (Lion's Blood, Stephen Barnes; The Years of Rice and Salt, Kim Stanley Robinson)
• What if we couldn't tell what is real? (anything by Philip K. Dick, Norman Spinrad)

I could keep going a long, long time. The story Rayne suggested, of what happens to love when your mind is being chemically controlled, is perfectly valid. And probably already been done, but everything has, so don't let that stop you from writing it your way. Speculating on What if? can go either direction, to the past or to the future. Either is fair game for the author trying to explore how we got where we are or how we can get to someplace else.

Spider Robinson isn't the first author to claim that science fiction is dying and backward looking. Judith Berman wrote a widely discussed essay on the topic in 2001. She examined the print magazines to prove her point but didn't look at the books published, though that would be an overwhelming task. The street wisdom is that your novel protagonist had better be young because the first readers at publishing houses are young interns. Being street wisdom, it may not be true; certainly there are exceptions: Lois McMaster Bujold's latest, Paladin of Souls, stars a menopausal woman who's been considered crazy years before the Change. I admit to having read a number of stories that struggle with death, but I'd hate to see us go so youth-crazy that we ignore that part of life. It doesn't look like there's a shortage of young people who want to write science fiction; I'll trust they know what their peers want to read. I know of several video game programmers writing in the field today.

John Campbell, an influential editor, once turned down a story because he didn't feel that his readers could relate to a black protagonist. The author, Samuel R. Delany, found this an odd thing to say about readers who were expected to relate to bug-eyed aliens every month. One of the most celebrated women authors hid her identity for years under the pseudonym "James Tiptree, Jr." I once heard an interview with Isaac Asimov in which he was challenged about the way science fiction treated women. He acknowledged that he probably had not done a very good job in that area, considering that he'd published his first book before he had his first date. Today ghetto walls are coming down. Authors are exploring their own heritage and others', having learned from Ursula LeGuin that no alien is stranger than our neighbor. Here's a very few examples, unresearched and off the top of my head:

• People of color: Samuel R. Delany, Olivia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, Steve Barnes, Tananarive Due.
• Women: Tiptree award founders Karen Joy Fowler and Pat Murphy, Ursula LeGuin, Sherry Tepper. Joanna Russ was one of the first, but she's not active right now. Connie Willis isn't usually the first name among feminists, but she brought child care, the PTA, parking spaces, sexual abuse, and the church choir to science fiction. When accused of not being responsive to "women's issues," she wrote a story about menstruation ("Even the Queen"). I've got too many names to even think about doing justice to this category, so I'll quit before I fall further behind. For general gender bending, see the collection of Tiptree winners from the 90s, Flying Cups and Saucers, if you can find it. Debra Doyle's essay on girl cooties is enlightening too.
• Native American: Greg Bear, Bill Sanders
• Gay/Lesbian/Bi/Transgender: Maureen McHugh, Samuel R. Delany, Arthur C. Clarke
• Jewish: Michael Burstein, Avram Davidson
• Asian: Amitav Ghosh, Hiromi Goto. People who've visited include Lucius Shepherd in "Radiant Green Star" and Kim Stanley Robinson
• There's even Texas Weird, which includes Bradley Denton, Bruce Sterling, Don Webb, William Browning Spencer, Joe Lansdale, Katharine Eliska Kimbriel, and a number of folks who'll be mad I left them off. I'm willing to update!

With my brain in a pan-fried state, I'm not coming up with Hispanic and Muslim authors, but I know they're out there.

In summary, some folks think science fiction is dead because:

• They think sf should predict the future. (Of course, the genre absolutely missed the personal computer, but that's not real relevant, is it?)
• We no longer view technology as an absolute savior.
• Technology is wallpaper, a background we expect and ignore (until a blackout or computer virus).
• Science fiction's focus has diversified from just future technology, youth, and men. This may lead some readers to think their kind of fiction isn't being published any more. (Actually, space opera, which many people think of as the only sf, is alive and well. Star Wars is space opera, for instance. And it comes in all flavors: American space opera tends to the right, politically speaking; British, to the left.)

For a dying genre, it has a large number of authors knocking on the door to get in. I can think of five summer writing workshops for budding science fiction writers that fill up every summer, and I know there are more. That doesn't include the writer's workshops that most of the conventions run. One of the more horrible form rejection slips from one of the magazines reads, "Your story just didn't stand out from the other 800 we received this month." The editor admits it's out of date; the number's closer to 1000 now.

With all these writers out there dreaming, we need more readers. Thanks to Star Trek, Star Wars, and a number of movies, more people than ever are familiar with sf tropes like time travel, warp drive, alien intelligence, and many others. I hope you'll find some authors you like. Most of the science fiction authors do not make it onto the mainstream shelves (Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Lethem, and Jasper Fforde being happy exceptions), but the genre shelves are rich with speculation.

I haven't talked about fantasy at all, except for a few authors whose works have wiggled across the permeable barrier, but that's a topic for another week. You only get the title tonight: "Fantasy: Not Just Elves in Woods Anymore."

An Incomplete, Possibly Incorrect, Infinitesimally Small List of a Few Current Science Fiction Authors, Not All of Whom I've Actually Read

Hard SF: Greg Bear, Greg Benford, Charles Sheffield (recently deceased), G. Nordley, Stanley Schmidt (also the editor of Analog), Vernor Vinge, Geoff Landis

From the "softer sciences," for example, anthropology: Ursula LeGuin, Mary Doria Russell, Suzette Haden Elgin (linguistics)

In between lies Nancy Kress, taking on biology.

Post Cyberpunk: Neal Stephenson, Pat Cadigan, Paul di Filipo, Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, Bruce Boethke, Cory Doctorow

New Weird, or "Things that make you go WTF?" China Mieville, Jonathan Lethem, John Crowley

Tying History in Knots: Tim Powers, Harry Turtledove

Space Opera: Peter Hamilton, Alistair Reynolds, Wil McCarthy,Charlie Stross, M. John Harrison

Military: Lois McMaster Bujold (who claims her books are only marketed as military sf), Elizabeth Moon, Harry Harrison, David Webber

Literary: Kelly Link

Western/SF: Carol Emschwiller, Wen Spencer

SF/Romance: Catherine Asaro (a physicist by trade)

People I Can't Fit into a Box: Gene Wolfe, John Kessel, James Patrick Kelly, Ted Chiang, Michael Swanwick, Michael Resnick, Robert Silverberg, Michaela Rossner, Ian McLeod

Apologies to those I've left off. I'll add more as I think of them, or as they're suggested.

Here's two reading lists, one from Austin and the other from Boston, which has previous year's listed at the end of the page.
1:09:12 AM    

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