Relevant SF?
SF really ought to be the most relevant form of literature around today. After all, we live in rapidly changing times, much of that change is driven by new technology, and no other form of literature deals directly with such issues as Science Fiction does. My friend and US publisher Lou Anders says this often, and I agree.
So why do so many people still view SF as irrelevant? Much of it, clearly, is that a majority of people just aren't paying attention to how the world's changing -- people have to eat, and pay the bills, and most people simply don't have the hours in their days to keep up to date with such things. Which is why they have writers to do it for them. So why aren't more of those writers household names today, like the Asimovs, Arthur C Clarkes and Heinleins?
There are two issues here I think worth considering. The first is that Science Fiction may partly have itself to blame. SF doesn't thrust itself into the real world like many other genres do. When jetliners flew into the twin towers on September the 11th 2001, the media immediately sought interviews with Tom Clancy. Likewise it's not uncommon to hear crime writers talking about real life crimes, and even less uncommon to hear the writers of political thrillers talking politics, or family drama writers appearing on Oprah to discuss their relationship with their parents.
There are some examples of SF writers getting similar attention -- Arthur C Clarke's opinions are still sought frequently on space travel and communication, William Gibson is asked about the internet, and Kim Stanley Robinson quotes can be found whenever NASA plans some new Mars initiative. But mostly, from what I've seen, SF writers are rarely recognised or consulted as experts in the field. When cloning became real, no one ran to SF writers -- they talked to doctors, scientists and geneticists. Bird flu threatens us with a global pandemic, yet despite all the SF predictions of future germ catastrophes, it's once again the whitecoats getting asked all the questions. And probably this is sensible thinking by the media. After all, a lot of SF stories dealing with disease pandemics have been cliched nonsense or excuses to indulge in yet another dystopian, post-apocalyptic world where men can be real men, and sport big guns, and wear leather, and drive big cars with spikes on them... all great fun, perhaps, but serious? And SF is solely responsible for most of the cliches about clones that lead to exasperated scientists having to explain again and again that no, we don't grow them in vats, and no, they're not like androids and will have no more desire to take over the world than anyone else.
The other side of this argument is that the mainstream also appropriates SF all the time. They sneer at cloning as impossible, then refuse to give credit once it happens. They tell SF writers to 'grow up' and be serious, then happily accept the benefits when some new piece of technology first predicted by SF writers arrives. This is inevitable, and we can only keep explaining, tiredly, that most things now taken for granted were once derided as impossible, and that if it weren't for the existence of people who continued imagining impossible things, nothing would ever change.
The second issue is that we may simply be in an anti-SF epoch right now. The so called SF 'golden age' happened in the fifties and sixties, when there was also a real space race going on, and real psychological barriers were being destroyed all the time. I don't think this is a coincidence. I wasn't there, so I can't imagine the ground-shaking enormity of someone landing on the moon for the FIRST TIME. When Clarke and Kubrick brought out 2001 the movie, I'm sure it seemed to many people a reasonable timeline -- that by the year 2001, surely we would have space stations and moon bases and interplanetary travel, because that was the sharp angle on which the development curve was ascending. That space-faring future seemed inevitable, then, and it forced people to speculate about what was coming.
Today, that sense of inevitability is gone. Space travel is expensive and dangerous, and all the dates the media put on arriving on Mars, or even returning to the moon, are about twenty years away at the soonest... and of course, they were twenty years away in 1985, too. There are no personal robots, no flying cars (see my previous post), and the internet is fun, but it's a place for games and porn and online advertising, not Matrix-style mind bending reality twists. SF always promised a future wide-eyed and amazing. Well, the future is here, and it's... mundane.
What's the answer? Well, that's harder to know than the future itself. I've heard some in publishing say SF just isn't as much fun as it used to be, and it should do more gee-whizz stuff to get the fans back. I doubt it. A big part of crime fiction's success, I think, is because it combines elements of peoples' everyday lives, and familiar worlds, and puts them together in a dramatic form. Horror even moreso. When something is familiar, writers don't need to extrapolate much, and can simply assume a certain readerly familiarity with the subject matter. Then on the other extreme you have fantasy, much of which is pure escapism, and there's nothing wrong with that. But the popular perception of SF, it seems to me, currently lies somewhere in the middle, neither escapist enough for the escapists, nor relevant enough for the thinkers. Much of it is familiar only to people who read it regularly, and to many readers, that with which they aren't somehow familiar is also not dramatic. My sister-in-law confesses that SF and Fantasy alike just baffle her. It has no relevance to her world, and she can't connect with any of it. If she were abducted by aliens, I suspect that feeling might change. But we can hardly arrange such a thing just to boost sales. Can we?
As writers, of course, we can ultimately only write to please ourselves. If we're lucky, our personal tastes will coincide with the public's. But I can't help wondering, whenever I think on this, what would happen if the sub-orbital tourism boom promised by people like Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos happens in a few years. Imagine seeing ordinary people (if fairly wealthy ones) taking rides into space not just every month, but every day. That, the newspapers would surely say, would be Science Fiction-made-reality. Gosh, people might realise, isn't space travel exciting! What great TV it makes to watch. I'd love to do that, if I had the money. And it's happening right now! If the prices keep coming down, I'll be able to do that. Certainly my kids and grandkids will. Probably they'll go into orbit. Maybe even to the Moon and Mars. Now where can I find some books that tell stories of what that might be like?
There's only one section of shelves that'll do it mate, and it's not the celebrity biographies. Until, of course, the mainstream begin to appropriate it all, and then all the 'experts' are engineers, tourism operators, businessmen and even stock fund managers. And everyone says 'no, this isn't science fiction, it's happening right now, it's real, how can it be?'
This is SF's eternal dilemma -- today's mundane reality is yesterday's fantastic vision, and the future just keeps fading, mirage-like, into the distance. Oh well. We'll just keep trudging after it. We'll get there one day.
So why do so many people still view SF as irrelevant? Much of it, clearly, is that a majority of people just aren't paying attention to how the world's changing -- people have to eat, and pay the bills, and most people simply don't have the hours in their days to keep up to date with such things. Which is why they have writers to do it for them. So why aren't more of those writers household names today, like the Asimovs, Arthur C Clarkes and Heinleins?
There are two issues here I think worth considering. The first is that Science Fiction may partly have itself to blame. SF doesn't thrust itself into the real world like many other genres do. When jetliners flew into the twin towers on September the 11th 2001, the media immediately sought interviews with Tom Clancy. Likewise it's not uncommon to hear crime writers talking about real life crimes, and even less uncommon to hear the writers of political thrillers talking politics, or family drama writers appearing on Oprah to discuss their relationship with their parents.
There are some examples of SF writers getting similar attention -- Arthur C Clarke's opinions are still sought frequently on space travel and communication, William Gibson is asked about the internet, and Kim Stanley Robinson quotes can be found whenever NASA plans some new Mars initiative. But mostly, from what I've seen, SF writers are rarely recognised or consulted as experts in the field. When cloning became real, no one ran to SF writers -- they talked to doctors, scientists and geneticists. Bird flu threatens us with a global pandemic, yet despite all the SF predictions of future germ catastrophes, it's once again the whitecoats getting asked all the questions. And probably this is sensible thinking by the media. After all, a lot of SF stories dealing with disease pandemics have been cliched nonsense or excuses to indulge in yet another dystopian, post-apocalyptic world where men can be real men, and sport big guns, and wear leather, and drive big cars with spikes on them... all great fun, perhaps, but serious? And SF is solely responsible for most of the cliches about clones that lead to exasperated scientists having to explain again and again that no, we don't grow them in vats, and no, they're not like androids and will have no more desire to take over the world than anyone else.
The other side of this argument is that the mainstream also appropriates SF all the time. They sneer at cloning as impossible, then refuse to give credit once it happens. They tell SF writers to 'grow up' and be serious, then happily accept the benefits when some new piece of technology first predicted by SF writers arrives. This is inevitable, and we can only keep explaining, tiredly, that most things now taken for granted were once derided as impossible, and that if it weren't for the existence of people who continued imagining impossible things, nothing would ever change.
The second issue is that we may simply be in an anti-SF epoch right now. The so called SF 'golden age' happened in the fifties and sixties, when there was also a real space race going on, and real psychological barriers were being destroyed all the time. I don't think this is a coincidence. I wasn't there, so I can't imagine the ground-shaking enormity of someone landing on the moon for the FIRST TIME. When Clarke and Kubrick brought out 2001 the movie, I'm sure it seemed to many people a reasonable timeline -- that by the year 2001, surely we would have space stations and moon bases and interplanetary travel, because that was the sharp angle on which the development curve was ascending. That space-faring future seemed inevitable, then, and it forced people to speculate about what was coming.
Today, that sense of inevitability is gone. Space travel is expensive and dangerous, and all the dates the media put on arriving on Mars, or even returning to the moon, are about twenty years away at the soonest... and of course, they were twenty years away in 1985, too. There are no personal robots, no flying cars (see my previous post), and the internet is fun, but it's a place for games and porn and online advertising, not Matrix-style mind bending reality twists. SF always promised a future wide-eyed and amazing. Well, the future is here, and it's... mundane.
What's the answer? Well, that's harder to know than the future itself. I've heard some in publishing say SF just isn't as much fun as it used to be, and it should do more gee-whizz stuff to get the fans back. I doubt it. A big part of crime fiction's success, I think, is because it combines elements of peoples' everyday lives, and familiar worlds, and puts them together in a dramatic form. Horror even moreso. When something is familiar, writers don't need to extrapolate much, and can simply assume a certain readerly familiarity with the subject matter. Then on the other extreme you have fantasy, much of which is pure escapism, and there's nothing wrong with that. But the popular perception of SF, it seems to me, currently lies somewhere in the middle, neither escapist enough for the escapists, nor relevant enough for the thinkers. Much of it is familiar only to people who read it regularly, and to many readers, that with which they aren't somehow familiar is also not dramatic. My sister-in-law confesses that SF and Fantasy alike just baffle her. It has no relevance to her world, and she can't connect with any of it. If she were abducted by aliens, I suspect that feeling might change. But we can hardly arrange such a thing just to boost sales. Can we?
As writers, of course, we can ultimately only write to please ourselves. If we're lucky, our personal tastes will coincide with the public's. But I can't help wondering, whenever I think on this, what would happen if the sub-orbital tourism boom promised by people like Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos happens in a few years. Imagine seeing ordinary people (if fairly wealthy ones) taking rides into space not just every month, but every day. That, the newspapers would surely say, would be Science Fiction-made-reality. Gosh, people might realise, isn't space travel exciting! What great TV it makes to watch. I'd love to do that, if I had the money. And it's happening right now! If the prices keep coming down, I'll be able to do that. Certainly my kids and grandkids will. Probably they'll go into orbit. Maybe even to the Moon and Mars. Now where can I find some books that tell stories of what that might be like?
There's only one section of shelves that'll do it mate, and it's not the celebrity biographies. Until, of course, the mainstream begin to appropriate it all, and then all the 'experts' are engineers, tourism operators, businessmen and even stock fund managers. And everyone says 'no, this isn't science fiction, it's happening right now, it's real, how can it be?'
This is SF's eternal dilemma -- today's mundane reality is yesterday's fantastic vision, and the future just keeps fading, mirage-like, into the distance. Oh well. We'll just keep trudging after it. We'll get there one day.
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