Response to Spider Robinson on the State of Sci-Fi 199
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."
The demise of sci-fi (Score:3, Interesting)
It was not really a disagreement (Score:5, Interesting)
Reminds me of Francis Fukuyama in a way. The important decisions of history have been made, and things will not got significantly better or worse than they are right now. Democracy and capitalism have conquered the world.
But...why? (Score:5, Interesting)
Just saying over and over that it's so, as this response does and most of the comments here last time did don't explain WHY it's so.
Thieves & King Website (Score:3, Interesting)
Spider Robinson is depressed about the state of Science Fiction.
He cites dropping sales and no new authors replacing the old, as well as a mass defection of readers to 'Tolkienesque' fantasy.
You can read his article/rant here.
I can understand where he's coming from. Heck, I've heard his lament on the lips of numerous other Sci-Fi writers. To be part of a fading industry isn't exactly inspiring, seeing fellow creators slip from view, watching the dizzying excitement of a once lunatic market place die down to something which actually makes sense. . . (Well, I don't know if the paperback book market could ever really be described as 'lunatic' in quite the same way comics were for a while. . . Nobody I knew ever sealed away paperbacks in vinyl bags for posterity!) In any case, I do feel for Mr. Robinson.
Moreover, though, it got me wondering. .
And, ohhh, but this is a can of worms like none other!
I'll start off small. First of all, I should explain that I have always felt Science Fiction, from the day it first began to materialize, has had an expiry date stamped across its forehead. I'm not just reiterating the tried and true, "Sci-Fi will be pointless when when there really are people walking around in space suits and zipping back and forth between the stars."
No, no. It's much simpler than that.
See, I think stories have only two basic purposes and that everything else is just turkey trimming. Ahem. .
"I believe that stories exist for no other reason than to explore and share ideas."
It works like this; when people become curious about a subject, there is a desire to examine and to consider that subject. When desire grows enough, somebody will inevitably sit down at a keyboard and hammer out a book about it. Ideas flow, you see, whether we want them to or not, and they must be contained! Recorded. Sifted through. Shared. --And if the subject is fascinating enough, why then a lot of somebodies will hammer out a whole lot of books!
Look at teen romance novels for instance; because there are always young women clamoring to know everything they can about love and relationships, there is a more or less permanent market for 150 page paperback novels with sappy covers about dating and first love and all that. --When young women grow up, then we see the far more prolific 'grown up' romance novels for slightly different reasons, but still driven by the desire to spin around and absorb certain sets of ideas. So long as there are heroines, (and hormones), there will be romance novels.
Not so with Science Fiction. No hormones there. (Well, actually, there were quite a lot, but that wasn't Science Fiction's reason for being.) No. Science Fiction came into existence because the millions of minds living through the first two thirds of the twentieth century were besieged with the growing awareness that technology and industry could, and very likely would achieve terrifying and spectacular wonders! --The kinds of wonders which would change the very shape of humanity itself into something new!
But crikey, if people had only the dimmest clue of what that something would be. .
Indeed, people had only the most vague notions, but with Hydroelectric dams being built, telescopes probing ever more deeply into space, rockets being erected, new materials being developed, and all manner of new technological powers being discovered. . , people quickly began to realize that whatever the change was going to be, it was going to be Big with a capital 'B' --and that they'd better start thinking about it right smart quick!
But no fear; the trusty human mind has ways to deal with this kind of scenario. Why, the human mind when faced with sudden shocking possibilities, will Think About Them A Lot, thank you very much. --The mind will swim in new ideas and jump around with great excitement, examining the problem from every angle as though it wer
Re:But...why? (Score:5, Interesting)
For a good exploration of this idea, I would suggest the book 'Future Shock'. A very good read.
Wolf is right (Score:2, Interesting)
But I think Wolf and Robinson ignore the the new paradigm of computers and virtual environments. Science fiction was the perfect literature for the burgeoning of science and technology in peoples' lives. However, with cyberspace, I think that a better model, a better metaphor, is magic. Think about what's the most popular virtual community: Everquest. All of the progress of the scientific worldview to make not just computers, but the Internet, and the best interaction is a magical world. It fits.
Re:But...why? (Score:4, Interesting)
That's a really good point. In Asimov and Heinlein's heyday, we didn't have appliances that were smarter than their users. No VCRs blinking an endless noon; no DVD players that insult [google.com] their owners. Our cars didn't have an average of a dozen CPU chips each, and we didn't have hundred-million transistor personal computers that only a few dozen people on the planet can honestly say they understand through and through. The ubiquitous Joe Six-Pack could still assimilate the technological content of his life as late as the mid-Seventies, and he had time left over on the weekends to think about what it all meant and where it was going.
But then the Japanese figured out how to fit 10 pounds of shit in a 5-ounce box. The sales graphs at Heathkit flatlined, Radio Shack started selling toys, and some hippie named Wozniak dragged a weird-looking piece of hardware to a club meeting in a forgotten basement in Sunnyvale. We quit making stuff in the Western world, both personally and industrially speaking, around the time of the last Apollo mission. When subscriptions to Popular Electronics started to decline, how long could Asimov's Magazine of Science Fiction hold out?
Maybe this is why the few examples of really-successful modern SF have been escapist fantasies rather than celebrations of futuristic hardware and intellectual conquest. I really liked this guy's essay, and I suspect he's a lot closer to the truth than Spider Robinson is. Fantasy hasn't replaced SF; it's just less optional today.
How to find the good stuff? (Score:2, Interesting)
Same with music. The increase in the number of bands out there seriously trying to make it, compounded by less diversity on the radio, makes it harder to find new bands that are doing stuff that you're interested in. I used to be able to use what was on the radio to not only directly find new bands, but to also jump off into new directions to find bands that might not be on the radio. Of course that kind of exploration can still be done today, it just takes more time to do so. Time that just isn't there (for me at least). More content out there to weed through, less time to do so.
So yeah, I state the problem and then don't offer up a solution. But what is the solution? Is it just finding several critics that seem to enjoy the same content that you do? Or is there another solution that just hasn't come to fruition yet?
How politcally correct of you (Score:3, Interesting)
>>In roman times, not even half of the world had been explored...
>
By anyone. Did the aboriginees know about egypt, or the chinese know about madagascar?
Good Modern Sci-Fi Author List (Score:3, Interesting)
Who else should be here?
It's actually quite simple, and logical, too... (Score:4, Interesting)
Society today, however, though tech-savvy, wants -- no, *needs* -- to find some reason or purpose to life other than just "moving forward" (whether toward the stars, the moon, etc.). Whenever society reaches a critical mass of "understanding" of the "known and accepted potentialities" of technology, it reverts to the "spiritual".
This is why the fantasy stories are obliterating sci-fi. People already *know* what will most likely happen tech-wise within their lifetime. What they *don't* know is whether there is a "god", or "gods", or whatever else you can dream up in the "spiritual" realm. IMHO, the fantasy genre is more important to the average reader today than sci-fi because fantasy texts address the questions and concerns that today's readers are really interested in.
Sci-fi is very extro-spective -- focusing on what might happen based on current scientific knowledge and theory. Sci-fi generally ignores or poo-poo's the spiritual/human concerns of us carbon-based entities, instead pushing either techno-utopian agendas, or techno-hell agendas.
Fantasy, on the other hand, is very intro-spective -- focusing on the (usually) historic, spiritual planes of thought and existence. Fantasy doesn't care about the future, as long as it can describe a believable past.
In a nutshell, I think what's happening is that people know enough (and have been let down enough) by technology to not have faith in the hypothetical futures described in sci-fi. Instead, these same people want an altruistic world like Tolkein offers (all is black or white, very little grey) that has the semblance of "history" or "religion", and doesn't require buying in to a specific school of futurism.
Of course, I'm probably full of shit and don't know my own ass from a hole in the ground, but that's what I think about this.
Peace, my fellow
it's the exploration, stupid (Score:3, Interesting)
In the meantime, there's a news piece once a month on advances in carbon nanotubes to build a space elevator. On orbit for $5 a pound, coming right up, ma'am.
In the meantime, there's a considerable subset of the population that wants Mars so bad we can already taste her oxidized sands. A few billion dollars (perhaps 10% of what we've spent on the war in Iraq) and ten years and we could be there.
And no one seems to care. Where is this planet spending it's collective dollars, pounds and rubles?
"... using perfectly good rockets to kill each other, instead."
Re:But...why? (Score:3, Interesting)
But the interesting ideas of the near future are in communication and thought -- things that will change *us*
Of the "modern" writers, I like Greg Bear best. He is actually exploring the new frontiers of science, like genetics and evolution in "Darwin's Radio" but keeping to the tradition of great SF writing. Take a single idea about something new and explore how it impacts society and people. Gordon Dickson, a bit older, did the same thing in The Childe Cycle stories.