Trying to put my finger on it…
Around this time of year people start talking about where scifi is going (Ellis is a good example of someone talking about it, but it’s mostly been through his email list). Maybe not people you talk to but, trust me, people are talking about it. Even if examining things like this closely isn’t all that important to you you’re going to recognise the difference between the world that produced Startrek and the one that produced Bladerunner. Hell, look at the difference between episodes 4-6 and 1-3 of Starwars. Fiction is culture, and thus an important piece of the picture.
So, I find myself wondering, ‘what’s the next step?’ All of the old subgenres are dead and we need something new. I’m not really sure what exactly, but I have a feeling that it’s something in my peripheral vision that I’m not looking at quite closely enough. The of the matter is, though, the moment it’s defined, it’s over. It happened with cyberpunk, with the seventies’ new wave, it’s even the case with the Mundane SF stuff that everyone is so excited about right now. The act of defining a genre establishes the boundaries and kills the fun (and the possibility) of exploration. It’s the same deal with everything, really. Most of the important impressionists did their best work before impressionism was really define. That’s not to say that it can’t be fun to read a new book written in a dead genre, or even profitable to write one, it’s just not doing anything new which is, fundamentally, what sci-fi should be about.
So what does that mean? It means that all of the jerkoffs who sit around talking about genre drift and trends (myself included) should leave that to scholars and define the next genre by writing it. Unless you’re one of the people who wants the next big subgenre to be re-tellings of StarWars, I don’t really recommend writing that.
Anyway, that’s what I say, but who’s going to listen to me?
Nobody.
The problem with people is that we’re too subjective to truly come up with a “new” genre. You can basically break all genres into a couple of different axes, and generally be able to define the area that a genre, and more specifically, any one piece, is positioned. Off the top of my head, let’s talk the axes of past-to-future and real-to-surreal.
What can’t be defined by these axes? You’ve got contemporary fiction, which falls hard on the side of “real” and the middle of past and future. Fantasy is past and surreal. Sci-fi is future and somewhere in between real and surreal (or all surreal). Lots of generes are ones where you sort of transport bits of one location on the axes to another place — sci-fi westerns, lost civilizations, modern dude in a fantasy world — but these are just mixing things around and not really making something “new”.
Actually making something new is like the problem of alien species in sci-fi. You (at least, most people) can’t make them too alien because there’s this wall where we can’t think of things too terribly far outside our own experience. Try! Seriously. Mentally try to create an alien species that you can’t say “Oh, this is like X and Y” (where X and Y are Earth creatures) and then try to think about them for a long time. The idea is tenuous and slippery.
If you do manage it, I’d love to hear it. Maybe I’m saying more about the limitations of my own thinking than any true reality.
Comment by Shamus — January 19, 2007 @ 3:39 pm
Granted, that’s all true. I was talking more about new genre paradigms, though, which are more like new things. If you take, say, cyberpunk, it’s not something that was built out of pieces of things that came before, distinguishing it from the ‘meta-sub-genres’ (yes sir, I did just make that up) like the space opera (Starwars) or the space western (Firefly), which act more as commentaries on the existing body of work. Where a new ’sub-genre’ is taking the basic tenets of the genre and heading in a new direction with them, the ‘msg’ (I like the way it shortens too) stands within an existing subgenre and links it to something else.
I’d draw a diagram, but that would be nauseating at best.
Axes don’t necessarily work with literature and it’s dangerous to try to use them. Remember The dead poet’s socitey? They make you shoot yourself. I think that’s what happened, anyway. It’s been a long time since I saw that movie and I think I’m getting it mixed up with I can’t believe this is happening in MacDonald Hall. It’s quite possible that title’s incorrect.
Last thing, the aliens. My favourite depiction of a completely ‘alien’ was a sentient lake that someone wrote about. I can’t remember who, though. The easiest (and laziest) way to avoid this is to just not describe the aliens. It did great things for Michael Scott Rohan in that scifi novel he wrote. Run to the Stars, I think. I want to say The Stars my Destination but that was Bester.
I’d better tell Jeremy about this thread. He has a giant hard-on for talking about things like this.
Comment by Brendan — January 19, 2007 @ 4:08 pm
I do indeed have a giant hard-on, as we speak!
Let’s set up a couple of distinctions here. First, there’s a difference between a) what’s getting published, and b) what will have a lasting influence. I don’t read much sci-fi, but I can pretty much guarantee that most of what’s getting published is pastiche and retread. That’s pretty much always been true.
Another distinction. Among the innovative stuff, I can see two different categories. There’s a) fiction that posits some entity or phenomenon on the frontier of our current scientific knowledge or speculation, and then constructs the plot around this phenomenon to showcase it in an interesting way. How would people react to this thing? How would it affect how humans relate to one another? “Solaris” is in this category. “I, Robot” is in this category. The Matrix is here. Then there’s b) fiction about the ongoing effort of human beings to find meaning in the world, even well into the future. This is kind of a catch-all that can include all sorts of stuff that might not, on the face of it, seem to go together. “Nineteen Eighty Four” is in this category. Most dystopian stuff is. “Starship Troopers” is here, absolutely (the book I mean, not the movie). “Dune” is here, too. “2001″ is here.
The categories aren’t meant to be clear-cut or mutually exclusive; for example, I just saw “Children of Men” and I reckon it straddles the two categories. It does posit a frontier phenomenon: “What if the human race stopped having children?” But that’s only a pretext for exploring the general problem of the loss of momentum in our civilization, and the risk of rising Caesarism in response to the general decay of world order since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The world it portrays could plausibly come about through a variety of historical circumstances; the “no babies” thing just lets us put it on an accelerated schedule. On the other hand, something like “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” also straddles the categories, but the emphasis is maybe the other way: the role the computer plays in the moon revolution is extremely important to the development of the plot, even though revolutions are a part of the perennial human condition.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the best hope for sci fi that makes a lasting impression, is stuff that focuses on the human effort to make sense of our world - an effort that has continuity with the past. “Dune” is as much about the human race ten thousand years ago as it is about the human race ten thousand years hence. That’s what makes it cool, and interesting. That’s what we need more of.
Comment by Jeremy — January 19, 2007 @ 7:02 pm
Upon closer examination I see that we’re all talking about different things. Shamus’ quest for new-ness is something that everybody is always trying to do within the greater search for a new sub-genre that I was talking about. Jeremy’s point about what makes literature good is, when I look at and think about it, what I was looking for but didn’t quite arrive at in the original post.
Thanks, guys. I honestly value your input and discussion.
Comment by Brendan — January 21, 2007 @ 7:06 pm
So what, you’re saying you’re gay for us now or something?
Comment by Jeremy — January 23, 2007 @ 7:49 pm
Kind of sounds that way, doesn’t it? That came after writing a long winded response where I split genre hairs and managed to bore myself half to death. I realized when I had finished that further explaining myself wasn’t really going anywhere.
The difference between what we were all talking about mainly has to do with the different approaches we take to literature, science fiction in particular. Shamus is looking for entertainment and new ideas, you (Jeremy) are looking for enduring fiction, I’m trying to make a sale so that people can recognise my incredible genius.
Comment by Brendan — January 23, 2007 @ 9:05 pm
Based on our conversation and what I know of each of us, I can’t argue with that.
Comment by Shamus — January 25, 2007 @ 8:23 am