"But if we accept that SF is struggling as a literary genre because of a combination of the shift towards blockbusters-as-adaptation impacting the tie-in market, having caught up with the grim future predicted in lauded sci-fi of decades past, and the rise of new genres and subgenres drawing away the educated, persistent, high-volume readers who constitute SF’s core readership then there remains two final questions: can we save SF and should we?"
@MLClark
That's sad to hear but maybe it needs to go underground and get weird again. Demographically, "adults aged 30-45, above average wealth and education" buy the books but chasing sales never leads to quality art. Running the opposite direction might actually save it. A proud antithesis to pop-blockbuster schlock. So bizarre that screenplays would be impossible👍
YES! BRING BACK THE MADE-IN-YOUR-BASEMENT SFF FANZINES! I want weird screeds from random anonymous authors, patched together with bizarre cult stories and haunting collage art. Print run of "however many we can do before the coloured paper and staples run out". 😉
@MLClark Yes!! Ground zero, the incubator. Our heroes, authors and characters, all came from that world.
@MLClark I...don't buy this guy's assessment, especially when he shifts into Rite Gud's Squeecore critique and attributes it to the "science fiction convention scene." That raises huge red flags for me. Then he goes off into raving about Jeff Vandermeer. But he also condemns fandom as being "reactionary..."
Lots of red flags for me.
My assessment? Genres come and go--look at horror. Or Westerns. More in the next post.
:) You're preempting my upcoming BookTube comment on this piece!
Suffice it to say:
"science fiction" is a commercial genre. Speculative fiction has taken many forms over time, and if we're hyperfixated on a specific label or material context for our work, we're missing the forest for the trees. But I'll get into that further on the weekend.
@MLClark Part of what I see in the field right now is, bluntly, a pushback by middle-aged white men from all sides of the political spectrum against BIPOC, LBGTQIA+, and women. Just because he uses left terminology doesn't mean he's not unbiased.
(I have spent too much of my life being told that the class war will solve everything, don't worry your pretty little head over it)
And as an older white woman, I'm seen as a target for some of these guys.
@MLClark But part of the problem that I see in the field right now, both tradpub and selfpub, is that priority is given to those SF works that have hard systems which are explained in detail. This is shaped by reviewer expectations. You see the same thing in fantasy where, again, priority is given to "hard" magic systems that are explained in detail.
Even the more "literary" works focus on "hard" systems.
And yow, does the guy ever have a thing about John Scalzi. Which...
@MLClark Scalzi is a very effective barometer by which to measure critique. He is popular because he writes rather effectively in a mode that is readable and accessible. And...he doesn't write "hard" systems. He's an exception but make no mistake. There's depth there. Even in Redshirts or Starter Villain.
It's telling that McNeil elevates Vandermeer. While Vandermeer says some interesting things, I've stopped reading him because I'm not into that absurdist edginess.
Eh. Scalzi doesn't have the greatest writing all the time - sometimes he very openly phones in his novels - but so what? He entertains his people.
He's also been critiqued for signal-boosting/QT-ing less prominent people to mock them, knowing that they'll get piled on by his fans. Just because he's "one of the good ones" doesn't make everything he does safe from criticism.
Fandom makes people get super territorial about "their" guy - but these are just tempests in teapots.
@MLClark oh yeah, Scalzi's not perfect. However, I notice in both those essays that McNeil points to him...why not Charlie Stross, for example?
Because Stross doesn't occupy the same position in fandom?
Scalzi got a huge boost by "making it" with a sensational publishing deal, and that gives him a lot more "celebrity" culture appeal, for better and for worse.
(He also keeps that shtick alive with the burritos and other playful content toying with all his "haters". I don't think Stross has a social media shtick of a similar stripe?)
@MLClark the other piece is that McNeil is not that in touch with anything other than Big Convention Fandom. I've gone to the small regional conventions in the isolated West where people attend because it's the only time all year they can hang with similar people. It's very different from Worldcon.
Stross has a very intense hard core group of fans that pulls from horror as well as SF--the mix of Merchant Princes multiverse plus Laundry Files horror.
The funny thing is, I know that McNeil runs in horror circles, but a lot of folks in his slice of horror REALLY don't like to be associated with the rest of SFF. They have their own beefs/issues, tyvm. 😉
(I find that hilarious, and part of my overall issue with our hyperfixation on specific names for genres and other superficial manifestations of working in a commercial genre. We write STORIES. And hopefully - if we're lucky - they will reflect the times we live in well.)
@MLClark oh yeah. I know about that crowd. Some of them are wannabe literary types. One of my early mentors straddled that slice as well as SF. Not fantasy, though.
I'm rather skittish about horror because their bad apples are...really bad.
Me? Well, John Steinbeck was literary and wrote stories. Same for Willa Cather, Ursula K. LeGuin, Craig Johnson...and so on.
Oh, horror just went through a NASTY news cycle, and I feel very bad for a lot of lesser-known writers caught in the churn of this latest press/anthology debacle.
It is indeed a strange scene!
@MLClark Vandermeer also makes the mistake of many enviro activist sorts in applying his circumstances universally. Having been an enviro activist myself and realizing suddenly the degree to which enviro activism can slide into problematic areas if you aren't careful, I'm pretty strict in my critiques about people who push that advocacy in their work.
And that's where Vandermeer and squeecore / cozy SF all converge under the same umbrella of issue crafted by their shared publishing context: they're all more or less coming from the same geopolitical foundation / regional interests, which presents some real limits to how much they can write effectively about solutions that serve more holistically.
@MLClark exactly. I suspect that one reason why my work hasn't been picked up by tradpub is that I use the Pacific Northwest as a setting, in both science fiction and fantasy.
I'm surprised as well that no one, NO ONE has done much with developments in agricultural technology. OMG there is SO MUCH THERE. I kinda got distracted by family power dynamics but...gonna mine that field some more once I'm done with the Martinieres and write the fantasy trilogy.
🔥 See, now this is the benefit of posting a provocative essay!
If it motivates you to write more of the untold and VITAL stories of agricultural technology in your neck of the woods, that is AMAZING.
(And keep me informed when you dive into that rich territory!)
@MLClark well, the Martinieres kinda get into that world. Problem is, tech is moving fast. I wrote a short story about using drones and chip/tag implants to herd stock...um, it's already happening. Invisible Fence for livestock.
(Sorry, I got off hold with CRA, so I had to talk taxes for a bit.)
I suspect that this is where Gibson's and Doctorow's approach to "SF of the present" works really well.
One does not need to anticipate future tech to write moving sci-fi. One simply needs to imagine innovation - in cultural attitudes, in workflow, in unexpected consequences - around said tech, for the work to have a "science-fictional" feel. So don't feel like you need to stay ahead of progress to write!
@MLClark yeah, I tend to focus more on control of technology than the details of the tech itself.
Squeecore does have some serious classist issues in it, and that's definitely an issue for Simon: the way broader ecological and capitalist issues aren't effectively addressed by a dominant set in publishing.
But the problem with the manifestation of those concerns in this context is that... squeecore is low-hanging fruit. A seasonal blip. The underlying structure of commercial SF has always supported superficial approaches to performing activism in lieu of leading change.
I might talk about this more on the BookTube this week. I needed a topic smaller than reviewing a whole book, magazine, or multiple podcasts anyway. 👍🏻