The 3 problems with scifi
First is it’s widespread acceptance. It’s in every action movie, mostly in comic book form, the product of Star Wars, adventure fantasy. Things explode, people are shot, some special effects happen, but it’s all just mishmash with no unifying picture beyond what looks cool. It’s Firefly, toying around with the western, lacking the messiness of slavery. It’s Heinlein’s powered suit, fighting capital E, evil, with none of the philosophy to think about between action scenes. It’s Dr Who farce, without the biting wit of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide.
It’s not just the movies, it’s the dull little cul de sacs like Steampunk, which just seems like endless variations on Dickens and Verne, without the social commentary of Dickens or the inventions of Verne. It is zombie stories. There was a time when it seemed like the English produced a never ending stream of possible apocalypses, Triffids, droughts, plagues, drownings, meteors, and even the death of grass, endless apocalypses and post-apocalypses. At least there was some variation, rather than the same undead eating machines ever since Matheson decided to play about with reinventing the vampire. It’s the endless masturbation of alternative history novels which are never anything new as much as just another version of the happened. When it was Piper, Leiber or Anderson the ideas were still somewhat fresh, but there isn’t much new to say about alternative worlds or time travel, that wasn’t said in the pages of Astounding. You get a few novel takes on the subjects, sort of a post-modernist version of scifi when SM Stirling gives his rebuttal to the “great man theory” of classics like Connecticut Yankee, just as Max Brooks’ World War Z experimented with the apocalypse novel recast as social history, but neither is really new scifi, as much as clever ways to offer the same ideas up anew.
Secondly, it’s the the teen market. Now I’m not saying all teen scifi is bad, I’m not sure where scifi would be today without the Heinlein juveniles or novels such as Palmer’s Emergence, but where much of the older scfi might be easily read by teens, today’s teen market seems to only want teenagers. The big paydays involved with teen movies and books seem to be sapping some of the better talent. Paolo Bacigalup’s Wind Up Girl and Cory Doctrow’s Makers seemed to promise some new ideas, but they retreat back into children’s books, content to write for an uncritical audience. Much of the rest of the teen writers seem content to just recycle old ideas, which leads to the endless dystopian novels and teen power fantasies. Worlds the only people who can do things are teen girls in love. The Chrysalids ad infintum.
Last, and most dangerous is the flipside of my first complaint. Just as the acceptance of scifi has led to it’s use in action movies, the acceptance of scfi has siphoned off the best of the newer scfi writers into the mainstream. The genre has always hemorrhaged some of the best. Orwell’s 1984 isn’t shelved in the ghetto, Vonnegut one day was sitting with Sturgeon and the next day with Phillip Roth, Margaret Atwood may have never been nominated for Hugo, but she should have been acknowledged as the sister to Ursula Le Guin. Haruki Murakami might be so unlike Tolkien that it’s spawned it’s own label of magical realism, but it’s fantasy. The number of such books on the “regular fiction” shelves seems to grow. More and more the distinction, the isolation that made the sub culture we knew as scifi possible is gone( to crib William Gibson) and with that escape from the genre ghetto, we have lost the conventions of the ghetto, the customs of the tribe that make scifi so special to us, the focus on the technology and it’s ramifications, rather than just the low brow explosions, or the intricacies of philosophy made flesh.
Then there are the days where I dismiss rage & depression and remember the words of a great man “Sure 90% of scifi is crap, but 90% of everything is crap.”