Alas, poor SF, it suffers from premature mourning

Yes, yet again SF is on its virtual deathbed, diagnosis terminal - and yet, the shambling corpse keeps staggering on. And on. And... well, you get the idea. This latest case is part of a broader treatise on the nature, life, and death of genres by Daniel Abraham . He's got some good ideas, although why he feels the need to wrap it all in academicese is something I'm not going to think about.

The basic argument this time is that modern life is so SFnal that there's no room for the kind of "gosh-wow" optimism that was all over Golden Age and pre-Golden Age SF. Cloning is mainstream lit, vampires are sparkly (speaking of which, just so you can share my nightmares, go take a look at Freefall for today (http://freefall.purrsia.com/default.htm until Friday, then it should be at http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff2000/fc01950.htm), and SF is so dystopian 1984 starts to look positively chipper.

I disagree. Yes, there's a lot of modern life that looks a lot like SF, but there's still plenty of places imagination can take us, and they don't all look darker than the Pit of Despair. Oh, wait. That's just Fezzik blocking the light. Sorry.

We're right on the edge of self-replicating gadgetry - and affordable, too - that can make all sorts of useful stuff to spec. We're not that far from figuring out how to stop age from killing us, or failing that, slow it down even more (and let's face it, "old age" happens a lot later than it used to even 25 years ago). If we wanted, we probably could get a functional scientific base on the moon, although at current tech levels it wouldn't be all that comfortable - but it would be there, and be usable for research and as a jump-off point to bigger and better things.

What's missing? In my view the voices of PC have drowned out everything that doesn't fit their view - and many of the loudest voices boil down to "all things about humans that aren't straight from nature are evil". So, those of us who've put a lot more distance between us and our poop are much more evil than those of us who haven't. This, in the view of certain PC factions, is tied into skin color. Presumably distance from poop causes bleaching (ahem). Um. Sorry.

Anyway - what do you think? Where can SF go, why are people so keen to hold the funeral, and why did Westerns die and Romances get out of the back corner of the bookshop?

Pack Up the Kit Bag?

Has Elvis left the building? Is it time to pack up and go home? Is SF dead?

Not that I want to pack up, but a recent article in LOCUS really got me thinking.

I was reading the interview with Barry N. Malzberg in the recent October issue. He was talking about how science fiction has changed over the last century. His comment was "Science fiction has so infiltrated the culture that you don't need it any more. If you look at it as a familiarization of science and engineering for the larger culture - which is exactly what Hugo Gernsback said he wanted - it succeeded beyond any limit of his ability to envision."

That really made me sit back. Part of the appeal of these funky little stories in the old pulp magazines was that they were describing a foreign culture. SF was a weird sub-group. Most people had no conception of the inner workings of science and technology, and were completely inexperienced in projecting this into the realm of possibility. Now it's everywhere. It's in the local paper, it's on the cable channels: popular science documentaries, science shows.

We used to play this game: Ask someone if they like speculative fiction (usually they say no). Then ask them to list their favourite top ten movies. Invariably they end up listing something that has quite significant speculative fiction elements. The point is that it is so familiar that it has become invisible.

SF - and what becomes noteworthy in the eyes of reviewers (or editors) - becomes highly experimental work that is actually a high-art interpretation of the genre itself. Being part of the 'scene' goes hand in hand with encyclopedic knowledge of the genre, because a good SF story is just not enough anymore. It needs to somehow redefine something that is actually dwindling to non-existence.

Then there is the issue of form. Reading that same LOCUS issue, which was discussing some of the history of pulp, it really struck me that at one point this was the new thing. Has this form of fiction completely lost its relevance in this new world?

My wife recently flew back to Brisbane from Adelaide. The flight had maybe 400 people on-board. Blocked by the trolley, she had to walk through almost the entire length of the flight to find an available toilet. On the way she scanned the people to see what they were up to. In every single row there was at least one laptop and at least one person playing games on an iPhone. These are forms of entertainment that simply did not exist when pulp made its appearance. Of all those people she passed, two were reading a book. Two!

OK. Here is my provocation. Is SF - and the form of fiction in general - dead? What do you think? Do we all need to apply our imagination to neat little iPhone games instead?