If This is the Best...

Picked up some paperback anthology at the library the other day, Best SF of the Year, and it made me sad and angry. If this is the best being done in the genre, science fiction—a genre I've been reading and writing for over half a century—is as dead as Norwegian blue parrot.

Every genre is an extended conversation with the dead...in this case, with authors as far back as Lucian of Samosata and Menippus, not to mention Cyrano de Bergerac, Edgar Allen Poe, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and a host of others. That conversation is now worldwide; the anthology included writers in Australia, Canada, and elsewhere, not just the US and UK. Many of these "best" writers are clearly well educated, scientifically literate, and pretty skilled as writers. But their stuff falls right smack into Sturgeon's 90 percent—the crap content of any genre. The dead are conversing as brilliantly as ever, but the living have nothing worthwhile to say.

Where to begin?

Do we really need a story about a gunslinger on a desert planet, drilling some assassin right between her "pert breasts"? Do we need a story about married computer scientists so traumatized by a miscarriage that (rather than try again) they create an artificial-intelligence child with a quantum computer for a brain? Do we need a "tribute" to Leigh Brackett about still more gunslingers on a desert planet?

(For the chronologically challenged, Leigh Brackett wrote space opera for pulps like Planet Magazine in the days when people still thought Mars might have canals. So a story going back to that era is imitating a literary coprolite—fossilized crap.)

What struck me about these stories (and hundreds like them) is their sheer lack of imagination and energy. Northrop Frye used to argue that literary genres eventually become too "academic," ironic, and self-referential; when that happens, they need a good dose of vulgar pop sensationalism to revive them. Here it's the reverse: Irony trying to breathe life into dead vulgarity. Sure, a Martian-gunslinger story can't help but be ironic, but at the expense of a dead target? Why bother? My God, I was writing satires of pulp SF in 1954 when I was 13 years old and the pulps were still around.

In the "hard science" stories I found an occasional clever idea or insight, but never a radical one. The societies are all full of people like ourselves, except that they can cross galaxies. One story was about a space station orbiting a wormhole (isn't that a novel idea?) where starships dock. Forget the means of interstellar travel—I'd like to know what the economy is like, and how it can afford goods that have been schlepped thousands of light-years by "sailors" who literally have a girl in every port. In other words, we can travel the stars but we still need an old-fashioned bar staffed by old-fashioned bar girls (and boys) so the sailors can get drunk and laid. Wouldn't it be cheaper to leave the sailors on earth and crew the ships with robots?

One of the greatest lines in SF is in Ursula K. Le Guin's The Word for the World Is Forest. A member of an older human race is assessing the impact of Earth humans on an ecologically intact planet that the Earth colony is exploiting very badly. The elder human says: "You have not thought things through." And the vast majority of SF writers do not think things through. (Neither, alas, did Le Guin: Her Earthmen were logging the planet and shipping timber light-years back to ecologically ravaged Earth. I'd love to have seen the business plan.)

My mood didn't improve when I took this wretched anthology back to the library tonight and looked for something else. I couldn't find anything that looked as if it belonged in Sturgeon's Blessed 10 Percent, whether in SF or in fantasy. Just more morons with swords, more "military" SF epics, more alien invasions, more sharecropped tales from Star Trek. It was as if Italian cuisine in all its varied glory had been reduced to a cold Domino's pizza. And a plastic glass of grape juice.

I reflected on the day I'd pitched an editor on an idea for a new novel, and he'd said: "Well, it's not exactly original..." And I'd said: "If it were really original, would you buy it?" "Probably not."

Sometimes I do run into an SF or fantasy novel with some originality, and I recall the exhilaration of first reading Heinlein and Tolkien when they themselves were originals, forcing us to look at the world (and at writing) in a new and difficult way. But now the originals have to struggle to get out of the masters' long shadows, and the market is busy mass-producing Heinlein and Tolkien clones.

Maybe the only way to revive these genres is to stop reading them and stop trying to publish them in the usual manner. For 30 years before the collapse of the USSR, Soviet literature flourished underground, in "samizdat" publications: manuscripts carefully (and illegally) photocopied, passed from hand to hand, discussed in small groups. Those works deliberately targeted all the bromides and clichés of socialist realism, demanding that readers re-examine their most cherished values, and their authors risked a lot to make their points. In today's commercial SF and fantasy market, such re-examination, and such risks, are long overdue.

Comments

[Mris]

Y'know, if I had that reaction to a Year's Best anthology, I'd probably be sad and angry with the editor of the anthology, rather than assuming that the living had nothing worthwhile to say.

[Crawford Kilian]

Thanks for your comment, Marissa, and congratulations on the successes you list on your site!

Reminds of the time in the mid-1970s when I heard Robert Silverberg, at a Vancouver con, announce his departure from SF because he was sick of the commoditization of the field. At the time I was trying hard to sell a couple of commodities (Icequake and Empire of Time), so I disapproved of his attitude.

Well, I sold my novels, and Silverberg came back to SF (I finally met him years later at another con, in Calgary, and a very nice man he was, too). But the "Best" anthology was just the trigger for my rant, not the sole evidence for the decay of SF and fantasy.

I realized years ago that something was wrong when I could go into a local all-SFF bookstore, wander around for an hour, and leave with nothing. Once in a while I do find a fine novel in one genre or the other, and maybe I miss a few because the packaging and blurbs for most novels are so nauseating. But Sturgeon's Law remains sadly unchallenged.

My response is not to stop writing the stuff, or to stop seeking publishers. But I'm past caring about what "the market" wants. I'm writing what interests me, whether because the ideas are intriguing or they require a technically challenging means of storytelling. If "the market" is willing to buy the result, fine. But it's no longer the point, and never should have been.

Best wishes for your writing career!

[Murph]

Names, Crawford, we need names. What volume, and who was the editor? There are so many year's best volumes out there now, I think it's easier to cherry pick the ones you like and disagree vehemently with the rest. There are plenty of authors out there who are stretching things, but certain editors are rather hidebound, I think, and some authors recognize this and write to that market of One.

D

[Christina]

Hey, Yeye, a tad bit harsh, aren't you? Though I must agree, the breats parts (and the soldiers getting laid) are rather nasty. I don't read much science fiction, but from what you described up there, I don't think I want to. Hey, by the way...would Harrison Burgeron by Kurt Vonnegut be counted as a good science fiction? (Had to read that last year in reading class.)

[Crawford Kilian]

Murph asked for details about the "Best" book, but it's already back in the library. I'd picked it up mostly because it had a story by Ursula K. Le Guin (and the story was OK). As I read the other stories and realized how bad they were, the only real interest for me was in the phenomenon itself, rather than the particular editor or year of publication.

[Chris Cypser]

Talk about a deja vu! I only ran across this blog yesterday, the same day that I happened to finish reading "The Word for World is Forest." I liked that particular line about not thinking things through, too. The book was enjoyable -- though many of Le Guin's characters were stereotypical by today's political standards, I think the clarity of their different motivations makes the story more powerful. And she did a good job of looking through the eyes of opposing cultures, in a way that was easy to read.

You're right about some of the silliness, such as cutting down trees and shipping them hundreds of light years through space. Then again, corporations on Earth do the same thing, shipping an aluminum soda can all around the globe before it ever reaches a consumer -- doing harm both to the environment and to their bottom line. I don't think, though, that humans would behave so harshly toward any benign and possibly intelligent alien species.

Speaking of Robert Silverberg, I picked up one of his books that I found lying around recently, "Across A Billion Years," and found it almost unreadable. Not only was the plot tiringly familiar -- an ancient and supposedly extinct race of superadvanced aliens has left behind artifacts that are the key to human destiny -- but the cast of characters seemed so strainingly exotic and eccentric that it was like reading an unintentional comedy about a circus troupe. I don't know if it's just me, or him, or that particular book...

[Chris Cypser]

Here's some science fiction I've read and enjoyed recently, though you may have already read them yourself:

"The Sparrow" and "Children of God"
Mary Doria Russell

"The Homeward Bounders" and "A Tale of Time City"
Diana Wynne Jones

I also recommend some of the short stories of Terry Bisson like in his collection, "Bears Discover Fire."

[Crawford Kilian]

Thanks for your comments, Chris. I agree with your opinion of Terry Bisson. He's one of the few distinctive voices in modern SF and fantasy, and one of the very few whose work I re-read. Will look around for the other titles you mention.