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It became green everywhere in the first spring, after London ended
I sent the following by e-mail to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel and he responded favorably, so I am transplanting it with minimal edits to the internet before I fall over and desperately try to sleep for a few hours. Not being able to breathe through my nose at all and my throat feeling swollen closed is a bad combination for my breathing comfort. (Yes, I saw a doctor. No, they didn't have anything helpful to say. I'm on antibiotics for the sinus infection, but they're not kicking in as rapidly as I would like.)
Background: Ian Sales does not like where science fiction is heading.
I started excerpting sentences to mock and critique and then I realized I was just copying every other paragraph. He longs for a kind of science fiction that (a) was never the only form of science fiction, witness all the horrible apocalyptic stories that clustered around the Great War and in some cases preceded it as people became afraid of the political and military developments that seemed inevitably on the horizon (b) excluded a great many people who lived then, live now, and are definitely going to be around in the future, failing to understand that the world wasn't simpler in the Golden Age of Science Fiction, it was just more narrowly sliced (c) was not invented by Hugo Gernsback; he coined the term that developed into the contemporary classification, but the first historically defined works of science fiction existed in the eighteenth century and the nineteenth century only accelerated the trend until the 1850's had to invent "scientific romance" to describe all the speculative novels springing up like weeds. Edgar Rice Burroughs publishes his first Barsoom novel in the 1910's. Gernsback doesn't get Amazing Stories off the ground until '26. He's also talking strictly (puzzlingly) about American sci-fi; the British tradition is and always has been either more pessimistic or more realistic, depending on whether you like that sort of thing or not. Richard Jeffries' After London was detailing the post-apocalyptic deterioration of society in 1885. There is no Great Man in The War of the Worlds (1897) unless you really feel warmly toward the common cold.
derspatchel and he responded favorably, so I am transplanting it with minimal edits to the internet before I fall over and desperately try to sleep for a few hours. Not being able to breathe through my nose at all and my throat feeling swollen closed is a bad combination for my breathing comfort. (Yes, I saw a doctor. No, they didn't have anything helpful to say. I'm on antibiotics for the sinus infection, but they're not kicking in as rapidly as I would like.)Background: Ian Sales does not like where science fiction is heading.
I started excerpting sentences to mock and critique and then I realized I was just copying every other paragraph. He longs for a kind of science fiction that (a) was never the only form of science fiction, witness all the horrible apocalyptic stories that clustered around the Great War and in some cases preceded it as people became afraid of the political and military developments that seemed inevitably on the horizon (b) excluded a great many people who lived then, live now, and are definitely going to be around in the future, failing to understand that the world wasn't simpler in the Golden Age of Science Fiction, it was just more narrowly sliced (c) was not invented by Hugo Gernsback; he coined the term that developed into the contemporary classification, but the first historically defined works of science fiction existed in the eighteenth century and the nineteenth century only accelerated the trend until the 1850's had to invent "scientific romance" to describe all the speculative novels springing up like weeds. Edgar Rice Burroughs publishes his first Barsoom novel in the 1910's. Gernsback doesn't get Amazing Stories off the ground until '26. He's also talking strictly (puzzlingly) about American sci-fi; the British tradition is and always has been either more pessimistic or more realistic, depending on whether you like that sort of thing or not. Richard Jeffries' After London was detailing the post-apocalyptic deterioration of society in 1885. There is no Great Man in The War of the Worlds (1897) unless you really feel warmly toward the common cold.
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Agreed; I do not believe that dystopia is the only valid mode left to write in and that the only alternative is the Golden Age. Much of the reason Sales' article rubbed me the wrong way was his assumption of this opposition and then the sweeping statements he made about each respective mode in order to support his preference for one. You write very good science fiction about space and other planets that doesn't read like Amazing Stories circa 1935. And I like that futurist stuff.
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That's really useful to know. Between his dismissal of Katniss as "a super-special snowflake" ("teenage narcissism . . . the sort of nonsense kids believe") and his lament for the days of Gernsback, he came off as a lot more retrograde than he apparently is. Thank you for the corrective.
I see exciting work being done at the moment in short fiction, but if you went by this article you'd think all SFF is turgid doom.
Yeah. The state of novels may well be dire—I'm not reading that many at the moment—but short fiction is thriving and diverse and not that depressing from where I read!
Do you know him well enough to point him in the direction of some contemporary short speculative markets?
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Do you know him well enough to point him in the direction of some contemporary short speculative markets?
He knows they exist! I'm tempted to write up a bit of a reply; if I do, I'll link to some specific examples.
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Cool.
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Except it's not. I've been more excited about some of the SF novels I've read in the past year than I had been for a while. And in fantasy--I had essentially stopped reading it for about a decade, because I just got tired of the Tolkien tropes and lack of invention, but this year I've read several epic series that have been really great and fresh.
So, no--I think Sales is focusing on the YA thing way too hard and having a bad day.
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Excellent! I figured he hadn't read Ancillary Justice, but I have not read that many other science fiction novels recently; it was possible the latest crop was pretty downbeat.
but this year I've read several epic series that have been really great and fresh.
Recommendations?
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I'm also reading N.K. Jemisin's <a href="http://nkjemisin.com/books/the-inheritance-trilogy/</i>The Inheritance Trilogy</a> which explores some interesting ideas about gods. That do for a start?
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Yes, thank you! I've read N.K. Jemisin, but not actually any Daniel Abraham despite recommendations and I'd never heard of the James S.A. Corey series at all.