It became green everywhere in the first spring, after London ended

[sovay]

I sent the following by e-mail to 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.

Comments

[intothespin]

I tried reading the Sales, but gave up at the obligatory swipes at YA.

[alankria.livejournal.com]

I sympathise with the longing for more optimistic science fiction, and it's an approach to the future I enjoy writing (although any idea of space "exploration" needs very careful handling, as that is by no means a neutral concept even on a barren world), and maybe there's a dearth of that at the moment? I feel woefully under-read, both in contemporary SF and past SF, to say. I know there are other forms of science fiction that I find immensely valuable, including those about war (not necessarily propping up imperialist mindset), and I'd like a more thorough consideration of more modes than apocalypse vs. optimism.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

The future is always full of anxiety, for me. (Then again, so is the present, which can be difficult, but that's what I went to therapy for.) I don't know how you could possibly see it as nothing but positive potential, and it seems not only naive but sort of damaging even to try to do so. Is there something off-putting about all these people who seem attracted to the idea of a denuded world? Yeah, sure--totally. But this is nothing new; as you rightly note, it pre-dates the Atomic Age. I think it probably goes back to the Black Death, or the very idea of Apocalypse: cut the Gordian moral knot, wipe the page and start again, usually with a eugenicistic chaser of "and no one will survive except the RIGHT people, who of course include me." It's a fairly normal fantasy of power, or powerlessness.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

This reminds me of an article in the Guardian about how YA dystopias were opposing the caretaker state and were basically promulgating neoliberal libertarianism, which seemed to me to be a bit of a headscratcher--seemed to imply that if the government was the Big Bad in a novel, that then the novel opposed the phenomenon of government. Similarly, I just don't think Sales is right in his extrapolations of what current SF say about readers, or what current SF is trying to do. The point isn't to wait for superspecial Katniss, the point is that you identify with Katniss; you're empowered.

[spatch]

I love the common cold!

I think Sales wanted to respond to the current prevalence of Near-Futuristic Dystopia in the mainstream, because there's certainly a lot floating around and he totally pegs YA as practically Patient Zero in this case, but he's got serious tunnel vision. There will always be pessimism in science-fiction, yeah, man, but there too will always be optimism, futurism, cynicism, that-blowed-up-real-goodism. The balance will always be uneven depending on the times.

The essay fondly recalls the days when sci-fi was all about the urge to explore. Okay, let's take the 1950s as an example: Plenty of spacemen and rocket boosters and missions to Mars and beyond in the films and Disneyland. Bradbury starts the decade with The Martian Chronicles, Asimov writes about emergent robotic technology in the near future and advanced civilization in the far, and Ijon Tichy goes off to have some really crazy adventures. There are all kinds of exploration/invention stories across all kinds of media but there are also stories driven by fear of atomic destruction and mutation, invasion by extraterrestrial foreign powers, body snatching, man tampering in God's domain, and rats, giant rats, with teeth and diseases and shit.

Science-fiction is also not as polarizing as Sales seems to think it to be. Bradbury's Mars, colonized by optimistic, forward-thinking individuals, HUP HUP HUP HERE WE GO RED PLANET AHOY, turns out to be an unmitigated disaster. Asimov's robots break down and robot-cry because two of their three/four rules are in conflict; his Galactic Empire goes tits-up just as one cynic kinda-predicted.

Heck, even H.G. Wells, who was writing science-fiction before Gernsback was thinking of portmanteaus, threw his Time Traveller into a bleak future of contrasts with Eloi above and Morlocks below. My gosh, you can have good things and bad things in your stories! Your heroes might not have to be perfect! Your villains might not have to be totally evil! Dystopia and hopeful exploration can go together! A pretty young woman newly-freed from an oppressive society which prematurely recycles its citizens can approach Peter Ustinov, touch his wizened old face, and realize that everybody will now have the chance to grow wrinkles. And thus Carousel was transformed into a plastic surgery clinic. THE END.

not going to even START on the Great Man bushwah. nuh uh.