“The End of Science Fiction”: A View of the Debate (Part One)

Someone seems to be declaring the end of something or the death of something at any given time, and they are usually wrong. Indeed, it is so much a commonplace that that it hardly seems worth paying attention to anymore.

Science fiction has been no exception to the pattern, its death predicted any number of times over the years. I rarely gave the fact much thought, generally regarding talk of its death as greatly exaggerated.

Yet, the fact remains that literary genres have always run into the law of diminishing returns, and none to date has proven immortal. Epic poetry, Medieval hagiography, chivalric romances, Elizabethan revenge tragedy, you name it, eventually they all become musty things rarely of interest to anyone but academics (even as later literature continues to bear the stamp of their influence). And at this point I’ve spent a lot of years studying this genre as a professor of literature, as book and magazine reviewer and sometime science fiction journalist, and as a plain old fan, with eyes wide open all the while for signs of the Next Big Thing (NBT).

As I’ve written before, more than once, it seems that we’ve gone a very long time without anything of the kind materializing, that the (highly qualified) end of science fiction (not horror, fantasy, paranormal, “slipstream,” or any of the other kinds of fiction lumped together with it, but science fiction narrowly defined) as a genre (at least the Anglophone branch of it) may not necessarily be upon us, but at the very least in sight. Of course, that’s how it always seems before the NBT comes right around the corner and makes you look awfully foolish, so I could well be jumping the gun.

However, there are five big arguments for a bleak view of the genre’s prospects that certainly merit consideration. Three of these, which concern the cultural conditions inside which science fiction writers work, are covered here, namely, what some have taken to calling “the end of science”; our changing expectations about the future; and the internal dynamics of the genre of science fiction itself. The two others, which concern the business environment in which science fiction writers work, will be covered in the second half of this article, which is scheduled to appear on the fifteenth of this month.

The End of Science
Back in 1996, science journalist John Horgan wrote a book titled The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age.

I have to admit that I didn’t particularly care for the book. Consisting primarily of interviews with an assortment of scientists and philosophers of science ranging from Karl Popper to Freeman Dyson, it drips with such disdain for the majority of its subjects that I wondered why Horgan was doing science journalism at all—and who would ever consent to being interviewed by him again.

Nonetheless, it seemed that there might be something to his core idea, namely that the foreseeable future of science includes little possibility of a scientific revolution as radical as the ones we’ve seen in the last century and a half: the theory of evolution, and the development of genetics as we have known it since the discovery of DNA; relativistic and quantum physics; the “Big Bang” theory.

It seems only reasonable that an “end to science” like the one Horgan writes about would impact the speculative fiction written about it, especially the hard, extrapolative kind, by diminishing an important supply of fresh inspiration. Where tropes like time travel and multiple universes are concerned, science fiction is playing with a cosmology that’s now decades old, and looking it. Indeed, the absence of “new” science to provide much validation for established genre concepts like faster-than-light travel or macro manifestations of quantum uncertainties (like the existence of parallel universes) has helped diminish the intellectual appeal of such concepts for some, as evidenced by Geoff Ryman’s “mundane science fiction” movement (recently featured in a special issue of Interzone, reviewed here).

Futurehype?
Nonetheless, this is not the only sense in which “science” may be coming to an end. There are those who see applied science as similarly facing lean times. Of course, we are constantly told that we live in an age of unprecedented rapid technological change, a claim which is often made magisterially, as if no sane person could take issue with it. Indeed, some, like David Louis Edelman, Bret Funk, and Bruno Maddox, go so far as to say that the astonishing rate of technological change has rendered science fiction obsolete, with William Gibson’s suggestion that science fiction has “colonized reality” not much different.

However, a simple consideration of the technologies of daily life is enough to cast doubt on this “futurehype.” Electric lights, air conditioning, central heating, indoor plumbing, and most of the electrical appliances now standard in the modern home (like the vacuum cleaner, washing machine, and refrigerator) were in wide use before 1940. So were the skyscraper, the movie, the phone, the car, the radio, and the airplane (while the first jet engines were demonstrated in the late 1930s). Television was invented in 1928, and the first broadcasts occurred just a few years later.

It seems safe to say that the 60 years that followed did not see nearly as much change, at least where daily life is concerned. (It is also notable that the big inventions that did occur, like nuclear energy and space flight, were for the most part clustered in the early part of this period.)

One reason may be that this flow of invention sated many human needs, so that what remained was essentially refinement—not fundamentally new lighting concepts, but more energy-efficient, longer-lasting light bulbs. Still, it is also the case that many inventions expected in the last few decades failed to materialize, as a glance at a list offered by Herman Kahn and Anthony J. Wiener included in their 1967 book The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years reveals. Automated housekeeping and “effective appetite and weight control” were both rated by them as very likely to become available in the last third of the twentieth century—but today, these are still things an increasingly overweight and overworked population that would gladly pay good money for them can only wish for.

Even more striking has been the slow pace of progress in areas like energy and food production, medicine, transportation, and the colonization of the oceans and of space. Some areas of manufacturing (like steelmaking) have seen their productivity explode, but the makers of textiles, for instance, remain dependent on massive quantities of sweatshop labor. In his new book, The Shock of the Old (a compelling examination of the continued importance of “old” technologies and the routine failure of new ones to bring on the promised revolutions), David Edgerton notes that even regression is not unknown, and points in particular to the shipbreaking industry, as it is now carried on in South Asia.

It seems that, contrary to what Krysta Now said in Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales, the future is going to be much less futuristic than scientists predicted.

The great exception seems to be communications and information technology. I grant that my students do look at me slack-jawed when I explain to them the concept of a pay phone, but it may be that the significance of such changes has been overrated, at least when it comes to economic impact, as Robert J. Gordon contends. We tend to forget that the most dramatic innovation happened quite early on—the electronic computer during World War II, the advent of the first integrated circuit in 1958, the first microprocessors and microcomputers in the 1970s, three decades ago. And we also forget that this process has entailed significant disappointments, like the bust that satellite-based cell phone service proved to be, the false dawn of virtual reality in the 1990s, and the slowness with which practices like telecommuting and technologies like videophones and voice-recognition software have developed. Again, it would seem that there has been more refinement (and admittedly, proliferation) than revolution.

It was the experience of drastic change that made science fiction seem relevant, as Richard Harter suggests in his own article; contrary to the claims of Edelman, Funk, and Maddox, its absence, such as we have seen, is what will diminish that sense of relevance. Nor does this seem likely to change in the years to come, with all the disincentives to technological change all around us: an intellectual property regime so out of control it is stifling the invention it was supposed to be encouraging; the hyper-abundance of cheap labor generated by globalization, weakening the incentive to develop labor-saving devices; a business climate conducive to the resistance of “disruptive” technologies by established firms, with their market power, deep pockets, and political influence, exemplified by the challenges facing renewable energy. And of course, where biotechnology and medical research are concerned, there is fundamentalist religion, indicative of a third dimension to the “end of science” problem: the growth of irrationalism and anti-rationalism.

Irrationalism and Anti-Rationalism
A common target of social critics like Carl Sagan (whose last book, The Demon-Haunted World, took on exactly this issue), the irrational and anti-rational is also manifest in New Age and self-help fads, in the “postmodern” outlook’s distrust of reason, in the lobotomizing that goes hand-in-hand with an advertising culture that leaves little room for attempts at more complex, reasoned communication. (The corruption of science by groups like the “intelligent design” lobby and the “global warming is a myth” crowd does not help matters, muddying the waters as to what properly constitutes scientific inquiry.)

It may be telling that the recent Left Behind novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins have vastly outsold every science fiction series in history. The same goes for the fact that Dan Brown rose from mere bestsellerdom to literary superstardom by switching from high-tech, science fictiony thrillers like Digital Fortress and Deception Point to mysteries with a religious theme like The Da Vinci Code. (And of course, that others seem to have taken the same course, like Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child in their later collaborations, only reinforces the view.)

A world in which science is diminished in standing and interest for the general public is necessarily one in which a fiction with roots in science suffers. No less importantly, it makes for a very different attitude to the future, and especially the “capital F Future,” than the one that has enabled science fiction to flourish.

Changing Expectations
The “capital F Future” spoken of here is the one rooted in the Enlightenment’s vision of what the world could become: one in which the relationship between human beings and nature, and each other, were ordered according to reason. Applied science would make the world a freer and more prosperous place.

Of course, this was not the only vision of the future, even in the nineteenth century, so often characterized as the heyday for that idea. There were fears of Roman-style decadence due to financial corruption, secularization, or dysgenic biological degeneration; of ecological collapse, dramatized in E.M. Forster’s short story, “The Machine Stops.” H.G. Wells elaborated fears that the capitalism, nationalism, and militarism of his own day would ultimately lead to totalitarianism on a worldwide scale (as in The Sleeper Awakes) or a globally destructive armed conflict (as in The War in the Air), both ideas to become much more commonplace in the wake of World War I.

Nonetheless, at least in fiction, these ideas drew much of their interest from their contrast to more hopeful alternatives (in Wells’s case, the scientific world-state which he advocated throughout his life) in a process that might fairly be described as dialectical. This certainly goes for “New Wave” science fiction, and even cyberpunk, which defined itself against the more traditional Golden Age vision in pieces like Gibson’s “The Gernsback Continuum.”

However, as of 2008, the Golden Age, “Jetsonian” vision of the Future seems rather remote. Part of this is simple age, but it is not a matter of age alone. The “end of science” described above had much to do with it: with the future less “Futuristic,” much of its interest is lost. It was the proximity of dystopia to utopia that made the former interesting, and the latter idea has been a long time dying.

The Long Depression
The economic experience of the public at large, not neatly separable from that end of science, has also been a factor. Golden Age science fiction, and the reaction against it in the New Wave of the 1960s, constitute an exceptionally vibrant time in the history of the genre, and it is no coincidence that they came in a period of exceptional economic prosperity, during the wartime boom in the United States, and the global boom that continued through the postwar era for a full generation.

Nothing of the kind has been seen since, with the rate of global economic growth slashed to a third its earlier level, and neoliberalism apparently here to stay, people who have to actually work for money tended to be more rather than less insecure and pinched, without much hope for redress of the situation. Meanwhile, the danger of nuclear war didn’t go away, but took on new life amid the “Second Cold War” of the early 1980s. The ecological concerns of the earlier period also sharpened rather than lessened, particularly as manifest in problems affecting the whole world rather than just localities, like ozone depletion and global warming.

These changes made themselves felt in popular expectations about what tomorrow would bring, and were clearly evident in the speculative fiction of the period. Where earlier writing about the future drew on both hope and fear, now it was the fears that seemed to have the upper hand, or even the only hand. It all made the future a more forbidding place, and in Bruce Sterling’s famous assessment in the preface to the short story collection, Burning Chrome, it seems that writers (and readers) of the 1970s commonly responded by not dealing with it. Sterling pointed to a turn to sword and sorcery, to decaying galactic empires, to postapocalyptic scenarios in that decade, which simply drew a curtain across the future. However, it seems that the cyberpunk movement he helped to lead (arguably the only really new development in post-1973 print science fiction), despite its intent of returning the genre to its earlier concern with a plausible image of things to come, ended up just drawing another curtain, as James John Bell observed in his own take on science fiction’s prospects.

The Singularity
Just as technological progress may have become less dramatic, science fiction from the cyberpunks concentrated its attention on an image of technology pushed very near to the limits of the imagination. The information technology and biotechnology revolutions, it was imagined, really would Change Everything by exploding every limitation of the “human condition”—birth, aging, reproduction, material scarcity, our capacities for perception and consciousness, even death—in a not-too-distant future, and perhaps even in our lifetimes.

This turn was not wholly unprecedented. You could find such themes handled by writers on a regular basis going back at least to Olaf Stapledon, and strictly speaking, there is little in the hardware of the “technological Singularity” that was not already present in Arthur C. Clarke’s 1956 classic The City and the Stars. Still, the intensity of the genre’s focus on such developments (made explicit and given a handy label by Vernor Vinge in his 1986 classic Marooned in Realtime), particularly as something about to become a commonplace in the very near future, was not simply a recycling of old ideas.

To the credit of the “Singularitarians,” their development of this concept did reinvigorate the genre, particularly in its offering a basis for some optimism about the future (at least, among those willing to embrace a posthumanist view of the world), but the very extremity of the Singularity vision also presented authors with certain difficulties that seem to have been the price of that new burst of energy.

One is the problem of describing something by definition impossible for us to picture, considerably escalating the literary challenges that had for nearly a century before them vexed the modernists and postmodernists, who found plain old reality tough enough to describe. Most writers accordingly stuck with setting their stories in the relatively short span of time between the present and the Big Event, when it is clearly on its way but not quite here. The few who did attempt to convey the experience of living through or after it (the short stories Charles Stross assembled in his book, Accelerando, are a particularly noteworthy example) tend to tell more than show on their way to hitting the “wall across the future” Vinge described in a well-known 1993 essay.

Putting it a little more concretely, they simply can’t get at more than the earliest developments in such a radical evolution, no matter how hard they try, and because the reality that results from even those first steps (such as a considerable prolongation of human life inside our very own bodies) is so profoundly alien, they can’t explore it very deeply. They can only skim the surface, which means they can only do it for so long before it stops being productive.

However, because the concept has so thoroughly reshaped expectations inside the genre about depictions of the future (Stross himself would famously say that the “Singularity is this enormous turd…crapped into the punchbowl of SF writing, and now nobody wanting to take a drink can ignore it,” and Jo Walton has said a good deal on this subject as well) it is now very difficult to present any other kind of future without appearing to backtrack, either to an older-fashioned science fiction, or to those same apocalyptic scenarios Sterling denigrated. As a result, it is that much tougher to make a decades-long career out of different ideas about what tomorrow will be like in the manner of Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Clarke.

Accordingly, many cyberpunks and post-cyberpunks, after offering their early, radical vision(s), don’t simply invent other, comparable futures, but relocate to different territory entirely. They set their stories much nearer to our own time, lowering the pressure on them as futurists; they retreat to earlier historical periods; they switch to speculative approaches less demanding in terms of world-creation, like horror and fantasy tales, or alien encounters; they even write fiction that is only marginally speculative in nature, or give up the genre entirely, commonly for long stretches and sometimes permanently. (Sterling has certainly been no exception to the rule, and the same goes for Gibson, for Rudy Rucker, for John Shirley, for Neal Stephenson, for Ken MacLeod.)

Jonathan McCalmont, accordingly, suggests the Singularity is an overused trope, but I would argue that the problem it poses for the field has been so large because it is really much more than that, nothing less than the logical end point of the line of thinking that has traditionally been at the center of the genre (and indeed, the development of modernity).

You can find it hinted at in Givoanni Pico della Mirandola’s “Oration on the Dignity of Man,” in which, far from consigning humans to a menial slot in the Great Chain of Being, they were granted an unlimited capacity for self-definition, a chance for transcendence through their own efforts, and in particular their exercise of reason.

You can see it given an explicitly technological form in the mastery of nature proposed in the writings of Rene Descartes and Francis Bacon, and in particular, as Bacon put it, “the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.” The last chapter of Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Human Population (like most classics, much more often quoted than read and understood) offers as his contribution to theodicy a vision of population pressure with all the suffering it causes being used to “form matter into mind” (a phrase that could have come right out of Accelerando), all toward some unknown end. And certainly by the nineteenth century, an explicit posthuman idea was emerging, most clearly in the writings of Nikolai Fedorov, perhaps the most important thinker you’ve never heard of.

Consequently, our difficulty moving away from it, backwards or forwards or even to the side, is not some accident of fashion. And the special connection of cyberpunk/post-cyberpunk with the Singularity is no doubt connected with that branch of the genre’s possessing its special quality of being a final flowering.

The Life Cycle of Genres
While the problems posed by the Singularity are inextricable from the current of modern thought for the last five centuries, its treatment in fiction also raises the question of the genre’s internal dynamics, and this section will consider a number of takes on that subject.

Getting On in Years: The Aging of Science Fiction
It is a commonplace to apply “organic” analogies to social phenomena, to say that this or that thing is born, matures, becomes senescent, and eventually dies. Literary genres are no exception. John Barnes, whose October column in Helix on science fiction as an “undead” genre—certainly one of the most thoughtful pieces of the type I’ve ever encountered (and which I strongly recommend to anyone interested in this issue)—is an example of the organic approach at its best.

Barnes, drawing on the work of numerous cultural theorists, and an impressive knowledge of the history of the paths traced out by other genres, notes that these tend to last about 70 years or three generations, each of which have a different relationship to it. As Barnes put it, the first generation’s work is “about doing it at all,” creating something that really hadn’t existed before; the second, which can’t personally remember the genre not existing, and can bring to bear a higher level of technical skill to developing the considerable undeveloped potential remaining, is interested in “what you could do with it”; while the concern of the third, coming after the accumulation of a fairly well-developed canon, is with “doing it well.” However, the greater polish of the new works cannot make up for the exhaustion of the genre’s possibilities, as a “finite number of tropes can only be combined in a finitely many ways.” Indeed, by the third generation, the genre is already fossilizing and dying, in which case:

“it tends to become something like an inside joke (as with much of live theatre), a treasured family story (as with opera or jazz), or a set of exercises in which to display virtuosity (as with ballet and with much of orchestral music).”

After that, there’s only “afterlife,” the way some old genres continue to enjoy a readership beyond the strictly antiquarian (as with the novels of Jane Austen, which still have a significant audience outside the lecture halls); and there may be periodic “revivals” which offer interesting, sporadic additions to the earlier body of classics (as has been the case with, for instance, movie Westerns), but nothing like the old combination of volume and innovation.

To me, at least, Barnes’s idea is intuitively compelling. I can very easily picture this process unfolding from E.E. Smith, to Asimov, to Frank Herbert and New Wave authors like J.G. Ballard, to the cyberpunks and post-cyberpunks. Nonetheless, for all the insights they can offer, organic analogies tend to be much better at describing the life cycle of their subject than explaining exactly why they must follow that course. Barnes does better than most, suggesting that genres emerge because they fill a hole that earlier existed in the culture, and that the hole has generally been filled when the genre has completed that cycle. Nonetheless, it is not a completely satisfying explanation, and there is plenty of room for complements and alternatives to this view.

The Dialectics of Science Fiction
A good place to start is a look at how the genre itself develops. One crucial aspect of this may be the way in which ideas inside it react on one another. I have already mentioned the interplay between hopeful and fearful visions of the future. This was not the only way in which the genre’s contradictions were important to its productivity in the past. Where the science fiction of the Golden Age tended to be poppy and pulpy, and prone to focus on hard science and its products, the New Wave offered an antithesis to it in a greater affinity for the “softer” sciences, and a more literary approach. Where early science fiction was most strongly identified with the “macro” technologies of the very large, epitomized in space exploration, and a focus on the men (and occasionally, women) on science’s frontiers, the inventors, the researchers, the explorers, the pioneers, science fiction by the 1980s had long since come to pay far more attention to the “micro” (and “nano”) technologies of the very small, especially as manifested in information technology and biotechnology, and to the rest of the population that simply has to live with the consequences, not just the ordinary and respectable among us, but even the most marginal. And so on and so forth.

However, synthesis has since prevailed. Cyberpunk, notably, brought a New Wave style and sensibility to hard science fiction. More quietly, the giant starships featured in the space operas written today (like Scott Westerfield’s The Risen Empire) absolutely bristle with the technologies of the tiny, and even the most technology-oriented science fiction authors give more serious attention to what their gimmicks will mean when they actually hit the street.

It is now exceedingly difficult to point to a major idea that has not found significant expression in the genre; a subject that has not been treated; a narrative approach that has not been taken; a literary experiment that has not been applied to it—in virtually any case I can think of, many times over. (This is likely one reason why parody is so routine a storytelling mode in the pages of upscale magazines like Analog, with Wil McCarthy’s “How the Bald Apes Saved Mass Crossing”—a story that I enjoyed reading and reviewed favorably for The Fix—a particularly striking example. We’ve seen these ideas so many times that parody’s by far the most obvious way to get a little extra mileage out of them.)

Nor can any of this output really be considered fringe stuff now. While some work is clearly more commercial than others—the media tie-in novels, the military science fiction coming out of Baen Books—prestige and sales are not the same thing, and there is little sense that anything constitutes the “Establishment” anymore, the way it did back when the New Wave first came along. (Barnes, incidentally, identifies the end of disputation about what does or doesn’t belong inside a genre as reflective of the later stages of its development.)

As a result, it is decreasingly possible for writers to offer significant innovation by setting themselves up against some prevailing cliché, to simply react to what came before (even the “where are the flying cars?” jokes are getting old at this point), strengthening the need for the kind of external inspiration that, as discussed above, seems to be in shorter supply. The old conversations appear to have run their course (certainly those about what science fiction can or cannot do), and it is far from clear that there can be a new one, or even a return to the old ones. Not only would it seem that the broader hole in the culture that gave rise to science fiction has been filled, as Barnes suggested, but that the same goes for most of the holes inside the genre as well.

Science Fiction as Modernism
It has been common to compare New Wave science fiction to the literary modernism of the early twentieth century because of its penchant for literary experimentation. However, there are grounds for regarding science fiction more broadly as a Modernist development. If science fiction is seen as on some level essentially being about our world as it is now (and as shown above, there is plenty of reason to think so), and as not a category but a movement (as again, has often been done explicitly), then one can view it as, like the Modernism that grew up contemporaneously with it, a response to the inadequacy of nineteenth-century-style “realist” narrative to the task of describing, understanding, or answering the present.

In the view of scholar Steven Connor, for instance, the key difference between the “High Modernism” of writers like Virginia Woolfe and science fiction is that while the Modernists tended to present very ordinary, everyday events in unconventional ways (as in Mrs. Dalloway, with its stream-of-consciousness narrative), science fiction used relatively conventional storytelling to present unconventional subject matter. In that, it might be likened to a variant on nineteenth century Symbolism, using speculative science to capture crucial aspects of modern life that a straight description of everyday detail might not catch—just as George Orwell’s 1984 probes the nature of totalitarianism in ways that a novel like Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon is probably incapable of doing.

This makes it no surprise when, like other modernist innovations, science fiction seems to run its course. After all, stream of consciousness was once cutting-edge. Now, it’s just another item in the writer’s toolbox, and one that’s not really used all that often, because instead of resolving the problem of making sense of the world to the satisfaction of the literary community, it just lets artists do some interesting things. Likewise, many of science fiction’s tropes (like parallel universes) seem to have become just more items in the toolbox, to judge by the ways in which non-genre writers routinely draw on them. (One can see in this the “heat death” of science fiction, as described by Elizabeth Hewitt in her 1994 Science Fiction Studies article, though to its credit, science fiction lasted longer and enjoyed more popular appeal than anything conceived by Ezra Pound and his contemporaries.)

The Maturing of “Media” Science Fiction
That said, there remains the science fiction that is not in print, but existing in other visual, electronic media. (It is the latter that has been labeled “media” science fiction, and while this terminology is problematic—print is a medium after all—it is hard to completely get away from it.)

The conventional wisdom has generally run that “media” science fiction lags behind the written, literary kind. It is not hard to see why that has for so long been the case. Aside from the fact that books more easily offer their audience depth than the alternatives, there is the question of cost, and the need for an audience of a given size, which in turn affects the sheer volume of production. You can publish a short story to be read once, by a few thousand people. With film, with television, you have to engage an audience of millions, and ideally tens of millions, which makes it much harder to push the envelope. Because this also means that far more novels and short stories can be published than television shows and films made, the odds also favor the appearance of innovative ideas in print.

Nonetheless, the idea of a wide gap in quality between print and other kinds of science fiction seems to be less true with the passage of time, due in large part to the efforts of the innovators who closed the distance. After Alan Moore’s ground-breaking work in the 1980s, notably, it became an obsolete snobbery to deny that a graphic novel could be as literate and literary as the other kind.

The same goes for film. The 1982 Ridley Scott film, Blade Runner, is widely regarded as a canonical piece of cyberpunk, and it came out two years before Gibson’s Neuromancer even hit the shelves. (Some might point out that the film was based on Philip K. Dick’s brilliant Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, but with all due respect to Dick, and the affection the cyberpunks feel for his work, the novel can’t take all the credit for that.) More recently, critical darlings like Michel Gondry’s The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Alfonso Cuaron’s screen translation of P.D. James’s Children of Men won over the snobbiest of highbrows, though there has also been much to admire outside the art houses. (We are, for instance, seeing a golden age of comic book films, many recent examples of which proved that these can be as complex, character-driven, and thematically sophisticated as anything else in theaters.)

Television, too, has narrowed the gap greatly, as Orson Scott Card observed in his famous letter to the Los Angeles Times about the demise of Star Trek: Enterprise, and as I also attempted to demonstrate in my survey of genre television in the June issue of the Internet Review of Science Fiction. Even the ultra-conventional critics who think that the epitome of a good TV experience is watching a bunch of lawyers and/or doctors pretend to work, pretend to wrestle with moral dilemmas, and sleep with each other; upper middle-class half-wits obsessing about their sex lives; a fat, stupid mobster tediously engaging his equally slow-on-the-uptake psychiatrist; were absolutely lavish in their praise for J.J. Abrams’s Lost. More fair-minded observers noticed the change coming long before that show hit the air, however, as strikingly as anywhere else in the space operas the mainstream has tended to overlook, like J. Michael Straczynski’s Babylon 5 and Paul Donovan’s Lexx, shows which made the claim that the genre was mired in 1930s-era pulp clichés utterly untenable.

While they may not be there yet, even video games are showing a new level of rhetorical and narrative sophistication, as with the richly allusive BioShock (a lengthy comment on Ayn Rand’s oeuvre) and the space opera, Mass Effect, from last year. The increasing involvement of noted novelists in the creation of video games (as with Card’s participation in the creation of Advent Rising) has yet to produce a classic, but is still suggestive of this direction.

The result is that proclaiming an ambition to produce a really “adult” piece of science fiction in these media as something totally unprecedented simply means you haven’t been paying attention, because not only have we already been there and done that, but it has long been standard procedure. Here, too, the holes have been filled, the contradictions resolved, the experiments largely undertaken.

Yet, any survey of this issue would be incomplete were it to stop here. The life cycle of a genre is not only a matter of what has already been done by a given point, but also what its practitioners are empowered to bring to audiences, the terms on which they can publish unquestionably a powerful factor in the fertility of their field. It is to this that the second installment of my article will turn.