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

Back in September, The Fix ran my article, “‘The End of Science Fiction’: A View of the Debate,” part one of which covered the cultural environment in which science fiction writers work, with part two discussing the business environment.

I’ve received a certain amount of feedback on both parts of the article and have decided that the piece rates a postscript, both going back over what it was I meant to say and adding some final thoughts on the matter.

My argument was simply that a lot of factors (most of which have been noted by other observers, often more than once) now seem to be working against the vitality of English-language science fiction, narrowly defined (which is to say, excluding fantasy, horror, paranormal, “slipstream,” and other such fellow travelers). I list the most important of these below again, bullet-pointed for easy reference:

• The absence of paradigm-shattering developments in the sciences in recent decades.
• A slowdown in the development and proliferation of significant new technologies.
• The growth of anti-scientific irrationality.
• A slowdown in economic growth which, along with ecological and other concerns, is fostering a sense of pessimism about the future.
• The special imaginative and literary challenges raised by the place the “technological Singularity” has attained in the genre, which I argue is not just “another trope.”
• The aging of the genre, evident when examined from a number of perspectives (science fiction as a genre following an organic life cycle, science fiction as it developed dialectically, science fiction as a “Modernist” movement).
• The maturing of “media” science fiction, shrinking the gap between print fiction and other media (like comics, and especially electronic media) that had recently been responsible for much creative output.
• The decline of the science fiction magazines, especially as a gateway for new writers and hubs for new movements.
• A book publishing industry which is less receptive to new talent and original ideas in general, notable examples of which include the diminished opportunities for unagented writers, and the emphasis on “high concept” and “star-driven” projects like media tie-in and celebrity-authored books.
• The industry’s preference for “pointlessly long” books (to use Robert J. Sawyer’s phrase), which has helped to make a very large quantity of work nearly impossible to publish on the grounds of sheer length (novellas, certainly, though this extends to anything in at least the 10-80,000 word range).
• Weak sales of science fiction books, relative to other types of fiction—which also happen to be easier to market—and are therefore more attractive to the industry.
• The “ghetto” status science fiction continues to have, at the expense of the support it might otherwise enjoy from cultural elites.
• The disappointment (thus far) surrounding alternative types of electronic media as a way of bringing print fiction to the reading public.

I think that the combined effect of these factors has already been considerable, as the absence of really major debates or striking new movements demonstrates (the last of which seem to have been in the 1980s).

Of course, just raising the possibility gets a rise out of people. I find myself thinking of the vehement denunciations of the “end of science fiction” argument with which Asimov’s magazine editor Gardner Dozois ritually opened his Year’s Best Science Fiction collections for many years. He typically pointed to the total number of titles published, the rising number of books bought by a growing number of people—and insisted that the quality and vitality of the field is as great as ever. (It should be noted that Dozois’s arguments about book publishing relied on very general numbers of books published, ignoring even the simple issue of the science fiction/fantasy breakdown—as well as the fact that midlist books remain numerous, but sell less and go out of print more quickly, a trend reconfirmed in a recent study by David D. Kirkpatrick. Meanwhile, Dozois’s much more rigorous analysis of the magazine market invariably ended with his conclusion that it had been “another” bad year commercially.)

Some people get downright nasty about it. As is so often the case in times like these, this kind of criticism is commonly taken as proof that there is something wrong not with the thing being criticized (the conditions in which science fiction writing is occurring), but with the critic. The tendency is to assume that what is speaking is really nostalgia for other days that really were not that great; a prudish, philistine or otherwise closed-minded attitude toward the new stuff; the bitterness of the has-been, the might-have-been, the never-was-going-to-be; an expression of a personality prone for some other reason to view the glass as half empty, or to chicken little-ism; simple ignorance; in short, anything and everything, save the possibility that they may have a point.

Nonetheless, I do think a few qualifications are in order. I certainly did not mean for the reader to take it that “nothing good is being written now,” because as my reviews here and in other publications testify, I certainly think there is. In fact, I think that we will go on seeing good new English-language stuff for years to come. Even if we are, as John Barnes says, in a phase much more marked by virtuosity than originality, that virtuosity can still dazzle even a jaded onlooker. (Indeed, I think that virtuosity may be one reason why the genre looks healthier than it really is.) We may even chance on a few wrinkles not yet unexplored. (My review of Scott Bakker’s Neuropath and Peter Watts’s Blindsight for Strange Horizons quickly had people speculating about “neuropunk,” Watts himself “calling dibs” on the term in his comment about the review on his blog. The idea seems to be catching on, with cyberpunk great Rudy Rucker recently blogging about it too.)

I should also concede that the issue as I framed it in the article is far more relevant to critics, editors, and writers, as well as the connoisseurs among the fans, than to more general or casual readers, who may understandably see this kind of talk as pointless. (It certainly seemed pointless to me before I began reading science fiction systematically, and probing into genre history, for academic and other reasons.) The average fan, especially if they don’t draw much distinction between old stuff and new stuff (and given the way reprints are often packaged by publishers, a casual reader can be forgiven for not even being able to tell the difference), between the canonical and the merely entertaining, will never be short of interesting stuff to read. Nor, for that matter, will the connoisseurs (even if they find themselves reading more old stuff than new).

Finally, I should note that some of the trends described above may be reversible. In fact, I can see three significant possibilities which might not wholly turn back the clock (we simply can’t go back to where we were in 1926) but would at least extend science fiction’s productive life.

Three Possibilities for a Science Fiction Resurgence
As suggested by the things I saw as obstacles to science fiction’s continued vitality, the three issues I am raising here have to do primarily with the economic and intellectual environment in which writers operate.

Boom Times
The first is a protracted period of really rapid economic growth, which I believe would make a profound difference in the situation, given the relationship of economic growth and technological innovation I already discussed in the article.

Interestingly enough, there is a broad theoretical approach for examining the issue, the “long cycle” theory of economics first advanced by Nikolai Kondratiev back in the 1920s. (I will limit myself to a brief discussion of the issue here, but those interested in a broader overview of the field can see my article, “Long Waves and Space Development.”)

Kondratiev argued specifically that economic life follows a (roughly) 47- to 60-year cycle. The cycle begins with a generation-long “upward wave” characterized by booms, followed by a generation-long “downward wave” characterized by recessions and depressions, and slower overall economic growth. It ends with the beginning of a new upward wave.

Kondratiev identified four such waves. The first began in the 1770s; the second in the 1840s; the third in the 1890s; and the last in the 1940s, with the downward wave setting in during the early 1970s. Many if not most long wave theorists believe that we are still living through that downward wave. The low rate of economic growth of the post-1973 period is frequently connected with this.

The “end of science” to which I referred would appear to be a related development, certainly at its technological end. As economist Joseph Schumpeter (one of the earliest proponents of the long cycle theory) wrote, “an apparent absence of novel propositions of the first magnitude [is] part of the familiar pattern of any depression.” (After all, in depressed times, new things might well be invented in an attempt to turn things around, but who’s going to put up the money to get them out there and up and running? That usually waits for when things get better.)

However, I suspect it relates to the issue in other ways as well, including the “end” of theoretical science. Looking back over the sweep of the last two centuries, it seems to me that most major theoretical discoveries happened, or at least attracted notice, in the early part of an upward turn. (Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859, right in the second upward wave; Max Planck and Albert Einstein did their revolutionary work early in the third; James Watson and Francis Crick modeled DNA in 1953, early in the post-1940 wave.) It has also been widely argued that long waves affect a host of other political phenomena. The insecurity attendant on long downward waves seems to go hand in hand with greater social conservatism and would seem to be strongly related to the religious “backlash” seen from that time on.

A renewal of economic growth could therefore mean the proliferation of significant new technologies. It could mean significant new theoretical science. It could mean a more rational cultural outlook, the “return” of the irrational proving to be more hollow than it looks (as Tariq Ali argues is the case with Islamic fundamentalism)—and a more optimistic outlook as well, not least because we would have a better chance of doing something about the problems weighing so heavily on all our imaginations, from war to poverty to environmental collapse. Any and all of these things would furnish science fiction writers with new inspiration, and especially in the context described here, provide them with new opportunities, since aside from reviving public appetite, less tight-fisted (and perhaps, also more leisured) times could give writers more chances to connect with audiences.

In short, science fiction’s slump may simply be a reflection of a pattern of economic upswings and downswings running back for centuries—and assuming the pattern described above is continuing today in the cyclical fashion described by long-wave theorists, it would seem that we are overdue for a new upward wave. However, it is not actually clear what causes them (this was the part about which Kondratiev himself was most doubtful), and many writers on the subject suggest these are inauspicious times for them. Heikki Patomaki, for instance, has noted that downward waves have been tied to the kind of free market economics that have prevailed since the 1970s, upward ones with a move away from them to more activist government. Globally, some suggest that the statist economics of countries like China, Russia, and Venezuela presage a broader turn to them. However, given the tone of political debate in North America, Western Europe, and other major industrialized regions, such a turn looks to be a long way off.

We Look Beyond the Posthuman
It may also be that we have more leeway to think about the future than seems to be the case. The theory of the “technological Singularity” is no more or less than that the continuing acceleration of technological progress (particularly in the area of computing) will result in a rate of change such that those of us living today would simply have no frame of reference for understanding the rapidly unfolding consequences (just as the laws of physics as we know them break down near a gravitational singularity).

The interpretation of it currently prevailing, a transition from a human condition to a posthuman one (commonly presented as being as mind-bogglingly swift as it is complete) is unlikely ever to go away. As a technological answer to religious eschatology, and more importantly, the logical endpoint of a line of thought going back to the Renaissance, it is too inherently compelling for that.

Nonetheless, it is only one way to look at the matter, and other scientists, and writers, examined the same issues and came to different conclusions. Irving John Good, who famously speculated about machines attaining a higher level of intelligence than humans, and then improving on that indefinitely (usually regarded as the key to all the other developments associated with the Singularity) was preceded by Isaac Asimov’s examination of a similar situation in the concluding story to his collection I, Robot, 1950’s “The Evitable Conflict.” The consequences of that event, whether or not they were more convincing than today’s widespread expectations, were far more subtle. Assuming “neuropunk” develops along the lines some imagine, I suspect it will also look at the darker implications of neuroscience, less posthumanist as we have known it than anti-humanist.

It is also the case that our limited view of the issue is a result of other factors that are not necessary parts of the Singularity package, two of which seem especially obvious. One is the prevailing “end-of-history” conservatism, which I think has constricted our artistic imaginations, as well as our political ones. Indeed, some go so far as to view the standard vision of the Singularity as corporate propaganda, especially given its easy sidestepping of the kinds of social, economic, and ecological politics so offensive to the Haves. In all fairness, Ken MacLeod, among others, offered alternative ways of looking at the issue, but their ideas have been all but drowned out by the Silicon Valley-style libertarianism in which so much writing about the subject is soaked, from Wired magazine to Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near. (Kurzweil’s answer to all those worried about global warming in that book? Don’t worry. Carbon-eating nanites will save us.) Despite its dominance of the mainstream (at least, in the English-speaking world, particularly the United States), this view is unlikely to prove as eternal as its proponents would like it to be.

The other is the confusion of science fiction writing with futurism. There is nothing wrong with extrapolation, but it may be that the pressure to invent a “realistic” future has become so great as to crowd out other approaches to science fiction writing, to our cost. Not trying so hard to write novels that read like think tank reports or government planning documents may snap chains on our imaginations that we didn’t know were there, permitting us to go in new directions.

Even if the changes mentioned above would not suffice to unseat the currently prevailing vision of a technological Singularity, the fact remains that if the Big Event doesn’t happen in the near future, it is likely we will simply find ourselves less preoccupied by the idea, just as we have stopped seriously expecting the arrival of the flying car and all it stood for. Indeed, Vernor Vinge himself laid out three alternative scenarios in a presentation at a futurist seminar last year.

Admittedly, they are not terribly original. Two of them are variants on the stuff of postapocalyptic fiction, and the third, a “golden age” scenario, is also a return to thinking that has also been long familiar. (Indeed, in his seminar, he mainly cites old, but still relevant, books, like Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth, Herman Kahn’s On Thermonuclear War, and Gunther Stent’s The Coming of the Golden Age.) He then capped off the whole thing by trotting out the old space as the last guarantor of species survival idea. Nonetheless, the kinds of changes in the intellectual climate postulated here will mean a clearing of the field, which can only help the genre’s fecundity.

The Reinvention of Publishing
I find it almost impossible to picture substantive change coming from inside of the publishing industry. As things are, the major players in the business strike me as a perverse combination of lumbering dinosaur and slick, axe-wielding multinational, forever uttering the neoliberal’s cry: “We had to destroy the village in order to make it competitive.” It satisfies no one as it is, not even the money men calling the shots (who are always stupidly wondering why, despite all their efforts, profits aren’t still higher), and the mood in the industry as a whole seems dire, even apocalyptic, as in this recent piece by Boris Kachka for New York magazine.

However, those publishers that manage to survive their colossal mismanagement by the Rupert Murdochs of the world will likely respond to any opportunities that do emerge, were the public’s appetite for science fiction to resurge. More importantly, it is conceivable that tomorrow’s writers may have chances to bypass the obstacles the dominant part of the industry has increasingly thrown up in their way.

Of course the Internet, on which so many staked such high hopes in this regard, has been a disappointment. I am not here referring to the existence of online booksellers, which I do not regard as such a change. Outfits like Amazon.com, whatever their virtues, offer essentially the same service as their brick-and-mortar counterparts, as economist Robert J. Gordon noted. Nor am I referring to the innovation and skill companies like Jim Baen’s Baen Books have displayed in using the Internet to promote their books and authors.

Rather, I am talking about the potential for other forms of publishing to offer an alternative, whereas today they simply supplement the output of the conventional presses. This certainly is the case with e-books, the sales of which are going up at an impressive rate (Business Week reported a 59 percent rise for 2007), but consist mainly of electronic versions of conventional books from major houses (and in any case, still account for well under 1 percent of all books sold).

The same goes for “podcast novels” of the kind made famous by Scott Sigler. These have an advantage in that they are essentially a variant on the book-on-tape, eliminating the problem of developing a more visually comfortable display. Nonetheless, Sigler’s success is the story of his using podcasting to break into conventional publishing, rather than finding an alternative to it—and it even remains to be seen that this will be a bridge for others as well, rather than an isolated event.

A more substantial change in the situation is likely to await a more dramatic technological development, like the belated appearance of “smart paper,” making e-books easier to read.The newest e-book readers, like Amazon’s Kindle, are said to offer that, but going by what I have seen at the time of this writing, I am doubtful that the technology is there yet. One reason is the price of the readers—the Kindle currently goes for $359—so that only the small minority of people who read very heavily can even begin to consider it a rational purchase. In other words, someone who reads just one, or two, or even a score of books a year may do well to save their money, even when counting in the access the readers provide to other content.

Additionally, one should keep in mind that if you buy an old-fashioned print book you get an item, robust enough to take quite a knocking around, and likely to be with you for the rest of your life unless you lose it or do really drastic damage to it. (It also doesn’t need batteries to work.) However, to go by the common service life of electronics, an e-book reader would last you just a few years, even if handled with kid gloves.

This problem is compounded by the strict technological controls on the transferability of files, which means that when your Kindle is lost or breaks, you lose your whole library with it. It also happens to mean that you cannot share your books, short of sharing the reader itself, and resale is greatly complicated, in practice as well as legally. All of this makes it impossible for libraries to loan out e-books existing in this format.

Of course, these problems may not be insurmountable. Perhaps the price of the readers (and perhaps the content as well) will drop to compensate for some of these deficiencies. And perhaps future reader concepts will offer more flexibility while still somehow seeing to it that publishers get paid for sales. Nonetheless, the revolution is clearly not here yet.

This brings me to the other great possibility: the realization of what once seemed to be the full promise of print-on-demand technology—the prospect of going to your local bookshop, and via an in-house system, having any book on file printed “on the spot, indistinguishable from a regular trade product” as Dozois put it in his opening to the 1998 edition of his annual.

To be honest, I find the latter the more exciting, since the product would combine more of the advantages of regular print books with the easier distribution of e-books. Either way, however, the success of these technologies would make it much easier for publishers unable to afford lengthy print runs to reach substantial audiences.

It would not simplify all of their problems, however. Small publishers, whether print or electronic, would still not be able to compete with the larger firms in areas like publicity; and their lower prestige continues to affect their position—if not necessarily with readers (generally not very interested in the name of the press that turned out the book they are reading), then with the critical community.

Still, with the medium improved in the way described above, one may hope that the passage of time will ameliorate the tendency of readers to look at small, web-based publishers with suspicion, in the event that enough of them find worthwhile reading there. Additionally, while they still may not command the attention of the major reviews, online venues (like the one carrying this article) may yet grow into the hub of a critical community which similarly stands as an alternative to print. (Where short fiction criticism is concerned, in fact, one may already see this as being the case.)

Yet, this would only count for so much, delivering not a revolution, just some additional wriggle room. It remains to be seen what can, and will, be done with it, throwing us back on the two issues treated above—the course of our economic life, and the impact of that on everything else; and our ability to imagine what we haven’t already thought up. Then again, the point is that the fortunes of the genre, and every other genre, always depended on exactly those two things.

Living On Through Its Children
Regardless of what comes of the possibilities discussed above, it may be noted that the “end of science fiction” still may not be the end of science fiction. As Barnes noted in his discussion of this subject, genres do not just die. As I noted in the conclusion to my article, much of science fiction’s established stock of tropes has been absorbed by the culture more broadly, but that is not all. Genres have children, too, successors which continue to develop after their passing.

Science fiction itself is clearly the offspring of such, preceded and influenced by genres that are clearly no longer with us, like the utopia, the invasion story, or the fantastic voyage. (Additionally, while the break is more ambiguous there, I still think the same may fairly be said of the “scientific romance” as produced by writers like Jules Verne and H.G. Wells.) Science fiction as discussed here did not simply continue in their spirit, but succeeded them, and something else may succeed it in its turn. Barnes himself names two possibilities: alternate history and paranormal romance.

I must admit that I am not familiar with paranormal romances, but I am fairly familiar with alternate history, and I am not sure that it is a genre “struggling to be born out of the undead stump of speculative fiction.” It is, by this point, a fairly old, fairly prolific form, which has for a very long time produced works of great sophistication, like Philip K. Dick’s 1962 classic The Man in the High Castle and Michael Moorcock’s 1971 The Warlord of the Air. Indeed, the genre’s favorite themes are, by this point, fairly well worn (an issue I examined in my essay on the World War II stories in the August issue of the Internet Review of Science Fiction), while the idea itself is increasingly mainstream (as the recent bestsellers by Philip Roth and Michael Chabon demonstrate). Still, even if he may not be right about that particular possibility, the point may nonetheless prove valid. And that may be the thing for us all to watch in the years to come, and it might be that to which the possibilities discussed above contribute most.