FutureTense

Several famous writers in the field have attempted to explain away the decline of SF and the rise of fantasy as the natural reaction to an uncertain, increasingly dismal future. Depressing futures lead to depressing stories and thus, to depressed readers who turn away from SF toward the comfort of the known, the formulaic and the irrelevant.

That’s what the pundits of the SF field would have us believe. Personally, I take exception to the generalization that Fantasy is comforting, formulaic and irrelevant. Personally, I also believe that another word for “depressing” is “dangerous.” Those dangerous futures can produce — perhaps even require — SF works of insight, imagination and invigorating peril.

With that spirit, I was delighted to chance upon John Brunner’s definition of Science Fiction among Neyir Cenk Gökçe’s collection.

As its best, SF is the medium in which our miserable certainty that tomorrow will be different from today in ways we cant predict, can be transmuted to a sense of excitement and anticipation, occasionally evolving into awe. Poised between intransigent skepticism and uncritical credulity, it is par excellence the literature of the open mind.

Best regards,
Alan

The dominating presence of male authors in the Hugo awards (and by implication, both major awards) came up in the BroadUniverse discussion forum as only one work written by a woman was nominated this year.

Since Kelly Link did OK last year (2005) sweeping both Hugo and Nebulas and Bujold has done quite well, historically, with 3 Hugos to her credit, I was curious.

Looking at just the awards — not the nominees — for novel, novella, novelette and short story since 2000 (a completely arbitrary cutoff point):

2006 Nebs: 1 / 3.

2005 Nebs: 3 / 1.

2004 Nebs went mostly to women: 3 / 1.

2003 Nebs 2 / 2.

2002 Nebs 1 / 3.

2001 Nebs: 3 women, 1 man.

2005 Hugos: 2 to 2

2004 Hugos: 1 woman, 3 men.

2003 Hugos: 0 / 4

2002 Hugos: 0 / 4

2001 Hugos: 2 / 2.

I don’t see a bias in the Nebs at the award level. Haven’t had time to look at the nominations, which can be more important economically — a lot more people get to say “Nominated for a Nebula Award” than get to say received same.

There’s a page about the history of the Nebs that shows a clear gender bias, historically. I don’t know if there are enough data points for the results to be statistically meaningful, but it looks like the bias is at the nomination step. For example, 21% of the nominees are women, but 26% of the winners are women. I don’t know if his data has been corrected for the gender of the writer as opposed to the gender of the name on the work. In earlier days of SF, many women published under a male name. It was enlightening and entertaining to attend the retroactive Tiptree Award and find out how strong a presence women writers have had through out the history of SF, as the panelists went through the list of proposed candidates going “he’s not a he, he’s a she.”

Appears to be a gender bias in the Hugos at the award level. I can’t, from this information, figure out where the bias is. You have to get published, nominated and have sufficient recognition among the members to get the votes necessary to win. Could be at any of those steps. For example, many members of BroadUniverse publish in smaller, less well known outlets that are often online. Even without gender bias, it would be hard to accumulate the votes needed to win.

It is interesting that the fantasy bias in the Hugo is fading. A fantasy novel has won every other year since J. K. Rowling won for Harry Potter.

Best regards,
Alan

This one is a bit old, but still worth passing along.

Being a numbers man, I can’t say that spending two years writing a book for a $5,000 advance sounds all that thrilling. Instead, we should all get degrees in computer game design, where the average computer game artist makes $42,500 3 years out, the average computer game programmer makes $54,300 3 years out and top artists will pull in over $200,000.

Still, the sad news is that long fiction _still_ pays better than the short fiction market, word for word, after you take into account acceptance rates.

Best regards,
Alan

Glorious names. Apatosaurus. Coelophysis. Parasaurolophus. What if they were all gone? The bones warehoused instead of out on display. Books that mention them quietly disappeared. No more mythic Tyranosaurus Rex in the movies or stories.

For those of you — and you know who you are — who missed the Earth shattering news, Pluto is no longer a planet.
The sky is falling! Quick. Let’s summon the mercenaries, gather the change from our change jars, pool our resources and start a “Save Pluto” foundation.

I guess this is an example of what passes for “excitement” and “controversy” within the SF field. (At least it managed to keep the various news groups i belong to buzzing for a week or so.)

For me, it was a painful measure of the relevance of the field of SF. I live in a state where all forms of intellectualism are under attack, including education. Science — thanks to its association with Darwin — is pariah even among college educated, advanced degreed, intelligent types who ought to know better.

This end of the country is on the blank part of the map, where scientific method is dismissed as nothing more than a belief system. Maybe I’m just oversensitive but when SF types dance the “Tempest in a Teapot” tango over whether Pluto is a planet while there is real — perhaps permanent — damage being done to the intellectual capital of this nation in the name of religion, I can’t help but think maybe we’re conspiring in our own extinction.

I can wish the problem would go away but wishing isn’t going to turn the tide. Effort is what is called for. Effort and leadership that should be — but is not — coming from us brainy think-tank types here in the SF world. We’re the ones who are supposed to forecasting the future and reporting back to the rest of the world on what we find. That’s our job. That’s why they pay us the big bucks.

Remember. There are NO stegosaurs in the Bible. Now! Think like a dinosaur!

Best regards,
Alan

Coalescent LJ excerpts an article attributing the collapse of the short science fiction market to the greed, shortsightedness and general disinterest of writers who churn out volumes of mediocre works in a flurry of “numb the audience with volume.”

I have to take exception to part of this thesis. Whether or not I universally enjoy the fruits of their labor, I can’t imagine any of the writers I know or have read approaching their craft with anything other than the desire to create a rewarding read.

Writing short SF doesn’t pay well enough and there’s darn little glory in it. So many stories never see the light of day, you have to believe the writers are trying to put together at least a story they enjoy because the odds are they won’t get anything more than that for all their time, effort and postage. Even for most hacks, its still a labor of love inn a field that isn’t particularly rewarding. Whether or not I like what’s being written, I can’t agree with the premise that the writers are cynical, money grubbing overlords of an Empire in which they recieve all the spoils and we, the readers, are a slave population that exists only to provide them sustenance.

They are us, no different flesh. Really. They’re in, we’re out. Get on. If you don’t like it, get together with a bunch of your friends and start up an magazine like Rabid Transit.

What I didn’t see mentioned in the comments as a contributing element in the decline of short SF is , well, SF. I don’t see it. It’s a rare event when I find a SF story in F&SF. I haven’t seen Asimov’s under Shelia’s guidence so I can’t comment. I usually head over to SciFi.com to see if there’s any SF. It’s mostly fantasy over there but whether SF or fantasy, the stories are always well written.

I’d guess that most of the comments on the LJ are from writers early in their careers. That brings up the other thing that I’ve noticed.

No readers.

There is a tremendous creative impulse to try and understand why SF is bogged down and what to do about it, but the impulse is not coming from the community of readers, it comes from the community of reader/writers. Elvis has left the building and the SF readers have are withdrawing from the dialog. They weren’t getting what they wanted and they didn’t stick around.

In the past ten years or so of asking people what they’ve read that excited them, I occasionally get an SF novel as an answer, more likely a fantasy or horror novel. But I’ve never had anyone in those ten years say “You just have to read this short story…”

Best regards,

Alan

We’re back from two weeks in Vermont (love you folks), we’re trying to refinance the house (can anyone say “three year adustable rate mortgage with less than a year to go?”) GeekLog–my previous content management system for FutureTense–has crashed pretty hard. Did anyone tell me?

No.

[Updated 6/10/2006]
I set up WordPress and planned to move over the geeklog content but there’s no easy way to do it. So we’re back to Geeklog for the time being.

Read anything exciting in SF recently? Let’s spread the word about the good stuff!

Best regards
Alan

I always wanted FutureTense to be a community, modeled after the seminal cyberpunk samizdat newsletter “Cheap Truth”

I already know what I think about the current state of the Empire–I want to know what other people think. From time to time I wonder if what I say is too strident, that some of you who might be otherwise willing to engage are worried about how editors might respond. Or I’m boring or I’m just so terrifyingly right that no one can find anything else to say.

I try not to be boring.

Worrying about the splatter affect has cramped me for the last six months or so. Not that I contirbuted extensively over at Futurismic but it dampened my desire to say anything that might cast a shadow over the fine writers associated with that project and their hopes for careers in the field.

I plan to move to a single person bully pulpit some time in the next month and we’ll see what kind of trouble my loud mouth can get me into.

Best regards,

Alan

My server has been inaccessible for months. I finally bit the bullet and transferred to a new web host. Since I can’t access the old server, I had to rely on an out of date backup. What few articles were posted between the end of October and the end of December when I lost command are vanished forever into the void.

New hosting company. I’ve been losing emails sporadically since last fall. If you’ve sent me somthing and I’ve been silent, it’s not because I don’t love you. That’s the good news. The old hosting company has been unresponsive to my request to transfer this domain name to a new domain name host. I only have a couple of months before the domain name is up for renewal. Yoikes and away!

The forum is gone for the moment. Since it was never used that much I might not invest the effort to resurrect it.

Best regards,

Alan

The artist, as Collingsworth tells us, must be a prophet, “not in the sense that he fortells things to come, but that he tells the audience, at the risk of their displeasure, the secrets of their own hearts.” That is why he exists. He is a spokesman for his community…. No community altogether knows its own heart; and by failing in this knowledge a community decieves itself on the one subject concerning which ignorance means death.

Saul Bellow, Culture Now

The rememdy, in Saul Bellow’s essay, is art. Art opens the eyes of the community, and it is the writer as artist who bears the responsibility for seeking out those blind spots.

As readers of speculative fiction–SF, fantasy, horror and the many blends–we expect the considered juxtaposition of our reality against the many possible realities. That expectation is part of the very definition of “speculative fiction.”

It seems to me, however, that as the genre reader has retreated into their own private Idaho–”Bartender, make mine entertainment. Hold that other stuff”–so too have the artistic types withdrawn in their own form of splendid isolation. “The Women Men Don’t See,” and other works by James Tiptree, Jr. challenged the community to respond in the 1970’s. Michael Swanwick says Alice Sheldon’s work set the genre on fire. Pratically overnight, you had to change the way you thought or be left behind.

Karen Joy Fowler’s Nebula award winning “What I Didn’t See” makes for the modern counterpoint. While WIDS does pay homage to gender issues (most notably of a long gone era), the dramatic engine is a literary device as the story is really about appreciating the unrealiable narrator. WIDS is a wonderful tale skillfully told, riffing ever so slightly off of TWMDS. I enjoyed WIDS and by itself I have no fault with it. Yet I regard WIDS as archetypal of the modern artistic branch of speculative fiction where the primary concern of the artist has become the artist or at least personal artistic pursuit and fulfillment.

With the 1970’s SF became a important force in experimenting with gender issues, an incubator for social change. A certain amount of success was achieved. and naturally gender equality drifted to the edge of cutural radar (although given the reactionary direction of world affairs, it might be back.) But what social concern has taken its place? Personally, I find it painfully difficult to believe that 30 years have gone by and the combined genres haven’t discovered a new windmill to tilt nobly at. I’m convinced the world is full of them. Maybe I’m confused.

Perhaps I’m looking in the wrong places but I can’t remember a single story in the last year that succeeded in (or really tried) challenging my vision of who I am and my place in the world. For the most part, the SF I’ve encountered ultimately reads like fantasy, exuding soothing warmth and affirmation: you’re a fine person. You don’t need to think critically about your place in the world. Don’t worry about the past, don’t stress yourself about the future, just keep consuming.

If you’ve found challenging material, please mention it in the comments.

Instead, it feels as if the mainstream is taking over where SF is supposed to be leading. Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (ad supported), whether or not you agree with it, should have been a genre work. Is, in fact, that most disreputable of sub-genres, alternate history.

How come none of my homes are doing this kind of work? How come something like this can get published outside the field but not inside?

I don’t want all of my SpecFic reading to be challenging any more than I want all of my meals to be Frosted Mini-Wheats. Some is good for me. Too much “good for me” you can have. On the other hand, most intelligent people know the future isn’t rosy–no more rosy than we make it, anyway–and the past wasn’t so rosy either. For all stories to be uncritical, unchallenging entertainment establishes cognitive dissonance in the reader, transforming “speculative” into “unbelieveable.” It’s not healthy for the genres, it’s not interesting for the reader, and its not carrying our weight in regard to the larger community outside the genre ghetto.

Best regards,

Alan

at Slashdot. Wish his current reading list had more surprises on it. Most enjoyable were Neal’s thoughtful sideways views on technology and culture.