Fantastic Metropolis

Finding little nourishment in the center of the genre, people have begun to make forays to the edges and peripheries, and discovering that it’s quite rewarding. The commonalities that eventually draw us together might not be what we now consider science fiction. New touchstones might be created. (Why can’t there be a slipstream that uses hard sciences? All it takes is a willingness to try.) Creating better-written stories will create better stories.

The genre’s new shape might be less of a centralized state and more of a Hanseatic League, a confederation or constellation of different styles, techniques, and even audiences. This is not quite as scary as it sounds; it’s a different but more realistic model for the way the field is already going. The larger magazines will have the central place at the head of the table, but there will be a lot more activity at the side tables—or better yet, in the kitchen amongst the help. There may not be a Next Wave, implying a stable shore, a body of water, and a singular undertow. There might be lots of little waves. The audiences will be more mutable, but this audience has every potential to grow as well. The decentralization of the genre—accelerated by the Web, easy access to desktop publishing, and maybe print on demand—is both a reflection of larger trends (_all sorts_ of modes of information are decentralizing, after all) and a growing hunger for something different in the field. Or by people who aren’t even in the field, but who are clearly interested in the kind of complex, readerly satisfactions that science fiction can provide. It’s already happening with zines of all sorts burgeoning in the science fiction field during the last 5 years or so by publishing high-quality stuff, taking their publishing models more from indie rock labels than a Silver Age publishing model. And I see stories with rich SF content peppering experimental literary magazines all the time. Writers like Ben Marcus, Colson Whitehead, Rikki Ducornet, and Adam Johnson are living proof that there is not, really, a mainstream—at least not in the way that many genre folk refer to it. There are plenty of writers—published by literary presses—who cleverly disavow the strictures of modern American realism and sincere-lit as well. The fact that the science fiction hegemony, for the most part, denies that these writers even exist is symptomatic of the willful compartmentalization that takes place within the genre.

Either the SFnal audience will rise to the occasion of more complicated fictions, or the tide will go out, leaving all (writers, readers, editors) in its wake. It is a symbiotic relationship between the three. It is not impossible for science fiction to go the way of the Western. The Western as a commercial genre—obsessed with the Frontier as one of its involiate tenets—had reached a point of exhaustion. Shelf space shrank until today, where it is practically invisible. A few pulp writers dog on, but elsewhere the injection of literary values into the Western trandescends the commercial constraints of genre—working in their forms, but cleverly subverting them as well (Larry McCurty, Carol Emshwiller, Cormac McCarthy). And yet, 75 years ago, the existence of the Western as a genre—to writers, readers, and editors, with certain steadfast rules—seemed inviolate. People would always want their cowboys and Indians, right? That didn’t prove to be the case. Substitute, for example, “sense of wonder” with “cowboys and Indians” and you see history repeating itself in 10 or 20 years.

The prime commonality that we share might be the simple willingness to discuss our differences, and a determination to neither wallow in nostalgia nor circle the wagons in fear—if the end goal is to create superb stories. Now, if the end goal is not to create superb stories driven by inner need and vocation, if the end goal is simply to acquire publishing credits for their own sake, to get paid for its own sake, then we are talking about two uses of writing altogether. But I think that there are enough writers in the field who do treat it as a vocation rather than a career—whether or not the checks are coming in. And this allows for an eclectic swath of stories.