Science Fiction has always been about the future. Oh, yes, there are some stories which dabble in the past and present, but basically since Johannes Kepler dreamt up the genre with Somnium way back in 1630, forwards has been the bread and butter. So, naturally, when I see an established commentator and reviewer of the genre—like Paul Kincaid—fret like the genre of the future has no future, I couldn’t help but laugh.
THE OVERWHELMING SENSE ONE GETS, working through so many stories that are presented as the very best that science fiction and fantasy have to offer, is exhaustion…In the main, there is no sense that the writers have any real conviction about what they are doing. Rather, the genre has become a set of tropes to be repeated and repeated until all meaning has been drained from them.
http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/the-widening-gyre-2012-best-of-the-year-anthologies
You know the book has got to be bad when the reviewer who wrote a book about reading science fiction—ooh, how meta!—is too busy having an existential crisis to review the book. A simple “don’t buy the 2012 Horton’s Anthology” would have sufficed, but I suppose the sky is falling does make for more page views.
You see, the thing is that Kincaid is precisely right and dead wrong at the same instant. The sky is falling for science fiction, and this is most noticeable with short stories. Of course, this isn’t because the artistic elements are tired, but rather because the genre itself is getting upended.
Remember Somnium? Right in the first recognizable work of science fiction Kepler had aliens.
As recently as the 1980s Carl Sagan waxed on how the universe would be brimming with life on million-billion star systems and billion-billion planets. Now we know about things like galactic habitable zones, that earthlike planets are reasonably uncommon, which makes it unlikely there’s much life out there or that we could directly interact with what there is. And intelligent, tool-using life like us? Forget it. The requirements for it are longer than your tax forms. This knowledge is reasonably new: almost exclusively in the past ten years. If anything, scientific knowledge is starting to wring the mindless optimism from the genre, and except for a few people like Ken Liu who write about paper shikigamis or the future of taking pictures, or Cherie Priest who writes (Confederate) zombies and zeppelins, the raw upheaval of the key tropes will take time to adjust to.
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