What's our genre coming to, anyway?

[kniteracy]

What's our genre coming to, anyway?

scott_lynch has some opinions. Check them out here.

Now, obviously, I posted this because I think SL has some good points. Feel free to tell me what you think, but if you want to debate the author, his journal is only a click away!

Comments

[guyelfkin.livejournal.com]

I'm a fantasy fan, not a science fan, and I couldn't beiring myself to read the whole thing (because, frankly, it would have to be a *lot* more lively/interesting to get past my short-attention-span reflexes) but as far as I'm concerned Science, fantasy, horror etc etc etc - all come under the same speculative fiction umberella, and the subdivisions underthat umberella are purely for convenient compartmentalising purposes. After all, the boundaries between them are frequently blurred if not indistinguishable.

Teddy

[smallship1.livejournal.com]

guyelfkin speak with much wisdom as usual. It's sad when a once fine mind fossilises. (Benford's, not Lynch's.) All sf is a subset of fantasy. (As are mainstream novels, romances, whodunits, spy thrillers, westerns, historicals, horror books and political biographies, but we won't go into that.) You can't draw a line and separate the two. Well, you can, but you end up with a very small circle inside a much larger circle and it looks silly.

As for his predictions about the political future of the Western world depending on people reading sf and not fantasy, well, looks like we're doomed then. Can anyone remind me what's actually so bad about living in a backwater?

[telynor.livejournal.com]

Oh, I agree completely. I posted this because I am always surprised to hear disgruntled hard SF fans go on about how unrealistic other genres are. When are those replicators coming, anyway? ;)

[keristor.livejournal.com]

"... you end up with a very small circle inside a much larger circle and it looks silly."

I dunno, I like Polo mints *g*. More to the point, a fuzzy line inside a polo mint /tastes/ weird. There are no hard lines, and what lines there are (someone has to make categories otherwise we might as well have one heap on the floor labelled 'books' -- oh, wait, that /is/ my house!) are largely arbitrary and subjective. Benford claims that Asimov had a similar view to Benford about Fantasy, but Asimov wrote the stuff -- well thought out and reasoned fantasy, admittedly. And I know a number of 'hard' SF fans who claim that anything with FTL travel or communication is fantasy (because 'obviously' Einstein had a line to Absolute Truth(tm)) and refuse to read it. So much for B, B and B (as well as A, C and H).

As Lynch said, there is indeed a decrease in the number of scientists in the next generations, but it's the fault of the education system (he was talking about the US, it's equally true here). I was looking at the UKC website (where I got my degree) and the computing courses seem to be all about application writing these days, none of the actual science in Computer Science is evident. If the other sciences have been similarly dumbed down then we are training technicians, not scientists. And if the Chinese or whoever are training scientists I say good for them!

Scott Lynch is dead on

[osewalrus.livejournal.com]

I had this argument with a friend some time back. Writing goes through cycles, hard SF is losing ground in some areas while fantasy sells. Some folks seem to think there is a fantasy conspiracy out there.

What gets published has a lot more to do with economics and the transformation of books into a mass medium. Chain book stores stock a limited amount of genre fiction. What goes on the shelves is what gets pushed by the few major publishing houses which publish stuff from either proven bestellers or new authors who will commit to multi-book deals for cheap. The whole concept of the "middle list," authors who reliable produce steady sales but not bestsellers, has pretty much died away. Sadly, most hard SF was in this "middle list" catagory.

If you are a best seller like Bujold you get published. If you are a mid-lister like Beresford you can't. Some are quite bitter about this. As are their fans.

I recommend they follow in the path of folks like Cory Doctorow and develop alternate distribution mechanisms and alternate means of funding. This, however, is harder than whining against the great conspiracy.

[bunrab.livejournal.com]

Thanks Harper!
I'm a science fiction-fantasy-crime-mystery-romance-comicstrip fan, myself.* I bet Benford disapproves of "Calvin and Hobbes" too, since it's got talking animals and transmogrifiers with no scientific basis!!

*And science fact and history and political commentary and newspaper column collections and orange juice cartons and cereal boxes...