SF is dead - discuss

http://www.koopress.co.uk/speaking.htm Sorry Rokkit, but the Fleeces thread _is_ the new si-fi. Witness how soon AG morphs into Dr. Jek as quick as you like. You need to get up to speed, baby or else your ass will be archergrass.

Jeff Noon is great, in my opinion. I love Vurt and Pollen, especially. From my layman's viewpoint, it seems to me that there is a comparatively big market for sci fi and fantasy shorts, compared with the rest of the short story market. Novels are different. One of the problems with sci-fi and fantasy is that it's not marketed very well and for the most part, as you say, it's not written very well. I don't think that the sci fi / fantasy movie / comicbook/ video game popularity impacts on the literature market any more than any movie impacts on the literature market. Look on the bright side, if your stuff any good, there's a definate gap in the market for you. Ben

have you tried stephen hawking There's nothing more mind-teasing than the incomprehensible eagerly avowed - Dennet

I barely read any sci-fi any more (nothing against it, but there are too many books out there). I was really impressed by Michael Marshal Smith but I gather he's dropped the 'Marshal' and now writes crime fiction. I hear Iain M Banks' latest is up to standard with all the rest of his sci-fi output(which is very high in my opinion) but I havent got round to borrowing that off the flatmate yet.

Jeff noon's vurt is more than 10 years old now! I quite liked Falling Out of Cars. Recently I discovered David Zindell. His 'Neverness' series is excellent. Then he wrote some god-awful, narcolepsy inducing fantasy. jude "Cacoethes scribendi" http://www.judesworld.net

Yes, that's true, it is old now. That makes me feel old. Falling out of cars was good, but not as good. I like the feather stories.

The genre isn't dead Rokitt, it is simply a matter of you getting older and leaving it for better subjects. Sci-Fi is for kids. You're just now realizing it. Visit me http://www.radiodenver.org/

Seconded on Michael Marshall Smith - the four books he wrote before he decided it was easier/more lucrative to write cliche-ridden crime fiction are some of the best sci-fi I've read. Start with 'Spares'. I enjoyed some Larry Niven stories too, particularly 'The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton' and 'The Patchwork Girl', which feature a detective with a psychic arm. Jeff Noon has some fun ideas, but his writing leaves me cold. Have you tried 'Jennifer Government'? I read a few pages of that and found the writing very pedestrian, but you might think different. What about Neil Gaiman? I've never quite got into him either, but he's pretty good at what he does. I don't know if the genre being dead is really your problem though, Tim. You said, "To my chagrin, I struggled to find a single book that I wanted to read." That's a problem I have a lot of the time too - in any genre - and I think it's more down to the fact that everything seems (or is made to seem?) so similar on the surface. It's very hard to appreciate the individual merits of books in a bookshop, because they're all largely aimed at people looking for more of the same, rather than something different. Also, you're looking in the 'sci fi' section - some of the best sci-fi is going to be found in the General section because the sci fi section is put there to attract the trench-coat-sporting sci-fi uberclique, much like you can't browse the graphic novel shelves without waiting for the posse of Tokyopop-snaffling schoolkids to move on. "Sci-Fi is for kids." Er... Kurt Vonnegut? Philip K. Dick? Stanislaw Lem? 1984? Not everyone's cup of tea, granted, but hardly children's fiction. I think a lot of sci-fi appeals to the kid in us, but that's just another way of saying it's genuinely exciting, rather than the kind of worthy, rambling snorefest that we associate with 'grown-up' literature. ~ I'll Show You Tyrants * Fuselit * The Prowl Log * Woe's Woe

"I want the elegant sociopolitical allegories, but I want sympathetic protagonists with their own quirks and wholly selfish agendas, too." Time to start reading X-Men! :-D ~ I'll Show You Tyrants * Fuselit * The Prowl Log * Woe's Woe

There is a lot of great sci-fi writing in comics (or graphic novels if you prefer), perhaps that's where it's all gone. I've been reading 'Y The Last Man,' that's pretty good. Margaret Atwood write good sci-fi novels, even if she insistis on denying it.

If we're talking Fantasy as well, Stan Nicholls' Orcs is good... an original take on the much-maligned villains of more "standard" Fantasy. As for "capers"... Rankin? Tiresome? They make me smile & brighten my day... nuff sed! ~PEPS~ “Underlay is overrated."

JC...I wasn't so much talking about who is writing Sci-Fi, but more along the lines of who the target market is. I did a fairly thorough study of this before I started my magazine, as I too am a Sci-Fi fan, but what I found was interesting (but not necessairly complete). I concluded that getting into Sci-Fi publishing wasn't worth the effort....Why? A typical Sci-Fi reader is going to be in their mid-30's, and a white male. A typical marketing strategy for Sci-Fi (all media) is going to target their product to 12-25 year old males. There's a gap here, and I attribute it to fact that while there is a strong fan base for Sci-Fi up to say mid-40 year olds, it's a simple fact that the people spending money on the subject are much younger. Economies of scale take over, the products are made to attract the strongest purchasing base. Thus, as we get older, we realize that the product on the market isn't as appealing (by design). There are a number of Sci-Fi magazine editors that feel they can change this by creating a better product for the more mature reader..better character development, more sophisticated themes and story lines, but this turns out to be mostly a pipe-dream, as it is very hard to maintain a profitable subscriber base with a more sophisticated product. There simply aren't enough people over 35 years of age willing to buy enough product to make it worthwhile for a publisher. Publishers and other media sources of Sci-Fi simply dumb it down for the teenager and young adult. Visit me http://www.radiodenver.org/

Y The Last Man is great, I second that recommendation. Personally, I don't think Jeff Noon's prose is limp or lazy. I read Only Forward a while back and for me it's nowhere near the standard of Vurt - although I confess that's the only MMS I've read. Personal taste, innit? My opinion of sci fi novels is low, although I like sci fi films and I've got a massive soft spot for comics. It's because so many sci-fi novels are trash - but to be fair, it's probably preportionally no more than any other genre. It's just a bias I have, that in my mind a sci-fi novel has to do a lot to impress me. I think I'm not alone in that.

OK, well, that's a little different to 'sci-fi is for kids'. I follow the logic of what you're saying up til the point where you say they 'simply dumb it down for the teenager and young adult'. I think if your target market were just, say, teenagers, then there may be an element of deliberate dumbing down, but if we're talking about a range that goes up to mid-30's, then there's no reason to do so. Young people, in my experience, are more likely to take on high-brow literature - not sure why, but rigorous intellectual material starts having a very strong appeal once you get towards the end of your teens (if you're a bookish sort of person) which is why Camus' 'L'estranger' and the like are unfairly branded as student-lit. Once out of school, it suddenly becomes cool (again, in bookish circles) to have read The Inferno, or the Qu'ran, or Paradise Lost, and especially Ulysses. The more ancient/difficult/classic/incomprehensible your book, the more hardcore you are. Plus, the sci-fi audience is notoriously erudite and nitpicky to an anorak-wearing degree when it comes to philosophy, classic literature, mythology and other high art subjects. They know far more than is good for them, and they hate the idea of stuff being dumbed down (have you read any of the 'tedious technoporn' to which Rokkitnite refers? It's excruciatingly, unnecessarily difficult to read, and usually packed with Biblical/arcane trivia.) So why does the appeal wane when you get to your 40's? Well, I can only go by supposition and anecdotal evidence, but it seems to me that once you get that old, most people can't be arsed with existential angst and the 'big' questions. This is the age when they turn to Agatha Christie and Andy McNab. No-nonsense plot-driven storytelling without the headache-inducing philosophy or the jargon of arcana. If anything, I'd argue that books aimed at the over-40's are more likely to be 'dumbed down'. But, really, I think it's hard to say what 'dumbing down' is anymore. What's the fundamental difference between dumbing down and simply making a book more readable/understandable? Personally, I find most sci-fi hard to get into simply because it takes itself so seriously and refuses to cater to the kind of reader who doesn't want to have to study invented histories of empires in order to understand the sociopolitical machinations that serve as the backdrop to the main characters' struggles. ~ I'll Show You Tyrants * Fuselit * The Prowl Log * Woe's Woe

I just don't GET Sci-Fi. Never have, never will.

We're spinning in two different directions here. One is "who buys it" the other "who likes it". Mainstream Sci-Fi is more sophisticated than it was years ago, no doubt. Your personal tastes are probably not indicative of the "average", as from my understanding and supposition, you are fairly well educated and live in an environment where the literary standards may be higher than a typical marketing target. I'm guessing you are in your early-mid twenties...you are not typical, you have higher standards in literature as do some others. So, what happens when we get older...well, the interest may still persist, but the available material may not be up to our standards to maintain a buying interest. There are other considerations...Older people are a little more focused on where their money is spent, mortgages, cars, utilities, children, etc...so their ability or desire to spend their money on entertainmant may be limited or reduced, so in effect they become more selective on their purchases. >existential angst and the 'big' questions I don't know about reasons for what happens when we get older. I do know that in my own personal experience, the older one gets, the less I fantasize about existential things and the more I focus on matters closer to home...Life & death, my role in my environment, so I look for things to read that help enlighten me about things that are important to me. I know that space aliens are not visiting the earth. I know that monsters do not live in the woods. The mystery is gone, the sensation of fantasizing about them is no longer there. I'm more interested in the human struggle in day-to-day life and realistic or plausible settings. I don't need a make-believe setting to get the information. All that said, I’ll still watch the occasional rerun of Star Trek, or The Twilight Zone. I find my ability to delve into the fantasy is less and my attention is more or less focused on the technique used to deliver the social messages and what they are trying to say while the giant lizard monster trys to eat Kirks' face. Visit me http://www.radiodenver.org/

Some people claim that Jeff Noon's Vurt and MMS 'Only Forward' are Cyberpunk not Sci-fi. I disagree and think of Cyberpunk as a sub-genre of Sci-Fi but that's not really relevant, I'm just musing. The only Sci-Fi sections worth browsing in my experience are in the big book stores along the Charing X Road. I tend to look at what I like on Amazon and look at the people who have bought's lists . Your average Waterstones will have a very limited selection. I think Zindell may have what you're looking for- the inventions, the creatures but most importantly, a futuristic culture that is totally believable. However it may fall into the technoporn category. 'Requiem for Homo sapiens' works to overcome the dichotomy between materialism and spirituality, being in part a mathematical search for the source (Zindell's degree is in mathematics). To me, the mathematical, philosophical, anthropological ideas were clever and an absolute delight to read and actually I think they were written well enough for the layman to understand without being dumbed down. The storyline was also very good. I read all three one after the other without pause and they are pretty hefty! The books' Achilles heel is overcharacterisation and you want to kick the hero in the nuts towards the end of the finale due to his simpering pacifism and 'blazing eyes'. Tis a flaw I can forgive though. But the triumph is that the 'Neverness' world had me, hook, line, sinker and keep-net. When you're writing sci-fi, I think that the hardest part is to convince your reader that it's real. I agree with Ben, I don't think Jeff Noon's prose is lazy. Noon admitted that 'Vurt' was a book that had to be written and anyone could have done so. Only when he got to 'Pollen' did he feel he was doing something that only he could have. I really love his collection of short stories 'Pixel Juice' and 'Cobralingus', an experiment in language. Looking forward to you book Rokkitnite. I haven't found any new sci fi that's wowed me since finding Zindell two years ago. jude "Cacoethes scribendi" http://www.judesworld.net

I've read all of Akira now. It's staggeringly good. I think graphic fiction is really the best medium for sci-fi - after that, film. Part of the problem is that prose is inadequate when it comes to the broad canvas. Its great for turning the landscape of a man's mind into something readable and dramatic, for injecting richness and significance into plain objects and details, but paragraphs that attempt to define a world are so often unbearably tedious - and even a description of a person's whole appearance and manner quickly becomes dull. You need to stop at a few choice details. Whereas a graphic novel can show you a whole person, or a whole city, in one frame. And since science fiction stories are so often about the relationship between people and their environment, you *need* that visual medium in order to really do the story justice. Personally, I think the main hook has always been what sci-fi has got to say about humanity. It's been said that all Philip K. Dick's stories are really about the present, and I buy that theory. ~ I'll Show You Tyrants * Fuselit * The Prowl Log * Woe's Woe

Not sure that I entirely agree with you that prose is inadequate for sci-fi any more than it is for any other type of story. However it is probably easier to fall into that trap of tedious description and explanation. Good sci-fi will draw enough on our experience of this world and now to convey the world without having to spell it out.

SF works best when the “science” is used as a metaphor for modern issues. I like some of today’s SF, but I love those metaphorical short stories of the ‘40s, ‘50s, ‘60s… SF seemed more about the ideas then, less about the visual spectacles we seem to crave today. The moral dilemmas inherent in the “Laws of Robotics” in Asimov’s robot stories are unbeatable! ~PEPS~ “Underlay is overrated."

"Not sure that I entirely agree with you that prose is inadequate for sci-fi..." Ah, but that's not what I said. I said prose was inadequate for broad canvas depiction - ie. trying to portray an entire vision of a future culture, with all its scientific advancements, key figures, histories and cityscapes. Trying to describe these will always involve deviating from the actual story, whereas in graphic fiction, you take in those details *while* following the story. That doesn't mean that all sci-fi automatically fails, but a great number of sci-fi stories want to do the broad canvas stuff, and inevitably end up doing it blandly, because prose is their choice of medium. ~ I'll Show You Tyrants * Fuselit * The Prowl Log * Woe's Woe

Another reason why film-makers should not try to copy what is written in a book. ~PEPS~ “Underlay is overrated."