Damien G. Walter has written a think piece, Science fiction doesn’t have to be gloomy, does it?, for The Guardian. On the one hand, he argues that pessimistic SF has a distinguished literary history: “Science fiction evolved into a sophisticated literature of ideas, offering dark warnings of the future to come.” But his concluding paragraph reads:
The challenge for writers of science fiction today is not to repeat the same dire warnings we have all already heard, or to replicate the naive visions of the genres golden age, but to create visions of the future people can believe in. Perhaps the next Nineteen Eighty-Four, instead of confronting us with our worst fear, will find the imagination to show us our greatest hope.
Pessimism in science fiction and fantasy is something I’ve been thinking about a lot in the past few years as an editor of two Year’s Best volumes. While conventional wisdom dictates that readers tend to prefer more up-beat SF and that the Eeyores of the SF field just don’t sell, what I find as an anthologist picking stories during wartime and in the midst of the unfolding of various other dystopian scenarios is that a lot of the best SF and fantasy lately is really dark.
Do the darker stories that catch my eye as the best of the year break down into dire warnings we’ve already heard? Mostly not. Nor do I see much replication of golden age visions except reprocessed via the tools of postmodernism. I also don’t think that providing rays of sunshine through the storm clouds is really the solution particularly, nor necessarily the most workable aesthetic choice, unless you are in Hollywood. And though I am planning to vote for the presidential candidate whose slogan this resembles, I am not sold on an aesthetic of visions of the future people can believe in.
What exactly is pessimistic SF? Walter describes Nineteen Eighty-Four as the “darkest and greatest of all.” While it is certainly an oft-quoted touchstone and a very important book, it seems to me a bit off-center for science-fiction dystopianism. It seems to me that, say, Joanna Russ’s We Who Are About To… is considerably bleaker than Nineteen Eighty-Four. (SF novels bleaker than Orwell’s would make an interesting list, actually. There are a lot.)
He positions Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov as icons of happy SF; and J.G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock, Harlan Ellison, Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Bruce Sterling, and William Gibson as the icons of SF’s dark side. The reality of their careers is much more complicated. Most writers with lengthy careers are not easily categorized that way. Arthur C. Clarke wrote “Transit of Earth.” Tom Disch wrote The Brave Little Toaster. And that happy, chatty SF entertainer Connie Willis wrote The Doomsday Book.
In Walter’s paragraph on darkness and the failure of imagination, the writers he chooses as exemplary are Margaret Atwood and Cormac McCarthy. While these are important contemporary writers, they are not particularly exemplary of SF. That writers only on the fringes of SF do not live up to a science-fictional aesthetic is unsurprising.
For dark visions more relevant to SF, I direct Walter to Barry Malzberg (the darkness of whose works make Gibson look like Little Mary Sunshine) and, say, Jack Womack (author of Let’s Put the Future Behind Us, a novel on the theme of how capitalism can be remarkably like organized crime).* And of course for those craving pure bracing gloom, there’s Peter Watts.
In using Clarke and Asimov as the metonym for happy SF, he is essentially suggesting that the hard SF and space opera traditions are the happy contrast to that downbeat New Wave and Cyberpunk stuff. Olde Tyme space opera I’ll give him (with qualifications as outlined in The Space Opera Renaissance). But hard SF’s optimism is mostly superficial. While the New Wave’s pessimism was perhaps philosophical and coming out of movements like Existentialism, Hard SF had pessimism of its own, originating from scientific principles like the Second Law of Thermodyanamics. When asked why there were no villains in his fiction, hard SF icon Hal Clement replied that the Universe is antagonist enough and that in the end we are all dead. In a nutshell, Hard SF’s objection to New Wave pessimism was that it was unearned. Criticisms regarding hard SF’s affect tend to revolve around its coldness and lack of affect, not its lack of negativity.
Walter doesn’t drop the other shoe on the subject of who he thinks is doing a great job on the terms he sets forth. But his article seems to me like if he’d written more he would have come round to praising writers like cyberpunk-turned-futurist Bruce Sterling and newly-minted bestselling writer Cory Doctorow.
Walter’s last line—”Perhaps the next Nineteen Eighty-Four, instead of confronting us with our worst fear, will find the imagination to show us our greatest hope”—would make an easy segue into a rave review of Doctorow’s Little Brother. But while I am a big fan of that book —which I read with pleasure in more or less a single sitting—I have a hard time with it as a prescriptive text, as change you can believe in. I have a pretty good idea of what Sterling or Doctorow would tell you if you came up to either of them and said you’d hacked the Department of Homeland Security or the Yahoo account of a Vice Presidential candidate: They’d tell you to stop that because you can go to jail for that sort of thing. (SF writers as a lot are a fairly law-abiding lot.) And there are plenty of things Sterling’s protagonists do that he would consider you a certifiable loon for if you tried them in real life.
All this being said, Walter’s is a piece I would have been pleased to receive as a submission for The New York Review of Science Fiction. In that context we could have written all over it, gotten Walter to deal with these objections and give better examples, and all that. Despite my objections to the specifics of his argument, the subject of recent dystopianism in SF is an important one about which more should be written.
As an anthologist, what I find particularly striking about the pessimism of today’s SF is that it cuts across literary-political lines and is more an across-the-board trend than a movement. When I started this post, I thought I’d look over a few recent Year’s Best SF tables of contents and discuss some of the darker more dystopian of them. But I pull up the table of contents of Year’s Best SF 13, and there’s just too much to choose from.
Which story demonstrates a darker vision? John Kessel‘s “The Last American,” Gene Wolfe‘s “Memorare”? Peter Watts’s “Repeating the Past”? Gwyneth Jones‘s “Tomb Wife”? William Shunn‘s “Obvious Impermeability in a Closed System”? Karen Joy Fowler‘s “Always”? Terry Bisson‘s “Pirates of the Somali Coast”? Ian McDonald‘s “Sanjeev and Robotwallah”? or Tony Ballantyne‘s “Third Person”? It’s hard call. For affect, I would give the prize to Watts. But each of these fathom the depths in one way or another. (Perhaps the gloomiest of the stories in the book is actually Johanna Sinisalo‘s “Baby Doll,” about the commercial sexualization of girls; its first publication was in Finnish a few years ago.) But there is no coherent New Wave/Old Wave polarization to the mood of the stories, nor, say, a cyberpunk/humanist polarization.
Walter says he wants SF to do more than “reflect” the world, but rather fiction that seeks to “influence” it. What I see in wartime SF is a generalized very dark view, which is dark because the writers in whom I am interested—those writing the best science fiction and fantasy—are in touch with the nature of reality. In a world with YouTube in it, I think I’ll duck the question of how and whether we can influence the world. The most popular thing I ever did was post pictures of fake Yu Gi Oh! cards from my son’s collection. Despite being a novelist and all that, the most popular thing John Scalzi ever put out there in the world was a picture of his cat with bacon taped to it.
So what I would substitute for “influence,” as a goal, is that writers provide us with perceptual tools with which to understand the world, the future, and what is to be done. I view science fiction partly as a set of perceptual tools we take with us into the world. I don’t think SF can be held responsible for finding solutions to all the world’s problems, but I think it is SF’s task to help us understand them.
There are cultural forces much larger than the science fiction field that will have strong and noticeable effects on what SF writers write. For example, in the mid-90s, there was an obvious abundance of 12-step influenced fiction. War, disasters, and economic crises are among the most powerful of such forces.
So, to answer his question, Does SF have to be so gloomy? I guess my answer is that for now it does because it is in touch with the world we inhabit right now.
* . . . which seems to me very much of the moment in the midst of discussions of whether to give the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury discretion to hand out 700 billion dollars to private companies at his own discretion.
This reminds me of a 1969 Isaac Asimov essay entitled “The Sin of the Scientist”.
Asimov said that prior to about 1910, the general public saw Science as leading the way to a future utopia. After that, Science suddenly became Dr. Frankenstein, inventing hideous horrors.
The naive thought is that the shift occurred due to the invention of nuclear weapons, but that was far too late in 1945.
Asimov said the culprit was Fritz Haber, who pioneered chemical warfare for the Germans during World War I. The public had the rude awakening that Science could create nasty things as well as wondrous things.
My personal take on the subject is that dark and light sci-fi are simply two side of the same coin: the fact people can do good and bad things. Thus, while one focus on the bad, the other focus on the good, both exaggerating whatever they’re focusing on for dramatic purposes.
Take for example the world of “1984”: why is it dark? Because it’s focusing on the moment the Party is almost all-powerful, and there’s no hope. But were one to write, say, “2084”, with a plot were Big Brother crumbled 60 years ago, archaeologists and historians all over the world are rediscovering the pre-20th century history the Party had sent through the “memory holes”, the old telescreen network has turned into the technological foundation for something resembling our Internet, an enduring peace has just been signed between the 3 world powers, and the future simply looks bright, and suddenly you have a very light alternate-history novel with a mere dark chapter.
Expand a fictional world, any one of them, no matter which, and you’ll see all of its darkness or all of its brightness becoming a dot in a succession of good and bad moments. Pretty much like this very real one of ours.
Minor note, IMO any list of “Best SF” depends on what the person making the list thinks are the best. If the list maker likes dystopian fiction, then dystopian fiction will make the list.
I’m not a fan of dystopian fiction. However, I find purely optomistic SF to be somewhat unrealistic.
The stories I most enjoy are ones where the characters think they can make a difference. Life is tough but ‘we’ can make it better. Dystopian fiction comes across as “life is really really bad and we’d be better off dead”.
Drak Bibliophile
I’d say our biases are in the direction of upbeat rather then downbeat, since the YBSF & the YBF are commercial products. Our responsibilities are to our publishers and our readers. And so among our criteria for selection are that a work be fun to read; brilliant works that are nonetheless unpleasant because of the darkness of their worldview are intentionally screened out.
(David and I also have extensive track records; I don’t think either of us are particularly known for preference for downers.)
Hi Kathryn,
Thank you for that extansive and well thought out response. I should say that some of your comments are answered by the format and edititorial priorities of the piece. The Guardian blog is aimed at mainstream readers, hence writers cited as examples tend to be kept to the best known examples, in this case Clarke and Asimov. It also has a readership predominantly interested in literary fiction, so citing literary writers such as Attwood and McCarthy in such a discussion both helps to engage those readers with the discussion, and also expands the general perception of what science fiction is, or can be.
On your main response that, yes, science fiction does have to be gloomy, I’m glad to hear the counter argument but respectfully disagree. I’m speaking primarily as a reader in this regard, and as a reader I find the common dystopian worldview increasingly boring. To paraphrase a quote from Damon Knight; when sf becomes boring, the way to exciting new stories is to challenge the assumptions that make that story easy to write. The dystopian future makes stories easier to write, its an easy source of conflict and hence drama. But perhaps there are more exciting stories to be told that don’t make the dystopian assumption.
There is science fiction, the collective noun describing a field of endeavor, and then there are individual works of science fiction. The field of endeavor will and should be responsive to large social forces outside itself. That that is the case should in no way discourage people from reading or writing cheerful things.
(Me, I’ve been up in the Adirondacks painting cheerful pink-tinged scenes of Lake Champlain.)
An easy commercial argument to be made in response to what I’ve said (and not at all what you are arguing, I think) is that in sad times what people really want is escape. One could then debate the merits of escapism.
I don’t think upbeat cheerful fiction with a can-do spirit is either aesthetically inferior or superior to more downbeat fiction. In broad outline, over the long haul, happiness sells better than sadness. The specifics of the trajectory of individual works and writers is of course more complex than that. Gibson didn’t get on the bestseller list by writing happy books. Some people do, but that’s not how Gibson did it.
I’m not sure that dystopian assumptions do make a story easier to write. Maybe, maybe not. I really don’t think such assumptions (in the abstract) make it easier to write a GOOD story. What does make it easier to write a good story is careful and patient observation of what is going on in the world around you.
One thing I am unsure of is the extent to which you are talking about aesthetic possibilities as opposed to commercial ones. In the article on Happy SF on your website, you seem to be feeling out the possibilities for a movement. I think you’re going to need more than championing the idea of writing fiction that’s in a better mood for that. Proposing to solve the problems of the world, or to envision a world in which they were solved is nice, but its also been tried. I don’t think I’ve ever heard an SF writer aspire to write like Ernst Callenbach. Is a book like, say, Ecotopia, what you aspire to?
Who, from your perspective, is really doing it right?
One of the functions of sci-fi is to inoculate us against the future. It presents us with new bold and scary ideas so that we have time to adjust to them, mull them over, before being ambushed by the new.
And also: science fiction–despite when the novels are set–is always a reflection of the time in which they are written. Sci-fi written in a more naive time will always be more positive.
I do have to argue with the idea that “Joanna Russ’s We Who Are About To… is considerably bleaker than Nineteen Eighty-Four.” Russ’s novel is about a calamity that afflicts only a few space travellers who are marooned far from Earth with no hope of rescue. As the narrator observes, listening to other castaways blather about the need to coerce the women into pregnancy in order to rebuilt humanity, “Humanity is fine. It’s just not here.” Nineteen Eighty-Four, on the other hand, is about a future of endless oppression for billions. Moreover, the end of Russ’s novel features escape; the end of Orwell’s certainly does not.
Kathryn, your screening out the nasty filter is set at a pretty high level if Pirates Of the Somali Coast gets in. :)
Although that one is fairly reality based, as opposed to being an Orwellian dystopia.
Regarding Russ: there are plenty of works involving planets exploding and implicit megadeath that are a whole lot less bleak that Nineteen Eighty-Four: despite the destruction of the planet Alderan, no one would claim Star Wars was bleaker than Orwell despite the body count.
What Russ, and a number of other authors, did in that era was deconstruct more conventional SF and rub its nose in its own assumptions. Russ was essentially invoking Hal Clement’s universe-is-antagonist-enough trope in a context in which traditional reader expectations were that despite all odds, the can-do-spirit would shine through and the survivors would found a colony regardless of what horrors the founders endured.
I read We Who Are About To back in the Dark Ages when I was a student of Joanna’s, but my recollection is that pretty much everyone in the book comes to a bad end, either by murder or suicide. My recollection is that Russ’s position was that if a plane crashed in a remote location on Earth, the few survivors would not found a colony; under most circumstances they would all die, and in her SF novel that it should be no different, utopianism be damned.
I know we have a copy here Somewhere, but it’s not coming to hand. However here is Timmy Duchamp’s review of the 2006 reprint. Her word for the ending is “stark.”
BlueTyson: Perhaps I have a peculiar attachment to the pirates of Somalia. (One might reasonably conclude that from some of my online writings.) The story is actually another one that rubs the audience’s nose in their assumptions — in this case, that pirates are fun. (There are stories that didn’t make it through that filter; and despite my Somali fascination, that one was actually one of DGH’s picks.)
alexgieg @@@@@ 2: “Take for example the world of “1984”: why is it dark? Because it’s focusing on the moment the Party is almost all-powerful, and there’s no hope. But were one to write, say, “2084”, with a plot were Big Brother crumbled 60 years ago,”
But that’s a betrayal of the book’s fundamental message. In the book, technology and social structure have aligned such a way that Big Brother will never crumble.* That’s the basic sf assumption being explored: some believe that life-extension technology will reach a point where people will never die; what if the same thing happened to political systems? It’s Methuselah as government, and it turns out the type of government able to perpetuate itself forever/that was in power when those techs became available happens to be totalitarianism. That’s the scariness of 1984: it posits that totalitarianism really is competitively superior to all other political alternatives.
*Obviously the narrator may be mistaken—it’s happened before (“the permanent Republican majority” and all that), but that’s like me not finding Peter Watt’s Blindsight very depressing because I disagree with his theory of consciousness. If you accept the premise, then clearly it’s terrifying.
poormojo @@@@@ 7: “Sci-fi written in a more naive time will always be more positive.”
Your easy equation of knowledge and negativity is…interesting =)
Ok then :)
And yes, the spousal unit was even telling me about a Somali pirate news story she heard a couple of weeks ago.
heresiarch @@@@@ 11
While I basically agree with your point about Nineteen Eighty-Four, there is one thing in the book which suggests the rule of Big Brother will not last forever; the appendix, “The Principles of Newspeak”, which Orwell was very insistent the novel never be printed without (iirc he turned down a lucrative serialization over this), is written in the past tense (and is not itself in Newspeak).
(Also, it’s not a narrator who argues that the party is immortal, but O’Brien.)
Tim May @@@@@ 13: Hmm, that’s an interesting tid-bit. I agree that it does suggest that perhaps Big Brother (or at least Newspeak) doesn’t last forever.
(Also, the narrator seems pretty convinced, in my humble.)
At Confluence, where I was critic guest of honor this summer, I convened a panel entitled something like, “Never mind this year’s fiction, How do we know what’s best anyway?” concerning what the panelists believe makes some good fiction rise above other good fiction. (That is another post for another time.)
But in this particular discussion I have talked about authors being in touch with the nature of reality as one key piece of what makes some fiction “best.”
I should add that aesthetically being in touch with the nature of reality works best with authors who are simultaneously in touch with the nature of fun. Bisson, Doctorow, and Sinisalo all give you a good sense of what people do for fun. (Now that Delany, he knows lots and lots about fun.)
My memory of the Russ story was that it would have been a better story if the POV character had just killed herself at the beginning. Sure, Russ was correct that this small group had little chance of creating a colony, but her POV character *made* sure they had no chance.
IE Russ got me angry at her POV character.
Drak Bibliophile
heresiarch @@@@@ 11: I think this all depends from your perspective. I usually take the assumption that anything, no matter whether it’s good or bad, that had a beginning, will have an end, even if it takes a long time. Take Ancient Egypt: 3000 years almost straight, then puff, it ended. Same applies to immortality: as your eternal youthful life went on, the probability of you dying from an accident, being assassinated, or suiciding due to pure boredom, would approach 100% (see this blog post, linked from comment #12 to this Tor article), so good and bad changes would still happen, even if veeeery sloooowly. Take this approach to whatever fictional world you’re immersing yourself into, and it’ll necessarily relativise the author’s intention, be it a naive cheerfulness or the darkest of nihilisms. Most bizarre fictional example I’m aware of: Cthulhutech.
But then, this might well be me failing to engage into full suspension of disbelief.
James Nicholl over on his LJ remarks, “Given that [Kathryn Cramer]’s one of the the editors who produced the great wave of despair in 2007, I am not surprised where she comes down in this debate.”
Not sure whether to take that as a compliment or an insult. Perhaps he’s confused me with someone more powerful and eminent.
Also, Lou Anders has written a response to Walter as well, entitled I’m Tired of Flying Cars.
Further to the subject of Xtreme dystopia and also The Brave Little Toaster, have any of you read Swanwick’s “The Scarecrow’s Boy” (F&SF Oct/Nov 08) yet? I read it this morning and am quite taken with it.
I think there are two main reasons why tragedy is more common than comedy, whether in story or song.
First, gravitas has more dignity than grinning. Cool kids get further with scorn than with clowning.
Secondly, comedy is harder.
I was reading Damien’s article when I cracked up laughing at the idea that Orwell’s warnings had been heeded. Perhaps Damien doesn’t live in the same UK I do? No right to silence; cameras watching our every move; photographers treated as pariahs. Meh.
My SF is dark. Sometimes I reread it and even I’m shocked by how dark. I call it how I see it at the time.
In a lengthy response on my blog, I respectfully disagree.
The short answer: SF needs to engage in solution-based, forward thinking, or become obsolete.
In the book, technology and social structure have aligned such a way that Big Brother will never crumble.
Um. I’m not sure I agree; I think that the book argues that a specific form of middle-class activism based around a generalised, non-specific feeling of injustice won’t beat Big Brother.
There’s no indication that other forms of dissent are particularly doomed to failure. Oceania has only been in existence 40-odd years at the time of the book, and there’s no reason to assume that just because there will be no Orwells in Oceania there will be no Bevans.
While I think it’s true that the outlook for people-like-Orwell is astonishingly bad in Oceania, that’s not to say that there aren’t other forms of political change that might prove powerful. In fact, Orwell could be read as arguing against an idealistic notion of political reform, as opposed to an experiential pragmatist one.
FYI: Out there is the world, there seems to be a misapprehension that I work for Tor and/or that all my books are published by Tor. I am not, nor have I ever been, an employee of Tor Books. My husband, David Hartwell, is an editor for Tor. Not me.
I did a small amount of freelance work for Tor in the mid 1980s and freelance-edited two manuscripts about ten years ago. I have published a couple of books with Tor.
But our Year’s Bests are not published by Tor. YBSF 1-13 were published by HarperCollins. YBF 1-5 were also published by HarperCollins, with the subsquent volumes published by Tachyon.
I would of course welcome contracts from Tor for new projects, but right now I don’t have any.
1): no one would claim Star Wars was bleaker than Orwell despite the body count.
Well, not the first movie. The need for continual crises around which to wrap plots makes the Star Wars universe as represented by the extensive line of tie-in books extremely grim. The moral of it all seems to be that it doesn’t matter what the little people do to try to secure a peaceful and stable government, eventually those [rude word here] Jedi and Sith will ruin everything with their plots and rivalry.
OK, once the problem was an invasion by religious fanatics from another galaxy. That’s hardly better.
We won’t get into the slavery issues raised by the robots.
18: “Nicoll”.
It’s not really either [1]. I read the anthologies you co-edit so I have some idea of the sort of material you prefer. Given that, as I say over on More Words Deeper Hole, 2007’s various Best Ofs were all pretty bleak, it doesn’t surprise me that you come to the conclusion that you did.
Now, if Ryk E. Spoor had come to that conclusion, that would have been surprising.
I’d have an even better idea of your tastes if I read all of the short fiction that you selected from in 2007 (I get the sense everything skewed to the dismal that year) but that is not going to happen.
1: The comment lower down where I list which editors I think are in a position to affect how new readers see SF could be seen that way, though.
What I see in wartime SF is a generalized very dark view, which is dark because the writers in whom I am interested—those writing the best science fiction and fantasy—are in touch with the nature of reality.
Part of reality, anyway. As far as I can see, SF likes drama. Crises get noticed and flashy new scientific and technological developments might be seen as story seeds. Incremental improvements appear to me to be accepted as normal and not worth thinking about [1] or worse, ignored entirely. There also seems to be something of a blind spot as far as the quieter parts of history goes [2]. People remember Jonas Salk, Doctor William Saunders and WWII but they don’t remember what year it was kids in North America first had a better than 50/50 chance of growing up without suffering a nutritional deficiency disease (around 1960, IIRC).
I have a friend whose parents winter in India (Very few people who have a choice winter in Canada) so I get annual reports on the rapid pace of improvement in standard of living over there. This kind of development does not appear to me to have as much effect on how SF authors see the world as I’d like. It’s not uncommon for me to get books set on Earth where the author appears to be completely unaware of ongoing patterns in economic convergence – yes, that startles me too – and convinced that the relatively poor nations of today must be the relatively poor nations of tomorrow.
What drives me right around the bend is that a fair chunk of authors are my age or older and so will have seen, for example, South Korea go from being a very poor country to being a developed nation.
1: Moore’s Law might be an example of an often over-looking example of incremental improvement. Aside from Vinge, what SF authors ever thought about what it meant over a 20 or 40 year period?
Interestingly, Herman Kahn did think about it in one of his futurism books but he couldn’t quite make the jump past main-frames.
2: So over in fantasyland, we get lots of castle opera but very few peasant uprisings, even though peasant uprisings were hardly unknown in feudal cultures. Urban class conflict (I know I am going to regret using that phrase but i cannot think of a better one) does seem to be a lot more common from both the left and the right and I don’t know why there’s an urban/rural split on this.
Should put the two of you on a podcast with a few others, perhaps.
KC and the No Sunshine Band – or what is with all this bleak stuff, anyway?
:)
Tor, please give the more famous than she thinks Super Editor another fat project. How’s the Urban Fantasy Renaissance strike you?
KathrynCramer @@@@@ 23: I think people get the impression you work for Tor because this being a Tor-owned site, it follows it’s written by people directly and professionally related to Tor, or so the reasoning goes. It’ll take a while for many to realize that when it was said this site would be “different” and “nothing like” what’s out there, it wasn’t the meaningless market-speech we’re used seeing everywhere.
I must add I had been expecting this “differentness” to be on the technical side of things, not on the editorial contents of what, at first, seemed like a pretty standard corporate-driven multi-author blog. It took me a while to adjust and stop assuming.
I thought this was supposed to be rec.arts.sf.written Mark II?
[looks sadly at preprepared pile of comments discussing, in order, stories based on Those Pesky Belters and Their Torchships(1), why it is that SF is so determinedly anti-city (and by logical extension, anti-civilization), the impact of the interstellar medium on the economic viability of arcologies and extended whining about how The Makeshift Rocket should have been used as the basis for a shared-universe series]
1: Which should be easy because I can only think of one novel that claims to be and collection that might be.
Some thoughts on the politics of gloom…
http://damiengwalter.wordpress.com/2008/09/29/the-politics-of-gloom/
I have to wonder. The argument seems to be that negative SF is what people want to read. But doesn’t the major trend toward negative SF in the magazines like Analog coincide with a crash in readership numbers?
Is this a coincidence? Or is negativity a contributing factor to the declining number of readers? Can it really be argued that the general public wants negative SF? Or is it just the editors?