Sci-fi Stagnation - francis kafka (@pachabelcanon)
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Oct 31, 2024 · 10:26 AM UTC
I think that the main reason that science fiction doesn't feel like it has really caught up to the present is that there's a huge disconnection between the avant-garde literary and the scientific/technical sides
on one hand, you have Greg Egan, who genuinely does brilliant work, but there's behind him a host of writers like Andy Weir who construct stories as dramatisation of some plausible happening, there's little interest in style etc
on the other hand, you have literary writers of science fiction, but you get the feeling that that the technical stuff doesn't really matter, it's really all just satire/allegory for some reason or other
and in the middle, you see an increasingly tropey style of commercial science fiction, you can see this in Scalzi, it's a throwback to what we already know, like Redshirts, which are detached and reinvented in this or that way
so the first group essentially works through a bunch of formulaic science scenarios, the second returns to the same stock of themes, and the third is pale fannish repetition of tropes from media sci-fi
this feels linked to our inability to imagine the future, the last real additions were nanotechnology and the Singularity in the 1990s, and modern futurism is rather stale, it's really on the level of Twitter tech guys sharing AI art of whatever
it's purely "aesthetic", in the most vulgar way, but even this has an equivalent in SF fandom as the various "-punks", which aren't really anything substantial on a stylistic level or on the level of content
what made cyberpunk so powerful wasn't just that it was talking about computers and corporations, but because it developed a new kind of style, that drew from the avant-garde postmodern literature of the 60s, from the noir novel and so on
it was this, with its crammed prose and "eyeball kicks" which was proper to the Internet in some sense, you can't detach the style from the content
I think a lot about style these days: I think you can apply what Žižek said of Hemingway to Ballard and Malzberg and Silverberg, even to Peter Watts or Robert Heinlein
I think that the disconnection between style and content leads you to how science fiction becomes vapid, a work is reduced to a few "deep ideas" (sophomoric Phil 101 questions) which can be neatly disconnected from the text and be discussed
I guess this is why I don't like Ted Chiang, even though he's a great writer, his stories tend to be didactic in the sense of working out a thought experiment and reminding you of it, and making you feel smart for seeing the dramatisation of some idea or another
though he's the best at it, and is a supremely enjoyable writer, I think that, like, Isaac Asimov is a more authentically a philosophical writer. But that's for another day.
part of the impetus of the New Wave was that the traditional images of science fiction were losing their value due to proliferation, so it's time to invent new kinds of images
and Barry Malzberg, talking about the furious reaction to his 1972 Beyond Apollo, which was a biting satire of the space program, mentioned that he wasn't trying to bury the old science fiction (which literary fans and detractors said of him)
but that he was writing the kind of thing that was hopefully what 1945 Astounding would develop into by 1972. But 1972 Analog was still stuck in the 1940s in part
and Malzberg's on the cutting edge, in 1972—and today. What's the natural progression from Malzberg in 1972 to SF today? I wager that nobody really has tried to find out. And thats a shame
here's Malzberg's words direct (from "Breakfast in the Ruins", one of the most perspicuous works of SF criticism)
this is the New Wave reaction to the typical tropes of science fiction; I'm not so iconoclastic as them, but they're surely directionally correct here
