Movement: The Future Of SF

Norman Spinrad has some interesting views.

I'm going to backtrack slightly here. A big pack of Asimov's Science Fiction turned up this morning, where 'big' means 'the last four issues'. The reason for this is that my subscription had lapsed without my noticing, something that, when the publisher of the magazine is on a different continent, is easier to do than you might hope. So, when I renewed, I got them to restart from the first issue I'd missed. After all, I couldn't miss a Manfred Macx story, could I?

Asimov's rotates several regular fiction reviewers, all with distinct styles. Spinrad's style is...well, for want of a better phrase, he tries to put things in perspective. He tries to find the place on the speculative shelf where the work he's reviewing fits best. And he often provides some interesting thoughts about the genre in general on the way - it was in a Spinrad column, for example, that I saw the first serious counterarguments to the Singularity. Before that, I'd been under the impression that serious SF fans agreed it was inevitable. God knows why, given that serious SF fans aren't able to agree on anything else under the sun, but there you go.

The Spinrad colum in the October/November Asimov's is about literary movements within SF. I'd link, but it doesn't appear to be online. The gist of it is that he runs through all the well-known examples - Golden Age, New Wave, the rise and continued marketplace dominance of post-Tolkien Fantasy, Cyberpunk - and then asks, "what's next?" Because arguably, there hasn't been anything. Obviously, the column would peter out somewhat if he didn't then attempt to answer his question. Here's what he comes up with, considering Perdido Street Station (which I still haven't read...), John M Ford's The Last Hot Time, and John Clute's Appleseed.

Fantasy tropes, science fiction technique. Of course, my first thought on reading that was: Ted Chiang. My second thought was, what Spinrad is suggesting isn't exactly new. Third thought: Or is it? Is there more of it floating around than there used to be? Well...maybe. Just off the top of my head, Ian McDonald's Ares Express and Mary Gentle's Ash come to mind. Pullmans' His Dark Materials has a nifty slide into SF partway through the second book. And perennial OUSFG favourite MMS has been all over the genre-bending thing since his first book. There's more, but I'm not sure it's enough for a movement. It's an interesting trend, though, and not just because I like reading the stuff; it's interesting because it has the potential to be different.

See also this, on the Locus website, which says many of the same things. There's also Charlie Stross' response, and Gabe Chouinard's response to the response