Why Science Fiction Is Dying & Fantasy Fiction Is The Future.
Fantasy author Mark Charan Newton has some ideas about why sales for sf is flagging while fantasy is still going strong. He comes across as the extra who had to nod and duck out of frame when Claude Rains said “Round up the usual suspects.” We have literary types and Hollywood and “We’re living in the future!” and, er, women. (Because “Women matter” which I guess is supposed to suggest that women as a group read very little science fiction, or that sf doesn’t appeal to women. Or something. The author doesn’t make it entirely clear, stating that sf readership is falling and citing “More women than men read books” as a reason, leaving the reader to draw the conclusion. I know there are many, many women who read sf, but I wonder whether the percentages match the percentage of the reading public as a whole.)
There are a couple of interesting comments and assumptions in the post. One is the comment about women I mentioned already. Another is that the LORD OF THE RINGS and HARRY POTTER movies have driven people to read fantasy as a genre. While I’m sure that’s happened, I’m not all that convinced it’s happened at a significant scale. Harry Potter was bringing people into the genre well before the movies; that’s why they made the movies, actually.
An interesting question raised but not addressed in the post is that there are lots of science fiction movies out there (TV shows, too) but they don’t seem to be driving people to pick up sf novels. (In comments, “Niall” states that DOCTOR WHO is the exception, and if that’s true it would be interesting to figure out why.) Didn’t sf have a huge spike in popularity after STAR WARS?
He also states that he’s “talking about Space Opera, Hard-SF etc – the core genre.” I can’t help but wonder what parts of science fiction don’t make it into the core.
I guess my final point would be that I don’t expect science fiction will ever die. Not really. It might become the sort of thing that only a specialty press would want to publish for a core audience, but I seriously doubt it would ever fall to that level. Seriously doubt, in part because the poster notes that when talking about the survival of the genre, literary sf doesn’t count. I can’t quite figure out why.
I should mention that the last science fiction hard science fiction[1] novel I read was probably Picoverse, which was great fun until I realized the characters weren’t. My interest flagged quickly, and it occurred to me that several of the sf books I’d read recently had incredibly uninteresting or unbelievable characters. I’d been reading them out of a sense of duty–science fiction is supposed to be good for me, isn’t it? And the culture, too?–but not enjoying them. So I stopped. At this point I read mostly fantasy and mystery, and I’m happier for it.
[1] Discussion in comments has made me realize that I have read sf since then, but I wasn’t thinking of them as sf because I’d enjoyed them.
Mirrored from Twenty Palaces. You can comment here or there.
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Comments
Fixed.
Personally, I found Brasyl, for example, to be compelling and exploratory, as was Windup Girl. Political SF is growing slowly. I think we'll probably see more of it in the future. It may jut take some time for people to catch on to how good it is.
But hard SF and space opera might well be on the decline. Which is a shame. I like a good space opera. Still, what Newton misses is that, if someone writes an absolutely great, groundbreaking series in SF, it'll sell. People like good books. Good books sell. There's a lot of great work being done in fantasy these days, and it's overtaking SF. If SF has more superlative works, it'll sell better. End of story.
And I'll admit, freely, that I never read political sf. If I want to read someone's political ideas, I read their political ideas. I'm not so interested in settings and narratives set-decorated to let authors construct a deadly serious "If This Goes On..." lesson. Pass.
Edited at 2009-12-05 09:48 pm (UTC)
zomg! Real!
Personally, I am not sure how long it's going to take for the culture as a whole to get comfortable with women reading sf.
I mean, "we live in the future?" C'mon! I don't have a nerve disruptor pistol and a lightflyer, and won't see those things in my lifetime. To say that there's no SF because eh, we see that stuff everyday is bogus.
My understanding is that space opera is a small but respectable market. It's risky to write in that genre, because the readership is small enough that turning out something less than stellar gets your series cancelled. For instance, Tobias Buckell has stopped working on his Xenowealth series because sales were not strong enough.
I read the first two--they were okay, with good ship/ground battles but not so hot in the character department.
Hmm. I should edit the post above, because I've definitely been reading sf. I just haven't been thinking of it as sf, because I enjoyed it.
Then again, I've heard people criticize Bujold for her "lame prince" archetypes. I enjoy those books (although I don't seek them out) but I suspect they're so successful because of her characters more than the subgenre.
If that makes sense.
I mentioned PICOVERSE upthread, which was full of coolio ideas but characters that became completely new people at the turn of the chapter--and not in the interesting way, either.
Buckell's first novel, the title of which I can't recall right now, also disappointed me with the characters. The lead, John, was utterly standard Decent Dad type, right up until he had a new (actually, his original) personality reinstalled. Suddenly, he was an interesting guy, which only served to point out that he hadn't been all that interesting in the previous couple hundred pages.
No other examples come to me, probably because I'm pretty tired right now. My impression of most sf, though, is that the book is full of Cool Speculation (which doesn't interest me much in that medium) but the characters are utterly uninteresting. That impression is so persistent that even sf I read and enjoy doesn't erase it.
i can't see it dying. i can see all genre's surging and waning as peoples interest spikes and flags with whats out and whats popular. like you mention a spike with scifi with Star Wars, a spike in fantasy when a Harry Potter comes out. etc. etc. and i can see a spike in both when Avatar comes out ;)
each has their own favourite genres and what keeps them captivated book after book. and as such as long as there are authors to write, there will be the readers to read.
By the way, how is the Western doing these days? Has it reached the point where this description is true?
So, struggling as a genre and written 4theluv, is what I've heard.
I know that there have been writers who left the Western genre to find success elsewhere (see: Leonard, Elmore) but I have no idea how well it's doing right now.
Women have always bought the majority of books. Always. And if you think the percentage has shifted, then why are romance sales down, too?
(I have a whole rant about this, pointing out stuff like that over half of all pulp magazines sold were romance, but that nobody other than the accountants ever noticed that, because who cared about romance?)
The success of a genre in movies does not drive book sales; in fact, traditional fantasy sales are down in the aftermath of Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter franchise, and prose fantasy sales are now driven by urban fantasy, which was a very hard sell twenty years ago but has recently exploded in popularity.
Plenty of fantasy fans now get their fix from movies, TV, and games, instead of novels. Same thing happened in SF. When Star Wars hit big in 1977 there was a big spike in SF sales, but only briefly -- as more and more SF became available in other media, SF sales went into a long, slow decline. Fantasy boomed in the '80s and '90s, but then we finally got some decent fantasy films, and now it's fantasy's turn to follow that downward path.
I could go on, but hey, why bother?
I keep hearing that urban fantasy, so called, is heading for a crash, mainly because it's been so successful that publishers are putting out mediocre books to cash in on the trend, much the way horror crashed. I'd been waiting for something similar to happen to mysteries, but I think the recession masked the effect.
I'm already trying to think of ways to move my books farther out of the center of the genre--a number of reviewers have said the plot was same-old-same-old, which surprised me. I have no idea what I'd do, though.
You know what genre I think is due for a resurgence? Romance. I know it's already extremely popular, but a number of smart voices have been out there pressing the culture to give it more respect, and the subgenres they formed some years ago have been settling in and forming established readerships.
I wish I had the knack for writing them.
There are also books that publishers know are not very good books, but they expect them to sell quite a lot of copies anyway. The Thomas Covenant books fall into this category.
When publishers start selling books because they know the genre is hot and they need something half-decent to fill a slot that the genre becomes glutted with lifeless books and begins shedding readers.
Another problem might be format. I was listening to Joe Haldeman talk one time and he said sf is an exploration of an idea. A short story usually suffices to make that point, or at most a short novel (he believed his natural length for a sf novel was about 60k words, publishers expect much more nowadays). While I happily toss away an evening reading a good sf novel, unless you're talking DUNE or some titan of the genre most of the stuff that had an impact on me, and still sticks to my ribs all these years later, was short fiction. The short fiction world and its difficulties would make up a whole different blog post.
For the record, I don't think SF is dying any more than romance or mystery is dying. I think it's somewhere between recessionary and Spinal Tap's "the band's appeal is becoming more selective." I'm in bookstores constantly, and the genres seem to be chundering along.
My son, who grew up with state-of-the-art CGI monsters and effects, still sits at the edge of his seat for a good Harryhausen movie or, god help me, a guy in a Gamera suit. We still love that sort of spectacle for the way it fits the movie as a whole. This is why I can't understand people who think kids today are spoiled by modern effects.
Still, there was never anything like you get with a Michael Bay movie, where the story and characters are utter shit but the visuals are astonishing. And I have to wonder how many dollars World of Warcraft is siphoning away from DAW.
FTL is fantasy, so far. Telepathy is fantasy. Star Trek and Star Wars are fantasy. With fantasy you have places to go.
Personally, I think space habitats offer such places for hard SF but, so far, no takers.
If I were some kind of twisted extrovert, I'd like to organize a bunch of writers to do an anthology of stories with habitats in the same universe. That would of course require general agreement on things like how far-flung the habitats are, the speed of the ships, relations with Earth, etc.
Then write some more. Some more SF. Suck it Newton.
Neal Asher