Because Wyoming was no longer far enough away.
Posted on 09/08/2003 10:49:45 AM PDT by anymouse
I've recently returned from Torcon 3, the 61st World Science Fiction Convention, held at the end of August in Toronto. I left it deeply concerned for the future -- not merely of my chosen genre or my chosen country, but my species.
I served this Worldcon as its toastmaster, and presiding over our annual Hugo Awards ceremony required me to make a speech. This being the 50th year that Hugos have been given for excellence in SF, I devoted my remarks to the present depressing state of the field. Three short steps into the New Millennium, written SF is paradoxically in sharp decline.
My genre has always had its ups and downs, but this is by far its worst, longest downswing. Sales are down, magazines are languishing, our stars are aging and not being replaced. And the reason is depressingly clear: Those few readers who haven't defected to Tolkienesque fantasy cling only to Star Trek, Star Wars, and other Sci Fi franchises.
Incredibly, young people no longer find the real future exciting. They no longer find science admirable. They no longer instinctively lust to go to space.
Just as we've committed ourselves inextricably to a high-tech world (and thank God, for no other kind will feed five billion), we appear to have become nearly as terrified of technology, of science -- of change -- as the Arab world, or the Vatican. We are proud both of our VCRs, and our claimed inability to program them.
I'm not knocking fantasy, but if we look only backward instead of forward, too, one day we will find ourselves surrounded by an electorate that has never willingly thought a single thought their great-grandparents would not have recognized. That's simply not acceptable. That way lies inconceivable horror, a bin Laden future for our grandchildren.
SF's central metaphor and brightest vision, lovingly polished and presented as entertainingly as we knew how to make it, has been largely rejected by the world we meant to save. Because I was born in 1948, the phrase I'll probably always use to indicate something is futuristic is "space age."
There were doubtless grown adults at Torcon 3 who were born after the space age ended. The very existence of the new Robert A. Heinlein Awards, given for the first time at Torcon to honour works that inspire manned exploration of space, proves a need was perceived to foster such works.
About the only part of our shared vision of the future that actually came to pass was the part where America just naturally took over the world. But while it's prepared to police (parts of) a planet, the new Terran Federation is so far not interested enough to even glance at another one.
Inconceivable wealth and limitless energy lie right over our heads, within easy reach, and we're too dumb to go get them -- using perfectly good rockets to kill each other, instead.
The day Apollo 11 landed, I knew for certain men would walk on Mars in my lifetime. So did the late Robert Heinlein -- I just saw him say so to Walter Cronkite last weekend, on kinescope.
I'm no longer nearly so sure. The Red Planet is as close as it's been in 60,000 years -- and the last budget put forward in Canada contained not a penny for Mars. (Please, go to http://www.marssociety.com and sign the protest petition there.)
At Torcon 3, I caught up with Michael Lennick, co-producer of a superb Canadian documentary series about manned spaceflight, Rocket Science. His next project examines the growing phenomenon of people who refuse to believe we ever landed on the moon. Not because he sees them as amusing cranks . . . but because they're becoming as common as Elvis-nuts. And it's hard to argue with their logic: It beggars belief, they say, that we could possibly have achieved moon flight . . . and given it up.
On the other hand, I take heart that SF still exists, 50 years after the first Hugo was awarded. My wife's family are Portuguese fisherfolk from Provincetown, Mass., where every summer they've held a ceremony called the Blessing of the Fleet, in which the harbour fills with boats and the archbishop blesses their labours. The 50th-ever blessing was the last. There's no fishing fleet left. For the first time in living memory, there is not a single working fishing boat in P-town . . . because there are no cod or haddock left on the Grand Banks. For all its present problems, science fiction as a profession seems to have outlasted pulling up fish from the sea.
I believe with all my heart that the pendulum will return, that ignorance will become unfashionable again one day, that my junior colleagues are about to ignite a new renaissance in science fiction, and that our next 50 years will make the first 50 pale by comparison, taking us all the way to immortality and the stars themselves. If that does happen, some of the people who will make it so were in Toronto.
People still believe that men fished the Grand Banks, once. Some even dream of going back. SF readers have never stopped dreaming. We can't, you see. We simply don't know how.
B.C. writer Spider Robinson's latest novel is Callahan's Con.
Aw, go on, read one. They're nothing like the screen plays.
It's almost impossible to get a publisher interested in a new idea unless you've already sold a few stories that explore it and generated a positive buzz among the fans and critics.
Huh? I hadn't heard THAT!
No wonder!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Sorry (LOL), but I can't tell if you're joking or not.
I was looking for an agent, and introduced myself to a woman claiming to be an agent who was from Washington DC. She read my manuscript, then got back to me. She said that she thought the story was very good, but that she could not represent the work unless I made one teensy-weensy change: she wanted me to transform the story's hero into a lesbian female. (The story had absolutely nothing to do with sex - probably why it hasn't been published...).
I informed her that, unfortunately, the protagonist was a heterosexual male and there was precious little I could do about that.
Anyway, my story IS hard science fiction; no aliens, no other worlds, no mystic powers, just good old physics taken to the extreme. I think its an excellent story.
A bit of practical advice, though: I hope you're actually submitting the manuscript to actual publishers. It's a whole lot easier to get a good agent after you have some interest from a legit publisher.
A society that treats testosterone as an indicator for Prozac treatment will die on the planet it was born.
One of my first SF reads was Heinlein's "Door Into Summer".
Because Wyoming was no longer far enough away.
Agents live in New York, or Los Angeles. You didn't get an agent, you got a political hack/scam artist who is fronting for a vanity press. She probably has not made one sale to a legitimate press.
My assessment also. First it was the dystopic visions of the late 60s to early 70s, where the future changed from something wonderful to something horrible. Then the junk that turned away altogether -- I was furious when I bought the latest award-winner, "Of Mist, and Sand and Grass" by Vonda McIntyre (this is straight from memory so I might have part of it wrong) and found out what junk it was.
These days I tend to buy the annual Year's Best anthologies, and otherwise read from the collection gathered over the past 40 years.
You too? You know, I read every book in that relentlessly depressing series hoping for a happy ending of some sort. Ugh.
There are a couple of cultural factors working to push the pendulum away from "hard" SF - first, the notion, pushed by those on campus too stupid to understand engineering, that it is the social sciences and not the hard ones that will become predominant in solving the problems of society that constitute the backdrop to every hard SF novel. Second, the idea that it's harder to write - hard SF has rules that must be followed or it doesn't work; in the fantasy world anything (including the laws of physics) is negotiable. And third, it's kind of hard to get people involved with the explosion of incredible technologies in the real world - the Internet, GPS, computerized appliances, microtechnology, satellite communication, genetic engineering, to name but a few - to be impressed by anything more remarkable in fiction. Heck, it's hard to come up with a fictional idea more fantastic than today's reality, and that doesn't look to change for awhile.
But good writing will out, and it ages much more slowly than less-good writing. I saw a young relative of mine with a Heinlein novel in his hand not too long ago. It's kind of a tough standard.
More than 30 years have passed since the last Moon landing. Worse, the program was shut down before the enormous expenditure on research and development could be properly exploited, leading to the impression that we spent 40 billion dollars just to put 12 guys on a worthless rock for a few hours apiece.
The old idea of "our future in space" has worn pretty thin. It is the future now, and nothing has happened.
It could have been different, and this article explains why and how: 2001: No Space Odyssey
Check out this gang's homepage while you're at it: Nuclear Space. They are serious ogres and thought-criminals to the luddite eco-wacky mob, which makes their effort worthwhile all by itself.
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