Rudy, you say, “I’ve always felt that SF is more like surrealism. The idea is to shock people into awareness.” My feeling is that SF takes you to unfamiliar territory and then rubs your nose in something, and the particular SF trippy zing effect happens because it’s a real something, however mapped. Some connection to reality or realism-attitude gives the author a grip on your guts and your brain.

I’m not sure realism per se, relevance, responsibility and predicting the future are the right astringents, but still it’s a scary question whether SF is imperceptibly or inadvertently giving up that particular grip, authority, magic.

I would also like to clarify that nowhere do Mundaners say that FTL/aliens/AI is impossible, they just say its very unlikely. Overall, though, I think SF is about the fiction more than the science, and thats the way its always been. It’s important to remember that its all just entertainment.

One trap I don’t think opponents of mundane SF should fall into is defending why FTL/aliens/AI etc *might* be possible. That just lets the mundanes say, “Hey, look how wacky they are, talking about teleportation while we talk real science.” It doesn’t matter if those things are plausible because, as is wisely noted here, SF isn’t really about predicting the future.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMBNdDs-q4E

Be they pitchforks or harps or SF writers or other musicians of various and sundry sorts.

It’s an article saying SF is obsolete and “has suddenly and entirely ceased to matter.”

Imagine my fury!

The essay is lame BS by a professional pontificator who doesn’t actually read SF—other than Michael Crichton.

He went to a SFWA gathering, got creeped out by our looks and the cheap venue (generic hotel room with bean dip buffet) and he decided the field is dead.

His reasoning: (a) SF is for proposing ideas about the future in fictional form, (b) fiction doesn’t matter anymore, as people prefer putting their opinions into pontificating essays and blogs, (c) our technology is changing so fast that predicting the future is impossible.

Rebuttal: (a) SF is an ecstatic visionary art form akin to surrealism and the primary goal is to understand the present, (b) independent art is more important than ever as a last stand against psychic McDonaldsization, (c) in the face of change, we need wild and demented SF as the best possible way for conceptualizing what’s happening around us.

Shorter rebuttal. The guy is saying “I don’t read SF anymore, therefore it doesn’t matter.”

Still shorter and non-vocal: The Finger, followed by turning my back and walking away.

I don’t think the Discover attack bears directly on the to-Mundane-or-not-to-Mundane discussion, though. Either camp could argue that their approach is the most likely to produce SF likely to stem the abuse by morons like the Discover essayist. I’d say, let’s all keep writing SF any old way! Solidarity against the tyranny of consensus reality!

SF isn’t dying. It’s only just starting.

I think I myself prefer writing escape literature. And I feel I am taking care to make NEW kinds of Buddha statues.

I don’t view it solely as escape, though. As I discussed in my own manifesto years ago, “The Transrealist Manifesto,” I view the SF tropes as tools for delving into the human psyche. Objective correlatives for archetypal truths. (You can find the Transrealist Manifesto on my Writing page.)

The really likely and bummer futures just aren’t something I want to think about or write about. My sense is that all the news I hear is already about those things, and I do, yes, want to escape from it. I always have a sense that bad news is a way for the government to control me by frightening me. Like the popes with Hell, or Bush with terrorism, but on a continuing perennial day to day scale. My sense is always that there is so much more to day to day reality than newspaper topics.

But I grant that it could be well worth while for some SF-trained authors to go there. And hopefully come up with something wonderful and surprising. Not just more bad news.

Now, I am sure the artists and craftsmen and devotees could see the subtle variations and style of the one entity worthy of building a statue of. But to my foreign eyes, there is so much else. If I had been king of Thailand I would have passed a law that for one week a year all artists had to make statues that were not of the Buddha. Wouldn’t that have been something?

To me, so much SF looks like those Buddha statues. Repetitive rehashing of the same themes in a limited number of ways, subtle variations that are of no consequence to an outsider. Why not broadly categorize what’s being done, and demand something else for one week a year?

What’s being done is escaping. Consistently, SF is about breaking physical laws, getting saved by aliens, downloading our brains into cyberspace, in order to avoid the future that Science tells us is likely to occur.

There is undoubtedly a big void in the area. Stories in which the future comes and big things happen, and there is no lifeboat which lets us sneak away unscathed. The popular Science Fact books are at this place (such as Jared Diamond’s), but there’s little fiction present.

Now, you can either spawn off a tiny off-shoot of SF to occupy the space, or you can leave it empty for some dumb literary mainstream author to make his seminal mark there.

Which would you rather happen?