March 11, 2005
1:11 PM, Friday, March 11, 2005
While we’re on the subject of the demise of SF: Following this note
As to our criteria for considering something a good pick for younger readers, well, I doubt I can reduce it to a formula. I tend to do a lot of channelling my inner 15-year-old; I know very well that there are stories (and subjects) that interest that person and stories that bore him to tears, but I'm not sure I can sum up the distinction in a few sentences. It’s not just a matter of young protagonists or “coming of age” narratives; there are stories we picked which feature neither. I do think younger readers are as a rule more interested in stories that tell them interesting and empowering things about how the world works, which is one of SF’s specialties overall, and less interested in stories that sensitively probe the confusions and ambivalances of people in middle age. Judith Berman had some pointed things to say about this in her 2001 essay Science Fiction Without the Future, a piece that made me want to stand up and cheer.
from Patrick Nielsen Hayden on Electrolite, in re the selections he and Jane Yolen made for The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy for Teens I just read (reread? parts seem familiar, parts un-) the Berman essay in question. And I found this bit particularly interesting:
Cowan’s sonde-ballon seems emblematic of millennial sf: in a trend presaged by steampunk, the archaic and the antique are replacing the techno-futuristic as the source of the very coolest things. Our more primitive past — in this case industrial and polluting rather than pastoral — has become, in Levi-Strauss’s words, good to think.
One suspects this phenomenon is connected to the fashion for new furniture with “distressed” finishes, and the practice of naming subdivisions after the pastoral landscapes they have replaced — Pine Woods, Mill Creek, Sunny Meadows. Things that are genuinely old are disappearing from everyday American experience. This loss of roots is part of the millennial alienation of many Americans, who feel adrift in a sea of images and information devoid of meaning. The primitive certainties of the past, represented by the sonde-ballon, might seem to be the only vehicle sufficiently authentic to navigate the millennial Mindscape.
The essay is largely devoted to an exploration of this phenomenon, or rather of a related super-phenomenon (hyper-phenomenon?), namely, the undeniable preoccupation of contemporary SF with nostalgia. (For a characteristic and, I would say, particularly egregious example of which see last year’s “Off on a Starship” by William Barton.) The connection, or suspicion of a connection, between that phenomenon and the general experience of “millennial alienation” gets only that one paragraph. What Berman goes on to talk about, mostly, is the need for SF to stop obsessing over its past, stare the present in the eye and imagine the future of that present. She concludes:
We can’t imagine the future if we can’t even look at the present. To connect with a wider, growing, more youthful audience, sf has to grapple with millennial horrors and alienation, with the rootlessness and ferment and absurdity, and, yes, with the millennial fear of the future, in ways other than to say, “I wish things weren’t like this. I liked it better in the past.” Without a vital link to the ever-changing Zeitgeist, sf will become a closed system where recycling subject matter and theme is all that’s possible. And science fiction right now seems to be not only losing its connection to and its interest in the Zeitgeist, but becoming antagonistic to it. Of course that brings with it declining relevance to anyone outside the narrowing circle.
It’s a fair cop. But I’d like to go back to that connection Berman mentions, take it one step further.
Science fiction’s traditional core obsession is with the idea of social change driven by technological advancement over time. A lot of us in the SF world tend to take that as a given — even as an eternal verity. But it isn’t — for most of the world today technological change is spacelike, not timelike (advanced technology comes to Africa not from the future, but from the US or Europe; to the US not from the future but — increasingly — from Asia and, for some reason, Finland); for most of human history, technological change has been so slow as to be imperceptible. The idea of Progress began with the Enlightenment and (even if little-p progress has kept going) was over, as a Big Idea, by the end of the “short 20th century” in the 90s, if not by the late 60s.
Isn’t it possible — likely, even — that science fiction’s traditional forward-looking orientation is as much a product of the forward-looking Zeitgeist in which it originated as nostalgic SF is a reaction to a Zeitgeist of millenial alienation? That science fiction used to imagine the future because society used to imagine the future, and not the other way around?
That the future, as Nathan Horn said, is just a fantasyland we can’t stop believing in?
