Maybe some of this peripheral stuff kinda dulls the lucid gleam of his argument. But you don't have to be a medieval Italian mathematician to smell the reek of decay in modern SF. Scholz is right. The job isn't being done here.
"Science Fiction" today is a lot like the contemporary Soviet Union; the sprawling possessor of a dream that failed. Science fiction's official dogma, which almost everybody ignores, is based on attitudes toward science and technology which are bankrupt and increasingly divorced from any kind of reality. "Hard- SF," the genre's ideological core, is a joke today; in terms of the social realities of high-tech post- industrialism, it's about as relevant as hard- Leninism.
Many of the best new SF writers seem openly ashamed of their backward Skiffy nationality. "Ask not what you can do for science fiction--ask how you can edge away from it and still get paid there."
A blithely stateless cosmopolitanism is the order of the day, even for an accredited Clarion grad like Pat Murphy: "I'm not going to bother what camp things fall into," she declares in a recent _Locus_ interview. "I'm going to write the book I want and see what happens ... If the markets run together, I leave it to the critics." For Murphy, genre is a dead issue, and she serenely wills the trash-mountain to come to Mohammed.
And one has to sympathize. At one time, in its clumsy way, Science Fiction offered some kind of coherent social vision. SF may have been gaudy and naive, and possessed by half-baked fantasies of power and wish-fulfillment, but at least SF spoke a contemporary language. Science Fiction did the job of describing, in some eldritch way, what was actually *happening*, at least in the popular imagination. Maybe it wasn't for everybody, but if you were a bright, unfastidious sort, you could read SF and feel, in some satisfying and deeply unconscious way, that you'd been given a real grip on the chrome-plated handles of the Atomic Age.
But *now* look at it. Consider the repulsive ghastliness of the SF category's Lovecraftian inbreeding. People retched in the 60s when De Camp and Carter skinned the corpse of Robert E. Howard for its hide and tallow, but nowadays necrophilia is run on an industrial basis. Shared-world anthologies. Braided meganovels. Role-playing tie-ins. Sharecropping books written by pip-squeaks under the blazoned name of established authors. Sequels of sequels, trilogy sequels of yet-earlier trilogies, themselves cut-and- pasted from yet-earlier trilogies. What's the common thread here? The belittlement of individual creativity, and the triumph of anonymous product. It's like some Barthesian nightmare of the Death of the Author and his replacement by "text."
Science Fiction--much like that other former Vanguard of Progressive Mankind, the Communist Party-- has lost touch with its cultural reasons for being. Instead, SF has become a self-perpetuating commercial power-structure, which happens to be in possession of a traditional national territory: a portion of bookstore rackspace.
Science fiction habitually ignores any challenge from outside. It is protected by the Iron Curtain of category marketing. It does not even have to improve "on its own terms," because its own terms no longer mean anything; they are rarely even seriously discussed. It is enough merely to point at the rackspace and say "SF."
Some people think it's great to have a genre which has no inner identity, merely a locale where it's sold. In theory, this grants vast authorial freedom, but the longterm practical effect has been heavily debilitating. When "anything is possible in SF" then "anything" seems good enough to pass muster. Why innovate? Innovate in what direction? Nothing is moving, the compass is dead. Everything is becalmed; toss a chip overboard to test the current, and it sits there till it sinks without a trace.
It's time to clarify some terms in this essay, terms which I owe to Carter Scholz. "Category" is a marketing term, denoting rackspace. "Genre" is a spectrum of work united by an inner identity, a coherent esthetic, a set of conceptual guidelines, an ideology if you will.
"Category" is commercially useful, but can be ultimately deadening. "Genre," however, is powerful.
Having made this distinction, I want to describe what seems to me to be a new, emergent "genre," which has not yet become a "category."
This genre is not "category" SF; it is not even "genre" SF. Instead, it is a contemporary kind of writing which has set its face against consensus reality. It is a fantastic, surreal sometimes, speculative on occasion, but not rigorously so. It does not aim to provoke a "sense of wonder" or to systematically extrapolate in the manner of classic science fiction.
Instead, this is a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the late twentieth century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility. We could call this kind of fiction Novels of Postmodern Sensibility, but that looks pretty bad on a category rack, and requires an acronym besides; so for the sake of convenience and argument, we will call these books "slipstream."
"Slipstream" is not all that catchy a term, and if this young genre ever becomes an actual category I doubt it will use that name, which I just coined along with my friend Richard Dorsett. "Slipstream" is a parody of "mainstream," and nobody calls mainstream "mainstream" except for us skiffy trolls.
Nor is it at all likely that slipstream will actually become a full-fledged genre, much less a commercially successful category. The odds against it are stiff. Slipstream authors must work outside the cozy infrastructure of genre magazines, specialized genre criticism, and the authorial esprit-de-corps of a common genre cause.
And vast dim marketing forces militate against the commercial success of slipstream. It is very difficult for these books to reach or build their own native audience, because they are needles in a vast moldering haystack. There is no convenient way for would-be slipstream readers to move naturally from one such work to another of its ilk. These books vanish like drops of ink in a bucket of drool.
Occasional writers will triumph against all these odds, but their success remains limited by the present category structures. They may eke out a fringe following, but they fall between two stools. Their work is too weird for Joe and Jane Normal. And they lose the SF readers, who avoid the mainstream racks because the stuff there ain't half weird enough. (One result of this is that many slipstream books are left- handed works by authors safely established in other genres.)
And it may well be argued that slipstream has no "real" genre identity at all. Slipstream might seem to be an artificial construct, a mere grab-bag of mainstream books that happen to hold some interest for SF readers. I happen to believe that slipstream books have at least as much genre identity as the variegated stock that passes for "science fiction" these days, but I admit the force of the argument. As an SF critic, I may well be blindered by my parochial point- of-view. But I'm far from alone in this situation. Once the notion of slipstream is vaguely explained, almost all SF readers can recite a quick list of books that belong there by right.