After The Future Ended
Sep. 1st, 2003 05:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
coalescentIn the Sunday Times this week was this piece on the decline and fall of space exploration, featuring comments from JG Ballard, Brian Aldiss and Stephen Baxter. Ballard is brutal ("Nasa should be closed down. They’ve served their purpose. They’re just going to go on killing astronauts,") Aldiss is melancholy ("I feel very sad. When Mars was last as near as this, homo sapiens hadn’t left Africa. It seems terrible that we don’t have a spaceship to cover the brief distance,") and Baxter talks about throwing nuclear bombs under rockets ("The fall-out would have been dreadful, but if all had gone well you could have looked at reaching the moons of Jupiter by the 1980s"). Along the way Aldiss also opines about the state of the genre as a whole:
I'm inclined to think Aldiss is right here. You can count the number of hard SF writers - or at least the number of hard SF writers near the front of the field - on one hand, and it's tough going once you get beyond Baxter and Egan. Meanwhile, the big new things are Overclocked - Stross, Doctorow et al - the New Space Opera - Al Reynolds, Light and so on - and The New Weird - China Mieville, Justina Robson and the crew from The Third Alternative - and what all these movements have in common is a commitment to the aesthetic. Style currently trumps plausibility - which is not to say that the ideas aren't there, but that they're less grounded in reality. It's an attitude of 'don't let the facts get in the way of a good story,' with the implicit assumption that the facts will get in the way. The 'Accelerando' stories may originate in computer science, but they turn on the indistinguishability of sufficiently advanced technology from magic; and even Ted Chiang, possibly the most rigorous writer of the last decade, slides along the edges of fantasy as he sees fit. You can see it in TV spec-F as well; the triumph, if not of fantasy, then at least of the fantastic. At the same time, I think maybe there's an expansion of the self-reflective vein of nostalgia that's always been part of the field into something more melancholy - 'New Light On The Drake Equation,' 'Off On A Starship,' 'A Year In The Linear City' - or outright critical - The Light Ages - of dreams and wonder, and almost of the genre itself.
Baxter's take is different, as you might expect, but he's starting to sound somewhat isolated:
Aldiss, author of such key works as Non-Stop, Billion Year Spree and the Helliconia series, remembers the childhood thrill of reading HG Wells and Robert Heinlein, who wrote about moon landings long before they became reality. Later, Astounding Magazine became his inspiration.
"I read it avidly. I think science fiction now has gone haywire. There’s too much magic, too many wizards, too many dragons," he says.
In part, Aldiss blames the first moon landing, which hit the circulation of SF magazines. Reality could not match the dream. "Science fiction centred around the idea of manned space travel. And now the dream has gone. I think that sort of future has passed."
I'm inclined to think Aldiss is right here. You can count the number of hard SF writers - or at least the number of hard SF writers near the front of the field - on one hand, and it's tough going once you get beyond Baxter and Egan. Meanwhile, the big new things are Overclocked - Stross, Doctorow et al - the New Space Opera - Al Reynolds, Light and so on - and The New Weird - China Mieville, Justina Robson and the crew from The Third Alternative - and what all these movements have in common is a commitment to the aesthetic. Style currently trumps plausibility - which is not to say that the ideas aren't there, but that they're less grounded in reality. It's an attitude of 'don't let the facts get in the way of a good story,' with the implicit assumption that the facts will get in the way. The 'Accelerando' stories may originate in computer science, but they turn on the indistinguishability of sufficiently advanced technology from magic; and even Ted Chiang, possibly the most rigorous writer of the last decade, slides along the edges of fantasy as he sees fit. You can see it in TV spec-F as well; the triumph, if not of fantasy, then at least of the fantastic. At the same time, I think maybe there's an expansion of the self-reflective vein of nostalgia that's always been part of the field into something more melancholy - 'New Light On The Drake Equation,' 'Off On A Starship,' 'A Year In The Linear City' - or outright critical - The Light Ages - of dreams and wonder, and almost of the genre itself.
Baxter's take is different, as you might expect, but he's starting to sound somewhat isolated:
Despite the setbacks, Baxter believes the participation of science-fiction writers is as vital as ever. "Their role is that you have to conceive of being able to go to the moon or Mars before you can start the engineering. We’ve always been optimistic."
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Date: 2003-09-01 10:13 am (UTC)He wrote about angels. FUCKING ANGELS. That's a mite more than sliding along the edge!
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Date: 2003-09-01 10:17 am (UTC)Also, Tom's got this theory about why Chiang's a proper hard SF writer even though he writes about angels. I've never managed to get him to write it down, though.
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Date: 2003-09-01 10:19 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2003-09-02 07:28 am (UTC)