Troublemaker

[coalescent]

Matt Cheney is making trouble at Strange Horizons:

Don't tell anybody, but science fiction no longer exists.

Let me rephrase that, because though the statement is true, it's not entirely accurate. Try this: written science fiction has become two things—a genre and a style; the audience for the former is small and shrinking, while the audience for the latter is large, growing, and doesn't know of its own existence.

You all know that I've said this before. When I'm being fannish, I think I'm primarily being a fan of the genre; the commercially defined, readily identifiable stuff that everyone knows is sf. But more and more, when I think and write about the stuff that I like, I'm thinking and writing about the style, or the mode; the wider uses of the tools that sf allows, that make sf what it is, and why and how they work. I have Ian Macleod's The House of Storms waiting to be read, and I'm looking forward to it a lot, but I'm at least as excited, if not more so, about getting properly stuck into Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. I like the core stuff (hello! Baxter fan!), but I also want to follow the diaspora, to see what's going on out there.

Cheney concludes on a depressing note:

Today, David Bunch would be rejected by the major SF magazines and published by literary magazines such as Conjunctions and Fence. He would be compared to writers like Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, and George Saunders, and he would probably win a MacArthur "Genius" Grant. Young, celebrated writers like Matthew Derby and Ben Marcus would acknowledge the debt they owed him. "A science fiction writer?" people would say skeptically when anyone suggested that that was a label Bunch deserved. "No, he just writes about the implications of technology on what it means to be human, creating postmodern fables of alienated identity. That's not science fiction."

No, it's not. Not anymore.

Of course he's overstating the case--there are a good number of writers working in genre sf, particularly in this country, doing interesting things at novel-length, and the magazines, even the major ones like F&SF and SCIFICTION, aren't as straitjacketed as you might think from his column. But at the same time, of course he's got a point. Three genre stories are going into this year's Best American Short Stories, and though all of them are by authors closely associated with the sf community, of the stories themselves one comes from a small-press slipstream anthology, one appeared in Conjunctions, and one showed up online at Salon. SF is out there, and I'm not sure that we're keeping up.