Posthuman Blues

Rudy Rucker tells it like it is:

Science fiction is writing that analyzes some fast-changing aspect of society by extrapolating current trends into the future or into an alternate world. Traditionally science fiction has certain standard tropes that it uses, but new ones are being developed all the time --- I'm thinking of things like blaster guns, spaceships, time machines, aliens, telepathy, flying saucers, warped space, faster-than-light travel, holograms, immersive virtual reality, robots, teleportation, endless shrinking, levitation, antigravity, generation starships, ecodisaster, blowing up Earth, pleasure-center zappers, mind viruses, the attack of the giant ants, and the fourth dimension. I call these our "power chords," analogous to the heavy chords that rock bands use.

When a writer uses an SF power chord, there's an implicit understanding with the informed readers that this is indeed familiar ground. And it's expected the writer will do something fresh with the trope.

This implicit contract isn't honored by mainstream writers who dip a toe into "speculative fiction". These cosseted mandarins tend not be aware of just how familiar are the chords they strum. To have seen a single episode of Star Trek twenty years ago is sufficient SF research for them! And their running-dog lickspittle lackey mainstream critics are certainly not going to call their club-members to task over failing to create original SF. After all (think they), science-fiction writers and readers are subnormal cretins who cannot possibly have made any significant advances over the most superficial and well-known representations, and we should only be grateful when a real writer stoops to filch bespattered icons from our filthy wattle huts.

Don't misunderstand; some mainstream authors who dabble in SF are quite good -- I'm thinking of John Updike ("Toward the End of Time") and Margaret Atwood ("The Handmaid's Tale").

The problem, as Rucker points out, is the critical establishment's unadulterated fawning, which relegates worthy SF to the ghetto of geekdom. (One unfortunate by-product of this marginalization is the success of "techno-thrillers" by the likes of Michael Crichton, who shamelessly steal SF tropes and repackage them for dumbed-down audiences, all the while thinking they're operating at the genre's bleeding edge.)

Of course, some SF writers manage to make the arbitrary transition from "science fiction" to "literature" -- but usually posthumously, as in the case of Philip K. Dick.