Is Science Fiction Still a Distinct Genre?
Some people are using the term Sprawl Fiction to encompass the incredible diversity of forms and concepts that classical scifi has spread out into. You could think of traditional Science Fiction as the built-up, established, older city core, and Sprawl as the rapidly expanding literary suburbs young writers are fleeing to in search of more elbow room to test out new ideas. So people who assert that "Science Fiction is dead" are looking at where scifi used to be and missing the bigger picture completely.
How, for example, to categorize a novel as transgressive as "Pattern Recognition" or as relentlessly surreal as "Perdido Street Station"? What will genre historians make out of a book like Rudy Rucker's "Saucer Wisdom," John Shirley's "Crawlers" or Jack Womack's "Random Acts of Senseless Violence"?
4 comments:
...Not to mention Pynchon!
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Whoa! I remember that Time magazine cover--do you know what date/year that appeared, M.T.?
It must be from at least 10 to 15 years ago. I was peripherally involved in the scene described in the article, knew one of the illustrators, and knew and socialized to a limited extent with some of the "cyberpunks" and hackers mentioned in this Time cover article, from within and outside of the old Mondo2000 "scene/zine."
Strange days, indeed! Live SciFi...! Oh, the true stories I could tell about that period in the SF/East Bay...but, I've been sworn to secrecy by the Illuminati, on pain of self-incrimination. 8^}
Never mind:
Time cover article from Feb. 8, 1993.
Jesus, has it been almost 14 years?!? Well, I did start social engineering/hackin' & phreakin' about beginning in early 1972. 35 years. I may begin to feel old in another decade or two at this rate....Ha!
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So, Mac, is there a genre of SF you would put Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" or "The Crying of Lot 49" into if you were compelled by alien beings to do so? Heh...
Anyone who has read stories as diverse as Theodore Sturgeon’s “"Yesterday Was Monday" (1941); or Philip K. Dick’s “The Transmigration of Timothy Archer” (1982); knows that bottle-rocket “sci-fi” was only one bud on a mauch larger tree that always, almost from the ealriest days, played with channel normal in every way imaginable.
Science Fiction (if we accept the generic appelation) is as amorphous and varied as Forteana.
Perdido Street Station seems like clear cut Steampunk, the bastard child of Cyberpunk and Victorian sci-fi. If you look at the milieu chronology of the fiction over the decades, the earlier sf writers of the Gernsback era went too far into the future for the tastes of what would become the Cyberpunk enthusiasts. Cyberpunk backed up and did near future, was more realistic if you will with the technology and the political possibilities. Star Trek communicators are push-to-talk cellphones predicted to be invented in hundreds of years from now. Many Gibsonian technologies are already here in less than 3 decades from their fictional origin, albeit it in less imaginative forms. And then there's Steampunk. Cyberpunk backed up so much it went into the past and revisited Victorian sf in a new light. Pattern Recognition seems something beyond. Gibson lived so much in the near future, he backed up some more and just fictionalized the present and made light of the sociological and psychological observations he's made about the world after such rampant technologies and phenomena like the internet, google, myspace and youtube have taken over our lives. But I think I've said too much already...
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