MIND MELD: What’s The Next Big Trend/Movement in SF/F Literature?

[Do you have an idea for a future Mind Meld? Let us know! This week's Mind Meld question was suggested by John Ginsberg-Stevens.]

Next big trend, you say? My choice, you say? I’d really like to see a return to ghost stories and see people do some interesting things with hauntings … or just the sorts of stories you can’t quite explain – and that don’t need an explanation of everything. The sort of short stories that leave you vaguely unsettled because they look like the surface of a lake and you can’t see how deep it is, but you can see shadows of things moving beneath. Yeah, ghost stories. An example? Ah, China Miéville’s “The Ball Room” in Looking for Jake is that perfectly creepy, ghostly, weird kind of story that doesn’t explain everything and leaves you feeling uncomfortable. It channels the same kind of spirit as Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw.

As a side note by a grumpy old woman, I’d also love to see a return to some of the traditional forms but using rules and lore that actually exist instead of making it up – e.g. vampires can’t cross water and they stink coz they’re basically dead meat and they drink blood! No matter much Obsession cologne you pour on it, a vampire is going to stink and isn’t sexy and it’s supposed to be scary not cuddly. Rules! Limitations! That’s how you challenge your characters.

“Neo-Oriental Cyber-Imperialism”! Take a near future post-colonial setting — best in Asia, but even the Balkans will do –, place it in a future dominated by natural environmental catastrophe and the global manipulations of Euro-American corporations allied with native elites, include AIs with retro-national qualities (this makes them seem “neo-indigenous”), simulations of archaic beliefs, neo-Ruritarian political intrigues — add a dash of feralized GM animals (cyber-beasts will do) — and a plotline with no possible realistic political resolution, since neither nature nor technology has any redeeming value any more. Good stuff and diversity — from Air to River of Gods to Wind-Up Girl, maybe even City and the City fits here (ironically).

Editor’s Note: Linnea, solicited the opinions of others at the convention she was attending when she received this invitation.

So. Here I am in the middle of the ConText23 con in Columbus, OH US tasked by our suave and debonair blogmaster to find answers. And he’s not paying my bar tab…

• Laura Bickle (Embers/Juno-Pocket): After a significant sigh…. “More literary fantasy. More epic fantasy. And, as well, more use of magic in the cross-over genres.”
• Linda Robertson (Vicious Circle/Pocket): “Were-hippos.” This, of course, as you, can imagine, stopped the conversation a bit but only for a few seconds given we were… where we were.
• Bookseller Sally Kobee of Larry Smith Booksellers saw the coming trend as being “more hard science” and in the paranormal genres, more psi-based talents and less “magic.” Overall though she sees a need for stronger science-based science fiction. She also sees steampunk as a continuing uptrend.

At that point the bar not only ran out of air-conditioning (true) but pear-essence for pear martinis. No way one could continue.

A few years ago, a group of younger SF critics and myself were discussing this very question at a gathering in London, and inevitably many were coming up with comical variations on “-punk.” I suggested that particular suffix had been beaten to death long ago, and that maybe we should retire it in favor of an even trendier suffix like “-core,” as in mumblecore movies or nerdcore hip hop. That idea went nowhere fast-”singularity-core” just didn’t have a ring to it-so we pretty much gave up.

Then I started to think about that other hashtag warhorse, “the new”-as in New Weird, New Space Opera, New Horror, etc. But these merely seemed to be rebrandings of old subgenres, and didn’t really tell us what these writers were actually doing to make things new.

But earlier this year, while reviewing several year’s best anthologies, another idea came to me. One of the stories was Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette’s “Mongoose,” set on a space station endangered by Van Vogtian monsters. Old-fashioned space opera, right? But the story came from Ellen Datlow’s Lovecraft Unbound, the space stations all have names like Kadath, Dunwich, and Providence, the aliens get their names mostly from Lewis Carroll (boojums, snarks, toves, bandersnatches), the plot and the title carry deliberate echoes of Kipling and, just for good measure, there are a few scattered references to Pooh and Poe as well, and the spacecraft have names like Jenny Lind and Manfred von Richthofen.

Later in this same anthology (Jonathan Strahan’s Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy) was a story by Eileen Gunn and Michael Swanwick called “Zeppelin City,” which at first looks like a simple exercise in steampunk, featuring characters with names like Radio Jones and Amelia Spindizzy, but is also a classic screwball comedy and includes mad disembodied brains, Heinleinian moving sidewalks, and a complete alternate-world Marx Brothers version of Chaplin’s Modern Times.

The chaos and cacophony of a Marx Brothers movie seemed like a good signature for this new trend in gonzo fiction which seems not to fit neatly into any particular subgenre, but to simply borrow anything it damn well pleases from anywhere-near-future SF, alternate history, steampunk, space opera, pulp adventure, hard SF, film, mainstream fiction, surrealism, fantasy, horror, etc. Paul di Filippo’s “Yes, We Have No Bananas” from last year’s Eclipse Three is another example that came to mind, but there are many more.

At the end of that review of “Zeppelin City” I wrote that Swanwick has “always been one of the ringmasters of the new cacophony,” so the New Cacophony is the name I’m choosing for my movement-not fiction in the interstices, not slipstreamy cross-pollinations with the mainstream, not reinventions of old subgenres, but all of the above and more. If I wanted to come up with a more academic sounding name, it might be something like genre dissonance, but New Cacophony is more fun. It’s using any toy in the sandbox, plus any more you want to bring up from the basement. The only rule is that they have to somehow work together in the story.

There are ancestors of this movement going back decades-Philip José Farmer is among the most notable. But the reason I chose Swanwick as an example can be found in The Iron Dragon’s Daughter and especially The Dragons of Babel, in which nearly every marker that seems to give you genre bearings is undercut by another that seems wildly out of place-not just those famous afterburner-assisted mechanical dragons, but a Babylon with Frank Lloyd Wright lounges in which palace courtiers check their Blackberries, saloons decorated with pictures of Muhammad Ali, Kawasaki motorcycles and Mercedes and BMW cars, Pepsis, subways, Grand Central Station, McDonalds, Marlboros, Zippos, Duke Ellington songs, brownstones, Hermes bags (for carrying runes), Hard Rock Café t-shirts, Givenchy gowns, living stone lions who read Faulkner and wise women who quote Mary McCarthy.

In other words, it’s sheer cacophony. And it’s wonderful.

Experience. Content will be laced with it. Interactivity to the nth degree. Authors of science fiction and fantasy will be at the forefront (as usual) of the escapist experience, offering up virtual worlds embedded in their work. Plotlines, story arcs, full-bodied characters, they will all be there, but no one will care. The important thing will be how real the virtuals are.

At first science fiction authors will provide virtual trips to outer space, bringing entire galaxies within the reach of the reader. As more people make the voyage, though, the prestige factor will wane and the journey to the stars will appear about as interesting as the daily commute. People will demand “actuality.” Authors will step up to the challenge, offering actual experience.

The new content will reflect the changing culture. As the world becomes safer for democracy, it will become boring. Disease will be cured and there will be no more sickness. As money is finally distributed equitably, poverty and strife will disappear as well. The new fiction will need to reflect that. Old-fashioned ideas of conflict in a novel will no longer be relevant or even understood. Stories of experience will be all that is left for the author to work with.

At the same time, people will be fascinated with history and things they’ve never seen or felt. In the digitized books of yore they will find accounts of pain and ill health and they will desire it. They will demand books on the bubonic plague from which they can contract it. Wealthy readers will pay thousands of dollars if an author can guarantee a broken limb in one of their books. The highest paid author will be the one that can not only provide a spinal injury or burst appendix, but ensure the plotline cannot be jiggered (more on that later) to provide a surgeon to fix it, resulting in the reader being wheelchair bound or better yet, dead, for the rest of his or her life.

Naturally there will be thousands of self-help books for reversing previous books’ damage in case the reader has a change of heart somewhere down the road. The only conflict in the new science fiction will be between the authors: those that create tragedy and those that fix it.

Experience. To the nth degree. Subject matter will no longer matter. What goes with the subject matter will matter. Authors will not be writers anymore, they’ll be hosts in every sense of the word: every launch will be an event, a party with engraved invitations sent out to the entire fan base; at the same time, readers will feed on the author like intestinal parasites. The consumers will consume, especially since the new f/sf actualities come with taste and smell. Electronic literature will evolve to its logical conclusion when the word that is fairly disposable in our lifetime becomes edible. Our hosts, the authors, will not be known so much for their compositions as for their abilities in composing exotic flavors and shi shi fragrances.

Publishers that insist on reissuing the “classics” especially those from the 18th century with their meandering dialogue and overwritten texts will finally get sued for producing indigestible material. Something we’ve been itching to do since the phrase “required reading” entered the vocabulary.

The author of the new science fiction will hire ex-Dreamworks employees to create digital worlds to spec based on their latest book’s requirements. These worlds will be embedded into the ebooks and radioed to the readers’ brains via specially designed transmitters, using protocols unique to each. The transmitters will not be hackable to one size fits all; they will work only for the book purchased. The transmitter will be snail mailed to the purchaser’s home upon satisfactory credit check. All books will be free. Transmitters will cost $9.99.

Every city in the world with a population greater than 100,000 will be the site of a new book’s launch. All launches will be held on the exact same date and each one will be attended by the author. To prepare for the great launch, the author will create multiple copies of him or herself using any one of the methods described in the science fiction canon. The most common procedure will involve growing bodies in vats and then uploading the author’s mind.

Food served at the launch will be chosen to complement the flavor of the book based on the ancient rules of Tai Chi, Feng Shui, and La Choy.

At the launch every human on earth will receive an e-autographed copy of the book. Those that actually purchase the book will be given bonus material: the author’s unpublished email address. This will give the purchaser the means to request changes in his or her version of the book. Changes will not only be allowed but encouraged. From names of characters to plot points, anything is negotiable. Ice-nine doesn’t have to block the channels, Hal can be a benevolent computer ensuring Dave returns safely to Earth, and soylent green can be just an exotic type of bean curd.

Most books will be little more than scavenger hunts filled with Easter eggs, McGuffins, typos, errors of omission, split infinitives, and commercial messages such as invitations to drink Ovaltine. Readers that find all the hidden content will be rewarded with the phone number of the author who will then invite the winner to collaborate with him or her on the next book in the series. Some of these collaborators will be surprisingly talented. Often the author will give up authorship (hostship) of the remaining books in the series to this talented winner. The author’s name will continue to be used on the cover but the checks will go to the new guy. No one will know who the actual author is, perhaps even the original author him or herself. Eventually the original author will glom onto some rival author’s storyline, something she’s always fantasized about doing, and become that writer.

Science fiction and fantasy will be written and experienced by us all. We will all read it, write it, experience it, change it. Maybe there will only be one book. The Book. It will evolve and grow and there will be no more one specific book. It will be all books and at the same time the only one. It will blur the edges of reality. We will not know where the book ends and our lives begin. The Book will be our lives and our dreams melded. Mind melded.

I think the next movement in science fiction is already here–a subgenre I’ve attempted to describe as SciFi Strange. These stories combine the literary standards of the New Wave movement, the sensawunda of the golden age of science fiction, and the cultural understandings of today’s increasingly diverse world. In addition, SciFi Strange also flirts with the boundaries of what is scientifically and realistically possible without being constrained by our rather limited view of the universe.

Because the science in these stories often strays into the frontiers of scientific possibility–where science becomes almost philosophical in nature–some readers and reviewers mistake this type of fiction for fantasy. However, this is wrong. SciFi Strange is simply an updated version of the literature of ideas. And much as the New Wave movement and Cyberpunk defined science fiction during their days, I believe SciFi Strange is already leaving its stamp on the genre.

Many writers of SciFi Strange are young and first came to the genre by experiencing science fiction in film and video games (meaning they don’t see the term SciFi as derogatory but instead as celebratory). The more established of these authors publish their stories in Fantasy and Science Fiction and Asimov’s, while the newer ones can be found in Interzone, Clarkesworld Magazine, and Strange Horizons.

Among the writers creating this type of science fiction are Ted Chiang, Paolo Bacigalupi, Rachel Swirsky, Mercurio D. Rivera, Hannu Rajaniemi, Lavie Tidhar, Yoon Ha Lee, Caroline M. Yoachim, and others. In addition, writers known more for their fantasy–including Eugie Foster, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Jay Lake, and Nnedi Okorafor–have written some amazing SciFi Strange stories. In fact, Eugie Foster’s “Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast” is not only a perfect example of SciFi Strange, it won the 2009 Nebula Award for Best Novelette and is a finalist for the 2009 Hugo Award.

I recently posted a “SciFi Strange dream anthology” with links to stories by many of the authors mentioned above. However, if I had to pick one recent story to represent SciFi Strange, I would choose “The Spontaneous Knotting of an Agitated String” by Lavie Tidhar. Originally published in Fantasy Magazine, the story follows Mrs. Pongboon, a Laotian woman who sells talismans to ease your mind off whatever troubles you. But instead of this being a fantasy featuring magic and spells, Tidhar crafts solid science behind these talismans. Basically, Mrs. Pongboon has a machine to remove any memory you desire. The memory is then stored in a small charm so you can access it later. While this is presented as the best of both worlds, naturally the process isn’t that simple. And even without our bad memories, problems in life still arise, much as a string pulled free of its spindle still develops knots.

Tidhar’s story is beautifully told and emotionally gripping, and presents a future which is not only all too possible but feels like it simply must come true. I fully expect this story to make the award ballots next year and to be reprinted in some of the year’s best anthologies.

What’s interesting about SciFi Strange is that so far this type of story has been mainly seen in the shorter story-telling formats. However, I believe we will see more novel-length SciFi Strange stories in the coming years. An early example of this is The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, which won the 2009 Nebula Award for Best Novel. While The Windup Girl is a classic dystopian novel, it also contains all the elements of SciFi Strange, from beautifully written language to an awe-inspiring sensawunda ending.

As both a reader and a writer, I’m more interested in variety than in specific movements. In the young adult field, there are currently plenty of examples of both exciting and not-so-exciting work that can be filed under headings like steampunk, dystopian, paranormal romance, etcetera. I’m always on the look out for more boundary pushing work–novels that span different subgenres, novels that reinvent rather than rehash. I’d love to see the fantasy offerings in YA begin to open back up to admit more books that aren’t paranormal romance. There’s excellent, exciting work being done under the paranormal romance heading (both in the adult romance and YA fields), but what I’d really like is the not-so-exciting offerings to make way for more inventive urban fantasies (like Holly Black’s Curse Workers series or Sarah Rees Brennan’s Demon’s Lexicon), challenging dystopias (like Paolo Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker or Patrick Ness’s Chaos Walking series), or, say, more examples of steampunk set in well-developed worlds, be they alternate futures or Victorian-esque pasts (like Phillip Reeves’ Fever Crumb or Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan series). But perhaps the fact I can name examples of the kind of surprising books I’d like to see more of means they’re easier to find than I think. Still, we can never have too many surprising, excellent books, right?

Here’s my pick, cobbled together from echoes of the past, and about as good at predicting the future as SF is, which, to quote Warren Ellis, is to say that “[G]ood science fiction, challenging science fiction, is never about the future we expect. Sf has never been about predicting the future. It’s been about laying out a roadmap of possibilities, one dark street at a time, and applying that direction to the present condition.” This standpoint informs both my idea of SF and what I have conjured as my future literary trend.

I’ve been reading about some of the movements of the past, from good ol’ New Wave to the Mundane SF Movement (and even farther back, re-reading some of Sam Moskowitz’s books). Geoff Ryman gave a very thoughtful, sometimes playful, GoH speech at BORÉAL in 2007 about his take on SF. In it, he makes a great off-hand observation, that Mundanes “translates into French as ‘Profanes’. I think this sounds a lot more exciting, as a movement.” I completely agree! So, I would like to “translate” the Mundanes. . . into the Profanes.

The Mundane SF Manifesto has produced a lot of discussion. A LOT. I would like to move past that and just, well, profane the entire thing. The Profanes are not interested in being simply vulgar, but are quite keen to treat some tenets of the genre with irreverence and to inject a small amount of desacralization into the genre(s). Rather than obsessing over verities or clinging to one idea of how SF(and/or fantastika overall) works, the Profanes want to have very purposeful fun with a host of ideas, dropping some of them, half-starved and craving freedom, into a pit where one knife lies in the center. They want to be a bit Durkheimian, a bit Joycean, and a little Moorcockian, all at same time.

Eschewing a provocative manifesto, the Profanes have little in the way of a declaration of principles. The stories themselves are profane, provocative in intent while using cherished AND cutting-edge tropes and ideas to construct their tales. They cut to the heart of what literature does, and intensify the experience of reading by both embracing and warping the conventions of sf and fantasy. This is not a new technique; people have been messing with and mutating tropes and plotlines throughout the history of the genres. What the Profanes bring to the table is an awareness of how essentially sf and fantasy amplify the power of stories to stretch people’s imaginations and assumptions, to infect dreams and debate preconceptions. They are interested in the social impact, but as fertilizer for their productions. They do not want to predict, but to prognosticate; they want to foreshadow what now may do to tomorrow, whether in some historicized future or some marvelous, completely fabricated alterity.

The Profanes love fantastic literatures critically and passionately, yet are stupefied by them. They are seduced by the fantastic and want to draw readers into these other-worlds; not to distract or lull them into a torpor of information overload or pointlessness, but to engender a wider awareness of how our own world works, They understand, as Rudy Rucker put it, “that SF is more like surrealism. The idea is to shock people into awareness. Show them how odd the world is.” They take Fletcher Pratt’s assertion (which I completely agree with) that all literature is fantasy and run with it, for the purpose of engaging people’s sense of wonder while undermining the cultural and social givens and aphorisms that often reduce our vision rather than enhance it. Profanes point out that the Emperor has no clothes, and that all of us, to some degree, are in a state of undress.

But this is not an attempt to be some sort of revolutionary elite; the goal is to shake things up, but not demolish them completely. Love of story, of the how the fantastic can both comfort and upset our notions of what life is all about, is the starting point for the Profanes. Impertinence, not mean-spiritedness, is the closest thing to a guideline they possess. They despise demagoguery, but must be careful lest they fall prey to its vicious charms. To be a Profane is to turn the playful, but sometimes harsh light of profanity onto one’s own ideas and work. Profanes toe the line between Rabelaisian and Pragmatic ideals, and, sadly, some of them may fail in this balancing act and descend into self-parodying carnivalesque prose or “stories” that are little more than hectoring moral tales. It is then that the rest of the Profanes rise up and roast this unfortunate artist with an anthology that parodies their excesses. They then get that person drunk (or, fill them with ice cream if they do not drink) at the next con.

The representative story? That is the tough part of the question to answer. Like many things, you know it when you see it. You read a story and it opens up all sorts of strangeness in your mind, but not some sort of temporary insanity or head-scratching conundrum. It creates a change in mood about something. Perhaps it gives the grotesque a bit more humanity, or points out a new way that life is unfair. It takes something beloved, or unknowingly powerful, and shows you why it should, perhaps, be challenged. Not discarded, or annihilated, but looked at with a bit more wisdom, with some cognizance that it is partial, impermanent, or mildly fraudulent. The Profanes use SF to remind us that life is a giddy thing, but that it neither its starting point, nor its ending, and that if we do not keep asking questions, keep squinting to see new details, we miss out on what it truly has to offer us.

Taking my cue from Charles Yu’s absolutely brilliant new book, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, I see the following possible alternative universe futures breaking off from our own future, which will be destroyed by global warming within ten years, thus making all trends and movements moot. You will want to build yourself a TM-31 Recreational Time Travel Device and get yourself to one of these enclaves…

• Microism: A new trend in which up-and-comers riff off of one existing established author. For example, we will see such movements as Chiangpunk, Linkpunk, Morganpunk, Okoraforpunk, Atwoodpunk, etc.
• Next Wave: The genre community will keep trending multi-cultural and, at the same, trend less commercial and more personal, in part because many of the non-white authors entering the field are also not restricting themselves to traditional narrative approaches. This is a Good Thing in general for non-realistic fiction, and, even better, these differing perspectives aren’t coming in one at a time but in waves. Waves of kick-ass. I long for the day when I can write a story in code and be called too traditional.
• Samepunk: The world is overrun by literary zombies, werewolves, vampires, and by zombies, werewolves, and vampires repurposed to run the engines of Victorian- and Edwardian-era novels to the point of public vomiting. As a result, even the Disney Corp. becomes so sick of the boredom of it all that it relents in its claw-like hold on lobbying for copyright restrictions, so that at least the mash-ups can be updated to embed zombies, werewolves, and vampires into 1950s Beat novels or something.
• Steampunkforeverpunk: Genre will be forever encrusted, like peppercorn tuna, with the baroque stylings of Steampunk, which will eventually account for 95 percent of all genre fiction and about 50 percent of the mass of the planet, excluding the biomass of squid, if you take into account not only the biomass of humans who self-identify as Steampunks, but also the Things the Steampunks have Created, including books.
• Connpunk: Stealthvirus Brian Conn will rewire all of our brains by 2015 and connect them to the Mother Spider that we may power the engines of his narrative monsters. No book not written by Conn will exist by 2020. All hail Conn. (Damn you, Conn.)
• TMpunk: Characters from Star Wars and Star Trek will manifest in our universe/time-stream and begin to write their own novels about our mundane existence as push-back against being written into tie-in novels.

Related posts:

1. MIND MELD: The Literature Of Ideas
2. MIND MELD: Taboo Topics in SF/F Literature
3. Mind Meld Make-Up Test with Yoon Ha Lee
4. Mind Meld Make-Up Test with Mike Resnick
5. Mind Meld: Now It’s Your Turn

Filed under: Mind Meld

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