I think the garden metaphor you use here is compelling, and I did not get that sort of image from your piece. But I am unsure if “a culture with clear boundaries and a clear ideological purpose” is possible at this point. Fields of literary production are much more open and porous while “relevance” as a timid invocation shows up far more than serious attempts to examine the contemporary moment. I am not sure that planting seeds in a cordoned-off area will create a high yield, but I do agree that the potential of the literature is vastly underutilized. There are lessons we can learn in looking back, but I am not sure that trying to reconstitute SF in a very different social context will work. The question I have is, what IS possible now, and how can we create literature that speaks more to the present through speculative and fantastical lenses?

Regarding genres and agency, my view is that genres are categories, ideas, and discursive tools that participants in a field of production use. Genres are not active, but are activated by individuals and shared within groups. “Genre” is used far too often in a monolithic way, so I try to situate it in a field of production which is partly an arena of struggles over meaning and various forms of capital (drawing on Bourdieu). Genres do not act and rarely have firm boundaries. Participants in a field use ideas such as genre to identify and codify literary productions and their social uses, which for example is what Paul Kincaid and the rest of us have been doing in this discussion. Sometimes these uses of genre are illuminating, but it’s easy to lose sight of those lower-order entities who rarely all use the idea in agreement and thus lose the contentious nature of such terms.

* Can’t speak for Heinlein and Clarke due to not having read all that much of their stuff.

“I don’t actually think that Heinlein, Wells, Clarke or Asimov are worth reading other than as part of some historical research project.”

Really?

Jonathan McCalmont said:

“For example, I don’t think that space flight has any place in the science fiction I’m looking for… we’re no more going to colonise the stars than we are going to battle an army of orcs. That future seemed plausible in the 1950s but now it’s little more than an empty fantasy and a vapid nostalgia trip.”

Geoff Ryman and the rest of the mundane SF people want to have a word with you! Why didn’t you support them way back when — for example — Interzone published the special mundane SF issue?

So maybe, possibly, they weren’t so dreadfully wrong, after all?

I think that Paul is far fonder of traditional SF than I am. I don’t actually think that Heinlein, Wells, Clarke or Asimov are worth reading other than as part of some historical research project. So if you think I’m harkening back to some golden age of great science fiction then you are *very much* mistaken.

The only reason I suggest looking backwards at all is because I think that — terrible as most of them were — those old SF stories embraced the idea that SF was its own little garden that was quite distinct both from mainstream literature and from the rest of what Clute calls Fantastika. Though insular and stunted, that scene allowed the creation of a form of literature that is pretty much unique in all of human history.

Since its inception, that scene has been pulled out of shape first by an infusion of values from the literary mainstream in the form of the New Weird and then, more recently, in the form of a postmodern rapprochement with fantasy.

By importing values from other scenes and allowing the free movement of writers from one tradition to another, science fiction has become more diverse but this diversity has come at the expense of what made science fiction so unique in the first place. What once was a tiny garden is now an enormous field.

What I would like to see is a return to the science fictional garden and the creation of a literary culture similar to the one that created science fiction in the first place… a culture with clear boundaries and a clear ideological purpose of using fiction as a means of making sense of the world. This isn’t even remotely the same thing as requesting a return to golden age SF as neither the world nor the future we see from here in any way resembles that which confronted the writers of golden age SF. For example, I don’t think that space flight has any place in the science fiction I’m looking for… we’re no more going to colonise the stars than we are going to battle an army of orcs. That future seemed plausible in the 1950s but now it’s little more than an empty fantasy and a vapid nostalgia trip.

As for the idea that genres don’t have agency, I direct your attention to the term ‘Supervenience’. What is a genre if not a collection of lower-order entities such as authors, critics, consumers, publishers and editors? each of these possess causal agency and by looking at their collective actions at a higher level of abstraction, one can see genre as a system that acts and reacts in response to various events and stimuli. When you say:

““SF” and “genre” are not agents, but conventions and discursive tools that everyone involved in the field reproduce and refashion”

I see a distinction without a difference.

Agreed on all counts. #3 is hard to keep in mind sometimes, with the waves of rhetoric and propaganda out there about the future being “now.” I think #4 is what we need to focus on when we look at what is being produced.

Absolutely. For me, novels such as Disch’s ON WINGS OF SONG, Delany’s NOVA and TROUBLE ON TRITON, Russ’ THE FEMALE MAN, and LeGuin’s “The Word for World is Forest” were not designed to be mimetic projections, but they spoke volumes about the present by using the future as a theatre for their speculative dramas. Kincaid is not as focused on the utilitarian as McCalmont seems to be, but his idea of a graspable future seems to be one that is about recognition in a positivist mode. That is one way to approach SF, but it is neither the only one nor is it necessarily the best one.

The problems that I see stem more from a combination of longing for a return to a mode of genre that is outdated and has less resonance in the present, and an unreflective reproduction of assumptions (that are eagerly consumed by part of the readership) about what SF stories can and should do. Is there some postmodern excess here and there? Sure, but it is not some contagion that has infected SF’s precious bodily fluids. The field has more resilience than that because there are also writers who are producing powerful stories that, as Athena noted, tend to be on the margins and unseen or unengaged by the core readership.

My thought is that we’re in the early 80′s again, in genre, and the field is looking for the next strain to add to the Fugue of Genre. At the moment, the current voices (in the musical sense of the term) seem to be heading toward a low point almost as if in anticipation of the next voice…

And here is where I disagree with the axiom on which these arguments are based. When I look at the great works of science fiction that I grew up with, I don’t see studied projections of a plausible future. Herbert’s Dune, Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, Robinson’s Callahan’s stories, Zelazny’s Lord of Light, Bester’s Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination, and Haldeman’s Forever War. Which one of these are we saying get their power by being set in a plausible future? In what way is psychoactive space fuel that grows on a planet full of sandworms or learning how to spontaneously teleport an engagement with the future?

Science Fiction is and, I think, has always been more about the time in which it is being written than about the future it imagines, and the exhaustion I see in the field springs more from an increasingly narrow and inaccurate definition of what the genre is. Speculation and prediction have a place at science fiction’s table, but there’s an awful lot of other projects there too.