Am I going off sci fi?
Posted by bencooper | Filed under General
Blasphemy!
I don’t really think I’m going off sci-fi, but I have to say that of late I’m finding it very hard to become enthused about the genre.
Whenever I pick up a novel by one of the new(er) generation of SF, and by that I mean from the 80s onwards, I’m left cold. I read a hundred pages and struggle hard to get through what is often pretentious, self-consciously literary prose. Then I take a break. I leave it for a few days, maybe a week and nothing makes me want to finish said novel.
One of the criticisms leveled at SF (and many genres of fiction/music etc.) is that it hasn’t moved on, indeed that due to the inherent restrictions of genre conventions it cannot. That maybe (though I happen to disagree, and have good reasons for defending genre conventions and their use) but why doesn’t any of the new stuff I read grab me in the way Philip K. Dick’s work does. Dick was no stylist when it came to his writing, in fact he tended to write novels on amphetamine binges in a matter of weeks, but his books (even the lesser ones) are compulsively readable.
Authors like Dick, Clarke and Asimov were all story tellers with ideas. Their prose is generally plain, Dick’s verges on hard-boiled at times, and the narrative pushes forward. I feel it’s this narrative drive that is missing from a lot of modern SF. Who cares if the plot is a little cliché, the characters not quite three dimensional if it rattles along and entertains you? I’m not saying authors shouldn’t strive for the best quality prose, and wonderful characters…but sometimes it seems they get a little bit lost in their literariness.
Another thing that seems to have disappeared with narrative drive, and perhaps is intrinsically intertwined, is the concision of those “classic era” novels. When I look in the SF section of Waterstones or Smith’s all I see are brick sized books, 600 pages long or more, and quite often one of several in a series. Again, I’m not against length – a story is as long as you need to tell it, no? But I very rarely see those 200-300 page novels, unless they are re-prints of classics. Some would argue it’s the scope of the long novels, it requires so many pages. So are the novels of Dick, Clarke et al lacking in scope? I think not.
All this has been sparked by my flick through the latest copy of Interzone (223). Since subscribing to the magazine I’ve read very little short fiction that did it for me. There’s been a few but not much. And I’m in no way criticising the authors from a writers perspective, as I’m hardly a writer with a fine pedigree of published work. I’m simply stating that most of the fiction Interzone publishes leaves me cold, as a reader. I really wish it didn’t.
Anyway, that’s all for now. I’m just crabby because DHL still haven’t delivered my new notebook!
Later.
One Response to “Am I going off sci fi?”
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Leigh Barlow Says:
July 25th, 2009 at 12:03 amA few things sprung to mind when I read you post:
1. I haven’t read any sci-fi for about a year now, but that’s because I’m reading very little (I really music start buying audio books as podcasts are the only thing I have time for) and there are so many non-fiction books I want to read.
2. I don’t think all science fiction in the last few years falls foul of being overly written: take Peter F. Hamilton as an example.
3. Is the urge to concentrate on the writing style rather than the plot the same as the computer games industry’s need to have better graphics over compelling game play?
To all of this I would add the note that I’m very behind the wave as far as reading goes. I have never purchased a science fiction magazine, so my short story consumption has only been in the form of the odd Asimov and Clarke collections I have read. The books I have read in this genre have normally been available for at least five years. Neverness I read in 2006, Revelation Space in 2007. For me these were new and exciting and by then the world had moved on. I have tried to rectify this by noting down the nominations for various awards, but as I have a back-log of books to read this has become a moot point.
I was also interested to hear William Gibson comment in an interview that he doesn’t read science fiction at all. Is this, I am still wondering, a better way to gather ideas? By reading in the same genre I wish to write in am I at risk of just mimicking? I don’t think so as long as my other forms of input are extensive, but who knows.
Still, to return to the crux of your post, and my thoughts on the subject, I don’t disagree that some of the sci-fi authors out there are now aiming at a different level (style?) of writing than was being produced in the previous century, and maybe this is at the detriment to the story itself, but there are also plenty of other authors out there who write like Dick et al. Hamilton is just one example, but Adams also springs to mind as does Banks. (As an aside, when I have read both Adams and Banks more recently I have commented to friends on, what I considered, their simplistic style of writing.)