Random snarks on the "Mundane SF" thing
which I only recently became aware of via james_nicoll's posting on it. This is in lieu of a recapitulatory defense of genre fic with all its monsters, golems, flying ships, Tarnhelms and incarnate deities as speculum mundi and far more so than many a purely possible story set in dull sublunary realms, by someone who doesn't believe in UFOs any more than I expect to catch Pegasus by waiting by a certain spring with a golden bridle, disapproves of the current Space Program, and has no certainty of unseen Alien Civilizations, Yetis, Lemurians, Alternate Dimensions, nor expectation of Time Machines, Ansibles, Landspeeders or real AI ever being created--
-There already is a category of fiction about real-world stories limited to what's possible or probable with the technology we have - it's called Everything Else In The Bookstore/Library.
-If you want to narrow it down some, it's called the Technothriller genre. Or Crime Thriller, where you find even more social awareness and/or observation of cultural mores, along with more-or-less believable depictions of real-world forensic technology.
-The Mundane SF'rs definition of Serious Literature would exclude not only Space Opera and nigh everything that's been written in the SF genres these past hundred years, from Frankenstein to 20,000 Leagues to everything by Tanith Lee to Lord Valentine's Castle to Foreigner, but also the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, Gilgamesh, Beowulf, Macbeth, and Gulliver's Travels. Houston, we may have a problem here--
-Moralizing lit that is designed to be capital-D didactic, rather than to tell a grand story which happens to embody in various ways things which the author believes, is generally pretty bad. If you want to Save The World via your storytelling, you have to make it fun (for a given value of "fun" which can of course include "scare their socks off.") And you're going about it backwards anyway.
-If you want to Help Save The World Via Your Storytelling, and not just to pat yourself on the back for attempting to doing so (so unlike your unwashed peers!), mass appeal is very important. Twilight Zone understood this - but did not bind themselves to the mundanely possible.
-How exactly does a larvae ex machina ending fit into the strictures of Mundane SF? I have yet to encounter a speaking ghost in my nearly-two-score-years, and I have not yet found any reliable witnesses who have, either (the nearest I've come is to experience a recurring palpable gloom whilst crossing a centuries-old battlefield the which was unbeknownst to me until years after) - let alone ghosts who run fax machines and TVs to provide wish-fulfillment fantasy.
-Even after you've purged yourself of all the traces of unrealistic genre pollution, The Times Literary Supplement still won't love you. Neither will Granta or Slate.
[/snark] [/snark] [/snark] [/snark] -and I even cleaned the keyboard, sigh.
ETA: If I were going to be serious, I'd point out what a straw-man argument it is, claiming that stories about interstellar travel cause people to think it's okay to trash this planet 'cause we can always move on to another one. One of the first SF novels I read after discovering Jules Verne in 2rd grade was a very old story about a guy shanghai'd along an astral expedition run by just such Terrestrial Imperialists, where woven into all the sensawunda depictions of that other planet and its biospheres and cultures was the message that that attitude was Just Wrong On So Many Levels...
-There already is a category of fiction about real-world stories limited to what's possible or probable with the technology we have - it's called Everything Else In The Bookstore/Library.
-If you want to narrow it down some, it's called the Technothriller genre. Or Crime Thriller, where you find even more social awareness and/or observation of cultural mores, along with more-or-less believable depictions of real-world forensic technology.
-The Mundane SF'rs definition of Serious Literature would exclude not only Space Opera and nigh everything that's been written in the SF genres these past hundred years, from Frankenstein to 20,000 Leagues to everything by Tanith Lee to Lord Valentine's Castle to Foreigner, but also the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, Gilgamesh, Beowulf, Macbeth, and Gulliver's Travels. Houston, we may have a problem here--
-Moralizing lit that is designed to be capital-D didactic, rather than to tell a grand story which happens to embody in various ways things which the author believes, is generally pretty bad. If you want to Save The World via your storytelling, you have to make it fun (for a given value of "fun" which can of course include "scare their socks off.") And you're going about it backwards anyway.
-If you want to Help Save The World Via Your Storytelling, and not just to pat yourself on the back for attempting to doing so (so unlike your unwashed peers!), mass appeal is very important. Twilight Zone understood this - but did not bind themselves to the mundanely possible.
-How exactly does a larvae ex machina ending fit into the strictures of Mundane SF? I have yet to encounter a speaking ghost in my nearly-two-score-years, and I have not yet found any reliable witnesses who have, either (the nearest I've come is to experience a recurring palpable gloom whilst crossing a centuries-old battlefield the which was unbeknownst to me until years after) - let alone ghosts who run fax machines and TVs to provide wish-fulfillment fantasy.
-Even after you've purged yourself of all the traces of unrealistic genre pollution, The Times Literary Supplement still won't love you. Neither will Granta or Slate.
[/snark] [/snark] [/snark] [/snark] -and I even cleaned the keyboard, sigh.
ETA: If I were going to be serious, I'd point out what a straw-man argument it is, claiming that stories about interstellar travel cause people to think it's okay to trash this planet 'cause we can always move on to another one. One of the first SF novels I read after discovering Jules Verne in 2rd grade was a very old story about a guy shanghai'd along an astral expedition run by just such Terrestrial Imperialists, where woven into all the sensawunda depictions of that other planet and its biospheres and cultures was the message that that attitude was Just Wrong On So Many Levels...