The New York Times' new Science Fiction Column
is badass.
The column:
But what truly shames me is that I cannot turn to any of these people, or to my friends, or to you, and say: Whether you read books because you have a genuine, lifelong passion for literature or because a feisty woman in Chicago tells you to - you should pick up this new work of science fiction I just finished reading, because you will enjoy it as much as I did.
I cannot do this in good conscience because if you were to immerse yourself in most of the sci-fi being published these days, you would probably enjoy it as much as one enjoys reading a biology textbook or a stereo manual. And you would very likely come away wondering, as I do from time to time, whether science fiction has strayed so far from the fiction category as a whole that, though the two share common ancestors, they now seem to have as much to do with each other as a whale has to do with a platypus.
Dave Itzkoff diagnoses what's wrong with contemporary science fiction and comes to all the right conclusions: as his example he uses a recent book ("Counting Heads" by David Marusek) whose characters are overwhelmed by neologisms and a "larger fascination with all the trappings of the world he has created". Which is that it sacrifices character development for ideas. There's actually a crisis in Science Fiction that I hope Itzkoff delves into in one of his columns, with longtime and formally successful science fiction writers scrambling to make ends meet. Since usually this shrinking audience is attributed to the standard culprits--television, movies and video games luring readers away--I am relieved to see someone not blaming the reader for once. And in both Science Fiction and Fantasy, the writers who are standing out and grabbing people's attention are the ones who know how to write character, guys like William Gibson (still), Neal Stephenson, Neil Gaimen, and China Miéville.
The column:
But what truly shames me is that I cannot turn to any of these people, or to my friends, or to you, and say: Whether you read books because you have a genuine, lifelong passion for literature or because a feisty woman in Chicago tells you to - you should pick up this new work of science fiction I just finished reading, because you will enjoy it as much as I did.
I cannot do this in good conscience because if you were to immerse yourself in most of the sci-fi being published these days, you would probably enjoy it as much as one enjoys reading a biology textbook or a stereo manual. And you would very likely come away wondering, as I do from time to time, whether science fiction has strayed so far from the fiction category as a whole that, though the two share common ancestors, they now seem to have as much to do with each other as a whale has to do with a platypus.
Dave Itzkoff diagnoses what's wrong with contemporary science fiction and comes to all the right conclusions: as his example he uses a recent book ("Counting Heads" by David Marusek) whose characters are overwhelmed by neologisms and a "larger fascination with all the trappings of the world he has created". Which is that it sacrifices character development for ideas. There's actually a crisis in Science Fiction that I hope Itzkoff delves into in one of his columns, with longtime and formally successful science fiction writers scrambling to make ends meet. Since usually this shrinking audience is attributed to the standard culprits--television, movies and video games luring readers away--I am relieved to see someone not blaming the reader for once. And in both Science Fiction and Fantasy, the writers who are standing out and grabbing people's attention are the ones who know how to write character, guys like William Gibson (still), Neal Stephenson, Neil Gaimen, and China Miéville.