Failed Writer's Journey: The Literature Ballroom And The Death of SF

I am stealing someone else’s idea today — Lincoln Michel, of the excellent Counter Craft and his idea of literature as a ballroom — and apply it willy-nilly to the death of science fiction.

But first, a small personal note. I narrated a story for Starship Sofa, a British SFF podcast. The story, Footsteps Among the Stars, by Richard Dansky, is out this week. I had a lot of fun doing this, and I hope you check it out and enjoy it. Any flaws are the fault of the narrator, not the writer.

Okay, back to butchering other’s ideas for my own purposes.

Michel’s conceit, like most good ideas, is both simple and clarifying: literature is like a large ballroom with many different conversations happening in its various corners. Sometimes people cross from conversation to conversation, mixing their genres, so to speak. And I think that might be a key to why science fiction seems to be dying as a genre.

Science fiction does seem to be dying as a genre. Fewer people are interested in reading the genre, and the best seller sin the genre consistently sell less than other mass market genres. I think the ballroom explains why.

The ballroom, I think, is more crowded, to butcher the metaphor. Part of the crowding is that the ballroom is shrinking. There are fewer readers of fiction, so we’ve been moved out of the main ballroom and down into one of the smaller, less appealing smaller rooms down the end of the hall in the basement. Part of the crowding is that, because traditional publishing is more open to women, minorities, etc. than it had been even twenty years ago, we get different voices who have been parts of different conversations. Part of the crowding is that the number of books, in part because of self-publishing, has increased. So, more people involved in the conversations in a comparatively smaller space means that there is more cross-communication, more people taking things from more of the various conversations. Science fiction, then, I think, is fading as a genre because it has become more and more part of everyone’s conversation.

Science fiction has always been a part of other literatures, from literary fiction to magical realism. More and more, mainstream literature, literary fiction, and other genres are incorporating science fiction tropes, premises, and tricks. This has always been the case, but it does seem to be accelerating. There are many reasons for this — our world is more concerned with science fiction concepts, such as AI, technological surveillance, etc. But I do think that part of it is that more writers are familiar with science fiction, that as it has become more embedded in culture it has been drawn into other conversations. So much so that it no longer lives in its own conversation but is on the lips of all writers.

A bit simple, probably, but, hey, at least you got a link to Michel’s excellent essay out of it.

Weekly Word Count

Practically nothing. I have been editing the script version of Who is Sarah Smith with a collaborator with the intention of placing it in a competition readers think it would be a good fit for later in the year. Between that and work and life commitments, I haven’t really done any knew words.

Have a great weekend, everyone.