So Long, Science Fiction...

...But You Can Stick Around, Fantasy

I have shut down work on what was my current work-in-progress. After writing 90,000 words of a science fiction novel I realized that my heart just wasn't in it anymore. I was having too much trouble making myself interested in the things that actually made the story SF, and I'm pretty sure the writer's group was picking up on this, because their comments about the character situations were becoming somewhat pointed, where at the beginning they'd been wildly positive.

The problem for me wasn't really the story or characters; I suspect I had enough material in there I could repurpose to make it a fantasy that I'd be happy to keep writing. So the problem is with science fiction. I seem to have lost my taste for it.

Missing the Golden Age

I'm not sure I was ever a truly engaged reader of SF anyway. Unlike most people I know, I did not discover SF at age 12 (Lorna got hooked when she was six or seven, but she's always been precocious); my first real SF reading was in 1980, during late-night shifts at CKUA Radio: Heinlein's The Number of the Beast had been left in the control room by one of the other announcer-producers.* (I had a bit more luck with the other SF book that was left there: Alan Dean Foster's With Friends Like These.) I was in my mid-twenties and it was just after this that I discovered science fiction fandom; though the fan community in Edmonton I encountered C.J. Cherryh and the cyberpunks and the idea that it was possible to write and sell short stories.

For a time in the mid-eighties SF really did excite me: between them William Gibson and Lois McMaster Bujold made me want to believe in a future. In addition, in the mid-eighties I stopped working in the news media, and for a little while my cynicism abated and I began to think in what you might call a science-fictional way.

But the feeling didn't last. Probably cynicism won out; people prone to this probably should not become journalists. At any rate, I soon found myself finishing more stories of horror and fantasy than of SF.

That Terrible Optimism

The conclusion I've come to recently is that SF writers are at heart optimists. They don't just believe in a future; they believe in a positive future. Even dystopian writers are optimists: their writing is a warning about what will happen if we fall away from the right path. If you examine Bill Gibson's writing closely, he's as much of a techno-optimist as Robert Heinlein ever was; he just thinks the human material of what the positive future will be made is constructed in a different way.

Cory Doctorow devotes much of his writing, both fiction and essays, to pointing out the manifold ways in which the present world is going wrong. He's perhaps the fiercest optimist I know, and I am convinced he really believes in the potential of the future, that what he wants is achievable.

I don't believe this.

I wouldn't call myself a pessimist; I don't think we're all going to Hell, Michigan, in any sort of four-wheeled conveyance. I'm not an optimist, though, at least not in the sense I believe human beings can will a better world into being. Perhaps I'm just not over my cynicism yet.

My friend Karl says that fantasy writers are nostalgics, and while I understand where the idea comes from I don't completely believe that either. Just because I'm interested in history, and the way human behaviour differed in some past time from what it is now, doesn't have to mean that I miss such a time or want to project myself into it.

Okay, I'm not really sure what is behind my increasing interest in fantasy and declining interest in SF. All I really know is that fantasy is what I want to write now (with the occasional road-trip into mysteries) and going forward. I put alternate history into the fantasy side of things, by the way.

*I know, I know. It's a miracle I survived.