A question came up: Has contemporary science fiction become too self-absorbed, or does it still have the capacity to cross over to a mass audience? If so, who are the authors and books that have managed to do so? And who do the folks in our Roundtable discussion group think are likely candidate to break out of the genre and find a large non-genre readership in the future–and why?

Cecelia Holland, Stefan Dziemianowicz, Paul Di Filippo, Ellen Klages, Karen Lord, Carolyn Cushman, Elizabeth Hand, N. K. Jemisin, Gary K. Wolfe, Rachel Swirsky, James Patrick Kelly, Jeffrey Ford, Gardner Dozois, Paul Graham Raven, Rich Horton, Russell Letson, and Guy Gavriel Kay all join in the discussion.

As always, this discussion is broken up into multiple pages for ease of reading. If you’d like to read it all on a single page, select ‘View All’ from the drop down menu above. If you don’t see the drop down menu, please click here.

Cecelia Holland

I confess I read so little of this, but I do read a lot of historical fiction, and it seems to me in just the last year there’s been some kind of sea change, so much of this stuff looks old and worn and second-hand to me. I just read a book of Catherynne Valente’s, Deathless, that felt fresh and vigorous, and as they used to say about the death of the novel, just wait until a live one comes along.

Stefan Dziemianowicz

I oversee the publication of a line of leatherbound “classics” for my publishing house. Recently, we were granted the rights to reprint The Foundation Trilogy. That book needed no introduction to my editorial board, most of whom are not well-read in science fiction; they were familiar with the title and Isaac Asimov’s name. The names of Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, and Philip K. Dick (thanks in no small part to the stream of movie adaptations and the two Library of America compilations) were also immediately recognized, and William Gibson got a nod when his name was conjoined with “cyberpunk.” But though there are many science fiction authors whose work I enjoy and admire, it occurred to me that many do not have the kind of name recognition that suggests they are breaking out beyond the genre to a wider readership.

In contrast, brand-driven works of science fiction–Star Trek and Star Wars novels–reach a wide enough readership to become best-sellers.

Paul Di Filippo

It seems to me that the breakout success of Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl points towards a paradigm for reviving SF: topicality, self-contained neat ideas, appealing characters. Maybe a little optimism about the future too wouldn’t hurt!

Ellen Klages

I think it’s interesting that while science fiction books are generally shunned by the larger, mainstream audience, relegated to the genre ghetto, the same people that would say, “oh, I don’t read that stuff” will line up to buy tickets to a summer blockbuster — and when was the last time that a hugely popular, every multi-plex in the country sort of hit, did NOT involve an alien or a superhero or a wizard or a vampire?

Why are our tropes so widely accepted except in print?

(Yes, it’s a sweeping generalization, but…)

Click here to continue reading.

Karen Lord

Might be cynical of me to say this, but maybe for a lot of people it’s less work to accept a world that’s presented visually rather than figure out something described only with words.

Carolyn Cushman

Writing up Locus’ Books Received section every month gives me a good look at what’s out there, and I’m still frequently surprised by what breaks out of the pack.

I’m not sure optimism sells, these days. Suzanne Collins’ series The Hunger Games — dark dystopian, action-filled young-adult SF — has been a huge hit with younger readers, and is largely responsible for sparking a flood of such titles. The success of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road suggests that dark futures can be big with adults as well. But the next big dystopia… no clue.

And how do you predict big hits like George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse/True Blood series fit in? Or for that matter Harry Potter? All were popular before they were adapted into movies or TV. The general public has wider-ranging tastes than you might expect. I suspect a big part of these books’ success is their accessibility — they don’t toss around terms like “singularity” or “ftl” or even “telepathy” without explanation. That may be why books aimed at a younger audience are reaching so many adults, where adult genre titles have hard slogging. Media tie-in series such as Star Wars or Star Trek have a similar advantage in that readers already know what all the technical terms mean for that series, and readers are introduced to those concepts through a highly visual and auditory medium.

SF and fantasy have traditionally been geared toward readers who crave new ideas, and are willing to wade through expositions or puzzle out meanings and implications for themselves, as needed. Charles N. Brown used to tell me that for books to be bestsellers they had to reach the Lowest Common Denominator — be dumbed down, in other words. I don’t think that’s quite it — I think the books just have to be accessible on some level. Our field tends to make too many assumptions about what is common knowledge. All those paranormal romance/urban fantasies out there have to redefine vampires/demons/witches/etc. for their readers, every time — if the rules of that world aren’t set out clearly at the start, the series won’t fly. The more literary crowd sneers; anyone willing to put up with postmodern, experimental, or surrealist fiction can cope with a little fantasy — but such readers don’t necessarily like having worlds where magic has clear rules. Not only is SF somewhat isolated by the things that make it a genre, but there seems to be a split in the outside audiences we do reach, between the literary and the popular culture crowds. What audience are we aiming for, here?

I recently tried to think of a book to recommend to a lady on the bus who “never read science fiction” and drew a blank. I finally came up with the rather lame suggestion of Fahrenheit 451 or Dune. But recent, non-fantasy titles? Suddenly I’m back to the YA section.

Elizabeth Hand

Kelly Link. Her short fiction is wonderful — offbeat, wholly original, and I think would be extremely appealing to YA readers if she wrote something at novel length.

Stefan Dziemianowicz

As far as fantasy goes, Neil Gaiman has certainly broken out to a non-genre readership–his novels for adults as well as for younger readers.

N. K. Jemisin

When you ask whether SF (not sure whether you’re including fantasy here) has the capacity to cross over, what do you mean? To a mainstream/literary audience? Or to those members of the already-genre-loving audience who dismiss science fiction, specifically, in favor of other speculative material?

I’m guessing by your last question that you mean mainstream or non-genre readers — but I do think it’s important to note that science fiction currently has trouble appealing even to its own, broadly speaking. In the last few years, again and again I’ve seen established SF authors, editors, agents, and convention organizers seem surprised by the realization that there’s a vast and diverse audience which consumes SF — but that audience still doesn’t think of contemporary adult written SF as “for them”. Which suggests to me that contemporary adult written SF is still doing a great job of putting up big ol’ “keep away” signs as far as those readers are concerned. So before we question why the mainstream balks, we should question why these ready-made readers are balking.

And yes, I do think they’re balking because SF has become too self-absorbed. We have an image problem. Too much of our best skiffy stuff seems to have been written in conversation with other skiffy stuff; there’s little effort to speak to people who aren’t already fans. Then there’s the fact that we call this the literature of the imagination, but it’s really the literature of the white male power fantasy — and I think it’s telling that the stuff that’s been selling like gangbusters lately is science fiction which breaks this pattern. In YA science fiction, for example, the protagonists are young and diverse: lots of women, lots of people of color, lots of people struggling with poverty and disenfranchisement and being at the bottom — not the top — of the power hierarchy. In urban fantasy we’re seeing wizards who struggle with homelessness, werewolves trying to hold their marriages together when they’re not howling at the moon — fantasies of stability instead of sensawunda. It’s a Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs thing, or maybe a paycheck-to-paycheck thing. Power fantasies are great if you’re privileged enough for self-actualization, but for the rest of us, stories of survival are more resonant.

And by the same token, those SF books which have successfully broken the mainstream/literary barrier have mostly been those that didn’t adhere to SF’s stereotyped image and focus. Despite the obviously skiffy subject matter, the successful crossovers have had authors or protagonists that broke the white male mold (e.g., Kazuo Ishiguro, Colson Whithead), or the power fantasy mold (e.g., McCarthy’s The Road, which stomped all over the traditional postapocalyptic libertarian/survivalist glorification), and they’ve tackled skiffy subject matter with a social realism and artistic nuance that in-genre writers generally shy away from.

As for who’s most likely to cross the genre barrier next — Genevieve Valentine’s just waiting for some big-name literary critic to fall in love with her; Rachel Swirsky’s got the Iowa Workshop cred and will likely have the acclaim as soon as she produces a novel; and Nnedi Okorafor’s already straddling multiple genre lines and is headed for a mainstream finish. To name a few.

Karen Burnham

What Nora’s saying makes a lot of sense to me. The success of Paolo’s Windup Girl, as Paul DiFi points out, also bears out the argument that depicting a wider and more diverse (less US/Euro-centric) world helps attract a wider audience. I keep hoping that Ian McDonald will break through for similar reasons, and when some people were comparing The Dervish House to The DaVinci Code my hopes raised even higher. But it doesn’t seem to have happened for him yet–maybe the nanotech plot of Dervish House is still a little inaccessible.

I’m thinking that both Paolo and Kelly Link (both gaining wider attention in part thanks to Lev Grossman at TIME magazine) are published by smaller presses. Does anyone think that the different styles of the different publishing houses has any bearing on what ‘crosses over’ and what doesn’t? Is it easier for small presses to bring out the kind of flexible works that have a higher chance of attracting a more literary, more diverse audience?

Cecelia Holland

Karen’s remarks on the differences in outlook between small and large presses touch on a major issue right now anyway–the hidebound caution (not to say suicidal inability to adjust) of the big guys vs. the flexibility of the little guys. Some of them anyway. Then there’s electronic publishing.

Gary K. Wolfe

First, I think we need to separate the whole YA field from the question of adult fiction. Looking at the current NY Times bestseller lists, the only names I can find in the top 20 adult bestsellers are George R.R. Martin and Jim Butcher, and both are fantasies or paranormals (I didn’t see any science fiction at all). The “children’s” list (which in NYT parlance includes YA) shows 5 out of the top 10 titles for chapter books are fantasies, and 6 of the top 10 series (including, of course, Rowling and Riordan). It seems to me YA readers have always been more open to the fantastic, and this goes back way before Rowling to include names like L’Engle, C.S. Lewis, and probably even E.B. White.

That said, there may be something to Nora’s point about SF (more than fantasy) having become too self-referential, or possibly having set the entry bar a little high, leaving new readers to feel like the uninitiated. I think I get a sense of this occasionally when I go to a jazz club with an aficionado who can effortlessly compare a new horn player with something Chet Baker did in 1958, and I just find myself nodding amicably. And I also agree that reinventing some of these tropes from new perspectives–Caribbean, African, Latin American, or whatever–can be a way of revitalizing them and possibly bringing in new audiences. But, from my experience with my own students, some of these new readers aren’t even aware that they are reading SF; I’ve had students who see Octavia Butler solely as an African-American writer, or Nalo Hopkinson solely in terms of postcolonialism.

Like jazz, I think SF sometimes suffers from its own sophistication. Sometimes the factors that lead SF writers to be skeptical of a novel like McCarthy’s The Road–that it covers territory we’ve often seen before–are the very same factors that attract non-SF readers to it: there’s no entry exam, no particular awareness of an earlier tradition, but rather returning the concept to ground zero. Nor was there much very new in Justin Cronin’s The Passage last year, but that didn’t prevent it from becoming a bestseller. But when SF writers produce what I think of as accessible “entry-level” novels–Robert Charles Wilson and Jack McDevitt come to mind–they almost never break out in the way we’re talking about. There’s still a publishing and marketing ghetto, whether we like it or not. My students, few of them SF fans, were stunned at what a good novel Wilson’s Spin was in purely mainstream family-saga terms, and many wondered why they hadn’t heard of it before.

My sense is that SF breaks out in proportion to the reader’s ability to see it as something other than SF. Bacigalupi can be read as as environmental writer whose main instrument is SF; a generation or two ago Vonnegut could be read as a satirist, and a generation before that the late Heinlein could be read as a new age guru. Good, thoughtful novels about nanotech by Kathy Goonan or Greg Bear may not break out, but turn nanotech into an hysterical paranoid thriller and you’ve got Crichton’s Prey. I don’t entirely agree with Charles Brown’s “lowest common denominator” thesis, but I can’t entirely disagree with it as well. As long as you’ve got 74% of Americans believing in angels and 39% in creationism, SF in the traditional sense is going to be a hard sell.

Cecelia Holland

In a world drenched in fantasy, sf is too realistic?

Rachel Swirsky

Like jazz, I think SF sometimes suffers from its own sophistication.

To what are we contrasting it?

James Patrick Kelly

I take Nora’s point and certainly have been applying a filter to my own work: Can a literate non-sf fan parse this stuff? (Luckily I am married to one of these and she is my first reader.) Because if we’re ignoring that vast readership, we’re not really participating in the popular culture which we helped to create. So easy on the neologisms, the matter-of-fact warp drives and the so-what digital infrastructure. And stop writing footnotes to “The Cold Equations,” Jim! And having typed that, I do think that thinking about a YA audience’s tolerance for skiffy code words and tropes is a worthwhile exercise for writers who aspire to a wider audience.

But since no one has mentioned it yet, I think that at least part of the sag in popular acceptance of sf and thus its failure to breakout has to do with our perception of the future. It doesn’t look like an adventure anymore, or at least not the shiny adventure that we were hoping for. And much of the “science fiction” that does invoke the spirit of Golden Age sf — that “good old stuff” that we were brought up on — is full of magic technologies and ridiculous economics. Perhaps it was ever thus, but we know better now. For all the scorn that was heaped upon the advocates of mundane sf, they had a point. If one of the purposes of our genre is to run thought experiments about the future, what if space is not an option and global warming means an attenuated standard of living, as seem most likely? If sense of wonder is one of the engines that has driven our success, such as it is, what are we without it? In short, I’m inclined to believe that the zeitgeist has turned much more pessimistic after a long run of post-war optimism, and that a literature that purports to live in the future is bound to have some falling-off because of this.

N. K. Jemisin

Jim: Only if that literature fails to keep pace with the realism that readers seem to want from it. Again, I point to YA — the dystopian subgenre in YA is selling like hotcakes because it’s harsh and depressing, and because it doesn’t pull any punches with respect to workable economics and the un-shinyness of the future if we don’t change things. Something in that grimness speaks to the teenagers and young people who are growing up in the increasingly craptastic society we’re creating for them. Is it surprising that they need some kind of literary catharsis to deal with this mess? They need a space in which to imagine revolutions and solutions and coping mechanisms. They do not need “welp, no biggie, it’ll all get fixed somehow and in five hundred years we’ll be in spaaace!” handwaving. That’s not sensawunda, that’s naivete and denial, and if SF has nothing more to offer its readers than that then it deserves to fail.

But there is still a sense of wonder to be found in these more pessimistic narratives. It’s just that the wonder isn’t technological, because as you say — we know better now that technology is just a tool, not the solution to our problems. We are the solution to our problems. So personally, I get a thrill out of reading/sharing futures in which humanity has grown the hell up, because what a wonder that would be!

Nobody’s better at imagining better worlds than us, so as long as the futures we create aren’t based on Ozzie and Harriet silliness, SF can easily stay relevant.

Jeffrey Ford

What is SF that it might “suffer?” Action at the boundaries, adventures in the Marchland, breaking through and ransacking other genres, keeps the center constantly emerging and vital. The word “sophistication” is one way of damning it. It strikes me as writers expressing themselves. Some of its going to be crap and some will be cool as hell. Or were we talking primarily about marketing and readership. If so, forget everything I just wrote.

Paul Di Filippo

I find myself hard-pressed now to do more than nod sagely in total agreement with Gary’s insightful and elegant parsing of the situation.

Okay, I’ll add a small codicil: non-fannish, non-hardcore readers are now more savvy than ever about SF tropes–stargates, chimerical creatures, etc–so that they can easily score an A on a modest “entry exam”.

In other words, such a reader cannot immediately proceed to The Quantum Thief, but can easily master Jumper.

And here of course we are squarely in the territory covered by Judith Berman’s excellent essay, “Science Fiction without the Future.” I believe Kris Rusch also had a similar piece around the same time.

Stefan Dziemianowicz

Another argument that I’ve heard made (though I don’t know that I agree with it) is that the reality of what we considered the stuff of science fiction–technology, computers, space travel, etc.–has so permeated everyday life that the average person doesn’t need to read the fiction to experience that imaginative leap that the fiction provides.

Gardner Dozois

On the other hand, if you filter it enough that it’s not really SF anymore, you’re not solving the problem but rather avoiding it, whether it breaks out or not. I find it interesting that the most commercially successful SF books of the last couple of years, The Windup Girl and The Quantum Thief, are actually going in the opposite direction, and making their SF content MORE sophisticated. Greg Egan and Charles Stross had success doing the same thing.

I think one of the jobs of science fiction is to imagine viable human futures, futures that somebody might actually want to live in, or want to see their kids living in. SF’s track record with that in the last couple of decades has been spotty. I think extreme pessimism and gloom will only take you so far before the readers become tired of it. Once you read one bleak dystopian story or novel saying that everything’s hopeless and we’re all doomed, why bother to read another one? We’re all doomed, right? So what’s the point of reading another one, or writing it, for that matter? We’ve already reached that point with ecological disaster stories, and are beginning to see stories, from people like Paul McAuley and Carrie Vaughn which try to imagine how people can go on living and working and create a viable human future AFTER the disasters, in spite of them.

SF made a bad mistake as a genre in the 70s and 80s by virtually abandoning the Young Adult novel. There’s practically nothing after the Heinlein juveniles of the 50s and 60s to provide an entry-level SF reading experience (except, ironically enough, the much-hated “media novels” like Star Trek and Star Wars novels, that I think may have actually been keeping this function alive). The fantasy genre did not make this mistake–there’s entry-level and gateway fantasy stuff on all levels, from children’s books to YA, which carry readers on through to more sophisticated adult stuff. As a result, guess which genre sells better?

Gary K. Wolfe

I should admit that I’m far from the first person to compare SF to jazz–Kingsley Amis did it way back in 1959–but Jeff’s point is well taken that there’s a distinction between “breaking out” in the commercial sense and breaking out in the literary/artistic sense, though they’re not mutually exclusive. So by “suffering,” yeah, I was referring mostly to the popular market. As a mode, stream-of-consciousness never came close to “breaking out” commercially, but that doesn’t mean that Ulysses or To the Lighthouse are any less successful as novels, or that they “suffered” because of it.

As for sophistication: In this month’s Locus column, I had occasion to mention that, late in Charlie Parker’s career, a record producer had the idea of matching him up with arrangements for strings, which were still pretty popular in the 1950s. The idea, I suppose, was to make him more viable for the popular market. The records aren’t bad at all, and Parker’s solos are just about as sophisticated as they always had been–they were just packaged differently. I suspect we could all name dozens of SF novels from the last 50 years that, had they been presented differently, might have reached a wider audience.

But–again like jazz–SF has a devoted core of knowledgeable and passionate fans, and it’s very tempting to write and publish books for that smaller but more reliable market than to try to compete with teen vampires for the Walmart crowd. For myself, I have no problem with this. I still enjoy “sophisticated” high-concept SF, but if a talented and nuanced writer like Daryl Gregory wants to try his hand at a zombie novel, more power to him.

Jeffrey Ford

Precisely my point, too, Gary. More power to all of them, whichever manner or way they want to go — toward the center, away from it, where ever. We can only really talk about market trends to an extent and a demographic of readers that “theoretically” exist. Otherwise, every moment holds the potential for some young writer anywhere in the world to have a vision and write herself a novel that would change the entire game or start a new one.

Paul Graham Raven

To cut back to the original question (which, I would point out, is not an attempt to devalue any of what’s been said thus far, but more a way of blatantly skipping the need to take three hours to catch up on the thread thus far and respond to what’s already been said as well as the seed question – sorry, lots on my plate at the moment):

Has contemporary science fiction become too self-absorbed, or does it still have the capacity to cross over to a mass audience?

“Contemporary science fiction” is too wide, ill-defined and inclusive a category to make sweeping judgements about by this point, I think, but it certainly contains subgenres and tendencies which could easily appeal to a mass audience with a wee bit of tweaking and some smart marketing. I think it worth making the additional point that the “literary” audience is not a mass audience; indeed, in numerical terms, it’s probably far smaller than the genre audience, at least here in the UK.

If so, who are the authors and books that have managed to do so?

I just finished reading Charlie Stross’s Rule 34 for review. I remember him talking a long time back about “pitching for the geek audience” – novels that will flick the switches of the type of people who read BoingBoing every day. And I reckon he’s nailed it, too: for an sf reader, there are the buried references to the continuity of the the genre; for the webgeek reader, there are tidbits of weirdness you’ll have seen people blogging about, plus Zeitgeisty usage of memes and slang; for the average airport thriller reader, there’s a very tight, pacey and economical plot, set in the near future in a way that doesn’t alienate the reader from their position in the present. It’s a brilliant hybrid. (Walter Jon Williams appears to be driving in a similar direction, though he keeps getting caught out by setting things just a lttle too close to the future and having reality pip him to publication.)

There was a lot of talk recently about Mieville’s Embassytown, in the context of “breaking genre into the literary fiction scene” and potential Booker Prize nominations. I’ve not long ago finished reading that book, too, and while I liked it a lot, it’s a challenging and demanding novel that Josephine Average is going to bounce off very hard, and that Larry Literary is going to find (ironically enough) far too plotty, and riddled with stuff that is unabashedly drawn from the genre toolkit. So Mieville is almost certainly inhabiting an interstitial space at the borders of genre and literary, and writing excellent books to boot… but I think that hoping for the “sf breakout” to occur on that front is a false hope. If it’s gonna go over the lines anywhere, it’s at the already permeable border with the technothriller.

And who do the folks in our Roundtable discussion group think are likely candidate to break out of the genre and find a large non-genre readership in the future–and why?

I think a vast number of sf writers could do it. The question is whether they really want to; doing so will mean stepping away from the more traditional trappings of sf, getting futuristic (or alt-historic) in a way that doesn’t take a massive leap of faith or familiarity with genre protocols to grok, and writing pacey books that focus on plot and character in similar ways to the big bestseller titles. To use a slightly risky metaphor, if we think of science fiction (and indeed genre in general) as a sort of literary dialect – complete with its own slang vernacular, unusual pronunciation patterns and rhythms, so on and so forth – all that a native sf speaker (er, writer) needs to do to be understood more clearly is to make the effort to speak in the argot of the audience they’re trying to reach. Y’all remember the reaction to Cheryl Cole on American X-Factor? That’s pretty much what happens when you speak in downtown skiffy to a mainstream audience; only the ones who make an effort are going to get a grip on what you’re saying, and even they will struggle to get the nuances available to a native.

Personally, I suspect that publishing is heading for exactly the sort of collapse-of-the-mainstream-as-a-market that music is going through right now, and that within a decade at most there will be no easily defined “mainstream” to aim for, if by “mainstream” we mean “significantly larger and hence more profitable market”. “Mainstream” is just another genre, or a “vertical” as the MBA/marketing circuit likes to call ‘em; hence I’m not sure how much wisdom there is in chasing after a “large non-genre” readership for folk who already have a steady genre readership, the grass may look greener in the other field, but the field may not be as big as it looks, and already has an established herd grazing it as the fences shrink inwards.

Unless they have a particular aesthetic urge to write mainstream, of course – in which case tally-ho, wot?

Paul Di Filippo

I think a vast number of sf writers could do it.

What are the sales though for recent cross-borders thrillers by Greg Bear, Ben Bova and John Barnes, just to name three? Despite any wonderful goodness in their offerings–and I expect a lot, given their track records–they don’t seem to be burning up the charts.

Stefan Dziemianowicz

We do have the case of Neal Stephenson hitting the best-seller list with Cryptonomicon. Also Quicksilver (though not the other novels in the Baroque Cycle) and Anathem. Will be interesting to see how Reamde does.

I’m also mindful, based on some examples I gave, that some science fiction and some science fiction writers don’t cross over to popular (i.e., non-genre) audiences until a while after the landmark work is published. Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy was pretty much known to just science fiction readers until the 1970s, when his success with The Gods Themselves got him cranking out Robots and Foundation novels that began making the best-seller list. Also, but I don’t think Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land was a best-seller. I think it was a cult classic that built a non-genre audience for his work over time, with the result that his last few books charted on the best-seller lists.

Now that I think about it, Stephenson’s success is not unlike Heinlein’s. The cult audience that Snow Crash cultivated poised him to break through with Cryptonomicon.

I could be totally wrong about all of this, in which case I hope you more enlightened folks will correct me.

Rachel Swirsky

Basically, I agree with everything Paul Graham Raven just said, except inasmuch as I’m not sure the technothriller is the only border open for commercial crossing. In particular, I agreed with the dialect/language of genre/mainstream is another language stuff.

I think his much better explanation obviates the need for what I was going to say, which is good because I didn’t say it very well, but for what it’s worth:

Okay, but it seems from my admittedly spotty engagement with what people are saying here that there are at least two concepts being condensed–one, reaching a wider audience, and two, breaking out into commercial success.

When we say SF is too sophisticated to reach a wider audience, are we ignoring books like Housekeeping? I mean, whatever one thinks of it, it’s not unsophisticated. Nor is it divorced from a long literary conversation that much of the reading audience will only have some knowledge of. Or even more clearly with something like Midnight’s Children or Petals of Blood which are both very sophisticated and coming from several different literary and historical traditions.

So are we saying SF is like jazz, suffering from its sophistication, in comparison to… what? Do we want to reach the audience of Housekeeping? Or do we want to reach the audience of John Grisham? Or both?

Rich Horton

I’m (part of) the audience of Housekeeping — Marilynne Robinson is one of my favorite writers, and all of her novels are utterly remarkable.

So … is it in a different way too sophisticated? Well, Robinson’s later novels (but not, I think, Housekeeping) became bestsellers, so, no, not really. But … they are still very sophisticated. Am I reading them for something different than I read SF for? Some SF — but not all. Because part of the joy of Housekeeping is the prose, the astonishing prose, and SF has some writers who do prose very well.

Back in the ’70s, when I was but a kid, and some SF — Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke — was reaching bestseller size markets, I had a music analogy. I thought SF was like country music (as it was then). Back in the ’70s country briefly surged in popularity (as it has again since), but not in a sophisticated, inner-directed, way. Rather by adopting pop strategies. (Or singing pop songs — “I Am Woman”, “One Tin Soldier”, “Driftaway” all became big country hits for country artists.) I thought that was some of what SF back then was doing to reach a wider audience.

That is, basically, the techno-thriller approach. The John Grisham (or, more directly, Dan Brown) audience approach. (Don’t get me wrong, by the way — I love really good old-timey country music, and bluegrass. But I have a hard time with the poppier stuff.)

The route to Marilynne Robinson’s readers, if possible at all, is best reached with technical skill, by which mainly I think I mean prose. (I mean, you know, Michael Chabon, eh?) I don’t know if SF’s inward looking jazz-like “sophistication” is a problem in this sense. The plots might be (but hey, Chabon), and there are some readers (Sven Birkets?) you just won’t reach, but mostly I think the ingrown resistance to SFnal vocabulary is diminishing, and as long as the basic writing skills are not offputting, the readers will follow.

Gary K. Wolfe

So are we saying SF is like jazz, suffering from its sophistication, in comparison to… what?

There are probably a number of answers, all of which we’ve touched upon in this conversation.  One is simply the bestseller list, which as we’ve noted may occasionally include fantasy or horror (and much more rarely science fiction), but which is simply a measure of exceptional commercial success.  In terms of who shows up on college reading lists or as models for MFA programs (a very crude and artificial measure of “respectability”), we’re probably talking about the dominant paradigm for “literary” fiction, which still very often defaults to the kind of domestic realism that Eliot and James helped canonize, and that a lot of people still think of when they think “literature.”

A third comparison, not quite the same as the bestseller list, is whatever is currently trendy.  Like jazz, SF has maintained a fairly knowledgeable core audience for decades, despite what the dominant pop music or pop literature has been.  For a while in the 30s, it looked like jazz was the dominant pop music, but it gave way to crooners and eventually rock ‘n’ roll and hip hop.  But jazz fans kept listening to jazz, just like SF/F readers keep reading the stuff, even as its broader popularity waxes and wanes.

Russell Letson

Also coming late to the party and thus stealing from everyone’s plates:

The ground for general-audience acceptance/understanding of print fantasy has been well prepared for decades via Stephen King et al. (to say nothing of the YA tradition that Gary points to), but there has been no equivalent for SF, despite the occasional breakout book–Stranger in a Strange Land and even Dune do not really provide sufficient training for the range of tropes and conventions that make up SF in general. The dystopian/disaster subgenres are narrower and have general-fiction-world exemplars going back to the 1930s and 40s (Huxley, Orwell, George R. Stewart) and extending through the atomic-war anxiety of the 1950s (Nevil Shute), so even the most skiffy-phobic literary reader can get The Road without stretching. (And that’s without adding in trope and convention leakage from film and TV.)

Then there’s the “publishing and marketing ghetto” Gary points to, which might in part be a sociological/taste matter not unlike the milder dislike some audience segments have for other traditions with strong genre roots or affiliations, such as the hard-boiled or cozy mystery traditions or the historical romance (in the old Shellabarger/Costain/Yerby sense). (I sometimes think that the knee in the acceptance curve has to do with sheer excellence of execution: how many people who love Patrick O’Brian will be as enthusiastic about, say, Dewey Lambdin or Alexander Kent?)

The historical novel has some of the same barriers to easy understanding that SF faces, softened by the fact that one can generally swot up enough background to fill in whatever is unfamiliar–and I suspect that the successful and skillful historical novelist will, like O’Brian, find ways of managing expository information in a way that either stays out of the way or (better yet) becomes a feature rather than a bug: Here’s how you conduct gun practice; here’s how a naval surgeon repairs a depressed skull fracture; here’s how prize money motivates the crew to endure battle.

Implicit in Paul Raven’s comments is the recognition that SF is a family of related genres, and not all of them are equally accessible to readers unfamiliar with their conventions and histories. Wide appeal means managing the Shakespeare trick that Paul sees Stross pulling off: building a text that has something to entertain and amuse and enlighten a wide range of overlapping sub-audiences while maintaining its own integrity.

To return to the music analogy, jazz that remembers that it is evolved dance music will have a wider audience than, say, hard bop that seems to the uninitiated to live on the far side of a harmonic and rhythmic discontinuity.

N. K. Jemisin

Russell, I’m not sure I follow. You’re mentioning film and TV leakage, but you’re also saying there’s no “gateway drug” for SF. (Stephen King? A gateway into print fantasy? I can’t see people jumping from the Dark Tower to George R. R. Martin or China Mieville, but maybe I’m wrong there.) I can’t speak for others, but I know that thanks to film and TV — and video games and manga — I’ve gotten plenty of exposure to the Singularity, post-scarcity SF, mundane SF, and other concepts that are fairly esoteric to print SF these days. The serial numbers and labels have been scrubbed off, but the sophisticated content is there — it’s not all space knights and unimpressive technology like smartphones “tricorders” anymore. So it seems to me that film and other media make for an excellent gateway into print SF. Why people then might or might not walk through that gateway is a different matter.

Russell Letson

Nora: I guess I’m not sure how your generation’s introduction(s) to the various components of the fantastic map onto the print tradition I grew up with, particularly onto the magazine- and paperback-publishing core of that tradition, though I think I have a sense of how, say, Stephen King domesticated the Matter of Supernatural Horror for very broad adult audiences. Some of my uncertainty is rooted in demographics and my personal social situation: I just don’t hang out with people half or a quarter my age and thus have a diminished sense of how they came to read some of the same books I do–and whether and how they see them as fully competent expressions of genre possibilities or as the kind of entertaining-but-superficial employment of an Idea that I still (in my geezerly way) think of as “comic-booky” or “summer-movie-ish.” (It is perhaps partly a matter of my cohort membership that I can turn off the part of me that parses print SF long enough to enjoy, say, an X-Men movie but find small pleasure in comics or comix or manga. Or maybe it’s like my distaste for melon–just a matter of idiosyncratic wiring.) I have written in an earlier blog thread that the tropes of SF have in my adult life spread all through the popular culture space, but I think that the reading protocols that dominate core SF might be different from those employed by a general audience whose primary source of tropes is the non-print fantastic.

Guy Gavriel Kay

I admit to feeling depressed reading this topic, till Gary and Jeff weighed in, and then Russell’s late-to-the-dance (I’m later!) was reassuring and very smart. What he adverts to is the ‘requirement’ of excellence. Rich echoes that but I’m not sure where his thought takes us. No one can put a note in their commonplace book: ‘Write with exquisite prose and brilliant characterization tomorrow!’ (Well, we can write the note, but…) I might differ (I do) as to Marilynne Robinson, but his point is bang on about the rare artists who work with what we judge to be genius. (I’d substitute, say, Shirley Hazzard or Penelope Fitzgerald, but that’s just making the same point with different exemplars.)

So Russell, and Rich extending a bit, make my first point for me. It is possible to write (paint, compose…) anything and succeed in terms of quality … if you have the quality in you, either for a lightning in a field moment, or on an ongoing basis. This will not ensure commercial success, and in some cases will guarantee its absence! This is true of sf or primitive painting or architecture or grunge. Some subsets of art, like sf, do emerge from and with esoterica, and therefore have an initiation/learning curve, but the point at issue in this part of the dialogue was noting that true excellence makes its own rules (and is, definitionally, rare and not accessible just by willpower or wishing).

Next points, going back earlier in this.

Dystopic YA coexists with boy wizards and ADHD children of Greek gods and teens-with-vampires … there are multiple trends and copycattings at any given time, and it is always possible (and even useful) to search out the ‘social factors’ in why something clicks in pop culture (whether 50s hidden enemies among us, or vampires then and now, sensuous or not). But ‘angry’ social commentary is hardly new in or out of any genre!

Jeffrey’s takes us both wider and back to an old, old scrap. The ‘serious artists’ lament not enough readers, and the commercially successful claim to get no respect. (Find Stephen King vs Shirley Hazzard for one vivid version of this.) The former group urges publishers and the reading public to smarten up, dammit, we’re good for you! But whatever reviewer/commentator (quoted even earlier) said that Dervish House was like Dan Brown hadn’t really thought about either book. McDonald’s dense and knotty, deliciously crowded, and revels in it, Brown is need-only-15-minutes-at-a-time conspiracy fluff and sells in it.

So I’d say, on this issue, we need to focus on the question below in our answers to Karen: if this is about marketing and ‘why something hits’ it is a very different discussion than ‘where is the best work?’. The zeitgeist is what it is at any time, and clever tacticians will always, er, tack towards it (pander to it? get lucky?). A piece in this week’s Globe and Mail says there have never been so many fall TV series launching with kick-ass smart women stars. Is this just random accident in Lala land?

Challenging and ambitious art will not sell what tailored-to-fit-the-times work does. There is nothing specific to a genre in this.

And the ‘excellence’ of a gateway, in real world terms, is empirical … how often is it used? Otherwise we’re back to hectoring people (“Try this, you’ll like it, honest!”) and that rarely works … and only when we’ve made shrewd assessments of both the work and the people. This gets back to the ‘what is GRRM a gateway to’ discussion here earlier, and saying The Worm Ourobouros feels too much wishful thinking to me. (I’d love to be wrong.)

Seems to me we’re also still meandering about on what we’re ‘gatewaying’ (sorry!) to … one mass market cultural work to another, or mass market to deemed excellence in another medium (film/tv to books)? The HBO series was a gateway to George’s books, beyond that remains to be seen. And I haven’t even seen demographics as to how many non-readers of fantasy are buying, or if great numbers of fantasy readers (even greater than before) watched the show and are now buying George. Anyone seen anything that tracks this? (The book world is very bad at such things, though I’d bet amazon has an idea, based on buying patterns.) Anecdotally I know of some non-genre readers buying the first book, but whether they go to 2/3/4/5, and then whether they go to any other fantasies is another issue, too.

Meanwhile this was supposed to be about sf! Sorry.

I have vivid memories of the first Harry Potter being dismissed and even derided with irritation at conventions, with a lot of ‘Diana Wynne Jones did ALL of this before, and better!’ Then as HP exploded, went supersonic, it was adopted and embraced within the genre … that’s my sense of it, anyhow. I also know (random anecdote) a Canadian TV producer who was given the first book when it first appeared, read it, liked it, but decided there probably wasn’t a film or TV series in it, and didn’t do anything.

Scores of those stories out there, I know. How many publishers rejected the book? Or LotR?

This conversation branched out in a few different directions, each of which will be appearing over the next week and a half or so. Stay tuned!