not to read the stuff any more, that is the law

sartorias asked why, if at all, science fiction is ceasing to attract your interest, and I decided to let it all hang out. Here are the comments I left there. It should be, but alas is not, needless to add that it's not all like this, it just sometimes seems this way, and that I'm not calling for censorship or a crusade, I'm just saying what I personally think.

"Why I don't read SF any more" is quite a different thing from "Why I don't read fantasy any more."

1) Because I've gotten so allergic to the presence of obnoxious cant. Libertarian, Nietzschian, social-darwinist cant.

2) Because most of the writing is so bad. I know it's "better than it used to be." But SF of the 40s and 50s was playing in a different league, and it was good of its kind. Now it's trying to be good of different kinds, and while there are some writers who've achieved remote high-literary godhood (more in fantasy than in SF), even the best writers in a more popular mode are not ready to achieve the kind of goodness seen in the best-written bestseller novels. The dialogue is so pontificating, the characterization is so stiff and so achieved by throwing adjectives and descriptors against the wall to see if they stick.

It's not individual bloopers that cause my dissatisfaction, though there are enough of those too. (Read Thog's Masterclass.) It's just a general sense that comes through the fiction.

As the books I find unsatisfying tend to fade away from memory, I can only describe this by pointing to where it's done right. I'd gone from SF to reading the novel Primary Colors. And the prose was so sparkling, the characterization so deft and assured, that I realized with depression that even my favorite SF writers, the ones who avoid the above problems, couldn't write this well.

3) Turgidity. SF of the 30s tended to be whiz-bang way-too-fast. Then it slowed down. In the 50s it was just about right. (Alfred Bester was about as fast-paced as was tolerable.) Now the books are humonguous and the plots plod along interminably. Actually the reason the prose of those days is acceptable was not so much because the authors were playing in a different league, it's because they were telling such gripping stories that you didn't care about the prose. Now they trudge along and fill the books with acres of uninspired personal-relationship stuff that's just distracting in a Sensawonder story.

Here I can point to a specific recent example, the novel that won the Hugo in 2006. In that big fat book there's a short zippy book struggling to get out, namely the scientific puzzle story. But it's buried in a huge endless personal relationship story among the main characters. Had the relationship story been told without the SF plot device it would have been more tolerable, or rather I would never have tried to read it in the first place, because it wouldn't have been a very good relationship novel, as such things are measured in the mainstream.

The novel that got the right balance between SF puzzle and human relationships was Benford's Timescape. That book used the human characteristics to add touches of color to a dry puzzle instead of flooding it out.