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

[calimac]

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.

Comments

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

I've mostly stopped reading new SF too, but I think my reasons are similar to why I've stopped following modern pop music for the most part. It's partly that all the new stuff reminds me of old stuff, so it doesn't seem fresh and exciting anymore, and it's partly because I got tired of wading through stuff I didn't like trying to find stuff I did like. I also don't seem to have (or to take) the time to read as much anymore (discounting the amount of time I spend reading on the Internet, which is another part of the picture), so it's harder to keep up with what everybody else finds interesting. (Which is to say, that even using other people as a filter is too much work.)

I dunno. I'm guessing that there's plenty of stuff being written that I would have found interesting twenty years ago, but, as the Germans say, Ich habe keinen Bock. I don't see it as a failing in modern SF, but as a change in my own reading (and aging) process.

That said, I have been reading a fair amount of older SF, and I do like the shorter novel lengths. Who was it who said that SF's ideal form is the novella?

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I got tired of wading through stuff I didn't like trying to find stuff I did like.

That's not been a problem for me in SF, in which the general recommendation process seems to cater to my tastes as much as anything does. But it is a problem for me in fantasy, where people who ought to know better recommend the most amazing dreck and pass over actual good stuff unmentioned.

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

I don't read a lot of new SF because ...

No, wait. I still read new SF. But not as much as I yusta. Part of it is what fringefaan says, that I don't have the time or the resources to comb through it all. Part is because I have more other things occupying my time. And part is that I read more "other" stuff, particularly nonfiction (especially science, history and biography), than I yusta.

Still, I find stuff, partly by digging, and partly by reading new stuff by old favorites. I still enjoy what Robert and Gene and Ursula and many others put out, at least most of the time. I quite enjoy Varley's new stuff, though I'd enjoy it more if he didn't feel compelled to prove that he is the True Heir of Heinlein. Ditto Spider.

And, as I say, there're some good newer writers, too.

Like f'rexample, I think Stephen Baxter occupies a space pretty near midway between Clarke and Benford, which is by me a pretty good space, and doesn't write eight-million-page monsters.

Then there's the whole neo-literate-space-opera gang, who do tend towards a bit of bloat but not, in general, excessively so; the most obviously "bloated" is Hamilton's monstrous "Night's Dawn" trilogy, which is actually sized pretty well for what it is doing. Others I dump in this category would include David Zindell; Dan Simmons in "Hyperion" mode; Linda Nagata; and others I'm not thinking of.

Of course, none of the ones I'm naming here is NEW-new. I am no longer sufficiently in touch with what's happening to know the good new stuff until it isn't quite so new anymore. This saddens me a little, but I have so much of the past to explore...

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't call Spin an amazingly bloated novel, but only because the general standards of bloat are so high.

And that's supposed to be one of the best novels recently. It's not a bad book, but if that's one of the best there is in contemporary SF, I'm wasting my time around here. There's no reason why I should look into the others. I did pick up Hyperion when it was new, browsed through it, put it down before I got a hernia, then discovered it was only Part I.

[drifting-seeker.livejournal.com]

I hope you don't mind me responding here, but I thought what you were commenting on was a curious parallel to what I've felt about fantasy. Particularly in regards to the daunting size of modern fantasy books, not to mention the anger that I feel when I see a book that looks like it might be vaguely interesting, only to be stopped short by the Book 1 or Volume 1 just underneath the title, which makes me wonder and dispair over how stand-alone the book will be.

Since assigned college reading killed some of my love of literature, I find it exceptionally daunting contemplating reading lengthy fantasy sagas. So I've been following a path to older authors and older works, and even further back to the writings that inspired them. C.S. Lewis (since I never properly read the Narnia books when I was younger), Robert E. Howard (who I read somewhere that even Tolkien credited as being good), H. P. Lovecraft (Poe was to obvious for me, I think), and even further back, I've been looking to Dunsany. I have a copy of Edisson's The Worm Ouroboros, just for sheer curiosities' sake.

Perhaps mine are more superficial reasons for now preferring stories of more manageable length, but some of what you said resonated with how I felt.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

As I implied, my problems with current fantasy are different from mine with current SF.

For me, fantasy has always been a genre that's more amenable to greater length. That's because it explores a world, not just tell a story. (SF that tries to do that tends to disappear up its own fundament in search of philosophy, cf. Dune.) So I like long fantasy - someone as fond of The Lord of the Rings as I could hardly say otherwise. I'd never say, "C'mon, throw the Ring away and go home already" as some do.

But it has to be good, and most of it really, really isn't.

The Narnia books are pretty short even if you count all 7 of them. Howardian barbarian fantasy is just not my style, and I don't know that Tolkien ever said anything about him. Dunsany writes both short and moderately long, and is one of my very favorites. Eddison is a real test case: he's very long, and has exceedingly distinctive prose that you either love or find impossible.