Putting the future behind us: Geoff Ryman and mundane sf

This is a very interesting interview about emergent sf, where Geoff Ryman describes "mundane sf" and wonders about the field's dwindling.  It's a cliche (and sometimes a troll) to declare a living thing dead, but Ryman's doing something different. 

First, Ryman observes that the publishing category of "sf" has increasingly become "mostly fantasy":

Something has happened to both our reading and writing habits.  Go the SF shelves in Barnes and Noble and you will find mostly fantasy or horror...
In the 2004 Clarion West not much SF was being written.  Lots and lots of vampires and zombies in post-genre fiction –- fiction in which the weird happens but actually is not the whole focus of the story.  We didn’t get many SF stories.  This year’s Clarion even more so.

That seems about right to me.  Note that he's not objecting to either f or horror.

Then Ryman explores what's changed in the world.  His major argument is chilling:

Finally, our relationship to the future has been disrupted.  The future is not a place we want to live in.  We’ve got a bad few years ahead of us, and at the end of it our lives may involve less travel, less energy use, fewer toys, more work.  Maybe we just can’t face, as Elisabeth Vonarburg once said, ‘writing over that pile of corpses.’ Maybe we just no longer believe the SF dream.

My first thought was of James Kunstler's World Made By Hand (2008), about a post-peak oil society.  Grim stuff for much of it (and my review is coming).  My wife (Infocultwife!) says this makes her think of Octavia Butler's powerful Parable of the Sower (1993) and sequel, concerning contemporary American society in disintegration.  Which brought to mind Kim Stanley Robinson's "Down and Out in the Year 2000" (1992), that fine smack-down of cyberpunk's disconnection from social realities.  And Jack Womack's stunning Random Acts of Senseless Violence (1995), also following social disintegration, but in New York City.  These are all stories predicated on emerging or present societies in contraction.  Not dystopias about the present only, but arguments in this sense about the future.

The contrast with Star Wars, or Star Trek, or steampunk, is large.

Still thinking about Ryman's argument.

(via MetaFilter)

Comments

[HP]

Hmmm... and I would have said that most contemporary horror is actually fantasy or science fiction.

Sometimes I think that genre fiction needs to get back to its gothic roots and start the whole process over.

[Bryan Alexander]

What are good examples of that current sf-in-horror, HP?

Would love to see more of that Poe matrix, myself.