Bruce Sterling - Slipstream

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Bruce Sterling

bruces@well.sf.ca.us

CATSCAN 5 "Slipstream"

In a recent remarkable interview in _New

Pathways_ #11, Carter Scholz alludes with pained

resignation to the ongoing brain-death of science

fiction. In the 60s and 70s, Scholz opines, SF had a

chance to become a worthy literature; now that chance

has passed. Why? Because other writers have now

learned to adapt SF's best techniques to their own

ends.

"And," says Scholz, "They make us look sick.

When I think of the best `speculative fiction' of the

past few years, I sure don't think of any Hugo or

Nebula winners. I think of Margaret Atwood's _The

Handmaid's Tale_, and of Don DeLillo's _White Noise_,

and of Batchelor's _The Birth of the People's Republic

of Antarctica_, and of Gaddis' _JR_ and _Carpenter's

Gothic_, and of Coetzee's _Life and Times of Michael

K_ . . . I have no hope at all that genre science

fiction can ever again have any literary significance.

But that's okay, because now there are other people

doing our job."

It's hard to stop quoting this interview. All

interviews should be this good. There's some great

campy guff about the agonizing pain it takes to write

short stories; and a lecture on the unspeakable horror

of writer's block; and some nifty fusillades of

forthright personal abuse; and a lot of other stuff

that is making _New Pathways_ one of the most

interesting zines of the Eighties. Scholz even reveals

his use of the Fibonacci Sequence in setting the

length and number of the chapters in his novel

_Palimpsests_, and wonders how come nobody caught on

to this groundbreaking technique of his.

Maybe some of this peripheral stuff kinda dulls

the lucid gleam of his argument. But you don't have to

be a medieval Italian mathematician to smell the reek

of decay in modern SF. Scholz is right. The job isn't

being done here.

"Science Fiction" today is a lot like the

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contemporary Soviet Union; the sprawling possessor of

a dream that failed. Science fiction's official dogma,

which almos

t everybody ignores, is based on attitudes

toward science and technology which are bankrupt and

increasingly divorced from any kind of reality. "Hard-

SF," the genre's ideological core, is a joke today; in

terms of the social realities of high-tech post-

industrialism, it's about as relevant as hard-

Leninism.

Many of the best new SF writers seem openly

ashamed of their backward Skiffy nationality. "Ask not

what you can do for science fiction--ask how you can

edge away from it and still get paid there."

A blithely stateless cosmopolitanism is the

order of the day, even for an accredited Clarion grad

like Pat Murphy: "I'm not going to bother what camp

things fall into," she declares in a recent _Locus_

interview. "I'm going to write the book I want and see

what happens . . . If the markets run together, I

leave it to the critics." For Murphy, genre is a dead

issue, and she serenely wills the trash-mountain to

come to Mohammed.

And one has to sympathize. At one time, in its

clumsy way, Science Fiction offered some kind of

coherent social vision. SF may have been gaudy and

naive, and possessed by half-baked fantasies of power

and wish-fulfillment, but at least SF spoke a

contemporary language. Science Fiction did the job of

describing, in some eldritch way, what was actually

*happening*, at least in the popular imagination.

Maybe it wasn't for everybody, but if you were a

bright, unfastidious sort, you could read SF and feel,

in some satisfying and deeply unconscious way, that

you'd been given a real grip on the chrome-plated

handles of the Atomic Age.

But *now* look at it. Consider the repulsive

ghastliness of the SF category's Lovecraftian

inbreeding. People retched in the 60s when De Camp and

Carter skinned the corpse of Robert E. Howard for its

hide and tallow, but nowadays necrophilia is run on an

industrial basis. Shared-world anthologies. Braided

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Bruce Sterling - Slipstream

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