Is there a future for science fiction?
The passing of Arthur C Clarke has left many of science fiction's devotees in funereal mode: Asimov's gone, Heinlein's gone, Vonnegut too. With other titans such as Ray Bradbury and Ursula LeGuin not getting any younger, a collective sigh for giants passed has heaved through the blogosphere: who, now, can take the helm of Starship SF?
Well, lots of people actually - though in keeping with the genre's traditions, it is undergoing some unexpected mutations, and there are at least two very different horizons ahead.
Look in one direction and you can see writers splintering the genre into ever more specific niches, with correspondingly smaller readerships. Wikipedia lists 43 sub-genres of science fiction (for reasons as obscure as the mechanics of time travel, you must never call it sci-fi if you're talking to a fan), and there will probably be more by next week.
For those who like stories about underground groups doing battle with sinister megacorporations, there's biopunk. This is not to be confused with clockpunk, which considers the impact modern technologies would have had if they had been invented earlier. Bronzepunk and stonepunk have some similarities, but don't whatever you do give a clockpunk fan a space opera or a sword'n'planet as an Easter present.
Swing your scope around towards the mass market, however, and something like the Invasion of the Mainstream is under way. Where previously SF existed in its own universe, little visited by general readers, it is now taking over large stretches of Waterstone's shelves.
Until recently, a science fiction novel would never have made the Booker shortlist. These days the literati are forever zooming back and forth in time (Will Self and David Mitchell two recent adventurers) and fiddling around in the laboratory (Margaret Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro).
"I don't pretend we have all the answers," Arthur C Clarke once wrote. "But the questions are certainly worth thinking about." These days, it seems, all of us are doing so.
Lindesay Irvine (The Guardian)
The passing of Arthur C Clarke has left many of science fiction's devotees in funereal mode: Asimov's gone, Heinlein's gone, Vonnegut too. With other titans such as Ray Bradbury and Ursula LeGuin not getting any younger, a collective sigh for giants passed has heaved through the blogosphere: who, now, can take the helm of Starship SF?
Well, lots of people actually - though in keeping with the genre's traditions, it is undergoing some unexpected mutations, and there are at least two very different horizons ahead.
Look in one direction and you can see writers splintering the genre into ever more specific niches, with correspondingly smaller readerships. Wikipedia lists 43 sub-genres of science fiction (for reasons as obscure as the mechanics of time travel, you must never call it sci-fi if you're talking to a fan), and there will probably be more by next week.
For those who like stories about underground groups doing battle with sinister megacorporations, there's biopunk. This is not to be confused with clockpunk, which considers the impact modern technologies would have had if they had been invented earlier. Bronzepunk and stonepunk have some similarities, but don't whatever you do give a clockpunk fan a space opera or a sword'n'planet as an Easter present.
Swing your scope around towards the mass market, however, and something like the Invasion of the Mainstream is under way. Where previously SF existed in its own universe, little visited by general readers, it is now taking over large stretches of Waterstone's shelves.
Until recently, a science fiction novel would never have made the Booker shortlist. These days the literati are forever zooming back and forth in time (Will Self and David Mitchell two recent adventurers) and fiddling around in the laboratory (Margaret Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro).
"I don't pretend we have all the answers," Arthur C Clarke once wrote. "But the questions are certainly worth thinking about." These days, it seems, all of us are doing so.
Lindesay Irvine (The Guardian)