Editorial – June 2025: Traditional SF.

Hello everyone,

Reflecting on last month’s editorial, I had to have a think about my term ‘traditional science fiction’. Was it ‘traditional’, and do we all see it the same way?

If you include various mythologies which have their own internal logic, then science fiction is the oldest genre of all. It takes reality and tweaks it in a particular direction. You do have to wonder as people settled around the late-night fire to listen to the storyteller, how many people chose to go to bed instead because they didn’t get it? There must have been some for it to exist today. In modern times, where most people can read, this is invariably how we know science works and push or fudge it a little to open up possibilities to see how people cope with it.

Of course, Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ in 1818 got the renaissance in Gothic romance, but there were genre stories before Shelley. This was the equivalent of the breakout novel that had everyone talking and gained worldwide appeal. Then again, that can apply to any genre. Popular authors tend to transcend the generations, and if we knew how, then the contemporaries of the likes of Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote Science Fiction, don’t forget, would have been remembered as well. You might think it might have been a publisher thing, but his lead characters, Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, were deemed filmatic and widened the audience beyond those who read his books. You can apply that to any key character extending beyond their book source when they have multiple films. It differentiates itself by becoming iconic.

American science fiction really blossomed in the pulps edited by the likes of Hugo Gernsback and John Campbell Jr, allowing short story authors to get recognised and progress up the publisher ladder to doing novels. Even with those editors gone, SF still grew, although you would have a hard time picking out iconic characters until Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel ‘Dune’ and its messiah, Paul Atreides, kept alive through endless films now. You can bet more people have seen the films than read the books. I should point out British SF authors flourished on both sides of the pond, and the likes of John Wyndham and Arthur C. Clarke’s works got into films. It’s interesting that American Stanley Kubrick had the choice of many SF authors centred on Clarke. ’2001: A Space Odyssey’, with the HAL 9000 becoming the iconic character, raised the profile of SF films from low budget to high, but it took a few films before ‘Star Wars’ to show the profit margins that gave SF bigger respect and later films the necessary budget.

Over the years, more people have seen SF films than have read the books. SF is still seen as a slum area by the mainstream reviewers. In many respects, the same is now true for comic books as well now. The primary ingredient is the visual aspects. Viewers will watch even a lengthy SF film preferable to spending a week reading a book. If there is something to differentiate SF books and films is that the latter’s scriptwriters don’t need much grounding to use their tropes. Even so, the number of iconic characters seems confined to Ripley, the robot Terminator and various Predators. Name the lead characters from the TV series ‘The Expanse’, and I bet you’ll struggle, not helped by the rare use of names in it. A lot of the problems these days are a group ensemble and no star leading the show. Nothing wrong with that, but how do you identify anyone?

Anyway, I’m side-stepping. There are the occasional jumps. In the UK, it was Michael Moorcock’s ‘new wave’ which essentially meant more swear words and adult themes, although that got integrated over the years rather than being sustained. Regardless of the genre, there is always a shift in standards and protocols as each generation adapts to what becomes acceptable.

Everything, from cyberpunk onwards, needs writers to support it. Cyberpunk only really had less than a dozen writers supporting it and faded into the background when computers took off and had expertise looking at it and queried what they were driving at. William Gibson himself admitted he didn’t like computers and really put the crushers on the sub-genre, more so his belief that people who were drug-addled could program a computer when the truth is otherwise.

SF really needs some knowledge and writers good enough to present it well or show the downfalls. Today, we know that unstopped global warming will make the human race extinct, which tends to put a dampener on our future. Any SF author today has either to address this with a solution or ignore it if it gets in the way of a story. As we are also living in a reality which has many SF tropes as part of our societies across the world, SF authors need to work a lot harder to present something which would be regarded as new and ahead of its time. Not impossible, but nothing really breakthrough lately.

In that regard, we seem to be at an impasse. New ways to transport to other worlds? New weaponry? New technology? Are there any new alien species to discover? Time travel takes us to places we’ve never been before. All science fiction, but only backdrops to the character stories people want to read about how people get on in such worlds.

With Covid, many SF authors saw the writing on the wall for mankind’s future and gave their agents the impetus to steer them towards fantasy, which made them more money. The thing is, long before, many of the bigger publishers gave up their slush piles and relied on agents to find them new material, and now they are less involved because the money isn’t there, so why should they get new SF writers? I’ve tackled large slush piles myself to know it’s a lot of hard work looking for gems amongst samples from writers who don’t understand grammar or even have good ideas. Even when they have, it still needs someone to champion the work for a publisher to invest the money to make a successful book or, at worst, a tax write-off to balance their budgets. It also costs a lot of money to work through a slush pile properly, and science fiction isn’t getting the money anymore despite the success of SF films and TV series. Our genre needs an investment of money and time from you, the potential reader, to revive its fortunes.

So, here we are today with publishers looking for new audiences, oddly with romance, WOKE and even gay-integrated sub-genres of science fiction and fantasy. As I mentioned in the last editorial, with a set of reviewers who are predominately straight and many female, it’s a big ask. This is no disrespect to those who like these ‘new’ orientations; it’s just that it’s missing SF’s regular audience, who would prefer something more science fiction-y. I suspect the people in the above sexual orientation don’t even have a significant number of SF fans to benefit from or even select these books. Certainly we aren’t alone in not reviewing these books. Nothing against sexual orientation, but is it a selling point in science fiction? Recruiting reviewers now is hard enough, let alone anyone with a speciality in these new sub-genres. The last time romance/SF was tried was over 15 years back, and I read a selection of them. The romance aspect was really just a subplot that didn’t really drive the story any more than anything else and soon faded. Is it any wonder that I don’t think it will last any longer this time? Considering that the current seasons of ‘Doctor Who’ are taking a similar tack, it is thought to be contributing to its lower viewing figures on television.

Even though more publishers are taking this route this time, I can’t see them lasting when they get their sales figures back. You only have to look for the reviews, and, unless I’ve missed something, none of the established websites and magazine review columns are quoted in promotions, which should say something. The publishers need to re-establish contact with the regular SF readers who are sadly missing their material these days. There is too much dependency on agents to find writers who have their own slush piles once more and look for the talent themselves. Agents tell their genre writers that SF doesn’t pay well and they’d make more money from fantasy, so SF becomes a desert. Be mindful of potential pitfalls. A writer who disagrees is likely to be perceived as lacking business sense and may risk losing both their agent and career.

What drives science fiction is what is likely to happen in the future and how we handle it. Occasionally, science fiction might even serve as a metaphor for our current society, although I find it hard to understand how it can match or surpass what we currently experience. Is it possible for the situation to worsen, or for it to become something we would find compelling to read, given the reality we face on a daily basis? Of course, the ‘Illuminatus Trilogy’ suggests that we are all characters in a story, unable to escape its pages. If so, it’s worrying because we must depend on the reader to seek a happy ending, even if it’s not in the story.

Science fiction, as a written medium, is currently in decline. It will need a concerted effort to go forward or even stop losing ground. It needs a breakout novel or series to capture not only the science fiction reader but also the wider public, possibly as a film and/or TV series. As we have read about authors unsuccessfully trying to sell their novels in the rounds of going around the publishers, they rarely are good at picking a success first off. Without them looking through a slush pile, that’s even harder. They may choose a small publisher’s successful book and spread it globally. Of course, all could be valid, looking for that breakout novel.

We can only speculate about its potential contents. Readers can be fickle. They want something different but not too different. Science fiction has covered so much ground already, making it harder to reinvent anything. It would need a wildcard to stir the imagination. As I’ve commented in the past, the only thing missing in our own science fiction reality is a genuine first contact with extra-terrestrials, but if that happens, SF could be in a similar situation as it is now. Who can beat real-life extraterrestrial stories? How can SF compete with the real thing? Even more so, if they have their own version of fiction, let alone science fiction, it could supplant our own anyway.

Science fiction can be both optimistic and pessimistic in its outlook. Currently, we probably need an optimistic future, if only to give us something to look forward to or motivate future scientists to find a solution to our current problems.

Thank you, take care, good night, and buy a science fiction book and read it.

Geoff Willmetts

editor: www.SFCrowsnest.info

A Zen thought: Breathe, and you are supplied with needed oxygen.

What qualities does a geek possess? Did I mention deep thinking?

The Reveal: There are actually humans on this planet.

Observation: If ‘2001’ was made today, apart from having a new name like ‘2050’, the shuttles from Earth to the Moon would probably not have human pilots.

Computer Observation: In the middle of May, I had an odd problem with Hotmail/Outlook. I could only see new emails by choosing ‘select’ and filtering ‘unread’, and even that looked odd. If you find a similar problem, go into ‘sort by’, and you’ll see it’s been switched to ‘from’. Switch that to ‘date’, and things will go back to normal.

Computer Observation: Do PaintShop Pro users get annoyed when an update erases the commands in the custom bar? Me, too. I recently found out that if you select ‘Workspace’ in the File column, you can save it there. I was a little sceptical, but I tried it with the latest major update this time, and it works and saves a lot of time.

Feeling Stressed: Don’t try so hard.