Asimov's SF, September 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  The things that bring barbarians into the Science Fiction Village.

  Why do I want barbarians in the Science Fiction Village? Forget that they're my kith and kin. Think for a moment about the shelf space argument (good old #3). Large genres do not care about how much shelf space goes to tie-in novels. The mystery genre has a plethora of tie-ins, from Murder She Wrote to CSI. The romance genre has fewer, but almost every single romance movie that comes out has a novelization attached to it.

  In those genres, no one talks about the tie-ins “stealing” shelf space, even though, logically, there should be less shelf space because of the very size of those genres. In 2004, romance novels accounted for 39.3 percent of all adult fiction sold. Mystery and thrillers came in second with 29.6 percent. General fiction, which is what most of us would call the “literary mainstream,” was 12.9 percent of all adult fiction sold, followed by “other fiction,” a category that includes such things as Western and Men's Adventure, at 11.8 percent.

  SF came in dead last at 6.4 percent.[7]

  [7. Statistics compiled every year by the Romance Writers of America—www.rwanational. org—. These statistics come from two studies commissioned by the organization. One study “is tabulated by mathematician Olivia Hall, who draws data from mass-market book distributors’ yearly release information; from figures released by the American Bookseller Association; and from reports by Ipsos-BookTrends reports, an independent market research firm that studies book trends. This study is updated yearly. Another study focuses on reader demographics, book content, and book-buying habits. It is conducted via telephone survey and in-person focus groups by Corona Research, a market research firm in Denver, CO.” Other studies, conducted by various organizations, have similar figures. Anyone who doubts these numbers can do their own tally using books in print numbers: total fiction books published into the number I used above. I prefer the RWA statistics; they're less dismal for SF publishing.]

  SF—y'know, the genre that includes fantasy. I have no idea how low the sales would be if we were only talking about science fiction all by its little ole self.

  SF is committing the common sin of a dying literary genre. It blames its problems on the outsiders—the tie-in novels, and by extension, the barbarians at the gate—who are crowding the shelves and taking away space for “good” sf.

  “Good” sf can retire to the specialty press where the Science Fiction Village can read and discuss it. It's time to return to the gosh-wow, sense-of-wonder stories that sf abandoned when it added literary values to its mix, the kind of stories that Star Wars, and by extension, Star Trek, Stargate, and all those other media properties have had all along.[8]

  [8. In fact, I believe the Star Trek juggernaut faltered when it lost track of the same values that sf literature forgot: the excellent storytelling, the hero's journey, the strange new worlds (familiar and yet unfamiliar) promised in the voice-over for the first and second series.]

  SF's insularity is murdering the genre. Remember that publishing is a business. As a business, it is driven by sales figures, by profit and loss statements. For too long, sf has been in the loss side of the publishing column. As a result, fewer and fewer sf books are being published.

  The figures I quoted above for 2004 are down from 2003. In that year, SF counted for 7 percent of all adult fiction books sold. In 2001, SF counted for 8 percent. The literary trend spirals downward while the media trend goes up. Half the new television dramas introduced in 2005 were science fiction, fantasy, or had a fantastic element. Most of the movies in the top twenty for the past five years have been SF. Nearly all of the games published have been SF.

  If we bring even one-tenth of the people who play the games, watch the movies, or read the tie-in novels into the literary side of SF, we'll revive the genre. In a few years, we could overtake mystery or even, God forbid, romance.

  Let's put it another way. When Star Wars fans go to the bookstore like I did thirty years ago, they buy the latest novelization. Then they patrol the aisles for something similar—and find nothing. The books that would interest them are hidden between the jargon-filled limited-access novels that fill the shelves, behind the dystopian novels that present a world uglier than our own, the protagonists who really don't care about their fellow man/alien/ whatever. A few attempts at reading that kind of book, and the SW reader returns to the tie-in shelf where the heroes are indeed heroic, the worlds are interesting, and the endings are upbeat.

  Recently, Publisher's Weekly interviewed six sf specialty shops across the country, and asked their proprietors which books they consider must-haves. Not a single science fiction book on the lists has been published in the last five years. Fantasy novels include books published recently, but not sf.[9]

  [9. Sidebar to “A Hobbit Takeover?", Publisher's Weekly, April 4, 2005. Retrieved from website archives.]

  Science fiction, small case, is not producing novels that a large group of people want to read. And that spells the death knell for the literary genre at a time when, ironically, interest in SF is expanding.

  Fantasy will take care of itself. It has kept the tropes that bring in readers. It is a growing genre. The statistics I list above do not include young adult novels, which means that the Harry Potter phenomenon is missing from the 6.4 percent. But the gaming novels, movie novelizations, or original novels written in a media universe (like the Star Wars novels) are included in that number. Which means that the actual percentage of sf books in relation to other adult fiction titles sold is even lower than 6.4 percent. Significantly lower.

  The literary genre, on whom we modeled this debacle, saw the error of its ways about five years ago. Now, you'll notice, literary fiction has become general fiction (see above) and publishes things sf sneers at—alternate histories set in World War II (Philip Roth, The Plot Against America); time travel novels (Jasper Fforde); and scientific adventure fiction (anything by Michael Crichton). The literary genre has also reclaimed plot. Or, as Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon (author of the first-draft screenplay for Spider-Man II), calls it: Entertainment.

  In his opening to The Best American Short Stories, Chabon writes:

  Entertainment has a bad name. Serious people, some of whom write short stories, learn to mistrust and even revile it. The word wears spandex, pasties, a leisure-suit studded with blinking lights. It gives off a whiff of Coppertone and dripping Creamsicle, the fake-butter miasma of a moviehouse lobby.... Intelligent people must keep a certain distance from its productions. They must handle things that entertain them with gloves of irony and postmodern tongs. Entertainment, in short, means junk, and too much junk is bad for you.... [10]

  [10. Chabon, Michael, “Introduction,” The Best American Short Stories 2005, edited by Michael Chabon, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005. P. xiii.]

  Chabon goes on to say that those serious and intelligent people are wrong. Because they have strangled entertainment in the literary field, the field has narrowed unpleasantly. He continues:

  The brain is an organ of entertainment, sensitive at any depth and over a wide spectrum. But we have learned to mistrust and despise our human aptitude for being entertained, and in that sense we get the entertainment we deserve.[11]

  [11. Chabon, Michael, “Introduction,” The Best American Short Stories 2005, edited by Michael Chabon, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005. P. xiii.]

  Chabon's argument applies to the sf genre. We have gotten the entertainment we deserve, and it is slowly strangling the publishing arm of our great genre.

  Is current SF writing influenced by Star Wars? No, not nearly enough. We need more grand adventure, more heroes on journeys, more uplifting (if not downright happy) endings. Yes, we can keep the good sentence-by-sentence writing, the good characters, and the lovely descriptions the New Wave steered us to. We can even keep the dystopian fiction and the realistic, if difficult-to-read, sf novels, so long as we do them in moderation. They cannot—and should not—be the dominant subgenre on the shelves.

  Are
tie-in novels taking shelf space away from SF? Hell, no. The tie-ins, from SW to Trek and beyond, are keeping SF alive. If we, the sf writers and publishers, want more shelf space, we have to earn it. We earn it by telling stories, some of them old faithfuls that the fans like to read, the things that have been published before. We earn it by entertaining. We earn it by creating characters as memorable as Luke and Han and Darth Vader.

  We don't earn it by whining that a movie has encroached on our genre.

  Barbarians are taking over our little village!

  Well, let me remind you of the things I said in the beginning of this essay. I am a barbarian in villager's clothing. I snuck into the SF Village long ago, but I sneak back out every night for a little forbidden entertainment.

  Open the gates, people. We barbarians aren't here to trash your genre. We love it too. We love it for different reasons. But the village can become a city.

  In fact, it needs to become a city in order to survive.

  So let us in. We can save the SF genre.

  Copyright © 2006 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. First published in a slightly different form in Star Warson Trial, edited by David Brin and Matthew Woodring Stover, BenBella Press, June 2006.

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  As announced earlier in the issue, Kristine Kathryn Rusch's December 2005 novella, “Diving into the Wreck," was the winner of our twentieth annual Readers’ Award Poll. That story also won Spain's UPC award. In addition to her many SF, mystery, and romance novels and short stories, the author also writes a regular nonfiction column for Aeon Speculative Fiction Magazine.

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  WIDOW OF THE ANDROID-ROBOT TIME WARS

  by Vincent Miske

  Her deceased android husband appears to her every twilight, a much younger machine than her memory chips allow.

  Still, he is the same proud, brave fully functional warrior model, gloriously recounting the old inventories of destroyed robotic foes—but always displaying tenderly nuanced protocols toward her.

  He is so fervent between battles past or future (she cannot detect which) she hasn't the drive capacity to tell him he was neutralized at her local time coordinates some seventeen solar years ago by a C113-251 smart-missile launching robot model, newly outfitted with a Sandovellian sensor array which her husband could not evade, having only the Jaxtar IVS-34B scrambler.

  Like all robotic foes, the C113-251 is pure evil as all androids know.

  Yet, he had a gleam about him when he notified her of her husband's demise, as per interstellar treaty 63225678-UN.

  And if he should transmit an invitation again to review past or future casualty inventories together after seventeen solar local years, she might not, this time, be so quick to respond in the negative.

  —Vincent Miske

  Copyright © 2006 Vincent Miske

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  SUNLIGHT OR ROCK

  by John Kessel

  John Kessel is the co-director of the Creative Writing program at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. He has taught courses in fiction writing, American literature, and the literature of the fantastic at NCSU since 1982. “Sunlight or Rock” is a sequel to his novella “Stories for Men” (October/ November 2002), which won the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award in 2003. John is co-editor, with James Patrick Kelly, of Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology. The book has just been released by Tachyon Publications.

  In Mayer colony, Erno lived in the Hotel Gijon, on Calle Viernes, in a two-by-three-meter room barely high enough for him to stand up in. The room contained a gel mattress, a false window, and a thousand bugs. He assumed that anything he said or did in the hotel was being recorded for later perusal, but in fact Erno could not imagine why anyone would care what any of the residents of Calle Viernes did.

  Most likely the bugs were the remnants of some jackleg enterprise that had failed. Some would-be entrepreneur had seeded self-replicating monitors throughout the colony, hoping to sell the spy service, or the idea of the spy service, or protection against the spy service. The thing had fallen through, and now unless you lived in the park and could afford scrubbers, you dealt with the bugs.

  Erno sat up on the edge of the gel mat, cross-legged, trying to get himself moving. Too much wine last night. He stared out the window at an earth landscape: sunrise over forested mountains, pink and blue sky with streaks of white cloud, river in the valley catching silver fire from the sun. In the distance an eagle circled above the cliffs. Erno took a deep breath of Mayer's slightly sour air and relaxed the muscles in his back and shoulders. The eagle froze dead in mid-glide, the foliage in the trees stopped moving—then the bird jumped back and repeated its swoop: a glitch in the ancient image generator.

  Erno had been watching this stuttering eagle for six months now. After ten minutes he stretched to his feet, shook the bugs from his arms and legs, applied probiots to his groin and armpits, and drew on his stiff overalls. He drank the ounce of water left in the bulb by his bed and ate the leftover soycake from last night.

  Outside his room he ran into Alois Reuther, who lived in the next room. Alois, about to scuttle through his door, raised his left arm in greeting. It looked completely normal. The last time Erno had seen him, Alois had sported a glittering metal hand with six digits and a special manipulator.

  “New hand?” Erno asked.

  “The newest,” said Alois. He swiveled the hand 360 degrees and extended his index finger twenty centimeters. The fact that the hand looked like flesh rather than a machine was unsettling. “Watch,” he said. Alois touched his finger to the dim light fixture in the ceiling and the light brightened immediately.

  “Nice,” Erno said, completely repulsed. Alois had replaced much of his body with obsolete devices. His eyes were multifaceted lenses, his left arm was made of pink pseudo-flesh over a titanium armature, and servos in his legs clicked as he walked. The fingers of his flesh hand were stained yellow from the cigarettes that he smoked, imported from Clavius. His shabby blue suit, worn at the elbows, reeked of stale smoke, and every night Erno could hear him coughing through the thin wall that separated their rooms. Some of the other residents claimed that Alois had done hard time in Shackleton, others that he had a fortune stashed away in some secret account. Erno doubted it.

  Alois shrank his finger and held his hand out for Erno to shake. Erno hesitated, then took it. The hand felt like warm flesh. Alois grinned fiercely and would not let go. “Look,” he said.

  When Erno looked down at their grasped hands, he saw that Alois's little finger bore a silver ring—the same ring that Erno wore on his own pinkie. Startled, he let go of Alois's hand, and the ring on Alois's finger gradually subsided into the flesh. Erno touched the ring on his own finger. It was the only thing he had from his mother. He always wore it turned around so that the turquoise stone sat toward his palm, making it look like a plain silver band—less chance for the inhabitants of Calle Viernes to notice he had anything of value.

  “Perfect mimicry!” Alois said. As abruptly as he had engaged Erno, he turned and placed the new hand against his doorplate. The door flipped open and Alois hurried through it into his room.

  Alois was only one of the eccentrics who lived in the hotel. On the other side of Erno lived Brian, an evolved dog who worked as a bonded messenger. One floor down the narrow stairs lived a couple of dwarfs who went by the names of Tessa and Therese, each only a meter tall. At first Erno thought their stature was a freak of nature, until the concierge told him they were an abandoned genetic mod that had been tried at Tycho, engineered at half-size to reduce the load on resources. But the mod never caught on, and Tessa and Therese were left to live in a world of giants. They earned their living selling pornographic vids that they produced somewhere in the e-swamp at the north end of the colony. Erno bought one and found it pretty hot. On disk, they had the ability to convey by expression and pose the desperate need to have a
penis inserted somewhere, anywhere, into their bodies, immediately. Nothing strange about that: what was strange was to see that ability translated into money, something that he had heard about back home but never understood. Now, alone in a place where the sexual rules were all upside down, he understood it better. He was ashamed to admit how easily he had become a consumer.

  The concierge was already at her desk when he hit the lobby. “Good morning, Mr. Pamson,” she said. “Your rent is due."

  “Tonight, Ana,” Erno said. “I promise."

  “I promise too. I promise, if your door won't open for you tonight, I will not open it for you."

  “I don't promise unless I mean it,” Erno said.

  “Claro. The deadly Mr. P."

  He could not pay the rent. Anadem Benet had loaned him cash for two weeks now. Perhaps it was that he was an immigrant from the Society of Cousins, and she liked quizzing him about life in what she persisted in thinking was a dictatorship of women. The first time she had seen his penis, she'd asked him why it wasn't bigger. She had the idea that Erno had been born in a male harem, genetically engineered to give sexual pleasure. Erno's descriptions of everyday life among the Cousins only disappointed her. “Cousins are a gender-differentiated anarcho-social democracy,” he insisted, “not a role-reversed sexual tyranny. The founders were women and men; first chair Nora Sobieski said—"

  “So why were you exiled?"

  “I—I made a mistake. Because of it, someone died."

  “Ah.” It was the only time he had ever impressed her. The deadly Mr. P. Maybe that was why she had let him ride so long. Anadem claimed she came from one of the wealthiest families on the moon, graced with pre-natal mods that gave her lightning intellect and catlike balance. It was only through an unlikely series of investment reverses, and the malice of her great aunt Amelia, Anadem allowed, that she had come to manage the Hotel Gijon. Erno found the story hard to reconcile with her lank hair and spotty skin, and as for preternatural balance, the only evidence Erno had seen of that was when she dodged out the back of the lobby whenever Felix Menas came down Calle Viernes looking for her.