It seemed to me that midcentury mainstream American science fiction had often been triumphalist and militaristic, a sort of folk propaganda for American exceptionalism. I was tired of America-as-the-future, the world as a white monoculture, the protagonist as a good guy from the middle class or above. I wanted there to be more elbow room. I wanted to make room for antiheroes.
I also wanted science fiction to be more naturalistic. There had been a poverty of description in much of it. The technology depicted was so slick and clean that it was practically invisible. What would any given SF favorite look like if we could crank up the resolution? As it was then, much of it was like video games before the invention of fractal dirt. I wanted to see dirt in the corners.
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It's interesting that this interview was from 2011 and mostly discusses work written in the 80s and 90s.
I kinda feel like the script has flipped and people are getting tired of the morally grey, everyone-is-bad scifi settings... and we're kinda looking for more stories with pure heroes to root for.
See my review of Dispatch where I share some of these thoughts.
Ha I kinda agree! It is starting to feel like Dystopian sci-fi is a tired trope right now, and more optimistic sci-fi comes in really refreshing.
I started writing a fairly dystopian sci-fi novel an embarrassingly long time ago, and it totally feels like an overdone trope now. Kinda discouraged to keep working on it for this reason.
Interesting. I am not much of a sci-fi reader, but I can imagine.
Would you say that hapoens across culture, or is more concentrated in sci-fi?
I would say this def applies to movies and tv shows, in addition to print stories
cranking up the resolution is a good way to put it. Gibson definitely did that.
It's hard, when writing fiction: sometimes if I don't have a strong feeling for why a certain thing should be described the way it is, I cut and cut and cut and what comes out is too spare. But when I ask myself why there should be more words there, why I do have to describe what that spoon looked like or her expression when I wasn't looking, I don't have an answer and I just say she breathed on it and stuck it on her nose. Which reads okay.
(Relevant, from the interview)
Yea, I know what you mean. I guess the important thing is that what gets put in is worth reading. Narrators usually have special privileges and secrets and information and I guess its worth asking yourself, what those secrets are and why does your narrator have them.
i haven't thought about it as narrator's secrets -- but what is worth reading is precisely my problem. I have a poetic bent that gets carried away, and so what ends up happening is that I leave in a bunch of flowery passages that I just can't bear to cut, but i take a cleaver to most of the rest of the mechanics in the story. ends up feeling disjointed, I think.
Weird thought about monoculture in sci-fi:
Have you all ever noticed Latinos only seem to be in dystopian sci-fis?
In more optimistic sci-fis like Star Trek, no los hay : \