The current state of SF

The Gline explains why he's given up reading Science Fiction and Fantasy.

The short version is this: I stopped reading SF and fantasy when I realized the market had turned into a cesspool without a hint of real life or imagination, driven entirely by paper-thin profit margins and catering to easy, well-known product lines (or imitations thereof).

I don't doubt that there are, right now, very good SF and fantasy books floating around out there. But I have become so poisoned by the bad stuff that it may take me a long time to get my taste back. Not only that, but something else happened that probably undermines everything I could do to bring the taste back: I grew up.

There's no getting around the fact that SF and fantasy are designed to appeal to an adolescent cultural outlook. Not just adolescents, but a culture that revolves around appeasing an adolescent mindset. Many of the people I know who are my age have this kind of perpetually adolescent outlook -- their life revolves around not what's important or meaningful, but around what they can get and how they can get it. (I'm probably not much better, come to think of it, but it is something I have grown painfully aware of in past years.) And most of what they want is adolescent cultural products.

I think that's a little over the top. Sure, there's an awful lot of formulaic drivel out there, but there's plenty of good stuff out there for those that are prepared to look. And there are people out there that write SF and Fantasy suitable for grown-ups.

All of this is probably just a very wordy way for me to voice a prejudice: SF and fantasy as we have come to know it lately are [expletive deleted - this is a family blog]. Plain and simple. Have you read any of the Wheel of Time books? They're unspeakably bad -- atrociously written, ploddingly paced, and populated with characters I wouldn't want to waste ten minutes of my real life with. (That's the Gene Siskel test: if we don't want to spend lunch with these people, why the [another expletive] are we going to read 800 pages about them?) And yet the books sell like mad. Evidently my tastes are a lot finickier than most people's, but I can only report back on what I know. Most of what I keep running into, or what gets recommended, is just nasty hackwork.

I managed to read about a hundred pages into The Wheel of Time before deciding I didn't have the time to waste reading any more. People tell me the series does get better, but people also tell me the later books go off onto rambling interminable subplots, and Robert Jordan will never finish the story, because it's his cash cow.

I gave up on "generic fantasy" several years ago; I read one or two a couple of years ago as part of the Book Club section of the Compuserve SF forum, one of which was the first volume of George R R Martin's Fire and Ice saga. It reminded me of just why I'd given up on generic fantasy; what I was reading was an American daytime soap opera in fantasy trappings. The point at which it lost me was when I imagined a group of bickering kids as having American accents. Sadly I seemed alone in disliking the work, everyone else was praising it in gushing tones. The sysop in charge annoyed me particularly in claiming this formulaic potboiler was many times better than the previous book we'd discussed, Frank Herbert's classic "Dune", and questioning my judgement for daring to disagree with her.

I like the definition of fantasy from John Clute and John Grant's Encyclopedia of Fantasy, which claims that the setting itself must be an actor in the story, and not just a static backdrop. By this definition, much "Generic Fantasy" as written by the likes of Robert Jordan and David Eddings isn't really fantasy at all. I believe Generic Fantasy has now become an extremely conservative genre, almost as conservative as women's romances, driven by archetypes derived from Tolkien and Gary Gygax.

Saying this, I realise I have read and enjoyed a lot of what should be classed as Fantasy in the past couple of years; Roger Zelazny's "Chronicles of Amber", Tim Powers' "The Drawing of the Dark", Neil Gaiman's American Gods and the last couple of Terry Pratchett's Diskworld books, as well as re-reading "Lord of the Rings".

What I suspect is that most readers of Generic Fantasy (and the equivalent formulaic SF sub-genres) don't want surprises; they're not after sense of wonder, or metaphors for the real, mundane world. They're after the comfortably familiar, those easily-recognised archetypes, the same basic story told over and over. Which is why I'm not one of them.