Killer Whelks in Spaaaace

Charles Stross, author of the excellent Accelerando, has been wading into the sea of crap genre fiction.

We used to know what horror was about -- it was about Killer Whelks menacing a quiet English seaside town, from which a strong-jawed but quiet fellow and a not-totally-pathetic female lead might eventually hope to escape with the aid of a stout two-by-four and a lot of whelkish squelching after trials, tribulations, and gruesome scenes of seafood-induced cannibalism.

I'm sure I read that book when I was about twelve. But, as Charlie points out, the stuff being ground out now is far, far worse, endless sagas of dodgy vampire-porn with dubious fundamentalist overtones.

He also has strong words on the current state of American SF, which doesn't even seem to be approaching the Sturgeon Number.

Our field's strongest energies are going into tiredly re-hashing the US Civil War, the Second World War, the War of the Triple Alliance, and the Russian Revolution. And they're not even Doing It in spaaaaaaace. Well, some of them are: if I see one more novel about the US Marine Corps in the Thirty Seventh Century (with interstellar amphibious assault ships and a different name) I swear I'll up and join the Foreign Legion. Folks, the past is another country, and you can't get a visa. Ditto the future: they speak a different language and they get capitalism and the war on terror and the divine right of kings confused because they slept through history class.

Just about all the good SF I've read in the past few years has been British (or more specifically Scottish), from writers like Iain Banks, Ken MacLeod and Stross himself. He correctly points out that the so called 'British Invasion' isn't just because we currently have a crop of good authors, but that American SF seems to have lost it's way, and is content to churn out the increasingly formulaic. Has America lost faith in the future? Or is it just Sturgeon's Law cutting in?