As the 1960's edged toward their close, SF experienced a major revolution. In England, J.G. Ballard and Michael Moorcock headed the so-called "New Wave" of experimental writing, and in the US Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. LeGuin, Harlan Ellison, and Roger Zelazny led the way to adoption of many mainstream conventions and standards. Fans were sharply divided on the issue. Some were enthusiastic about the changes, expecting that they would make the field respectable at last. Others foresaw the death of Science Fiction As We Know It, insisting that the only true SF consisted of space operas and futuristic adventures such as were popularized in the 1930's by Edward E. Smith, Ralph Milne Farley, George O. Smith, and John W. Campbell Jr.

The truth, as might have been expected, was neither one nor the other. There has indeed been some academic acceptance of SF, but more as a cultural phenomenon than as a form of literature. The overall standards of the prose have undeniably improved dramatically, though some might argue with justice that this has been at least inadvertently at the expense of traditional storytelling values. Adventure oriented SF began a steady decline in favor of more serious speculations about the future of human society. On the other hand, SF of the 1970's and 1980's certainly attracted talented writers who might have directed their talents elsewhere if the field had not changed to embrace their styles of writing. It was a limited tradeoff; fans could still find what they wanted to read, but now it was necessary to do more than just grab a book at random.

The 1990's have become the setting for another major alteration of the field, and at risk of sounding like the doomsayers of the 1960's, I contend that this latest trend is potentially disastrous, possibly really the end of Science Fiction As We Know It. The changes of the 1960's were inclusive. Sure, writers like J.G. Ballard and David R. Bunch were publishing non-traditional stories, but that didn't mean that there weren't new books by Poul Anderson, Gordon R. Dickson, Andre Norton, and other adventure writers. In fact, most of the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs were published in paperback for the first time during the 1960's, and so were the Doc Savage adventures. It became almost impossible to read everything that came out because of the sheer volume, and there was enough of every variety to satisfy almost any taste.

The crisis of the 1990's has both internal and external causes, and the effect seems to be a tightening of the noose around traditional SF. The major internal factor has been the rise of fantasy fiction as virtually a separate genre as far as readers are concerned, but not in the eyes of booksellers and distributors. If we ignore spinoff books from other media, there were actually more fantasy novels than SF published in 1996. And that leads to a second, major culprit. When Star Trek's popularity spread beyond the SF community, we were enthusiastic that it would bring new readers to the field, and Star Wars seemed to increase that promise. What we didn't realize was that those readers would be reading further adventures of Spock and Han Solo rather than original works. They're the two major sources of spinoff novels, but virtually every new television program has had tie in books as well, everything from Babylon 5 to Quantum Leap to Aliens to Mork and Mindy. And there are spinoff books from computer games and card games as well. It IS possible to write a satisfactory novel in one of these preset universes, but it is almost impossible to do innovative work, and a future of endless Deep Space Nine and Predator vs Alien novels rivals the darkest dystopian futures I've ever read about.

Market conditions have also changed. With paperbacks at $6.00, readers have finally said enough to the escalation of prices. Interactive computer games have stolen an undetermined but significant percentage of the audience and its budget. But the most depressing of all is the disappearance of the back list and the consolidation of book distribution. When I was first reading SF, it was possible to order a large portion of the backlist directly from a publisher, and books that went out of stock were generally reprinted. If a reader hadn't read Sturgeon or Simak, it was more likely from choice than necessity. That situation doesn't hold true any more, and it seems likely to be compounded by the market's concentration on "bestsellers" and the continuing consolidation of the publishing industry.

In Shakespeare's England, the reading public shared a common language, because each individual was largely familiar with the entire body of literature extant. As that condition has passed, so has the community of SF readers. There is just too much out there, and more coming every day, to stay current. That's a normal form of evolution that is regrettable but inevitable. The constriction of traditional SF we're seeing now is, I believe, an abnormal condition, and a potentially devastating one. It has an exclusive rather than inclusive effect, narrowing the borders of the genre rather than widening them. I'm not optimistic about the problem, at least over the course of the next several years, and suspect that used book stores are going to see an increasing market for the "classics", at least until publishers find it commercially viable to target that group. In the meantime, it's up to long term genre readers to keep the memories alive.

Copyright ©1997 Don D'Ammassa