In the Ghetto

Annalee Newitz delivered a rant on IO9 yesterday that deserves an answer. ?Nay, it demands a response.

To sum up the invective found under the headline “Why Science Fiction Hates Itself“, she claims a massive identity crisis on the part of the entire genre because a novel and a television show aren’t being marketed under an SF label.

Please.? Last time I looked, The Genre wasn’t a self-actualizing being.? If it were its most likely response would be to leave a note and a nice piece of fresh fruit?on the table for Charleton Heston before “going home“.?

The hand-wringing is so intense I’m tempted to ship her off a case of Jergen’s skin cream lest she start a fire. Unless she prefers some of that Dead Sea stuff. It does have a nice smell.

She goes on to compare the fortunes of Eleventh Hour (a TV show that you might have heard of if you’re still engaged with that old-time media)?and Fringe (another one of those TV things), where she vociferously points out that the former, advertised as anything BUT scifi, is doing well while the latter, advertised AS scifi, is sinking and infers that the fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars (most of whom I’d never heard of before) but in, well, not exactly ourselves either.? Maybe it lies in those evil marketing and promotional types who are trying to earn money rather than appreciate art.? Horrors.

She then moves on to books, castigating the Borders chain for cutting back on its SF orders and casts a few stones in the direction of the publishers of Stephenson’s Anathem who obviously spent an enormous amount of effort to distance themselves from all of Stephenson’s previous work, even going so far as to print a massive disclaimer right there on the front cover:

“THIS IS NOT, NEVER WAS, NEVER WILL BE AND YOU CAN’T MAKE ME BE, A SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL. IN FACT IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN PROMOTED AS NEW AGE SELF-HELP OR ‘YET ANOTHER GUIDE TO THE NEW TAROT’ (ALTHOUGH SOME OF US WERE HOLDING OUT FOR THE ‘YOU AND YOUR NEW BABY’ CATEGORY’; AND TO BE HONEST ONE OR TWO OF US VOTED FOR ‘THE IDIOT’S GUIDE TO NEWITZ’ BRAIN’ BUT WERE SHOT DOWN FOR OBVIOUS REASONS) BUT EVENTUALLY WE ACQUIESCED TO THE DESIRES OF THE BUYERS AT BORDERS WHO ASSURED US THAT THEY WOULD BUY MORE COPIES IF WE COMPLIED WITH THEIR SUGGESTIONS. NOTE TO PRODUCTION: PLEASE MAKE SURE THAT THIS DISCLAIMER DOES NOT APPEAR ON THE FRONT COVER OF THE NON-SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL ANATHEM”

To be fair to Annalee, she did identify the post as a rant and we all know that rants are not graded on accuracy, but rather on?rantiness.? Which she does a pretty good job of here.

Following the punishment, Newitz moves on to her major theme, even going so far as to draw on Stephenson’s discussion of the bifurcated careers of some actors who have fame in the SF world and not so much in mainstream pop-culture. Examples?given by Stephenson are Lucy Lawless, Sigourney Weaver, Hugo Weaving, Summer Glau.? Examples cited by Newitz are restricted to Hugo. (Maybe because in popular culture, he’s the guy those awards were named after. Makes sense right? An obscure literary award named after an obscure actor.)

The idea is that these folks have achieved great fame within SF circles but not so much in pop culture circles. This might be?of concern to those individuals (since it affects their paycheck) – if it were true, but fortunately this seems not to be the case (again, for them: I could really care less how popular a particular actor is with any audience). To use the offered primary example, Hugo Weaving, he of the Elron and Agent Smith personas, has an 80% popularity rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

And NONE of that matters because if we’re going to talk about the GENRE we’ve got to talk about things that are really OF the genre – not some Hollywood actors’ popularity ratings. (Stephenson’s lecture was about intelligence – both on the part of characters and readers – being what separates SF from pop, not about some planned Illuminati-style plot to eliminate science fiction.)

I take exception to this piece for a variety of reasons and now I’ll go over them in order of least importance. First, movies and television shows (except for some foreign arthouse pieces or PBS) are pop culture.? They’re not genre literature.? Lumping the epitome of pop culture in with the wasteland that has become reading (of anything, let alone genre fiction) is like drawing a comparison between Great Grey Kangaroos and Kangaroo?Rats when the discussion centers on marsupials inhabiting the island continent of Australia.? Yes, they do both have the word kangaroo in their names but, ah, the discussion was about marsupials.? Maybe the problem lies in the fact that on Arrakis (a planet featured in a novel that was marketed as science fiction, btw) the Chakobsa are known as ‘instructors-of-boys’ and most specifically not instructors of girls.? But then, Fremen society was a bit chauvinistic, as was the entire pseudo-feudalistic society created by Herbert, so it must be his fault that Annalee didn’t get no edumacatin in the ways of the desert.

I do digress.? But before getting back on track:

Newitz attempts to weave?a logical connection between the marginalizing of Hugo (as if) and some perceived fear on the part of book marketing types that the same fate awaits all books labelled as SF.? Would all of those authors who have been unfairly stereotyped as?SF writers?who would be unhappy with a mainstream?popularity rating of 80% please raise their hands?? (Kurt, you’re dead, so you don’t get a vote.)? (Harlan, you don’t care about ANY imposed culture, so you don’t get a vote either.)

But mostly I object to this whole thing because somewhere along the line, people, including Annalee, seem to have forgotten that there are TWO types of ghetto. There are the real ghettos of our inner cities where people live desperate lives that are nasty, brutish and short and then there are the arts ghettos that are anything but “grubby and unappetizing”. They are, in fact, oasis of creativity where new ideas are given acceptance and encouragement.

Arts ghettos are places of vast creativity and experimentation. They coalesce around new ideas and new concepts, they embrace the avante garde, they foster the strange.? You can’t create new in a popular culture environment, there isn’t room, there is no acceptance and no one will spend money on promoting the unknown.

All popular culture begins in a ghetto.? Life, for an art form, ends at just about the same time that it becomes accepted and popularized for the great unwashed public.? The focus ceases to be the art itself and shifts to earnings,?branding, marketing and plushies. The ground-breakers (Stephenson would be included here) are the only ones who are really able to enjoy the straddle; they get to hold on to their art while benefiting from the ‘discovery’. All that follows is carefully selected product that fits in to the new category that the marketers (think) they’ve finally gotten a handle on.

Acceptance of science fiction into the mainstream of popular culture?is not to be desired. The genre would no longer be science fiction. Instead, it would be a marketer’s vision of what a particular set of demographics will spend their money on so long as certain labels are applied and certain buttons are pushed.?

That’s not to say that the trappings of popular culture aren’t desirable. Any author would love to have an enormous budget applied to selling their works. All authors would love to see their sales increased, their visibility raised, their advances with more zeros on the end, their royalties upped by several percentage points – but very few of them would want to have the decade’s old sensibilities of popculture applied to and placing limitations on their work.? Most would?(grudgingly) give up?higher rates in exchange for being able to write what they want to write, or would at least try to negotiate some kind of compromise – they’ll continue to write novels for the military-thriller, zombie-space pirate-werewolves, child-vampire-wizards, unicorns-mated-to-dragons series so long as the publisher will continue to buy non-series works. (But don’t forget to create five new cutsie characters for the next one cause we’ve got to support the plushie toy line with new releases in six months.)

Annalee is looking at this circumstance as if it were a bad thing and it’s really not. Science Fiction readers will continue to find the works by their favorite (and new-found) authors whether they’re on the shelves of Borders or not.? In fact, most of them (and I’m just guessing here) will even be able to find Stephenson’s new non-SF Science Fiction novel Anathem no matter what’s printed on the covers. A few unsuspecting souls will buy the marketing hype and pick up Anathem precisely because it is touted as non-SF science fiction and might even read a few chapters before demanding their money back based on false advertising claims.? Maybe even a few of them will say “gee, I really liked that non-SF science fiction novel, I wonder what other non-SF science fiction novels that Stephenson guy has written” and boy won’t they be surprised when they don’t find anything on the shelves at Borders marked ‘Non-SF Science Fiction’. And maybe, just maybe,?a few of those folks will shrug, sigh, realize that they liked Anathem enough and?give an SF novel a try.

So what if Borders wants to be stupid and cut themselves off from the entire ‘I liked that SF thing, maybe I’ll try some’ demographic. Book sales are becoming less and less about chain stores and more and more about self-promotion and social networking.? A friends’ “give it a try” is far more weighty than any artificial marketing niche.? Some authors will gain widespread popularity that transcends genre – and some of them will even be SF hacks.? That’s always been the case and always will be.? This time around though, those authors have blogs and social networks and watch what happens when they say ‘check out my author buddy’s new book’.

Newitz’s rant is a classical tempest in a teapot. There is no inimical conspiracy. Pop culture doesn’t want science fiction, it wants the LABEL (and already has it). Yay for the few authors who will benefit financially. So long as the genre itself remains (and it will despite all of the doom and gloom – there’s just too many of us “nerds at Comic-Con, the dorks at the comic book store, and the dweebs who wish Borders carried more scifi”, not to mention the?”troops of socially awkward people” for it to go anywhere soon.

That’s the beauty of an arts genre. Those of us who are in it know and recognize each other, what fits and what doesn’t and just don’t care about the labels.