Some people have been saying that Science Fiction is entering a new Golden Age. Do you agree with this statement or are people looking at the present with rose tinted glasses?

Regular readers will recognize pot stirring efforts on my part. The term “Golden Age” is a loaded one of course. It’s not the kind of language I’d normaly use but I agree with it. It’s hard to know for sure of course, some things just need to be judged in the fullness of time. But if Meme Therapy only dealt with absolute certainties we’d only post twice a month.

The quality of writing, the diversity of styles and ideas present within the genre has never been better in my opinion. It’s easy to compare the latest crap novel you read with the classics of yesteryear and come away with the conclusion that “it was better back then” but that’s not an honest appraisal, that’s looking at the past with rose tinted glasses.

Science Fiction fans and authors are ahead of the curve when it comes to pushing the genre into new niches (it’s not a coincidence that many of the first novels to be podcast were SF) and will continue to do so. It won’t be long before amateurs are cooking up homegrown CGI movies. Science Fiction is going to play a leading role in those efforts. If it’s current behaviour is anything to go by SF is going to be at forefront of most of the new permutations we come up for prose. That vitality is a good enough indicator for golden age status for me.

Now onto our commentators:

Jay Lake:
Golden Age? What Golden Age? By definition those are always in the past, when kids were more respectful, people spoke the language correctly, and those who should know their place knew their place. Cicero complained about the demise of language and morality, and here we are, 2,100 years later, proving him right. Science fiction is much the same. We’re all a bunch of amateurs now with no respect for tradition, writing things that don’t make sense and cheapening the markets. Ten or fifteen years from now the SF of today will be distant enough to withstand analysis. Right now, it’s all shite. Especially my stuff.
Jay Lake is a John W. Campbell and Writers of the Future award wining author.

Mark Chadbourn:
I have trouble with statements like that in whatever field we’re talking about, as we, as a race, have proven not very good at judging the situation we’re currently in. I think ‘golden ages’ can only be dispensed from the perspective of a few years away from them, at least a decade, I would say. If you’re saying, is there a lot of good SF around, then the answer is yes. But there’s always a lot of good SF around. My view of a true golden age of SF is one that ripples out from the core fan base and influences the wider reading population. Is that happening now? I don’t think so. In fact, I think the opposite is true. Mainstream readers (the ‘non-fan’) appear to be disconnecting even more from the genre. It’s not speaking to them in a way that it has, perhaps, in the past. I think part of this is to do with science burn-out due to our rapidly-advancing technology (which I’ve recently discussed on my blog).
Mark Chadbourn is a British Fantasy author

Kelley Eskridge:
I wouldn’t call it a Golden Age, at least not for science fiction publishing. Film and television, sure — the ideas, story arcs and characters in those media are better written, a lot more interesting and a bit more courageous than they used to be. And visual media are beginning to build new sf memes. These are all hallmarks (for me) of golden age status. It’s a bonus that there’s a corresponding widening mainstream audience for sf in films and television.

I don’t see necessarily see that as true of sf publishing. There are many good, interesting and courageous writers out there, but the genre as a whole doesn’t strike me as particularly bold or unified around common notions of what sf is these days, and what it’s for. I think of the Golden Age as a time when sf writers came together in community and in a certain coherent response to each other and their world. I don’t see that now.

The fact that more science fiction books are being published these days doesn’t mean the quality is better, or that the next Golden Age is upon us. It just means that publishers are throwing more books at the wall to see what sticks, and that fewer books are getting concerted support. It means that marketing departments are recognizing that sf readers are segmenting rather than cohering — “sf” these days runs the gamut from rocket ships and ray guns to straight-ahead romance. It means that more authors get lost in the mid-list death spiral and don’t get a chance to develop their work or their audience. That includes some of those good, interesting, courageous writers, and that’s the real shame.
Kelley Eskridge is a writer who will be teaching at Clarion West 2007

M.J Young
It’s more complicated than that. Science Fiction has to some degree become mainstream; but the part that has become mainstream is not radical, and the part that is radical has not become mainstream. As with anything else, to be mainstream inherently means to give up what is truly distinctive.

Of course, people speak of “science fiction” as if it were a literary genre. That’s a failure to understand the concept of genre. Science fiction is a category of setting, stories set in a possible future or a possible alternate present. Star Trek, Fahrenheit 451, and Alien are all science fiction, because they are all set in possible future worlds, but they are not in any real sense the same genre. All they really share in common is that they occur at some time in the future and attempt to provide some sort of scientifically rational basis for what they predict.

At the same time, we have had an explosion of information availability. If you’d told me even ten years ago that I would have a channel on my television entirely dedicated to golf, I am not certain I would have believed you; yet I have such a channel, because there are enough people in the world who specifically like golf to make it commercially viable.

In the same way, science fiction fans are still a minority, but we are a very large minority, and it is economically rational to provide product for us because we will buy it. A lot of that product is schlock. I do not agree with Harlan Ellison that you can arbitrarily declare that the schlock is “sci-fi” and the good stuff is “science fiction”, because, firstly, the quality of the product is at some point a subjective judgment, and secondly every category of entertainment, including opera, has at least some schlock, and every category, including professional wrestling, has at least some good. What happens, though, when something gets popular is usually the amount of schlock increases, because more people with less talent attempt to get their share of the profits. Hopefully the amount of good material also increases, but since presumably most of the people who are good at it are already doing it and are doing as much as they can without compromising quality, the good material does not increase as much as the schlock.

So if by a “golden age” you mean that there is more science fiction material available than ever before, that’s true not only for science fiction but for a wealth of other cultural interests. If, though, you mean that any of it is any good, that’s much more difficult to say. What made the golden days of Analog magazine great was that a very few very good writers were laboring in obscurity to create great science fiction stories because it’s what they wanted to do more than anything else. Today you can find large quantities of science fiction, most of it written by hacks who follow the formula that made some other story successful in the hope that they, too, will become rich and famous. I say that, knowing that I’d like to be one of those who create great science fiction, but despite the good reviews I’ve gotten in obscure corners I might be just another one of the hacks. Of course, the “golden age of cinema” was characterized by exactly the same phenomenon, that movies were so popular every major studio was trying to release a new one every week, and so there are a few great ones and a tremendous number of entirely forgotten films. If volume is what makes a golden age, we’ve
got it. I’m not at all sure we have the quality.

Mark Joseph Young is author or co-author of several books, including the novel Verse Three, Chapter One, and the Multiverser game books.

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