We kick the week off with a Brain Parade that got suggested to me by Lou Anders at Pyr.

What is the job of contemporary SF? Does it have a job?

I found it hard to come up with comments for this one, it’s much easier to answer your own questions.

I don’t see Science Fiction as having a purpose outside of being an entertainment form that pushes our imagination in a certain direction. But we have to resign ourselves to the fact that, whatever role we see Science Fiction fulfilling, it won’t be universaly held. Just like the old school roleplaying gamers have had to get used to their hobby being dominated by computer games, SF fans will have to get used to their genre’s profile being dominated by treatments in film and television. The nature of those treatments are and will be fundamentaly different than the dead tree version of SF. That may prove annoying to many, but that’s what you get for being obsessive about a genre that is so flexible and adaptable; it’ll take on incarnations that annoy you.

Lou Anders:
Science fiction very much has a job, though not all practitioners of the art of SF will agree with me, or even acknowledge that it has a job. However, as the second word in “science fiction” is “fiction” it must be stated that it’s primary job is that of all fiction, which is to entertain. If it fails in this regard, it is a failure in everything. Period. No argument. Game over. Fiction must be hedonic, i.e. pleasurable, i.e. entertaining. As has been said, we are competing for someone’s beer money, and as an author, (or an actor or a playwright or a filmmaker) you are saying “Look at me. I have something worth your investment of time and money and attention,” and the obligation that this statement implies is that what you have on offer is WORTH this investment. I do not believe that everyone can be a writer any more than I believe everyone can be an NBA star or a neurosurgeon, and nothing offends me more than someone who says “Look at me” and then has nothing worthy to show for it.

Hell yes. If I may once again quote Gardner Dozois, in what is becoming my most cited defense of rationalist SF:

“Today, the Pope interdicts cloning, the President of the United States pushes to make stem-cell research illegal, mention of the theory of evolution is banned from textbooks and explanations of “creation science” are inserted instead, and politicians of both political parties vote against money for space exploration, or any other kind of research where the instant up-front financial benefit to the bottom line is not immediately evident.

The battle of science against superstition is still going on, as is the battle to not have to think only what somebody else thinks is okay for you to think. In fact, in a society where more people believe in angels than believe in evolution, that battle may be more critical than ever.

One of the major battlefields of that war is science fiction, one of the few forms of literature where rationality, skepticism, the knowledge of the inevitability of change, and the idea that wide-ranging freedom of thought and unfettered imagination and curiosity are good things are the default positions, taken for granted by most of its authors.” (Galileo’s Children: Tales of Science vs Superstition)

As I have said before as well, I don’t think a clearer case as to why our “escapist literature”—as it is so often called—is so important, nor why it is never—not even at its most embarrassing levels—just escapism. Even absurd cinematic blockbusters like Star Wars (for all it has to answer for) have their part to play in turning on the minds of people everywhere to the wonders of the universe and the possibilities of technology.

Science fiction is the literature of the Enlightenment, or it can be. And given the retreat from reason occurring in contemporary America, where unpopular & inconvenient scientific findings (like Global Warming) are discredited by those in power, the the contemporary _expression of the literature of technology and change and the open mind absolutely *should* be doing it’s job, because the consequences of a retreat from Enlightenment are very, very real. Media is more pervasive than it has every been before at any time in history and what values and ideals and worldviews that media puts forth does matter, because it very directly shapes the shape of things to come. And the stakes are much higher today than just your beer money.

Lou Anders is Editorial Director at Pyr, an Imprint of Prometheus Books and blogs at Bowing to the Future

Joe Haldeman:
SF still has a social function as a kind of “flight simulator” for possible futures, or as a virtual canary in the social mine shaft. Its main job, of course, is to support contemporary science fiction writers.

Paul McAuley
Science fiction doesn’t have a job - it’s too busy hanging out on street corners, trying to look tough and knowing, cracking wise and dissing passing scientists: ‘Yo, Hawking! See this? See what I did to your fuzzy black hole my man? You like that?’

Science fiction is the holy fool of literature. It can say what it likes and get away with an examination of truly radical and subversive ideas because no one takes it seriously. When it’s at its best, we’re generally in trouble. Science fiction flourished during the social and economic upheavals of the 1930s, during the Cold War, and during the Iron Age of the 1980s. It should be flourishing now, damn it, but too many people who used to hang out with it have wandered off into some kind of fluffy make-believe world or other. Real science fiction doesn’t make stuff up. It turns reality up to eleven. It takes stuff from contemporary weather - stuff no one else has bothered or dared to question - and uses it to make an end run on reality. It not only shows us what could happen if things carry on the way they are, but it pushes what’s going on to the extremes of absurdity. That’s not its job: that’s its *nature*. And what’s happened to science fiction lately, it isn’t natural. It’s pale and lank and kind of out of focus. It needs to straighten up and fly right. It needs to reconnect with the world’s weather, and get medieval on reality’s ass.

Paul McAuley is the author of Red Dust and Fairyland who blogs at Earth and other unlikely worlds

Beth Bernobich

SF is Heinlein’s competent man. It’s a carnie, a geek, and a wise old fool speaking in tongues. It’s a biologist, a priest, an anthropologist, and a philosopher. It’s a political commentator joined up with a gee-whiz kid going, “OMG, Look at this because it is just so cool.” Sometimes it’s all of those and more rolled into one package (and goes by the name Charlie Stross). Other times it delivers you one perfect trick. And those are both Good Things, because readers read for all kinds of moods and desires, just as writers tell stories for six or one or seven dozen reasons.

But does it have a job? No. Because that’s too limiting.

Beth Bernobich is a science fiction author whose stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Asimov’s and Helix SF.

Chris Dolley

It has two jobs. One, to entertain. And, two, to boldly go where no other author has gone before. Everything else is rearranging the furniture:)

Chris Dolley is the author of Resonance (Baen, 2005) He blogs here and he has a web site He’s also a shapeshifter and boxed for Great Britain as a kitten in the 1972 Munich Olympics.

Robyn Fleming

You know, I once distinguished myself as the only humanities student in an astronomy class when I wrote in an assigned essay that I think science fiction is really about exploring what it is to be human, rather than about, say, space travel, or blowing things up in inventive ways. The professor had some moderately critical things to say about my position, which he helpfully wrote in bright red ink in the margins of my essay, but I still think I had a valid point.

Which is not to say that describing space travel and inventive ways of blowing things up are unworthy concerns for modern SF authors! But I do think that the genre’s historical interest in all things alien – and how those things intersect with all things human – is significant. So I guess I’d say that the ‘job’ of contemporary SF, if it has one, is to do what all good literature (or television, or film) does – entertain the viewer in a way that makes her think about something in a new way. And I think science fiction, with its frequent focus on the strange, can be an ideal vehicle for prompting examination of the familiar. Which can’t possibly hurt any of us.

Robyn Fleming (often known online as Revena) is an aspiring novelist, who also spends a lot of time critiquing the stuff that’s already out there. She writes critical essays about the portrayal of women in film for The Hathor Legacy, and posts internet memes and the occasional photo of her cats on her LiveJournal.

Memetic Accomplices

The Point of It All: a response to this Brain Parade from Torque Control.

What is the job of contemporary sf criticism? at the recently jazzed up Velcro City Tourist Board.

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