Says Willis:

At my very first writer's conference, George R.R. Martin said to me, "It's a pity you're getting into science fiction right now, because it's on its last legs." Not only was that not true, but now you can't turn on a TV without seeing our influence everywhere, and some of the best science fiction I've ever read is being written right now. Science fiction is an amazing literature: plot elements that you would think would be completely worn out by now keep changing into surprising new forms. I have great faith in the future of books-no matter what form they may take-and of science fiction.

[Publishers Weekly]

Writing in SFNovelists, Butler explains:

I tried to write a thriller. It was the last book I worked on before starting Reiffen's Choice, the first book I sold. The problem was, I don't like thrillers. Never have, never will. At least not reading them. (I've always loved thriller movies.) But I had this great idea, and a great ending. A shootout on top of Mt. Washington in a June snowstorm. Very visual. I was sure I could sell it.

But first I had to write it. Boy, was that painful. Like I said, I hate thrillers. My idea was about a serial killer who murders child molesters, and the biggest problem was that I had to write all these molestation flashbacks and come up with about half a dozen creative, graphic murders. Very nasty. I stated really dreading my time at the keyboard.

Even worse, it was boring. I was boring myself, which is a terrible sign. If you don't jump up and punch the air in celebration once every couple of weeks about a scene you've just written, chances are no one else is going to punch the air about it, either. If the writer's bored, pity the poor reader.

Thank goodness Butler finally switched to working on the fantasy novel he was actually excited about before his gritty gun-toting thriller hero nearly killed him. Anyway, "write what you love" seems like basic advice, but it's something many writers ignore to their cost.

Gill, who's executive editor at Harper Collins imprints Morrow/Avon/Eos, writes over at Harper Library:

Urban fantasy (and its cousin paranormal romance) is the easiest gateway to the genre-since it takes place in a world that is very much our own, only with magic. Not coincidentally, it's also the hottest thing going, between the phenomenon that is Stephenie Meyers' Twilight saga to the incredibly popular True Blood tv series. Urban fantasies are an easy way for readers to try the genre, and there are a lot of great ones out there.

With urban fantasy consuming an ever-greater market share, it's hard to argue with Gill's point. But it makes us wonder if science fiction isn't suffering partly because it lacks such an easy, newbie-friendly first hit. Or rather, that stuff exists, but it's not necessarily leading people to science fiction.

You have adventure stories set in the present day, but with fantastical gadgets, but those are generally marketed as "techno-thrillers" rather than SF. And when a science fiction giant like William Gibson does novels that are set in the present or very near future, featuring unusual technology, they're frequently marketed as mainstream fiction rather than SF. Meanwhile, writers like Charles Stross are proclaiming that you literally cannot write near-future science-fiction at all, because the future is so unpredictable, and many of the genre's most celebrated works take place thousands, or even millions, of years from now.

Do we need someone to invent the genre of "urban science fiction" to reach out to people who want to read SF stories set in the present day, in a familiar setting? Or just a return to "five minutes into the future" as a standard setting for stories?

Top image: cover to Jim Butcher's Proven Guilty.

Writer Mark Charan Newton (Nights Of Viijamur) cites some reasons why "science fiction is dying and fantasy is the future," including the movie popularity of Harry Potter and Lord Of The Rings, the predominance of female readers, and fact that real-life science is now as full of "sensawunda" as science fiction.

But game designer Andrew P. Mayer has a different explanation — fantasy is more relevant to our near future than science fiction:

Steampunk is the most obvious example. While it is generally considered to be a genre is fascinated with the past, it is, in its own way, truly futuristic. By telling stories of transformed ancestors it allows us to redefine our vision of ourselves from the other end of the telescope. It is a kind of pseudo-fantasy for a world that is clinging onto the real as it moves beyond the virtual. They are tales of a reality where humanity may on the cusp of truly becoming magicians, capable of transforming the physical world in more radical ways than we ever imagined possible.

And fantasy seems oddly predictive in other ways as well. The threat of global warming seems to be something out of Tolkein rather than Asimov, although without the convenient anthropomorphic villain to slay in order to solve our problems and set the world "right". Our solutions may have to come through acceptance of our abilities rather than an attempt to fight against them...

By populating our modern urban landscapes with creatures of myth, we could be giving ourselves metaphorical stories for the kinds of radical choices that may soon be coming for the human race. And for a generation that will have far more control over their own biology than any that has come before, it may well more helpful to have grown up with those of fantasies as opposed to rocket ships and space aliens.

What do you think? Could fantasy be providing us with more touchstones for our troubling future than science fiction right now? It's an intriguing argument, to say the least.

Robot dragon photo from Coated.

Michael Chabon, of course, won the Pulitzer Prize for The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier And Clay, his novel about Golden Age comics creators dealing with inspiration, sexual identity and the Holocaust, among other things. He also wrote the Hugo-winning alternate history novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union. Both Manhood and his earlier essay collection, Maps And Legends, deal with geeky, science-fictional elements. And he edited two anthologies of pulp science fiction by some of today's best authors, McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales and McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories. (And according to his Wikipedia page, he created a fictional alter ego, a quasi-Lovecraftian horror novelist named August Van Zorn, which I didn't know about until just now.)

The thing that's stuck in my head most about Manhood For Amateurs is definitely the passionate espousal of fandom, and the idea that fan obsession comes from the same place as the artistic impulse — the desire for communal expression. Why do you think people often see fans as in opposition to "true" creative people? Now that fans are running all the comic book companies, producing Doctor Who, and reinventing Star Trek, do you see this changing? What will it take for a work of fanfic to be recognized as art? Have you ever written fanfic?

Well, I'm not sure I fully accept the premise of the question: "People often see fans as in opposition to 'true' creative people." Or rather, you may be right, "people" do see it that way, but if so then these people are deeply ignorant of the history of popular culture and its production. Fans began to take over creative responsibility in the world of Science Fiction as early as the mid-thirties; I doubt that by the mid-seventies there were many major practitioners in the genre who had not started out as a passionate, Con-going, zine-compiling fans. The second great age of American cinema was entirely created by fans (Coppola, Scorsese, Rafelson, Ashby, Spielberg, Lucas, et al) ; The Godfather is as much about the intensive study of gangster films as it is about gangsters. Same goes, even more so, for Scorsese. Rock and roll, same deal. The Beatles work is fan fiction on the work of Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers: It's not simple (or even complex) imitation; it's elaboration, infilling, transformation, a strategic redployment of the tropes and figures of the source material/primary text; the Beatles are in dialog with Buddy Holly, as Badfinger was in dialog with the Beatles and Jellyfish with Badfinger. Or you could go Stones/Stooges/Sex Pistols. The word "influence" is insufficient and too one-sided to describe a relationship that is much more accurately reflected by the system of tribute/ appropriation/critique that fandom employs. This kind of process, by which one generation of fan/critics (because anyone who doesn't understand that a fan is a critic doesn't know what a fan is, and there is nothing sadder to contemplate than the idea of a critic who is not also a fan) becomes the creators whose work inspires and obsesses and is critiqued by the next generation of fans, who in turn become critic-creators, has occurred in every popular art form across the board going back fifty or five thousand years. The apostles wrote fan fiction on Torah. So your "people" are silly people, and we don't need to listen to them.

The other thing about Manhood For Amateurs, now that I've had a chance to mull it over, is the sense that shifting gender roles and the changing demands as you grow older mean that you have to keep reinventing yourself. To what extent is this like the process of world-building in a fantasy/SF universe?

It means — it means, if I take your meaning aright, that I am my own sequel, my own series, the CHAPTERHOUSE OF DUNE to my own DUNE: MESSIAH.

Why do you think such a high proportion of alternate history novels revolve around World War II in some way or another? Do you think it's different for authors who weren't alive during World War II and the Holocaust to imagine them turning out differently, than for someone like, say, Philip K. Dick, who was in high school during the war?

Well, of course PKD did a pretty fair job of imagining just that in THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE. I think the thing about WWII is that it was so huge, so important, so clearly one of the two or three most significant periods in human history — and yet even a cursory study of it reveals it to have been woven of dozens if not hundreds of teensy little frail threads which, if pulled or tucked a different way, might easily have produced a completely different outcome. Say, for example, that the British Navy had not captured a German cypher machine from a sunk U-Boat in 1941. Cracking of the navy codes is delayed... key messages are never intercepted...

That's true for EVERYTHING that happens of course: "for want of a nail." But you can really feel the Little, Big of it with WWII.

As someone who's written both historical fiction and alternate history, how would you say the research process differs for the two genres? Do they allow you to comment on the here and now in much the same way, or in different ways?

Research is research; historical fiction is alternate history, in the sense that you are still saying What if? What if, for example, a Russian nobleman named Andrei Bolkonski, with such and such a set of traits, was running around the battlefield of Austerlitz, getting wounded and rescued by Napoleon, whom he once admired...etc. Whether you are writing Napoleon Loses Austerlitz (alternate history) or simply Fictional Prince Andrei Gets Injured at Austerlitz (historical fiction) the research is going to be the same.

When your first novel came out, you were nearly mis-classified as a gay writer. You told the Metro Weekly in 2002, "There's a big lump that's called literary fiction or mainstream fiction or non-genre fiction or whatever, and that's sort of where I am. That's not a problem that really dogs me, except for that brief moment when Mysteries of Pittsburgh came out and Newsweek did a big roundup of all the hot new gay novels. That was me being pigeonholed and possibly confined to a section of the bookstore from which it can be very hard to get out once you're in. Luckily the book attracted a diverse readership."

Do you think people who are writing science fiction or fantasy should try to avoid getting shelved in those sections, for the same reasons you were keen to avoid getting shelved in LGBT fiction? Should we, as readers of SF and fantasy, be trying to get the novels we love shelved in "fiction," or should we be trying to find ways to help deserving genre authors to cross over? (Like your inclusion of people like Tim Pratt and Cory Doctorow in the Best American Short Stories anthology.) If this is just a marketing issue, do we need better labels, or just more flexible ones?

Pride and Resentment are the twin banners flown from the walls of all ghettos. We love being in; we want to get out. We are at home; home is not the world. Endogamy weakens us over time.

I think, in the end, it is largely a marketing issue. Personally I would prefer to see bookstores shelve all fiction together regardless of genre. Or maybe just have two sections, "Good Stuff" and "Crap." Into Crap we will consign all novels regardless of genre or reputation that trade in cliche and dead language. If I ever own a bookstore I will do it that way. Only I will just leave out the Crap section.

Kim Stanley Robinson digs up the two writers' correspondence for an article in New Scientist — apparently Woolf's key letter to Stapledon is among his collected papers, not hers, and wasn't included in her Collected Letters. The letter from Woolf to Stapledon, dated July 8, 1937, reads:

Dear Mr. Stapledon,

I would have thanked you for your book before, but I have been very busy and have only just had time to read it. I don't suppose that I have understood more than a small part - all the same I have understood enough to be greatly interested, and elated too, since sometimes it seems to me that you are grasping ideas that I have tried to express, much more fumblingly, in fiction. But you have gone much further and I can't help envying you - as one does those who reach what one has aimed at.

Many thanks for giving me a copy,
yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

Robinson believes that Stapledon had just sent Woolf a copy of his then-recent novel Star Maker, and Woolf had already read two previous Stapledon novels. Woolf had already been writing science fiction of a sort, with novels like Orlando. But Robinson claims that exposure to Stapledon's work pushed Woolf in an even more science-fictional direction:

These strange novels made a real impact on Woolf. After reading them, her writing changed. She had always been interested in writing historically, but her stream-of-consciousness style made that difficult to accomplish. Her character Orlando's fantastically long life, and the chapter "Time Passes" in To the Lighthouse, were two attempts at solving this problem. The modular structure of The Years was another. But after reading Star Maker, she tried harder still. In her last years she planned to write a survey of all British literature that she was going to call Anon; and her final novel, Between the Acts, concerns a dramaturge struggling to tell the history of England in the form of a summer village pageant. The novel ends with Stapledonian imagery, describing our species steeped in the eons. Woolf's last pages were a kind of science fiction.

And Robinson argues convincingly that if Woolf were alive today, she'd be reading science fiction — both because British SF is in a new golden age, and because what's hailed as the best literary fiction in Britain today is mere historical fiction, which doesn't necessarily tell us anything new about the eras it covers and doesn't illuminate the challenges we're about to face. Robinson's whole essay is well worth reading. [New Scientist]

The term speculative fiction holds a special place in my heart because it is able to accommodate all the other genres under its umbrella. What I mean by that is that fiction written under it can include elements of romance, mystery, horror, etc. In a certain way, the same can be said about the other genres....

There's also another advantage to such a vague term as speculative fiction. The only expectation one comes into reading it with is that anything can happen. Take horror, for example. When you read a short story that's classified as horror, you're already preparing yourself for the horror element to pop up. Compare this to reading a story simply labeled as speculative fiction, where you don't know whether it'll tickle your sense of wonder or frighten you (or both). While there's something to be said about the technical craft of writing a horror short story, sometimes it's better to not know that it's a horror piece in the first place for it to have a greater impact.

[BSC Review]

In any given year, there are probably at least a dozen science fiction movies that all your friends are likely to have seen and be able to rave (and bitch) about over lunch. This year, they include Star Trek, Watchmen, District 9, Moon, G.I. Joe, Transformers 2, Terminator 4, and a few others. The same goes for several TV series: You can be in a room with a random assortment of science fiction lovers, and almost everyone will have an opinion about Dollhouse or the BSG finale.

But even though almost everybody I know reads books religiously, it's a lot harder to find a room full of science fiction nerds where everybody in the room has read the same recent book, and wants to praise it or tear it to pieces. Everybody's reading books, but they're all reading different stuff.

From asking around, I get the impression there are two or three exceptions to this rule in any given year. Often, there'll be at least a couple of science-fiction books that every science-fiction reader will read, or at least have a strong opinion about. Often, you'll find these books on the Hugo and Nebula ballots, which tend to select for the books that the most people have read.

Obviously, nobody expects books to get the same level of ubiquity as movies or television — those media have a much broader reach. Plus it's a much smaller time commitment to watch a terrible movie (one evening, versus a week or more to read a decent-sized book.)

But I feel like mainstream (for lack of a better term) books do produce more volumes in a given year that everybody from a particular social class will be expected to have read — or skimmed, at any rate. Every year, you've got your Life Of Pi, your Brief And Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, your And Then We Came To The End. There's a certain class of book, what agent Nathan Bransford calls "Book Club Fiction." As I understand it, this isn't just books that get read by book clubs — it's books that are pervasive and talked about everwhere among "mainstream literary" readers, books that you must read to get your membership card in the bibliophile squad renewed in good order.

Some science fiction books not only break out of the genre paddock, but also cross over to the extent that they become "book club" fiction. Bransford says these books include Neal Stephenson's Anathem, Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife, Jonathan Lethem's early works (like Gun With Occasional Music), William Gibson's older works, Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, and Iain Banks' stuff.

And there's a whole apparatus that generates these books and makes the machine keep churning. You've got your book clubs, of course, and publishers have become much more aggressive about marketing to them (just look in the back of any big Simon Says book, and there'll be a list of insipid book-club discussion points, which the paperback of Sense And Sensibility And Sea Monsters satirizes brilliantly.) There are newspaper book review sections, although those are shrinking and vanishing. There's Oprah.

We asked Bransford more about how a book becomes a "book club" book, and he said there's a certain type (regardless of genre) that seems to achieve mainstream book-clubbability: these books tend to be "accessible, slightly more highbrow than average (but not too highbrow), and different (but not too different)." And for a science-fiction book to reach the mainstream, non-genre book club audience, it helps for it not to be published by a genre imprint in the first place, adds Bransford.

So how does a science-fiction book become a "must read," talked-about book among science-fiction readers? (I.e., a book that every science fiction reader feels he/she must read, or risk being left out of the conversation.) We asked Bransford, and he says:

That's a great question. I hadn't actually thought of it before you brought it up, but there really does seem to be fewer writers that everyone reads in science fiction as opposed to other genres (at least none that are living - nearly everyone who reads sci-fi has read Phillip K. Dick and Douglas Adams).

I wonder if it's a matter of science fiction readers having stronger preferences about the types they like (hard vs. soft, outer space vs. on Earth, etc.) and tend to stick to them? Or maybe it's harder to find a publisher for more literary science fiction that may have broader appeal within the science fiction reading community?

The more I think about it, the more I think Bransford has a point — there's a lot of segmentation in science fiction publishing, between different types and flavors of SF, so it's less likely that you'll find a large swathe of readers who are all drawn to the same posthuman epic, or the same Heinlein-space-opera pastiche.

Another factor that springs to mind is that science-fiction readers may wait for a book to receive the imprimatur of mainstream acceptance before they adopt it as a must-read within the genre — so a book like Spook Country or The Road, by virtue of having been lifted up among the people who don't consider themselves science-fiction readers, becomes a book every science-fiction reader feels is essential reading. So maybe a book doesn't become a must-read among science-fiction fans unless it's already gotten "mainstream" cred — even if it's a much-touted, highly praised, thought-provoking read.

And then there's just the fact that most science-fiction readers are nerds — and nerds are an individualistic bunch, who pride themselves on doing their own thing. The phrase "nerd herd" is actually kind of an oxymoron, a lot of the time.

So how do you start making particular books into "must reads" for all science fiction readers, regardless of their individual tastes? How do you fashion a "book club" out of the mass of science fiction readers?

A few ideas occur to me — some cities already have SF book clubs, and chances are your local SF bookstore may sponsor one. Often, though, those book clubs are jointly reading something that came out years, or decades, ago, which limits the ability to get critical mass. There are ways that authors or publishers could be encouraging SF-specific book clubs to focus on newly published works — by offering a bulk discount, by bringing the author to the club (in person, or via Skype) to take part in the discussions.

Also, some cities have a "one city one book" event, where the local public library encourages everyone to read a particular book during a particular month, so people can discuss it together. (This October, all of San Francisco is reading Doug Dorst's quasi-zombie lit book Alive In Necropolis.) Science fiction bookstores, sites and magazines could get together and do something similar for a new (or new-ish) SF book, and encourage everyone to read it in that month.

Most of all, though, it's up to us, the readers. When we do come across a book that's especially mind-expanding, gut-wrenching or apt to give us three-AM flashbacks, we have to evangelize more. Bug your friends, spread the word, press the book into people's hands. With a constant flood of new books landing on shelves every month, it's really hard for any one book to break out — especially if it's in some way unusual or ground-breaking. Authors and publishers are already spinning their wheels as hard as they can, trying to make their books the ones everyone will want to read — so it's up to us, as readers, to help move the books that move us.

Bransford, an agent with Curtis Brown, posted a poll allowing people to identify their works in progress according to a variety of different genres, but the comment thread turned into a massive debate about how to fit one's work into any of the boxes. There are the cries of people whose novels don't fit into a neat tidy genre:

You totally forgot the, "Help help mine is cross-genre, URGH, what do I call it?" category. "Other" just doesn't quite convey that. ;)

As well as the questions from people who aren't sure whether to call their novels "mainstream" or "literary." (To which Bransford suggests "literary," since that's not a value judgment, just another genre, and he doesn't believe that "mainstream" fiction exists as a category.)

There are the people who are writing superhero novels, and reluctantly classifying those as science fiction. One person is writing a steampunk novel and isn't sure if that's historical fiction or SF. There are the people whose YA novels have science fictional elements — like the person I quote in the headline, above. At least one person wants to abolish genres altogether, to which Bransford asks how the bookstore would know where to shelve things.

But don't worry too much about trying to classify your own work, Bransford says: "You don't even HAVE to tell the agent what you think it is. If you wrote the query well the agent will already know."

And then there's this guy:

I think my novel holds together as one solid entity but when I analyze it in terms of genre?

Total schizophrenia.

My main interest is in character and prose style, so maybe it's literary.

But it's based on my life experiences, so there's a strong element of confessional memoir to it.

It does feature adventures in which an alternate fantasy world is saved, so it's obviously quest fantasy.

But the fantastic elements are rationalized in a speculative fashion, so it might be science fiction.

It deals intimately with the nitty-gritty details of life at the bottom of the blue-collar ladder, so it's social realism.

Much of the material is disturbing on levels ranging from the spiritual to the physical, so it's horror.

It's intended to be funny and there's rarely a lot of space between jokes, so it's humor.

One of the central themes is redemption through love, so it's romance.

The plotting and a storyline involving a drug deal are clearly noir.

I was once asked to describe the damned thing in five words. What I came up with was, "Autobiographical horror with sick laughs."

As for Bransford himself, what novel is he secretly working on in his off hours? He explains:

It's kind of a cyberpunk PLUS steampunk women's fiction slasher romantic comedy.

[Nathan Bransford - Literary Agent]

We look at science fiction from the Cold War era with a certain bemusement, with all those allegories about Communist aliens, valiant colonizers and suburban/corporate conformity being challenged. But it's a safe bet that our onslaught of cookie-cutter movies, TV shows and books will look just as quaint, and reflect our out-of-date obsessions just as much, in a decade or two. And (we can hope) a whole new bunch of soon-to-be-dated genre standbys will be bursting out of our screens and pages, in masses and masses of sameness.

Every science fiction cliche reflects the obsessions of the time that created it. The stories that we feel the need to tell over and over are, in a sense, both wish fulfillment and metaphors for our technological progress, as well as the fears that progress have given rise to.

When mainstream science fiction comments more directly on politics and our social anxieties, it often feels jarring and/or preachy. There are exceptions — Battlestar Galactica talked overtly about the War On Terror, with its storylines about torture and suicide bombers, and its enemy who can look just like us. And it paid off, with acclaim and awards. But often, science fiction hits home when it's discussing our fears and excitement about progress and politics from one or two removes.

So how do our current crop of overused story ideas reflect today's preoccupations? Here are some stabs at identifying the roots of our fantasies. As always, feel free to disagree:

Superheroes

As we pointed out a while back, today's biggest superhero narratives are all war stories. For a while there, every big Marvel crossover had to have the word "war" in the title, and the prevalence of crossovers, in itself, is a preference for war stories over minor battles. Superhero stories used to be about crime, and even godlike characters like Superman were called "crime-fighters," making the world safe from urban malcontents.

But now? Look at movies like Iron Man (about a munitions maker who confronts the cost of war), Incredible Hulk (about a military experiment who doesn't want to work for the army), Watchmen (about the heroes who, among other things, won the Vietnam war) and Wolverine (about a super-mutant who fights in every war before joining a secret army squad.) As for The Dark Knight, it was so clearly about terrorism and the lengths to which you must go to suppress it, including that whole "civil liberties versus safety" conundrum, that it became a parable of our times.

So-called "realistic" movies that try to deal with the Iraq War and terrorism, like In The Valley Of Elah or Stop-Loss, tend to vanish without a trace. But spandex-and-superpowers films deal with the same issues, they make billions.

Zombies and vampires

Every time we see another show like Vampire Diaries or yet another first-person zombie romance novel hitting the stands, we have to wonder: what is going on here, and when will it end? And yet, we can't help but wonder if it's just a coincidence that the hordes of the undead are swarming in every story at the exact moment that human lifespans have gotten so much longer that everyone is obsessed with the demographic crisis of the elderly. Old people aren't dying as early, or as cheaply, as they used to — instead they're hanging around, eating up all our resources, in many cases even after dementia has taken away their reasoning powers.

The movie which encapsulates the zombies-as-older-relatives idea most clearly is probably Peter Jackson's Braindead, or Dead Alive, in which the hero's mother gets bitten by a "Sumatran rat-monkey" and turns into a zombie-like monster — who, at one point, hosts a dinner party with a group of respectable society people, even as her body literally falls apart.

And if zombies are about the downside of conquering death and living on and on, vampires are about the weight of history. They may be eternally young and glamorous, and full of glib sexuality, but they're also constantly going on about their past lives in the 19th century and all the huge historical events that they took part in. It's hard not to feel like vampires are the upside of life extension?

(In other words, zombies are your loved ones living to be 100. But vampires are you living to be 100 — hence the added glamour and wish-fulfillment.)

And yet also, vampires represent the weight of history, the baggage we thought we'd let go of, which insists on hanging around. Wasn't history supposed to have ended around 1990?

Cyborgs and robots

This summer, Terminator and Transformers clashed over the "giant robot movie" crown, and this Friday's G.I. Joe is bringing us (minor spoiler, sorry) evil nanomachines and cybernetic "accelerator suits."

It's not hard to see what these fantasies are about — Terminator Salvation director McG summed up the themes pretty concisely in his thousands of interviews about that film: we watch movies like his (or not, as the case may be) because we're uneasy about our creeping dependency on computers and gadgets generally. We fret about at what point we are so integrated with our iphones and our assistive technology, that we stop being human. (And Dollhouse is basically about the fact that we've subsumed our identities as people into Twitter and Facebook, so that our personalities exist as much in the computer world as in our heads.)

On the one hand, it's liberating and awesome to feel as though we have masses of knowledge and memes and ideas within easy reach of our brain tendrils. On the other hand — we're like cyber-inter-junkies! Cut us off from our devices, and our brains start to deflate like bad pastry. Writer Stephen Elliott spent a month without using the Internet, and had a week of bad withdrawal.

And it's hard to watch Transformers without thinking about our dependency on cars, how much like our best friends they are, how heartbreaking it is when they let us down.

Space opera

In books, space opera has lately been prone to massive, aeon-spanning sagas that take into account the vast distances between star systems and the large amounts of time required to traverse them. (Not to mention the time dilation and cognitive dissonance that happens when you travel at relativistic speeds.) But mass-media space opera tends to assume quick-and-dirty faster-than-light travel, and zipping from Alpha Centauri to Betelgeuse is as easy as a road trip from Albuquerque to Vegas.

As a result, mass-media space-opera becomes a veiled comment on globalization, and the feeling that our world is shrinking.

In the 1990s, we had the endless parade of Star Treks and their ilk, in which every planet you visit looks much the same as the last — with minor variations. And each new alien is only slightly differentiated from the previous dozen. It's not that different from going to Bulgaria and realizing that there's a Starbucks and a McDonalds and Budweiser on draft everywhere you go. The excitement of seeing that things are the same wherever you go ("exploration") is tempered by the guilt that you're ruining all these places just by visiting them ("the Prime Directive.")

Now, we're seeing a newer, even guiltier, run of movies about space and aliens — ones in which humans are clearly the bad guys, and aliens are the victims. The biggest example of this is James Cameron's Avatar, in which the naughty, naughty human race comes to despoil the pristine planet Pandora, so we can build strip malls on it. There's also District 9, coming next week, in which alien refugees come to Earth, and we force them into ghettoes. (And as I mentioned yesterday, a number of the stories in the awesome new anthology Federations also feature humans paving paradise and putting up a parking lot.)

If 1990s space opera was the happy-but-queasy view of globalization, then the new breed is just pure misanthropic "we're crushing the third world" bleakness.

Post-apocalyptic yarns

This one is the most transparent of them all — we're terrified it's all going to fall apart, thanks to swine flu and global climate toiletness and so on. And yet there's something liberating about casting off the shackles of history — no more metaphorical vampires! — and we love to fantasize that we'll be among the few who survive after everyone else is sleeping with the mutant fishes.

So what's next?

Want the flood of superheroes, apocalypses and zombies to stop? Then you should root for us to get a whole new brand of progress, and a whole new batch of anxieties to go with them. (It's true, of course, that Hollywood will keep greenlighting the same movie over and over again, no matter what, but only as long as the latest iteration of that movie is making money.)

So here are a few ideas about the next up-and-coming obsessions, and how they could translate into science fictional genres:

• Biotech. We're just scratching the surface of what we can do with gene-splicing, stem cells, cloning and smart drugs. How will these treatments change who we are? What kind of new life forms could we create?

  What kind of science fiction could we get? Well, there's the obvious cloning horror stories, like The Sixth Day or The Island. And there's the strange not-quite-human monster film — like Vincenzo Natali's creepy-looking Splice, coming later this year. OMG we're playing God — what's the SAG rate for that?

  But my hopes are pinned on a new genre of Charlie Kaufman-esque stories about people whose personalities or bodies are being altered by their new medications or new body parts. You can start out with unsettling little differences, and slowly build up to outright strangeness and horror, where people have hands coming out of their foreheads, by the end.

  I was chatting the other day with a friend who was writing about new Alzheimer's Disease treatments, and he mentioned that Maureen McHugh's collection Mothers & Other Monsters is chock full of stories about Alzheimer's — including ones where a cure turns you into a totally different person, with a whole new personality.

• Statelessness. The collapse of the modern nation-state may be one of the big stories in the next decade or two. On the one hand, you have multinational corporations getting more and more powerful, and global challenges like climate change will require stronger international responses. On the other hand, if our current econom-ick goes on for a decade, governments may become more impoverished, overstretched and weakened. Result: More countries will start to look like Afghanistan or Somalia, with governments that barely govern.

  

  What kind of science fiction could we get? Pirates! Please, let there be pirates! Preferably space pirates as well as futuristic ocean pirates in the style of Waterworld. And possibly there will be more stories about international hero squads, like G.I. Joe, where the war on evil has a new front line — and it's multilateral. (Maybe "This time, it's multilateral" could become the new action-movie catch phrase?)

  And maybe we'll see a new brand of space opera in which the dangerous, no-beings-land of deep space is populated by creatures with shifting allegiances and itchy trigger tentacles.

• Peak oil and the smart house I was going to do these two things separately, but they kept coming together in my mind. Oil forecasters are increasingly pessimistic about our oil supplies, and how much longer we'll be able to use up fuel on Traveling Pants-style roadtrips of self discovery. And meanwhile, everyone keeps saying that by around 2020, our houses will be brilliant. All our appliances will be talking to each other, and they'll all be plugged into our social network, so our friends can tell our refrigerators to make funny-shaped ice chunks. In other words: We'll never leave the house again, and our houses will do everything for us.

  

  What kind of science fiction does this give us? Well, there's the obvious trapped-at-home story, like E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops or the upcoming movie Surrogates. But if you think of science fiction stories as talking about our advances and fears a bit more metaphorically, then maybe we'll get something a bit further afield: like, say, stories about claustrophobia or evil buildings trying to kill us. Or even better, a slew of "Earth is quarantined" stories, where aliens try to keep us from leaving our planet and infecting the rest of the cosmos with our naughtiness.

The genre: Military science fiction
The book: Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein.
Actually, Wikipedia and Fandomania credit the earliest beginnings of military SF to George T. Chesney's 1871 Germany-invades-England tale "The Battle Of Dorking" and George T. Griffith's serialized "The Angel Of Revolution," plus the works of H.G. Wells. But the book that everybody refers to as the touchstone of military SF, the book which really launched the themes of futuristic interplanetary warfare and examining the military as a social entity, was Heinlein's Starship Troopers. As Fandomania's survey puts it, this 1959 book "put Military Science Fiction on the radar."

The genre: Cyberpunk
The book: Neuromancer by William Gibson.
There's some debate about who really "invented" Cyberpunk as a genre. As this cranky essay (PDF) notes, Asimov was the first writer to consider the ramifications of artificial intelligence seriously. Bruce Sterling helped shape the genre with his 1986 anthology Mirrorshades. Bruce Bethke invented the term "cyberpunk" with his 1980 short story called "Cyberpunk." But even Bethke admits:

I never claimed to have invented cyberpunk fiction! That honor belongs primarily to William Gibson, whose 1984 novel, Neuromancer, was the real defining work of "The Movement." (At the time, Mike Swanwick argued that the movement writers should properly be termed neuromantics, since so much of what they were doing was clearly Imitation Neuromancer.)

Gibson's Neuromancer gives us the fusion of noir with brain-computer interfaces and dystopian paranoia, which spawned so many imitators.

The genre: Gothic science fiction
The book: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Commonly acclaimed as the first science fiction novel in general, Frankenstein was the first novel to meld the burgeoning gothic lit genre with the themes of abuse of science. Brian Aldiss, in his seminal work of SF criticism The Billion-Year Spree, claims that SF was "born out of the gothic mode" with Frankenstein. As CUNY professor Lilia Melani puts it:

In 1818, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus introduced the theme of the dangers of science and created the obsessed scientist, who was to develop into the mad scientist, and the archetypal Monster. Frankenstein has been called the first science fiction novel; she of course thought she was writing a novel of terror.

Gothic science fiction has come to mean any science-fictional story with terrifying elements, a horrendous monster or some kind of science-fictional explanation for a horror trope, like vampires created by a bio-engineered plague.

The genre: First contact with an alien race
The book: Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke. This was a tough one - even if you only define "first contact" as being a scenario where human society, as a whole, comes into contact with an alien species (and not just one solitary human explorer) you still have tons of early stories about aliens showing up. Some would say the earliest notable "first contact" novel is H.G. Wells' The War Of The Worlds. But let's say that a crucial component of the "first contact" story is that the aliens are friendly - or at least reasonably well-intentioned. Otherwise, you just have an invasion or war story. In that case, Childhood's End, with its super-advanced Overlords showing up and guiding humanity to a higher plane of existence and merger with the Overmind, although somewhat disturbing, is still a more benign story than Wells'. And thus a more proper precursor to books like Carl Sagan's Contact and Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis saga.

The genre: Utopian science fiction
The book: Stories of utopian futures are enjoying a bit of a resurgence, with the upcoming Shine Anthology pushing for a more optimistic futurism. But the first future utopian novel (as distinguished from, say, More's Utopia, which is the account of a fictional realm) is The Mummy!: Or a Tale of the Twenty-Second Century by Jane C. Loudon. In this happy future, everyone wears neon hats:

The ladies were all arrayed in loose trowsers, over which hung drapery in graceful folds; and most of them caried on their heads, streams of lighted gas forced by capillary tubes, into plumes, fleurs-de-lis, or in short any form the wearer pleased; which jets de feu had an uncommonly chaste and elegant effect.

Other wonders include "the steam-powered automaton surgeons and lawyers (who speak briefs fed into tubes in their bodies) and the delivery of letters by cannon-balls, which are shot into large nets erected in each village." She even predicts a sort of Internet. Everyone travels around in giant blimps, and it's a happy, egalitarian society. There's also Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, in which a young man goes to sleep in 1887 and wakes up in the Socialist utopia of the year 2000 - Bellamy's book may have been more influential, along with H.G. Wells' A Modern Utopia. (Thanks to Liz Henry for the suggestions.)

The genre: Apocalyptic fiction
The book: The earliest apocalyptic novel is probably Shelley's 1826 novel The Last Man. But the first really popular novel of global devastation, and the one which helped to spawn a ton of imitators, is Nevil Schute's 1957 novel On The Beach. As you'd expect from that date, it's all about nuclear holocaust, which devastates the Northern Hemisphere and leaves the last survivors in Australia and New Zealand, drinking way too much wine while awaiting the end of everything. It became a film and also helped shape our atomic anxiety into a rich seam of fiction that endures today in novels like The Road.

The genre: Steampunk
The book: Infernal Devices: A Mad Victorian Fantasy by K.W. Jeter. Jeter not only invented the term steampunk, in an interview around the time this 1987 novel came out. A weird comic twist on the Victorian adventure novel, Infernal Devices stars George, a young watchmaker who discovers that his father was the greatest inventor of all time - even creating a clockwork automaton version of George. The clockwork duplicate of George plays the violin better than Paganini and has greater sexual prowess than George himself, leading to all sorts of wacky adventures as people mistake George for his automaton twin. Other books that could claim to be steampunk pioneers include Anubis Gates by Tim Powers (1983) and Homunculus (1986) by James Blaylock. But to be fair, the book that really popularized the steampunk genre was 1990's The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling.

The genre: Time travel
The book: The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. This is sort of a gimme, I guess. The best-known early time-travel saga, and still one of the best, Wells' story launched a whole flotilla of time vessels into the distant future as well as the past. Like War Of The Worlds, it has been adapted into movies and various other formats, and the Eloi/Morlock dichotomy has become a sort of shorthand for a type of future dystopia rife with exaggerated social division.

The genre: Alternate history
The book: Histoire de la Monarchie universelle: Napoléon et la conquête du monde (History of the Universal Monarchy: Napoleon And The Conquest Of The World.) Screw those "Hitler wins World War II" books. How about this popular "Napoleon won the Napoleonic wars" book, published back when Napoleon was still a living memory? Louis Geoffroy imagines Napoleon's First French Empire defeating Russia and then going on to invade England in 1814. Result: Game over. Napoleon rules the world.

The genre: Posthuman space opera
The book: Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks. I have no idea what book launched the "space opera" genre originally - that might be a question for another day. And there's some debate over which book inspired the resurgence of space-opera books loosely called "the new space opera." But to me, it's probably more accurate to call this genre "posthuman space-opera," since it so frequently deals with artificial intelligences, augmented humans, beings who live for millions of years, and generally a set of characters who far exceed the capabilities of a regular human. And for my money, the first really influential star-spanning novel about a civilization of A.I.s (the Minds) and superhumans whose concerns are much farther reaching than our pathetic horizons was 1987's Consider Phlebas. I freely admit this may be a bit of personal bias showing through, since Phlebas was the first novel I read which really knocked my head off and made me see the awesome potential for this type of story.

So what are you waiting for? Go out there and create some more new genres!

Top image from Consider Phelbas cover.

Additional reporting by Alexis Brown.

"It's easy to dismiss sci fi flicks as clumsy and loud, but the critiques miss a key virtue. Unlike other genres, fanboy blockbusters are a constantly innovating form, with an important message about the present even as they outline visions of our future. In romantic comedies, the scene can shift from the Civil War to the Los Angeles real estate market as long as boy meets girl amidst the bayonets or billboards. Horror movies can switch weapons with no fall-off in audience long as there are coeds to dice. Come Oscar season, World War II films are such a reliable source of nominations that Kate Winslet's turn as a sexy Nazi became a simultaneous joke on the genre and a lock for the Academy Award.

"Science fiction and superhero movies don't have the luxury of simply finding the latest neighborhood where attractive singles are settling or the flashiest car on the market and plugging those accessories into a formula. By nature, those films have to imagine the future, to put something on screen that audiences would never see in their everyday lives. Sometimes, those visions are farfetched, unrealistic, paranoid, immature, or deeply cheesy. Of the four major sci-fi movies being released this spring and summer, two feature vengeful giant robots. Another centers on a guy who metalizes his skeleton, and the fourth plants spaceships in Iowa cornfields. They'll vary in quality, and plausibility, but at least they have something to say about the perils and opportunities of the future.

"X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the first of these movies, is a perfect example of the power of a bad fanboy movie. The film is far too full of cheap-looking special effects and dialogue that seems ludicrous outside a cartoon bubble to be really absorbing. But Wolverine has far more to say about its chosen subject, the scientific manipulation of the human body, than, for example, the romantic comedy Ghosts of Girlfriends Past has to say about relationships between men and women." — Alyssa Rosenberg, writing in The Atlantic.

I was struggling with how to say that in a blog post, but luckily, Cheryl Morgan did it for me. Her thoughtful response to Kunkel's argument is well worth reading for its own sake, as she dissects the difference between genres and tropes. (Like, it's actually possible to write a novel about clones without doing the usual "Are clones human?" thing.) In a weird sense, the debate over literary fiction vs. SF has in itself become ridden with tropes, and Morgan does a good job of cutting through them.

I got curious about this topic when I saw that rising Christian romance author Deborah Kinnard had sold her novel Seasons In The Mist to Christian publisher Sheaf. Seasons is a time-travel romance set in 1353 Cornwall, and it comes out in spring 2010. I looked at Kinnard's site and saw other books that seemed to bring together science fiction, religion and romance, including Angel With A Ray Gun, which has the best cover ever.

Says Shoup:

Christian sci-fi and fantasy are growing markets... [and] Christian romance is most definitely a growing genre, as is romance in general. It never seems to shrink, just to grow. Historical romances have been around for a long time, and now we're seeing combined genres springing up all over the place—romantic suspense, mysteries with a strong romance slant, sci-fi and fantasy romances, and so on are becoming increasingly hot. I personally feel the growth potential is huge as long as publishers put out excellent stories that really engage readers.

Could this kind of genre-mashing be the future of science fiction? Not necessarily aimed at Christian readers, but aimed at readers outside the usual science fiction book audience. People get very excited when books with science fiction themes hit big with literary readers, but maybe we should be more excited when scifi-ish books break out with Christian readers, romance readers or mystery audiences? [Sheaf House]

Vampirism as a Virus

Given that conditions like tuberculosis and porphyria are likely inspirations for the vampire myth, it’s not surprising that the most common way writers introduce vamps into science fiction is through disease. Books like Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend and Scott Westerfeld’s Peeps carefully plot the nature of the vampiric germ, whose cannibalistic victims wreak havoc on the populace, and action flop Ultraviolet centers around a government-created supersoldier virus that escapes into the civilian population.

But does it work? It can, but results often fall to one genre or the other. Both Matheson and Westerfeld take great pains to describe how disease could cause the classic vampiric traits – even suggesting psychological explanations for the bloodsuckers’ aversion to religious symbols. And Matheson’s book succeeds as both an apocalyptic narrative – humanity decimated and transformed by pathogen – and an inversion of the vampire myth. But Westerfeld’s bloodthirsty peeps, despite their similar grounding in science, occupy an otherwise typical urban fantasy of monsters and the agents who hunt them. Conversely, Ultraviolet is set in a technologically advanced future, but its hemophagic affliction is simply a pretense for giving Milla Jovovich superpowers.

Vampires as Aliens

When you encounter life on a distant planet, you don’t expect humans to be its favorite food. But it happens all the time. Robert Darvel, the engineer hero of Gustave Le Rouge’s Mars series, finds the Red Planet inhabited by bat-winged beings hungry for his blood. And a trip through the Stargate brings the Atlantis expedition face-to-face with the Wraith, creatures so dependent on human energy for sustenance that they maintain breeding farms.

But does it work? Actually, it works quite well. Despite substituting extraterrestrials for the undead, these stories capture a key essence of the vampire myth: that nagging feeling that we may not be on top of the food chain. And, while we hope first contact will bring us to a benevolent and enlightened race, these stories play neatly to our fear of ending up in a warming tray at some intergalactic buffet.

Vampires in the Future

What if vampires exist, but they’re lying in wait? A nuclear holocaust, a few world-shattering wars, and they’ll rise up to snatch global supremacy from the human race. Dystopian futures are bad enough without having to worry that someone’s going to take a chunk out your neck.

But does it work? Perhaps. The post-apocalyptic world of the Vampire Hunter D films is alternately so gothic and so alien that, despite its cybernetic horses, rocket ships, and atomic mutants, it is ultimately fantastical rather than speculative. But Fray, Joss Whedon’s futuristic expansion of the Buffyverse, has a sci-fi edge: it takes place in universe its audience already knows, a world much like our own, but with demons and better dialogue. Vampires retain their mystical elements, but technology has advanced even as hellspawn threaten to overrun the Earth. Fantasy and science fiction operate in tandem, so that Melaka Fray battles the undead as well as the biologically enhanced living, and is as handy with a scythe as with her retro ray gun.

Vampiric Technology

But to be truly successful sci-fi, vampires shouldn’t merely exist alongside superweapons and flying cars; they should use technology to suit their own uniquely vampiric needs. The Ina of Octavia Butler’s The Fledgling experiment with genetic manipulation, introducing African human genes to increase their resistance to sunlight. And in True Blood, humanity learns of the existence of vampires only when perfected synthetic blood frees vamps from their dependence on warm bodies.

But does it work? It turns out that fangs and tech can mix. Butler uses her biological vampires in much the same way she uses aliens and time travel – to explore themes of race, intimacy, and domination. But beyond that, her vampires present an allegory for the possible benefits and social consequences of altering our DNA. And while the synthetic blood beverage will likely be the major technological advance of True Blood, it does serve as an object lesson in the ways that technology reveals surprising truths about the world in which we live.

1) On election day, thousands of people forget how to vote. Conspiracy? Psychosomatic?

2) A chemical plant accident causes it to rain love potion... which later wears off. Awkward!

3) Aliens invade, then realize they forgot something at home, and go away. And then invade again, a few weeks later.

4) Genetically engineered meat gains sentience, and becomes a pop star.

5) The only guy who can talk computers into self-destructing loses his voice, right before a robot uprising. Gargle! Gargle faster!

6) A new drug makes you think you have superspeed. But actually, you don't.

7) A supercomputer imposes Kant's Categorical Imperative as the only law of the land.

8) The shrinking-ray chase scene, with pursuer and pursued getting smaller and smaller.

9) Due to genetic degradation, it now takes a village to produce enough healthy chromosomes to make a child.

10) My clone plagiarized my memoir!

11) Only rich people can afford normal gravity, while the poor start floating away.

12) How much can you use genitals, and still take them back for a refund within the 30-day return period?

13) Crash diet: visit a dystopian future for a few weeks.

14) I set up a hologram to make it look like I was at work, while I was at the beach. But it was better at my job than I am.

15) The only way to stop genetic discrimination is to wipe out all knowledge of DNA. Using a sexually transmitted retrovirus!

16) After a conquest, your entire nation is now a giant theme park. Your behavior mods are forthcoming.

17) Sexual identity theft leaves thousands of people unsure of their sexual orientations. In some versions of this story, the National Guard is called in to sort things out.

18) Dead war criminals are reanimated so they can apologize, over and over again, to the descendants of their victims. But then of course they get groupies.

19) A new drug makes you want what you already have. But over time, you forget they already have it, and think you have to go out and get whatever it is.

20) You can't become famous unless your face can look like a more attractive version of whoever happens to be looking at it. The process works great for about five years, then your face melts.

On her blog, Walton says that doing all the research to make her science unimpeachable slows down her writing process to a crawl, to the point where she loses interest in the story. And her friends who know science end up suggesting alternatives that screw up what she wanted to do in the first place. She explains:

So I have this thing about aliens with four genders. It takes place in the universe where the solution to the Fermi Paradox is that FTL drives make your star explode after 20 uses. So these aliens are stuck in their solar system (with a couple of other aliens who showed up and can't go home) and they know about other aliens. (Earth may or may not exist in this universe. It doesn't matter. This is a story about some aliens.) My aliens have a mother planet and a terraformed marslike, and a moon where they live in domes. My character comes from the terraformed planet. He's leaving a spaceship on the mother planet, he smells the mother planet air, and he thinks "Ah, the sweet smell of /INSERT ATMOSPHERE COMPONENT GAS HERE/, which we don't have in the air of my terraformed home, which smells so atavistically good because this is where my ancestors evolved, but which nevertheless reminds me of the three years I spent here in the prison camp." And I stop, and I trot off to ask what atmospheric component gas it could be (and already you notice I have stopped writing and started checking, and also, note how much I had to explain to get to this point, which in the actual story would all not be explained) and after a long discussion I find out that there's nothing, unless I totally change everything I want, or give them noses that can smell argon or something (which is an unnecessary complication when they already have turtle shells and four eyes and the interesting thing is the four genders) and I have to scrap that sentence which was doing set up and incluing and background and was about to set up the next sentence about how he met his best friend in the prison camp and was going to lead on into some actual story.

If I didn't know any science at all, I'd just merrily put traces of chlorine in an oxygen atmosphere and it would all be as dumb as heck but at least it would actually get written and the characters would get out of my head and get to have their adventure.

And this is just one line, and it's all like that.

So anyway, that's why I don't write SF, even though it's what I like to read.

I wonder how many would-be science fiction authors get turned off by these sorts of concerns. And how many of them would have written thought-provoking classics of the genre. (And how many people who do write tons of science fiction novels bother to know their science half as well as Walton already does.) The comment thread over at Walton's post is also well worth reading. [Paper Sky]