It's a cliche to say "The Golden Age of science fiction is 14." When you're young and wide-eyed, all the universe's brilliance seems overwhelmingly new and awesome. Stories of exploration and conquest of the universe are fresh and thrilling, and the space hero's exploits feel like a proxy for your own process of finding your place in the world. It's the most awesome thing in the world, and you can keep experiencing that kind of excitement over and over again throughtout your life - I still watch the original Star Trek on DVD and get a little thrill of excitement (mixed with nostalgia) again.

But "sense of wonder," to me, is another way of talking about a child's awe at the amazing bounty of creation. And I can't help but wonder, when I hear people pining for "sense of wonder," if they're really just wishing for the return of childhood innocence. The phrase "sense of wonder," itself, evokes a sense of wide-eyed awe, a childlike amazement.

And over time, "My god, it's full of stars!" becomes "Hey, it's still full of stars!" And eventually, "Oh yeah, those stars? Still full of them." And finally "Stars. Full of. Yup."

As Peter Smith put it in the St. Petersburg Times back in 1986:

Science fiction fans call it the Sense Of Wonder. It's the feeling/knowledge that you're seeing something new, or something old in a new way. In many ways, the Sense Of Wonder can reaffirm your place in the universe, filling you with joyous, guileless awe.

A couple of years ago, in SF Crowsnest, Mark R. Leeper complained that the annual World Science Fiction Convention wasn't meeting his needs any more:

For some reason I feel the Worldcons of the 70s seemed to have more verve. Somehow Worldcons seem more staid and less energetic as there are fewer young and active attendees...
In fact, most of the authors who are currently writing do not seem to have such a strong following proportionally among the younger fans. Their prose is heavier and lacking in "sense of wonder." It appeals more to serious older readers. But fewer young people are going to Worldcons.

In other words, writers who appeal mostly to older science fiction readers are less likely to focus on "sense of wonder" and more likely to deal with knotty political or social issues.

And then there's Ted Chiang, interviewed in Locus in 2002:

Everyone refers to science fiction's ability to evoke a sense of wonder. That is definitely a goal of mine, because I remember the sense of wonder I experienced when I read science fiction when I was younger. I would like to be able to evoke that in other people.

Whenever people talk about "sense of wonder," it seems like they default to talking about childhood. And there's a certain nostalgia for that time, and a desire to recapture it or hold onto it somehow. It's no accident that Arthur C. Clarke, the dean of "sense of wonder" writing, has written on his tombstone, "Here lies Arthur C. Clarke. He never grew up and never stopped growing."

But here's the thing: growing up is important. We can't hold onto our innocence forever. Not that you can't stop and admire the awesomeness of the universe, of course — that never really goes away. (I do love me some space porn.) But I often think people who talk about "sense of wonder" are clamoring for more than just an appreciation of how cool space is, how amazing huge machines can be. They want that awareness of scale — the realization of how small we are and how big the universe is — to dominate, maybe even to drive the narrative. And in turn, that sense of bigness can obscure, or prevent, an awareness of how messy and complicated human beings are, and how likely we are to make a mess.

I started thinking about this last fall, when I read a blog post by Nancy Kress, talking about Somalian pirates holding an oil tanker hostage, and how it reminded her of a science fiction story she'd read when she was 15. At age 15, that story of someone capturing a spaceship felt awe-inspiring and awesome. But now, seeing something similar in real life, it just wasn't quite the same. She wrote:

Now that Somalian pirates have actually stolen a huge oil tanker, holding 25 people hostage and using organized crime as the transfer point for millions of dollars in ransom, my visceral response is not "awe." Outrage, disgust, fear are closer. The Somalian pirates' motive is greed, and the SF story hi-jackers' was (I think) patriotic freedom. However, it's the lack of "awe" that interests me at the moment.

Maybe the world has gotten too grubby and jaded for "awe." Or I have. At any rate, a "sense of wonder" is no longer what I look for in fiction, including SF. I don't want to be dazzled by things I never thought of before, even though often that seems to be what SF values. I want to be emotionally moved, involved at a visceral level with the characters and the situation, not with novelty or landscapes or gadgets or derring-do. Take, for instance, Elizabeth Bear's Hugo-winning story "Tide Line." I loved this story for the portrait of the dying sentient war machine who passes on its heritage to a child. Whatever devastated the Earth and sent it back to the Stone Age is barely mentioned. I'm sure that war was awesome, but it was probably also boring — UNTIL it's brought down to the level of personal suffering.

So — not a sense of wonder. A sense of vulnerable humanity. Which, now that I think about it, that space-ship piracy story probably lacked — or else I would remember something, anything, about at least one character?

Thing is, there are things you cannot see if you're too busy looking at everything with a "sense of wonder." And those things are often the stuff most worth talking about. I like science fiction that's gritty but hopeful, and politically realistic but still idealistic at its core. And it's hard to write science fiction that deals with complicated human problems, and stark political realities, when we're constantly pausing to admire our own ingenuity.

It's also hard not to look at the soon-to-be-uninhabitable cesspit our world is becoming, without asking "Did 'sense of wonder' help to fuck up the ice caps?" Since a big part of "sense of wonder" is not just "space is awesome" but also, "we can build huge awesome machines!"

It also feels a bit ooky: As Leeper points out, all indications are that the die-hard science-fiction readership is graying. A generation who grew up with Heinlein and Clarke is clinging to the genre as it ages, and younger readers aren't coming along in enough numbers to replace it. There's something a bit unsettling about older people asking to be talked to like teenagers.

So it's no accident that some of the most "sense of wonder-y" fiction I've read lately squares the circle, by featuring characters who are both ageless and impossibly old. I was thinking about this a lot after I read House Of Suns by Alastair Reynolds. All of the major characters in Suns are six million years old, partly thanks to life-extending technology and partly thanks to traveling in stasis at relativistic speeds. (Subjectively, they're still ancient, but they haven't experienced millions of years' consciousness.) And these quasi-immortal beings, who've watched civilizations rise and fall, constantly remind each other that they're still amazed by the richness of the universe. That's why they keep traveling, after almost the whole history of the human race: because they keep seeing new wonders and being amazed.

Reynolds gets to have it both ways, sort of — he writes about characters who are physically youthful and full of amazement, but they're also jaded and ancient. They're a good stand-in for the reader, who has probably read thousands of similar novels before, but is still looking for the next new thing.

The ageless, disconnected protagonist has become a bit of a trope of the new batch of space opera, as Alan DeNiro explained in his Rain Taxi review of The New Space Opera Volume 1:

In many of these stories, Earth-like physiology has mutated to a point of no return; virtual realities give way to virtual bodies and vice-versa. The anthology has a general inhuman pallor-to put it another way, humanity has been emulsified against the backdrop of far-flung space-but all too often, the fiction suffers because of the unexplored consequences of this stance. Like the protagonist in Greg Egan's "Glory," who is a molecular payload shot across space, many of the characters are, in essence, simulacra. People (if they can be called that) have to have their sharp edges smoothed over in order to survive in the recesses of the vacuum. And yet, how does a writer balance the needs of narrative when characters' motivations are, at best, flat? ("Always so sad, Debra: it's not good for the brain, you should take a break," a brutal assassin is told in the first story in the anthology, the inauspicious "Saving Tiamaat" by Gwyneth Jones). Of course, this impulse is spectacularly "retro," hearkening back to the origins of space opera in the early 20th century. As a lurid offshoot of the larger tree of adventure fiction, characterization was fast and loose, but it was a subgenre that was inquisitive as to its own metaphysics. In the current day, however, the metaphysics seem to come from the minutes of a transhumanist conference.

What's more disappointing is that in almost no cases is this disassociation from emotion made part of the story (something, ironically, that literary realist stories are often decried for in some genre circles); as an unexamined baseline, the affectless life forms plod through adventures whose outcomes appear meaningless against the larger backdrop of thousands of worlds, hundreds of civilizations. As Ian Macdonald's meandering narration in "Verthandi's Ring" tells the reader, "war was just another game to entities hundreds of thousands of years old, for whom death was a sleep and a forgetting." Again, this galactic void could be part of the observable texture of the narrative, picking up on how the enclosed space of a story-much like the sealed hull of an interstellar spaceship-can only contain so much prose.

Is it possible that the only way we can keep "sense of wonder" alive for the veteran reader is by turning to posthuman protagonists, who have seen it all before — except for the latest wonder? In other words, by clinging to "sense of wonder" so hard, do we end up jettisoning everything else, even the humanity of our protagonists? Even the foibles and emotional complexities that make people, well, wonderful?

"Sense of wonder" is for the rubes. The truly experienced SF boffin doesn't wonder at all — because she already knows. "Ringworld? Whatever. Call me when you've got a Mobius Strip-World, with infinite real estate." "Oh yeah, I already rendezvoused with Rama three times last week. Rama is my dog."

You always know a "little place" off the beaten track. Everybody else is reading William Gibson or Bruce Sterling? You're more into Pat Cadigan — but only her early stuff, before she sold out. Or actually, forget cyberpunk altogether — you're more into ribofunk, which the masses haven't trampled all over yet.

Nothing shocks you. Oh sure, people are buzzing about this new movie where babies get inflated to the size of Buicks and fired into space, where they can get bigger and bigger until they become giant human satellites, blotting out the sun around the equator. But you were into the baby-inflation craze before it went mainstream — and really A.E. Van Vogt did the definitive mega-baby story back in the 50s. You, yourself, have been inflated to the size of a semi. Twice.

Memorize a few helpful phrases. For instance, say your acquaintances are discussing a Philip K. Dick novel you've never read — and maybe you've never read any PKD novels at all. Simply say this: "Well, to the casual reader, Dick might seem to be using an out-of-body experience to explore an alternate dystopia. But actually, he's asking: 'Are we in ourselves, or out of pocket?' And the answer, as always, is 'When.'" Nobody will doubt that you've read the book in question — three times.

Know how to talk to the natives. They speak a pidgin dialect, made up almost entirely of quotes from Dune, Highlander, Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan, the old Twilight Zone series, the new Battlestar Galactica, and maybe a few British programs like Monty Python and Doctor Who. (Instead of saying "Bitch, please," say "Bitch, your agonizer please.") Plus the occasional bit of technobabble or gadgetspeak — memorize the words on this list and drop them into your conversation: "Either my telechronometer is frakked to the max, or I'm late for I'm late for my afternoon tasping."

Here's a handy list of actors whose body of work you can dismiss unseen: Shia LaBeouf, William Shatner, Arnold Schwartzenegger, Keanu Reeves, Milla Jovovich, Sean Connery, John Travolta, Kevin Spacey, Hugh Jackman, Val Kilmer, Natasha Henstridge, Jason Statham, Eric Roberts, Mark Wahlberg, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Tom Cruise, Eddie Murphy, Will Smith, Mel Gibson, Tobey Maguire, Hayden Christensen, Morgan Freeman, Eric Bana, Ben Affleck, Vin Diesel, Nicole Kidman, RIchard Dean Anderson and Ben Browder. It's possible some of these actors have done some decent non-scifi work, but that shouldn't concern you.

Oh, and did I mention that nothing shocks you? Everybody else is watching tentacle porn, but you've already moved on to eel snuff. You've already seen the video of Steven Spielberg demonstrating the correct way to react to an alien anal probe on the set of Taken, five times, and in fact you're the one doing the probing, off camera. Bitch, your agonizer please!

You've already memorized every landmark on the "hero's journey." You also know by heart all the lesser-known variants, including the hero's drain-circling, the hero's descent, the hero's graduation from fire-safety school, the hero's summer dog-walking job that ends disastrously when one of the dogs thinks an asphalt machine is a sandpit, the hero's heroin binge, the hero's first visit to a prodomme, the hero's missing bottom half of his spacesuit, and the hero's incredibly long nap that turns into a surreal reverie without ever leaving the couch.

Know the story beats in the average summer movie — to the point where you have them timed to the split second. "Hero's humiliation at the hands of minor bullies in three, two one..." People in movie theaters love it when you count down out loud, so go ahead.

Weed out the chaff. There's really no need ever to see a movie or TV show with the word "star" in the title. Or to see any narratives about cars, or big fighting machines. Really, any books that take place in a "Universe," with a capital "U" and its own first name, like the Mooboo Universe, are probably skippable. No book or movie sequels. And forget any books that are compared to Pynchon or David Foster Wallace on the cover, unless they're by one of those authors. (A book by Wallace that's compared to Pynchon may be okay. May.) If you manage to be jaded enough, you can whittle your entertainment choices down to one movie a year, and maybe a couple of books.

Nothing at all ever shocks you. You've already seen John Travolta giving an enema to a sentient planet, and you've asked John to stop coming over to your house and showing you. Klingon/Borg porn is so over. Nerve extraction and insertion into a giant space torus is totally done to death. Vat-grown city-sized noses that smell alien sex organs? Yawn. Wake me when you've caught up with my blood cactus porn collection.

• SF is now real life. "We are at last living in an SF scenario," Brian Aldiss said in a recent London Times interview. The article went on to paraphrase: "A collapsing environment, a hyperconnected world, suicide bombers, perpetual surveillance, the discovery of other solar systems, novel pathogens, tourists in space, children drugged with behaviour controllers - it's all coming true at last." It's like SF is a laundry list of predictions, and we've ticked them all off. What about colonizing Mars, though? Why do only the sucky predictions have to come true?
• It's been colonized by mainstream literature. Authors like Cormac McCarthy and Kazuo Ishiguro have stolen away our precious science fictional heritage and re-branded it as literary fiction. The literary establishment lavishes attention on these appropriating works, but ignore speculative fiction that has similar themes. And somehow, this will cause SF to wither into irrelevance.
• It's turned into pure fantasy. People get off on the "sense of wonder" in science fiction, says Bookslut's Paul Kincaid. Think of SF as a cosmic crack dealer. But over time, the wonder has gotten bigger and bigger, and authors have given up on trying to provide a rational explanation for it. So the science has become magic, and the SF has become just another kind of fantasy.
• The fanbase is ancient. "The literature of youthful, forward-looking openness... is graying," laments David Brin. At conventions, you see more retirees in scooters than kids. Is it because teh kids are too busy playing video games? Or is it that those older readers have created an impenetrable fan culture and a genre that caters to their finnicky needs? Either way, this demographic trend spells trouble in the long term.
• Rackspace is shrinking. Science fiction books are doing well as trade paperbacks (the bigger kind) but are in danger of losing their prominence as mass market paperbacks (the pocket kind), says Tom Doherty, publisher of Tor Books. That means fewer impulse buys at airports and drug stores, which convert new readers to SF.