After four years, Baen’s Universe will be closing down. It’s sad but not too surprising, mainly because Baen’s Universe never had much of a business model. Baen’s tried to move the print model of subscriptions to the internet, with the added caveat of previews and stand alone sales. It wasn’t a completely worthless experiment, but if Salon and the New York Times haven’t been able to make the subscription content model work, what were the odds that Baen’s would succeed? And then there’s the problem of the content itself, Baen’s paid SFWA pro rates, but didn’t seem to have much to show for it. Its sole Hugo nomination was to its editor Mike Resnick. Compare that to Ellen Datlow’s run on SciFi, which was a truly pioneering online magazine, and had a lot more to show for it. But then Baen’s is not exactly synonymous with great Science Fiction which may be the problem. When most people think of Baen’s, they think of garishly embossed covers of mech-soldiers fighting aliens from outer space. That might sell as a pulp magazine, but Baen’s tried to play to another type of market with Mike Resnick, and succeeded at appealing to neither.

With the death of Arthur C. Clarke, it’s hard not to notice that the Science Fiction of the present has lost much of what attracted so many to Clarke, Asimov and Heinlein in the first place. Squeezed on one side by market realities and merchandising novels and on the other by the erosion of quality and the loss of basic storytelling skills, Science Fiction today is a pale shadow of what it once was.

Science Fiction today is less concerned with the future than it is with the present. Faith in the future has given way to trends of technophobia and luddite sentiments not only in the usual haunts in Hollywood but in many books as well written by authors raised on Hollywood’s technophobic versions of Science Fiction’s vision.

The genre itself has grown convoluted, more concerned with itself than with serving as an open door to welcome in readers. Less concerned with telling a good story and more concerned with posing against the backdrop of some moral quandary and the latest scientific trend. It’s no wonder that anime is a lot more popular among the teenagers who should have been SF’s new readers and that the average age of the Science Fiction reader is continuing to trend upward and that the market accommodates it.

Science Fiction is killing itself off by turning inward, by catering to its core demographics’ preoccupations and failing to attract new readers in the process. What Clarke, Asimov and Heinlein brought first and foremost to their writing was a strong solid sense of rationalized order combined with an unfailing enthusiasm for exploring the possibilities and wonders of the universe. Both are qualities sadly lacking in Science Fiction today.

I’ll spare you the Star Wars Christmas Special jokes, by now I think we all know what to expect from George Lucas plus Star Wars plus TV. Anyone having any doubts at all, can go look at any given 5 minutes of a Clone Wars episode, before falling to the floor and shrieking in agony. Now the MTV movie blog reports that casting is underway for a live action Star Wars TV series tracing the rise of the Rebel alliance. With Anakin turned into Darth Vader, Amadalia dead, and all the Jedi perished, it’s hard to see how George Lucas could turn the subject into kiddie fare stocked with incredibly annoying teenage characters. Of course I have every confidence that he will rise to the challenge and do it anyway. Bets are out on how many CGI characters that sound like walking racial or ethnic stereotypes show up. Or maybe it’ll just be Truman Capote the Hutt. Either way what once would have been big news and manna to SciFi fans’ ears, now just elicits a shrug. Which tells you how low Star Wars has fallen. It’s long since become obvious to everyone that George Lucas only cares about cashing in fast, and knows the easy way to cash in is merchandising and kiddie fare. Except in the process he’s actually seriously devalued the worth of the Star Wars brand name. If he has any sense left, the Star Wars live action TV series will actually be an attempt to compensate for that, and won’t be aimed at 3 year olds. That would be right after we get a Knights of the Old Republic TV series written by the people who made the games. And then we can all fly around in a spaceship made of pizza and blueberry jam.

Roger Ebert’s review took a swipe, or a bunch of swipes actually at fanboys, both the movie Fanboys, and actual Star Wars fanboys, touching off a backlash from fanboys, the real ones, not the movie variety. Now lately Roger Ebert has fallen into the habit of not so much reviewing the movie, as going there and rambling on loosely related topics in the review. You can’t deny the man his Grandpa Simpson phase, but both Ebert’s review and the backlash toward it are classic unintentional internet comedy. Ebert damned himself by dedicating an entire half hour to the release of The Phantom Menace, a movie now considered infamously bad. I watched with complete disbelief as Siskel and Ebert spent a half hour, minus assorted commercials though the entire special was really one long commercial for George Lucas and Phantom Menace, going gaga over the movie. Now this was all the more unjustified because while Star Wars fans may have been fooled by the hype, many critics weren’t. The New York Post, owned by FOX owner Murdoch, had to drag in its editorial page editor to praise Phantom Menace because all four staff critics on the paper gave it a bad review. Clearly they either had more integrity or better judgment than Roger Ebert. Star Wars fanboys, the real and the movie version, can be forgiven for being taken in by their own hopes. But what was Ebert’s excuse for spending half an hour shilling for a terrible movie? The only thing worse than being a fanboy, is being a hack.

5. Bardon’s Revenge of Fury by David Drake and David Webber - First they blew up his planet, then they blew up his galaxy and then they blew up his starship. But that was their last mistake. Now Jon Bardon, mercenary with a grudge, and former Imperial Commando of the Secret Space Guards is after the Ap’Rij’hit Ra’none and nothing will stand in his way including an alien armada, bounty hunters, a seductive Imperial princess and his ex-wife who is now the Empress or something. Let the fury begin!

4. Applebee’s Elves by Jody Lynn Nye and Sarah A. Hoyt - When Emmie Winston who has believed all her life in elves discovers elves working at her local Applebee’s she is delighted and her 13 cats are even more delighted. But the presence of evil land developers who want to turn the Applebee’s into a nuclear power plant because they hate mother nature is a threat to the discovery of the secret of the elves. Also one of the elves might be a secret prince or something.

3. Russkies of the American Empire by S.M. Stirling - When Mike Barton, forest ranger formerly in the Gulf War, stumbles through an unexplained doorway into an alternate universe where the Russians colonized Russia and turned it into a vast Gulag full of Indians, there’s only one thing for him to do, lead the Indian tribes in a rebellion against their Russky overlords. Also for some reason in this universe fire and friction based weapons doesn’t work requiring Mike to invent an entire technology based on ice.

2. Smash the Space Bastards from Orion! by Eric Flint, John Ringo and Dave Freer - What if dinosaurs ruled the universe except on earth? Also what if they could use magic? Now imagine a dinosaur galactic empire based on magic battling humans in technological starships who are the only race in the galaxy on whom magic doesn’t work. Also imagine that in a last ditch effort to stop humanity the evil space dinosaurs go back in time to the age of the Vikings requiring Captain John Mistletoe USN to ally with the Vikings of the 4th century to destroy the dinosaur space menace once and for all. Also Captain John Mistletoe is blind but he has a really smart psychic seeing eye dog. Imagine that!

1. The Imaginary Brigade by Mercedes Lackey and Lois McMaster Bujold - When the International Space Station explodes sending researcher Diane Crawford back in time to the Age of Atlantis when wizards use magic, she discovers that the most powerful magic of all is love, and also crystals. But will it be enough to save Atlantis from the elves and their fearsome Imaginary Brigade that doesn’t exist? Can Diane go back to the present after discovering her magical abilities? Can you think of a reason for buying this novel? Yes, you’re still only thirteen.

These days Battlestar Galactica is a very popular SciFi TV series among people who don’t watch TV or read SciFi. That means everyone wants to write their own Battlestar Galactica episode. The question is how, but the answer is very simple. First take a piece of paper, write down your favorite things about the show and then crumple it in a little ball and put it in your mouth. Ron Moore should receive your pitch in six to eight weeks.

But to be serious for a picosecond, writing a Battlestar Galactica episode is very easy for those who haven’t tried it. All you need to do is break down your episode into the same exact elements that every other Battlestar Galactica episode has.

Let’s get started

1. A regular or recurring character experiences a drinking binge or a crisis of faith that causes him or her to question his or her beliefs while engaging in senseless and self-destructive behavior.

2. An extended armed standoff takes place between armed individuals or starships in which no one but a minor supporting character dies to milk some pathos out of the moment.

3. Someone has a vision, consisting of music, scenes from previous visions and no explanation for any of it.

4. Several Cylons or humans or both talk about how depressed they are and wonder if life has any meaning at all.

5. Adama and an unstated number of characters brood significantly while staring at A) Space B) A bulkhead C) Their own palm D) BSG’s last remaining audience

Now that you have these 5 vital elements in place, it’s easy to assemble your episode. Just plug in whatever names you feel comfortable with.

Let me set it up for you…

__________ experiences a crisis of faith after ____________ and winds up _________ to ______________. Meanwhile the ___________ faces an armed standoff with _____________ even as _____________ experiences further visions causing him\her to question whether ______________ is even real. Also ____________ broods a lot.

Feel free to plug anything in there, it’ll still be considered visionary no matter what you insert in there. For example

Chief _ experiences a crisis of faith after _ catching a cold from a nebula ___ and winds getting drunk to __a wind farm. Meanwhile the ___ bulkhead __ faces an armed standoff with ___ Hera ___ even as __someone___ experiences further visions causing him\her to question whether __teddy bear___ is even real. Also ___Adama__ broods a lot.

Congratulations you’ve written your first Battlestar Galactica episode. Now crumple it up and stick it in your mouth. Ron Moore will be sure to receive your pitch in 6 to 8 weeks.

You kind of have to feel sorry for anyone working over at Io9 and desperately trying to generate stories that will drive traffic and get them paid and non-fired, but aside from digging up porny bits of B Movies, and promoting William Gibson’s latest pointless essay, and of course reporting the movie and TV news that got reported a day ago, there’s not much there. So they have to make stuff up.

Case in point.

2008: The Year Science Fiction Became Science Culture

Ah 2008, that was the year.

This year, the top twenty movies in the US grossed 3.7 billion dollars. Science fiction movies accounted for 2.5 billion of that. In 2008, scifi rocketed out of the basement to become scicult.

I don’t have the numbers off the top of my head, but Science Fiction movies have been blockbusters for a long time. 2008 doesn’t break the mold or change anything.

Movies are really just a small piece of the pop culture pie currently being wolfed down by science fiction. You’ve got space opera and apocalypse in video games like Mass Effect, Fallout 3, and Spore, which are just a few of the scifi titles that obsessed audiences this year.

Yeah, an even bigger chunk of video games have always been Science Fiction. SF is about the most common type of video game there is. It’s either that or fantasy. So again, nothing new here.

comic book readers went nuts over alien invaders called Skrulls in last summer’s giant crossover extravaganza Secret Invasion.

Because DC and Marvel comic books have never been Science Fiction before. That’s just something that happened now. In 2008!

When science fiction has become so much a part of our everyday pop culture, does it make sense to call it scifi anymore?

Yes, because it’s still Science Fiction. It’s fiction about science. That’s the definition.

Certainly that seems to be the underlying message of some of 2008’s most popular new TV shows, such as The Mentalist and Fringe - as well as old favorites like House, Bones and CSI. All of these are fiction shows about science.

This is stupid even for Io9. And an old argument. Science Fiction is speculative, shows that deal with present day science, even a dumbed down version, are not Science Fiction.

What’s going on here? Acclaimed scifi author William Gibson has already explained it in interviews about his latest novels, all of which read like literary science fiction but take place in the present day. He believes that the present has become so saturated by high tech and advanced science that we are effectively living in a science fictional era.

Yes and to anyone from the 19th century, so were people in the 1950’s. This is a matter of perception and perspective. To someone from the 22nd century, we’d be technological barbarians.

Gibson is asserting that what once seemed futuristic is now part of the present.

That’s the definition of technological progress. It’s not an assertion, it’s how things work. We actually did go to the moon decades ago. We were futuristic then too. More so because we can’t go to the moon today, but we can blog a whole lot about how the future is now.

But it would be more accurate to say that we now accept scientific speculation as part of everyday life. We haven’t lost the idea of a future that’s way freakier than today. It’s just that now everybody thinks about the freaky future, not just scifi fans.

Has anyone at Io9 even heard of the world’s fair? Speculating about the future has been mainstream throughout the 20th century. Reading fictional books set in fictional universes, somewhat less so.

The phenomenal success of a show like House is testimony to this cultural shift. Every episode focuses on a medical mystery which House and his team can only solve using speculative thinking. Nobody would call House scifi, and yet it offers audiences the same pleasures as Star Trek: A chance to imagine how science might solve human problems, and where those solutions will take us.

Yes but it isn’t Science Fiction. It’s a medical drama dealing with present day medical science. House is just a detective show set in the world of medicine. There’s the annoying detective, and a cast of supporting characters and weekly mysteries to solve. Just because something involves science, doesn’t mean it is Science Fiction.

Scifi could become more like realism, where we explore the problems of ordinary people like House’s patients. Perhaps there will be no room for romantic monsters and heroic mutant outcasts in science culture, just as there is little room for those kinds of creatures in your typical episode of CSI.

What was that? Oh nothing, I was banging my head against the wall. House and CSI are not Science Fiction. They are fictional TV shows. They do involve Science. But they are not speculative projections of significant Scientific advances. They are mystery shows with a science backdrop.

If Science Fiction turns into that, it will be a dead genre.

Indeed, this draining away of experimental thought in scifi might explain the rise in fantasy stories right now.

This drain doesn’t actually exist. Io9, like a lot of elitist media commentary, just prefers what they consider realism, over good Science Fiction.

The SciFi Channel apparently assumes that people will like Caprica better than they do Battlestar Galactica because it doesn’t have spaceships, which once again proves that the SciFi channel management really understands Science Fiction. Because you know how people watch the SciFi Channel hoping not to see spaceships on it, just like they watch the Home Shopping Network hoping not to be offered anything for sale, and watch BET but would like it better without all the black people. Battlestar Galactica without spaceships, or you know the last season of the show, hasn’t exactly been a ratings winner. Overall the ratings factor out to less spaceships = less viewers. Now of course Ron Moore doesn’t think that Battlestar Galactica should involve spaceships, just people brooding and throwing tantrums while wearing suits and dies and wondering about the meaning of the universe. Shockingly this version of Battlestar Galactica is playing to a drastically eroded viewership. Now while I like the idea of a TV series with Eric Stoltz, having to sit through Battlestar Galactica minus the spaceships, the science fiction or anything of interest, isn’t all that appealing.

Personally I discovered Babylon 5 in a garbage can.

I was just in my front yard when I noticed an odd stench coming from a trash can. Curious I lifted the lid and behold, there was Babylon 5! At first I tried to pour pine scent on it to kill the smell but clearly Babylon 5 was rotting from the inside and the smell just wouldn’t die.

I tried to pick up Babylon 5 and throw it in my neighbor’s trash but it was slimy and slippery and I just couldn’t hold on to it. That morning I checked the garbage and the trash men had left it in the can, it seems that even the sanitation engineers couldn’t stand Babylon 5.

I was desperate and quickly running out of options. Finally it hit me, I took the can to a comic book store and instantly I was overwhelmed by hundreds of 5 foot 3 geeks covered in zits desperately fighting over Babylon 5. I held an auction and sold Babylon 5 to them for 18 dollars, 64 cents and 3 issues of Gorkman, Duck Killer. After that I sold them some old newspaper and a crate of spoiled eggs too that were in the can and that is how I discovered Babylon 5!

This essay from Mel Valentine over at efilmcritic isn’t unique, it’s not too dissimilar from reactions such as Moriarty’s over at AICN, though that seemed to be more embargo related, and a lot of online reviewers who are also Star Wars fans who are bidding goodbye to Star Wars over the Star Wars Christmas Special or Clone Wars.

Personally I think Clone Wars is a crossroads mainly because it’s impossible for anyone over the age of 6 to get anything out of the movie or keep on denying that the backlash to The Phantom Menace was dead on, that George Lucas has completely lost it and that Star Wars exists mainly for the sake of merchandising. Clone Wars now has a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 18 percent, which is seriously ugly. And while George Lucas will make money on it, the idea of a 15 million dollar opening for a Star Wars project is a joke, and one that Lucas helped to create by shortchanging the quality over and over again.

In a way Star Trek has done better than Star Wars or X-Files because Gene Roddenberry is dead and he quickly lost control over the franchise. Had the same Gene Roddenberry responsible for Star Trek TNG Season 1 and ST TMP kept on running Star Trek, I think the results might have been just as awful. Much as fans don’t like to recognize it, creation is a collaborative effort, and when a show or movie’s creator gains too much stature, it all goes to hell in a handbasket.

Mike Resnick’s August column at Baen’s delivers an oratory of praise for Olaf Stapledon. It’s a continuation of a tendency within SF to give Stapledon a ridiculous amount of credit, in this case giving him credit for inventing Science Fiction. Yes Stapledon did write up some revolutionary ideas, but the problem with giving him credit for them is that he really didn’t originate them, it’s hard to say that anyone did.

Stapledon often gets the credit because his books, such as Last and First Men and Star Maker read somewhat like conventional Science Fiction. This makes it easy to attach a Grandfather of Science Fiction moniker to him. Even the turgid prose and blatant racism and dated politics that fill Stapledon’s books put him in line with earlier Science Fiction. In practice though Stapledon was a popularizer of ideas, rather than an originator, and the claims made for him often veer into the absurd.

Resnick writes

It’s almost impossible to find a science fiction idea in the pulps of the 1930s and 1940s, or even the digests of the last half century, that does not owe something—usually a major something—to Stapledon. (In fact, when Larry Niven’s brilliant Ringworld came out and credited Dyson Spheres as its inspiration, I decided that that was the first truly major science fictional concept that did not owe anything to Stapledon.

Alternate universes and time travel easily come to mind. So do AI’s and robot uprisings. Giving Stapledon a ridiculous amount of credit diminishes not only the credit for the writers and playwrights who were helped popularize these ideas, but the continuity of ideas that produced them. Stapledon didn’t invent SF tropes anymore than Jules Verne or Capek or H.G. Wells or Stephen Vincent Benet did or that mysterious Kiwi author who far more accurately foresaw space travel earlier and more accurately than Stapledon. They retooled, updated, added and remixed what already existed, mixing Scientific, political and philosophical speculations with ideas that dated back to the ancient Greeks.

Stapledon’s work was boldly imaginative, but he didn’t invent Science Fiction. He was part of a tradition that predates the official American Science Fiction we think of as Science fiction, a tradition still part of earlier traditions of speculating and mythologizing the universe.

Here’s a fun question for Resnick and the Stapledon devotees. Name the SF novel written over two decades before Stapledon even began writing that foresees a matriarchy, laser weapons, flying cars, the elimination of crime and automated agriculture. Oh and it was written by a Muslim woman in India.

The SF world isn’t flat, it’s just flat for some people.

For everyone who’s groaned at the people who get in line to see a movie for a week ahead of its release, wearing full costumes and embarrassing us all, there’s The Line. Loosely aimed at somewhere between Star Trek and Star Wars with a fictional SciFi series called FutureSpace, it stars some solid talent and while it takes a while to get off the ground, the journey turns out to be fun. Don’t go into this expecting another Dr. Horrible’s Sing A Long blog, The Line is an affordable production taking place against the wall of a New York City movie theater, but the comic talent more than makes up for it.

As I said The Line picks up from episode to episode, really kicking into gear with Episode III with The Spoiler, all too real and believable. The series isn’t done yet but there are plenty of nice touches and character introductions, from the telepathic triplets to the spoiler to the master to the assistant manager who manages to steal the show. You sort of can’t help but get the sense that this is a bit of a giant waste of talent, but it’s still another demonstration that web series can hold their own without a fanatical following or musical numbers or a Darth Vader costume or fake reality TV.

Between a breakup, a custody visit, a mysterious moondagger, the five minute rule, the trivia contest, the shocking revelation about the ending of the Futurespace movie, the screener DVD and the big gulp, the protagonists of The Line’s episodes carry on the absurdity of fanboy life while making it seem almost fun, despite the social isolation and misery of the characters. With one episode left I guess we’ll find out if The Line still has a big finish left in it, as in the back of the line, the tension builds with 30 minutes left to the movie’s opening.

I say wonderful because it manages to give people new reasons to hate George Lucas while reminding us of all the old reasons we hate him. It’s so rare that in a brief interview a public figure can destroy his own image with every other sentence, while no one besides the fanboys pays attention. But that’s been the Lucas way for a while. The Star Wars prequels have become a running joke, the new set of Indiana Jones movies is pretty certain to end up the same way, Lucas has demonstrated over and over again that he simply doesn’t care. And so we take it from there.

In the Times interview, there are plenty of fun tidbits. Take Lucas’ admission that he really doesn’t care who he licenses Star Wars to and what they do with it, so long as they send the check to the right place.

“I am the father of our Star Wars movie world - the filmed entertainment, the features and now the animated film and television series,” he says. “And I’m going to do a live-action television series. Those are all things I am very involved in: I set them up and I train the people and I go through them all. I’m the father; that’s my work. Then we have the licensing group, which does the games, toys and books, and all that other stuff. I call that the son - and the son does pretty much what he wants.” He laughs. “Once in a while, they ask a question like ‘Can we kill off Yoda?’, things like that, but it’s very loose.

“Then we have the third group, the holy ghost, which is the bloggers and fans. They have created their own world. I worry about the father’s world. The son and holy ghost can go their own way.”

I’m going to skim over the obvious fact that George Lucas can’t seem to even talk about his own franchise without using some high minded religious metaphor that compares himself to a deity. This isn’t even the first time he’s done it, so it’s old school by now. The Mad TV George Lucas Dateline parody video above covers that one pretty thoroughly.

But let’s just recognize that George Lucas really doesn’t care what the licensees do with Star Wars so long as they don’t kill off major characters. That’s not the attitude of someone who cares about his work. It’s the attitude of someone who cares about cashing in.

“We were hoping for box-office figures like that, which is, ultimately, with inflation, what the others have done, within 10%,” Lucas explains. “So, we squeaked up there. Really, though, it was a challenge getting the story together and getting everybody to agree on it. Indiana Jones only becomes complicated when you have another two people saying ‘I want it this way’ and ‘I want it that way’, whereas, when I first did Jones, I just said, ‘We’ll do it this way’ — and that was much easier. But now I have to accommodate everybody, because they are all big, successful guys, too, so it’s a little hard on a practical level.

Of course Lucas could have just handed the movie over to one of his VFX supervisors to direct and made all the characters CGI, but unfortunately he couldn’t get rid of Spielberg and after the failure of Young Indy, maybe he’s grasped that Indiana Jones without Harrison Ford doesn’t work. But Lucas managed to be the stubbornest one in the trio, ousted Darabont and turned in a weak Indy 4 that even he admits just squeaked by. So naturally he blames Spielberg and Ford for it.

“If I can come up with another idea that they like, we’ll do another. Really, with the last one, Steven wasn’t that enthusiastic. I was trying to persuade him. But now Steve is more amenable to doing another one. Yet we still have the issues about the direction we’d like to take. I’m in the future; Steven’s in the past. He’s trying to drag it back to the way they were, I’m trying to push it to a whole different place. So, still we have a sort of tension. This recent one came out of that. It’s kind of a hybrid of our own two ideas, so we’ll see where we are able to take the next one.”

So basically George Lucas wants to take it into a future involving Communists, space aliens and Shia LeBeouf. Why stop there? Take it to the 22nd century or a galaxy far far away. The whole reason people liked Indiana Jones was because it took place in the past.

“I’m only going to produce Red Tails — we have a black director — but then I think I am going to direct some more, make some esoteric films that have a personal significance.” And what might they be?

A black director! Amazing. I’m sure he’ll do well as long as he caters to George Lucas’ expectations of what black people are like by talking like Jar Jar Binks,

From Thomas Disch’s poem on Livejournal, A Memorial Service

A Memorial Service

Who will rejoice at my death
as I am cheered now by the prospect
of Cheney’s? Some thousands?
It would be a vanity to suppose so.
A wizened few who keep their bad reviews
bundled in their spleens.
…
Even my worst enemies will not openly exult.
They’ll think twice and come up with some
pious, backhanded compliment
such as how much their dogs always liked me.
But no one will feel a triumphant thrill
at the thought that what I represent
has been wiped out of existence.

Finding that pious backhanded compliment is a task for the reader, but off the top of my head, there’s Patrick Nielsen Hayden who has no shortage of those. Disch himself had named his livejournal, Endzone, and wrote frequently about death, his own, his partner’s and those writers he despised. Death appeared more and more frequently in his poetry.

In some ways Tom Disch’s death seemed to share some commonalities with the deaths of other noted but uncommercial SF writers, such as Avram Davidson. The lack of income, the decaying living conditions and so on and so forth. It’s kind of a shame to think of writers who have genuine accomplishment and talent going without income. It’s a shame to think of Robert Sheckley in a Ukrainian hospital or having to write media merchandising novels. While the writers who pen media merchandising novels walk away with New York Times bestseller list under their names and can publishing anything they like, no matter how incapable they are of doing it.

Such is the life of the real writer, the occasional pat on the back and the positive write up, don’t do much to change the sense of diminishing returns. There is however no altering things and Disch preferred the acidic witty gaze to the self-involved mourning that is likely to meet his death. He saw the bitter senselessness of the world, it had been at the root of much of his fiction, and he embraced it as much as any man could.

While most of the world and even the SF reading public remains as oblivious to Steampunk as it does to the existence of the EFF and crocheted Warhammer 40,000 sweaters, there’s a certain faction that will nonetheless continue producing Steampunk short stories, Steampunk casings for computers and Steampunk costumes. In and of itself Steampunk is as harmless as it is pointless. The only real overlap between it and Cyberpunk is demographic, you might say that Steampunk consists of the people who were doing Cyberpunk and ran out of ideas and edge and instead hired an interior decorator to bring back the 1880’s.

Where Cyberpunk carried with it a raft of ideas about the world and the future, Steampunk is void of ideas. Steampunk is built entirely on style with no substance. It’s an entire genre devoted to little more than how cool it is when things are shiny and metallic and look Victorian and exist in some alternate universe where the British Empire never fell. Steampunk is its own sense of pointless summed up in its definition. And while The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen may have been cool, it was cool because it was another bizarre Allan Moore journey, not because it was Steampunk. And really compare The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in terms of ideas and influence to Watchmen or V for Vendetta and you fall sadly short.

Self-consciously Steampunk novels, notably the tedious Difference Engine, if you can even call it a novel, are little more than exercises in polishing Victorian gee gaws and trotting out the benefits of a liberal arts education in memorizing 19th century figures. The writers most involved with Steampunk often turn out to be epic cases of style over substance, case in point Moorcock. And then there’s BoingBoing which is certain to kill Steampunk, or at least make it unbearably annoying to everyone, by simply going on about it non-stop. Steampunk isn’t a genre, it’s a style. It’s not Science Fiction, it’s retro and full of ironic distance clashing with tech nostalgia that makes for a muddle statement of style rather than a vehicle for ideas or even storytelling.

The discovery made by Voyager 2 about the heliosphere no doubt has already peaked the curiosity of dozens of Science Fiction writers eagerly spawning their own fictional story based theories for the whole thing. The so called hand on the heliosphere already dovetails nicely with so many of the ongoing themes in recent Science Fiction about the expansion of the universe, black holes and supernovas and the occasional stray singularity. Fred Pohl alone should be able to make some interesting things out of it, not that he’s writing much anymore. This is the sort of thing it would be fun to see Robert Forward or Larry Niven kick around, though these days it’s likely to be the younger guns, which is a shame too. But then again the visual image of a hand on the heliosphere is already a striking enough Science Fiction metaphor, that you barely need much more than that, one so good that it’s hard to imagine any novel or short story exceeding it. But one appeal is that unlike the planetary developments on Mercury or Mars, a novel or story that explores the hand on the heliosphere won’t have to worry too much about newer findings upsetting the applecart.

Mike Resnick has a new column up at Baen’s Universe (well it’s new to me anyway) blaming television for the derivative writing and fan stories that clutter up the market today.

So why do so many people want only to tell second-hand stories about Kirk and Spock and Picard and Skywalker in a handful of third-hand, shopworn, thoroughly-explored and not-very-logical universes? When they see something that interests them or impresses them, why don’t they do what Simak did when he read about Asimov’s robots, what van Vogt did when he read about Wylie’s and Stapledon’s supermen, what Gerrold did when he encountered Heinlein’s time paradoxes? Why are the book and magazine slushpiles filled almost to overflowing with thinly-disguised Enterprises and Darth Vaders and the like?

And then it occurred to me. There is one major difference between most of the writers I named, and all of the hopeful ones I’ve been encountering for the past decade or so . . . and that is that most of the writers I named did not grow up watching television. Television didn’t exist during their formative years, so they grew up reading. They did not watch the same unchanging characters in the same trite, interchangeable plots week in and week out. They did not spend hours every night exposed to uncreative, unthreatening mental pablum that convinces each new generation of couch potato that it is Art.

There are a bunch of answers to that, but none of them leave the problem to rest with television. TV bashing is cheap and easy, but it’s also simplistic.

Yes TV shows come with repetitive plots, but so much of SF storytelling was mired in repetitive pulpy writing. Mike Resnick points to Simak or Heinlein, but that’s pointing to innovative and original writers who became leaders in the field. Asking why people who churn out Enterprise-lite and Darth Vader-lite stories don’t do the same thing is a question that answers itself. After all most writers in the 40’s and 50’s weren’t innovating the field either.

Most writers begin by imitating other writers. Some never stop *cough* David Gerrold *cough*. It’s not altogether a bad thing. Gerrold has done some very interesting with the old Heinlein standards, particularly in the Chtorr wars. Writers derive ideas from each other, some break through into more original variations, but there’s also much less room to expand and grow these days.

We’re not mysteries or Westerns. We’re science fiction, which gives its writers all time and space to play with. Our galaxy has about one hundred billion stars. We’ve got at least a couple of billion Class G stars, just like our sun, and we’re starting to find out that damned near every star we examine has planets. The possibilities, scientific and fictional, are endless

Not really. We’ve already exhausted a lot of them. It’s one reason SF lit these days is more likely to be set closer to earth. SF has seen its pulp period, its new age, its cyberpunk, and a lot of what’s out there consists of trying to put a new spin on an old idea. A hundred billion stars isn’t a hundred billion ideas. And there’s only so many ways you can dress up an old dog.

They did not spend hours every night exposed to uncreative, unthreatening mental pablum that convinces each new generation of couch potato that it is Art. And, uninfluenced by the tube, they kept science fiction lively, creative and innovative.

Can TV be art? It’s hard to believe that in 2008 anyone is seriously asking the question. Most of TV is bad, but so are most SF stories and novels. It’s simply an iron clad rule. But TV shows can be creative, original, insightful as much as a story can be.

Star Trek drew heavily from SF lit. As for Star Wars, we aren’t even talking about a TV show, but a series of movies based on Serials and some of the pulpiest Science Fiction out there.

What seems to bother Resnick is fandom itself, the part that tries to live in a fictional universe or play in it at least. But the sort of people writing Mary Sue stories in Pern or in a Galaxy Far Far Away might dump their stuff occasionally in the Baens slush pile, but they’re not really trying to be writers, they’re trying to enjoy themselves. While the rise of large scale highly involved fandoms somewhat associates itself with TV shows, but as Resnick’s own Pern recollections demonstrate, it’s really not about television.

There were no doubt plenty of teenagers trying their own hand at writing Tom Swift back before television. The difference was they had less outlet for that sort of thing. Technology has enabled the growth of that kind of involved fandom, but it’s not technology that’s responsible for derivative writing.

Damn libertarians.

You know every now and then when people would ask me about politics, I would say I’m a libertarian, but I haven’t done that in a while. It’s not just because Ron Paul set back the image of libertarians to about the time of the Civil War. It’s because of things like the Open Source Boobs project, because right away when I heard about it, I said, Damn Libertarians. I just knew it and I was right.

The problem with identifying yourself as a libertarian is that you have to be identified with people to whom the whole thing is a metaphor for rationalizing their personal self-indulgence and that too is the Open Source Boobs project, carrying that hallmark of both negative zone fan social awkwardness that requires a complex sociological justification in order to do some groping and the libertarian disregard for other people except as objects to be socially engineered into serving your goals and needs. We saw some of the worst of that expressed in the Ron Paul campaign and the Open Source Boobs project reflects that same kind of self-centered explotation.

To be fair to theferrett he’s not a bad guy, I agree with what a lot of his views in general and it appears that women were heavily involved in the Open Source Boobs project. He’s also taken a lot of responsibility in understanding that something like the Open Source Boobs project creates an unpleasant environment for women. More so than many of the self-proclaimed libertarians defending him. But did it really take such a backlash to understand why creating a geek equivalent of Mardis Gras beads was a bad idea or that sexualizing women in an environment where women are underrepresented and oversexualized in the first place was a bad idea? I have trouble believing that such a smart guy didn’t get that from the start.

I’m not the greatest fan of the Hugos, but the Hugo Awards got it right in 07 giving Vernor Vinge the Best Novel Hugo for Rainbow’s End, one of the few genuinely important SF novels of the 21st century so far, and giving Robert Reed best Novella for A Billion Eves. While this year we can safely expect the 2008 Hugos to be a complete embarrassment with Michael Chabon, Scalzi (WTF?), Robert J. Sawyer and Charlie Stross up for best Novel and Nancy Kress, Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Lucius Shepard up for Best Novella; it’s worth taking a look and a read back at A Billion Eves, especially in light of the FLDS mess now brewing, which is up on the Asimov’s site. Robert Reed’s evocation of Mormon patriarchal theocracy, seemingly gentle, and yet ultimately destructive, in a Science Fiction setting with multiple universes is the Must Read SF Story of the Day or Must Reread.

Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union for best novel of the year? Seriously does anyone actually think that’s the best SF&F novel of the year or the best bid for popular attention with a touch of pretentiousness that will let genre writers claim to be mainstream? Again the answer is pretty obvious. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is interesting, but it’s no Accidental Time Machine. Once again the SFWA sells out SF to mainstream literary pretensions. Why even bother keeping the SF in the SFWA?

Favorites like Nancy Kress, Ted Chiang and Karen Joy Fowler get their expected pats on the back. All three are vastly overrated but they come with a hell of a pedigree of connections. Bruce Sterling or Gene Wolfe were the rightful winners for Novella and Geoff Ryman deserved it for Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter. Meanwhile it’s downright baffling that Nancy Kress not only continues to write but that she was nominated in two categories. What a joke.

Children of Men got shortchanged too in favor of the ever trendy and artsy Pan’s Labyrinth. And to top things off Michael Moorcock got the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award, which I’m sure means Damon Knight is centrifugally rotating in his grave, after all Moorcock represents everything that Damon Knight hated. And for yet another bit of mainstream selling out, the Andre Norton for J.K. Rowling. What Bill Gates wasn’t available?