Hello and welcome to Track of Words, where today I’m absolutely delighted to welcome the fantastic Lavie Tidhar with a guest post taking a broad view over the science fiction genre as a whole – a sort of sci-fi state of the nation. A genre-spanning author of so many fantastic books, and editor of the wonderful The Best of World SF anthologies (both of which are available now from Head of Zeus), I can’t think of anyone better placed than Lavie to speak about current trends in SF fiction and publishing. If you’re at all interested in science fiction, whether as a reader or a writer, there’s bound to be food for thought in this excellent post.
So without further ado, over to Lavie.
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Lavie Tidhar: Ray Palmer, former editor of Amazing Stories, once argued that science fiction undergoes a paradigm shift every twenty years or so, thus becoming both relevant again and – perhaps inevitably – alienating the SF readers of the previous generation. (Not to get sidetracked, but Palmer also had a DC Comics superhero named after him, and was instrumental in ushering in the UFO craze. I highly recommend Fred Nadis’ Palmer biography, The Man from Mars, if you want to read more.)
I’ve been waiting for SF’s next paradigm shift for some time now, wondering when it will come and what shape it will take. I had the good fortune to co-write the Washington Post’s SF/F review column with Silvia Moreno-Garcia for the past three years; though we quit a few months ago, I got the chance to see the latest books and, indeed, be swamped with nearly endless publicity emails, which helped give me an indication of where genre publishing thinks it is now.
I recently called science fiction, in another post, the stubborn moss in the rockface of fantasy (or something to that effect), and it remains true, I think. Fantasy is king, with YA still its main component, but the relentless focus on debut novels exposes the relentless churn in the industry, a one-shot-and-you’re-out business model short on longevity but never on hopeful new entrants. The hardest thing in the book business, after all, is selling your fourth book; the easiest, your first. (Well. Unless your first is called Osama. Then it’s a different matter. But my path in publishing has never been particularly traditional.)
Within this top-down, Five Families ecosystem, science fiction flourishes as it always has – in the nooks and crannies, devoid of many bestsellers and the breathless enthusiasm of publicists – and it has taken on a couple of interesting forms in recent years. The first, which I am personally interested in, is its increased global diversity. While most non-Anglophone SF remains hidden behind English publishing’s abhorrence of translations, newer writers have decided to co-opt English as their language of choice (as have I). The most exciting fiction remains on the cutting edge, in the tiny world of SF magazines, where global diversity is now well represented. But this has been trickling into book publishing as well in recent years. My Best of World SF anthologies attempt to collect some of these stories into durable hardback, offering contemporary snapshots of the field.
The second form SF is taking is a natural lean-in to the cosy, a phenomenon that is spreading across publishing. Cosy SF, cosy crime – it has been said that this decade, what people want is comfort, an escape from our reality into a better one. (That hardly makes it different to other eras, to be fair, but as a trend in science fiction it does seem something relatively new.)
Otherwise SF continues as SF, its bread-and-butter/meat-and-potatoes core mostly indifferent to the buffeting winds of fashions and trends. You always know where you are with a spaceship on the cover.
It has been exciting to see the rise in diversity and global representation in SF over the past decade, and I think that has been the real paradigm shift from the noughties. The question of what the next shift will be, though, still makes me wonder. In my most recent sweep through the field of emerging global writers (for The Best of World SF Volume 3, out next year), I have certainly noticed repeating themes – climate emergency and refugees being central. Like global pandemics, though, climate fiction can be a hard sell – there is no more boring dystopia than the one you’re forced to actually live through – and there is an argument to be made for not a cosy, but at least an optimistic kind of SF (cue mentions of hopepunk or solarpunk). But these long-promised trends are also failing, so far, to make much of an impact beyond various small-press enterprises.
So what will the next science fiction look like? My answer, inevitably, is that we will know it when we see it. That it is coming, I have no doubt. Perhaps, in some form, it is already here, a fact which will only become apparent later.
In the meantime, there is plenty out there. I have sometimes observed that while not a lot of people read science fiction, the ones who do really like science fiction. And while many people write fantasy, not that many write SF, which makes it an interesting field to work in.
I look forward to discovering what shape it will take on next.
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Lavie Tidhar is the World Fantasy Award-winning author of Osama (2011), The Violent Century (2013), the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize-winning A Man Lies Dreaming (2014), and the Campbell Award-winning Central Station (2016), in addition to many other works and several other awards. He works across genres, combining detective and thriller modes with poetry, science fiction and historical and autobiographical material. His work has been compared to that of Philip K. Dick by the Guardian and the Financial Times, and to Kurt Vonnegut’s by Locus.
Find out more at Lavie’s website.
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Huge thanks to Lavie for taking the time to write this fascinating article, as part of the 2022 Track of Words Advent Calendar. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I did. If you haven’t read any of Lavie’s novels (or short stories – his Judge Dee stories are particularly brilliant) I would really recommend giving them a try, and I’d go as far as to say that for a sci-fi fan the Best of World SF anthologies that Lavie edits are absolute must-reads.
See also: all of the Lavie Tidhar reviews on Track of Words
The Best of World SF Volume 2 is out now from Head of Zeus/Ad Astra – check out the links below to order your copy:
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