When I first considered the idea that cultural genres may follow life cycles--emerge, develop, stagnate, decline, even "die"--and what this theory suggested about where science fiction (or more specifically, the particular Anglosphere print science fiction tradition that became consolidated as a genre in American fiction magazines in the 1920s) it seemed to me that science fiction was already in a fairly decadent phase. Most of what I had to say about that in the essay I ended up writing for The Fix still seems persuasive to me two decades later, affirmed by the way that where the absence of great new movements or subgenres or themes for some time had already been conspicuous all these years later that situation simply did not change.
However, some things did change--not least the proneness of the genre to "decadent phase"-screaming output. As John Barnes put it in his essay about the matter, in the late and declining phase a genre tends to become an "inside joke" or "treasured family story" for its fans. So did it go in the mid-to-late '00s when we were saturated with the allusive and metafictional, with playful evocation of or subversion of its classics, in which nostalgia for science fiction's past played a very great part. Amid all that Ernest Cline's Ready Player One's hitting the shelves in 2011 could seem a monument to the tendency, the more in as it was such a hit that Steven Spielberg was soon helming a film adaptation. However, by the time the film hit theaters in 2018 the attitude toward Cline's book was bitter hostility that, as that hostility's hyperbolic nature implied, was much less about Cline and anything he actually did than what he through no fault of his own represented, that nostalgic wave, which all these years later we can clearly see was drawing to its end--the output of nostalgic science fiction now well behind us, and perhaps much else with it. After all, if nostalgia is a hallmark of a genre's twilight years, might not the end of nostalgia mean that the genre's twilight years have passed as well? That the genre is no longer coming to an end but ended, no longer dying but dead?
It does not seem unreasonable to think so--that this particular tradition has run its course, and the genre is in its "undead" phase, as Barnes had it, not unlike those zombies science fiction helped popularize until they were one of the more prominent pop cultural phenomena of the past quarter-century as it goes on and on without showing signs of truly living (new novels appearing, for example, but just the same old thing produced for a declining fan base). Still, if that is the case, as seems to me possible, I do think that, as the case of Cline suggests, there was more going on than just the working out of the aforementioned life cycle. If the analogy with living things is indeed useful in understanding a literary or cultural genre, then it may be worth remembering that genres like other living things do not exist hermetically sealed off from their environment, that indeed their life cycle is inseparably bound up with that environment from beginning to end--with the fact that environmental circumstances may cause people to age and pass more quickly than they otherwise would especially relevant. Some of this, I think, had a direct bearing on science fiction's creative stagnation—that the technological and economic stagnation evident since 2007, the worsening eco-catastrophe, the pandemic, the wars, and the complete contempt government and the powerful showed the public and its concerns about the world's problems added greatly to the highly unbalanced diet of pessimism that encouraged science fiction's already hypertrophied and suffocating dystopian inclinations. However, those same years had unsalutary effects of other kinds as well, with the case of Cline especially telling. The release of the film version of Ready Player One, and the career of its author, fell afoul of a backlash against nostalgia less because fans were angry with nostalgia as such than because nostalgia had become an object of the country's status and "culture" conflicts, with supporters of identity politics aggrieved by their view that science fiction's pantheon, canon, concerns, received history, marginalized many a group--though that is far from all of it. There is also the fact that print fiction as such has been increasingly marginalized within contemporary culture broadly, to such a degree that behind the facade of stupid boosterism one has good grounds to suspect that the publishing industry is in crisis, with all this seeming to many evidenced in a generation gap within science fiction fandom that can almost seem to make the identity politics' crowd's concern for the tradition moot. As the preponderance of gray heads at the conventions shows, whatever the kulturkampfers may think, younger people these days care no more about Isaac Asimov than they do about Gone With the Wind, BECAUSE THEY DON'T READ. This combination of cultural conflict, with the marginalization of print with all that it means for the continuation of a genre of print fiction, has meant that the sense of a tradition, a discourse, a fan base, has dissipated to leave science fiction in a very different position from where it was not just in 1947, 1977, but even 2007, such that one can much less speak of a genre at all.
It does not seem unreasonable to think so--that this particular tradition has run its course, and the genre is in its "undead" phase, as Barnes had it, not unlike those zombies science fiction helped popularize until they were one of the more prominent pop cultural phenomena of the past quarter-century as it goes on and on without showing signs of truly living (new novels appearing, for example, but just the same old thing produced for a declining fan base). Still, if that is the case, as seems to me possible, I do think that, as the case of Cline suggests, there was more going on than just the working out of the aforementioned life cycle. If the analogy with living things is indeed useful in understanding a literary or cultural genre, then it may be worth remembering that genres like other living things do not exist hermetically sealed off from their environment, that indeed their life cycle is inseparably bound up with that environment from beginning to end--with the fact that environmental circumstances may cause people to age and pass more quickly than they otherwise would especially relevant. Some of this, I think, had a direct bearing on science fiction's creative stagnation—that the technological and economic stagnation evident since 2007, the worsening eco-catastrophe, the pandemic, the wars, and the complete contempt government and the powerful showed the public and its concerns about the world's problems added greatly to the highly unbalanced diet of pessimism that encouraged science fiction's already hypertrophied and suffocating dystopian inclinations. However, those same years had unsalutary effects of other kinds as well, with the case of Cline especially telling. The release of the film version of Ready Player One, and the career of its author, fell afoul of a backlash against nostalgia less because fans were angry with nostalgia as such than because nostalgia had become an object of the country's status and "culture" conflicts, with supporters of identity politics aggrieved by their view that science fiction's pantheon, canon, concerns, received history, marginalized many a group--though that is far from all of it. There is also the fact that print fiction as such has been increasingly marginalized within contemporary culture broadly, to such a degree that behind the facade of stupid boosterism one has good grounds to suspect that the publishing industry is in crisis, with all this seeming to many evidenced in a generation gap within science fiction fandom that can almost seem to make the identity politics' crowd's concern for the tradition moot. As the preponderance of gray heads at the conventions shows, whatever the kulturkampfers may think, younger people these days care no more about Isaac Asimov than they do about Gone With the Wind, BECAUSE THEY DON'T READ. This combination of cultural conflict, with the marginalization of print with all that it means for the continuation of a genre of print fiction, has meant that the sense of a tradition, a discourse, a fan base, has dissipated to leave science fiction in a very different position from where it was not just in 1947, 1977, but even 2007, such that one can much less speak of a genre at all.
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