Artists as Followers Rather Than Leaders, and the Stagnation of Science Fiction

Back in 2007 I wrote an essay about the long-standing debate over whether science fiction had pretty much run its course as a genre. Thinking of genres as currents within the larger world of an artistic medium and the culture more broadly, which tend to follow observable life cycles; defining the science fiction genre not in the broad way of fiction with speculative elements (which in a sense has always been around, and is not going away) but a specific Anglosphere and especially American genre that came into its own in the magazines of the 1920s and has since had its own concerns, discourse, classics, traditions, its own fandom and sector of the publishing world and section of bookstores which have had a distinct history (what we speak of when we refer to Hugo Gernsback and the "Golden Age" and the "New Wave" and so on); and identifying that genre with the presence of fundamental innovation in ideas and their execution, as against endless reiterations of the same old thing, after which a genre is not so much living as a "zombie"; I concluded that there was reason to think science fiction was doing so by the late twentieth century (that, as Brian Aldiss, writing with David Wingrove in Trillion Year Spree suggested, the genre was already looking and feeling its age by the '80s), and certainly 2007.

Nothing I have seen since has seemed to me grounds to question that conclusion. Still, I have had plenty of occasion to think about why that is, considering some new ideas--and revisiting old ones about it. Certainly the idea that genres do live out a life cycle seems to me more persuasive all the time. Yet there were more contingent factors that influenced its course, just as in the life of a living creature, with one that mattered greatly the state of society broadly, with stagnation here translating to stagnation in the arts--and in science fiction as part of that. If science fiction was lacking in Big Ideas, well, so was a society where it had become plausible for a figure like John Horgan to raise the question of "the end of science," where the hype about technological progress far outpaced the reality, where people believed they were at "the end of history" and that scarcely any other sort of modernity could be imagined. Of course, one may have hoped that science fiction would offer a salutary challenge to all that--and to their credit some science fiction writers did (a Ken MacLeod, certainly, had no truck with the end-of-history propaganda, and indeed defied it from The Star Fraction forward)--but on the whole, as many an observer has noted, artists tend to be impressionistic creatures, following rather than leading, and there was little in the situation to impress or lead them in the relevant ways.