Charles Stross' Career, and Twenty-First Century Science Fiction

Some years ago Charles Stross wrote a post for his blog titled "Why I Barely Read Science Fiction These Days." Having been a regular reader of both Stross' fiction, and his blog, I had mixed feelings about the post. It seemed to me to make a good many sound points about the importance of world-building, and the liberties that science fiction tends to take with the science for the sake of making the fiction entertaining, but it also seemed to me to have at its heart a blend of mean-spirited geek-punching with it's-really-about-the-characters literature envy (which I found wrong-headed, still do), and plain old burn-out, with the last what seems to me most significant from the standpoint of this item. I myself had argued that one sign of the science fiction genre's decadence was how involved upmarket stuff like what Stross wrote had become, which for all its pleasures (many of which Stross seemed to dismiss here, hence the reference to geek-punching-cum-literature-envy), also made heavy demands on both writers and the dwindling number of readers willing to bother in ways suggestive of the whole thing becoming tired. Meanwhile this one author of such novels as Singularity Sky and Accelerando (both of which I admired) had been at that game of producing minutely, densely, extrapolated hard science fiction for over a decade, a point at which I find even really innovative popular authors tend to run short on ideas and spend more time reworking their old concepts than impressing us with new ones, all as, I recall from other posts, he seemed to be cooling on the kind of fiction he had earlier made his name with (hence the reference to burn-out). I became less prone to follow Stross' career after for assorted reasons (not least that research for books like Cyberpunk, Steampunk and Wizardry required me to look at, or revisit, so much older stuff), but recently looking back it seems that Stross had indeed parted ways with the kind of conceptually dense science fiction he wrote in his earlier period. Since the release of 2013's Neptune's Brood he has stayed away from that kind of work, with his output since consisting mainly of new installments in the conceptually much lighter Merchant Princes series, and continuing entries in his Lovecraft-meets-espionage Laundry series. In hindsight it seems that he really was moving on, perhaps wisely (there is something to be said for knowing when to do that), though I have to admit that the course of events interests me less for what it shows about the trajectory of one writer's career than the trajectory of the genre in which he was working, Stross' departure seeming to me characteristic of the genre as a whole shifting away from the kind of work it used to do as science fiction either sputters out, or turns into something else.