In 2006 I really enjoyed reading Pattern Recognition by William Gibson. I would like to read more books like it. But what if I don't know where to go for recommendations online? What if I have no friends who read? Help me, oh incessant and pedantic labellers of things!

Apparently, it's called Mundane SF. Catchy. This is SF written for today, tomorrow, next week. Okay, I get that. I understand why a writer won't want to spend all day saying "I write science fiction. No, not like Star Wars." I'm not sure 'SF that's not like Star Wars' needs its own separate label.

These guys are serious. They even have a manifesto. May dog have mercy on their soles.

Actually by manifesto, I just mean some guy and his Clarion workshop students decided to pontificate about what 'proper' SF should and shouldn't be like. You know, dictating to writers about how to express themselves through writing? How utterly pointless. Genre is a dead end street, I'm just saying. The silver lining on that pareticular cloud comes as the occasional amusing rebuttal. Okay, that part is fun.

Rudy says in part, "A manifesto needn’t be a universal strait-jacket. But maybe some forms are self-defeating. Like a novel that doesn’t use the letter E. Or a piano piece that doesn’t use the black keys. Or a painting with no red or yellow."

I like that, and following a decent interval, I intend to steal it, and use it in conversation to sound witty. Now there's my manifesto! No Red Dwarf quote too obscure, no Simpsons reference too irrelevant. Actually there's probably a label for that too.

Anyway. *Yawn*. Doesn't matter.

My overall reaction to the seven stories that Ryman and friends have selected to exemplify their point is 1/ they are uniformly good, and 2/ this is the sort of stuff Interzone used to publish more regularly than it does now. I felt nostalgic. Nostalgic for the time when a copy of Interzone would throw you a flight of fancy and then on the next page tie you right back down to earth with a gritty, near-future piece that really made you think. Take a galaxy spanning Stephen Baxter or a baroque Richard Calder and follow it up with Greg Egan's "Learning To Be Me" or Iain McLeod's "Well Loved" or Chris Beckett's "Welfare Man" stories. Really stretch your mind. I'm not saying that IZ doesn't still strive to do this - David Mace's "This Happens" still lives fresh in my memory - but it's not as frequent as I remember it being.

So, if the Mundanistas are complaining that people generally aren't writing enough of this kind of carefully considered, predictive SF; if it's a spice, a flavour we've lost, then maybe they're right. Especially if they're as well written as Lavie Tidhar's "How To Make Paper Aeroplanes", or Elizabeth Vonarburg's "The Invisibles", or Geoff Ryman's wholly thought-provoking "Talk Is Cheap", which rounds off the fiction offering of the issue perfectly.

So, Mundane SF. Do I like it? Yes, when it's done as well as this.

Will I write it? Probably, sometimes, but like most genre writers, not all the time.

Put it this way, if I were a chef I wouldn't cook with it exclusively, but it'd be a flavour I'd be wanting to use more often in my restaurant.

Thanks to IZ for reminding us what it tastes like.

"The idea," says Geoff Ryman, in his introduction, referring to the prohibitive tone of the original mundane manifesto, "was that Mundanity would work like the Dogme school of film-making to create a space for different kinds of sf. It was about what we didn't want. Here's what we do." A cynic might point to his statement later in the introduction that "if [mundane sf] gives itself some slack on the science, it does so to open up a new possibility" as a cleverly-inserted get-out clause (aha! We're not as dogmatic as you thought!), but perhaps it would be fairer not to hold mundane sf's advocates to their past words too strongly, and just take this as what the publicity splurge obviously positions it as: a relaunch. The adversarial tone of the manifesto -- which, tellingly, is no longer online, although you can find traces of it in discussions scattered across the sf blogosphere and beyond, or a complete copy in Vector 245 -- ensured that the original launch of mundane sf as a concept, way back in 2004, was comprehensively bungled; much hot air later, from both pro- and anti- camps, and you can't blame anyone if their first reaction to a whole issue of Interzone devoted to the stuff is hostile, and about the only good thing you can say is that the "movement" outlived expectations. But it remains, to my mind, a perfectly reasonable ideological position about sf, for two reasons that Ryman articulates: one, that stories about the future should make "an effort in good faith to show a future" (i.e., and not be fantasy in drag), and two, that a lot of sf's strength derives from originality (i.e., and tropes that are "tired" can end up being, among other things, inadvertently consolatory, rather than the challenging literature that sf, I think many would be comfortable saying, should aspire to be). Whether or not it's actually the "best possible" sf is basically irrelevant: taking the idea that it might be as a provocation isn't the worst thing a writer could do.

What it comes down to, I guess, is whether you agree with the mundanes' implicit argument that in the contemporary field the pendulum has swung too far away from sf that focuses on the probable, and too far towards wild speculation. There's evidence either way. You could look, for example, at awards shortlists. Certainly, on this year's Hugo shortlist for Best Novel, only one nominee -- Charles Stross' Halting State -- is unarguably mundane, having explicitly been written to meet mundane constraints. (Alien communications buzz out Rollback, while parallel worlds see off Brasyl and The Yiddish Policemen's Union.) On the other hand, arguably only one nominee -- John Scalzi's The Last Colony -- is meaningfully anti-mundane, in its cheerful use of many familiar tropes from sf's history; and this year's Clarke Award shortlist drew some fire for, among other things, basically being too mundane. Another way to approach the question, though, would be to look at content. It would be fair, for instance, to ask where the climate change stories are. Stross once charmingly described the singularity as the unavoidable turd in the punchbowl of sf, but you could easily argue the the turd should be climate change, or at least the confluence of climate change and peak oil. But, with a few exceptions -- Kim Stanley Robinson is the obvious one -- the stories aren't there, certainly not in the numbers that post-singularity tales now are. A reasonable number of works have climate change as a backdrop, but very few engage with it as an issue that could define our next fifty years.

And of those that do engage with it, plenty take the same approach as "The Invisibles", and lose sight of any connection with our world. I've already said Vonarburg's story is fine work, but there's not a thing about it that couldn't have been achieved equally well using a domed city on another planet. This is, if you like, a problem of affect, and it rears its head again in IZ216's other major climate change story, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's "Endra -- From Memory", except that this time it's actively to the tale's detriment. We're a bit further into the future this time (I think), and the tale is mostly told through the memoirs of one Melizan kem Gishcar-Shwy. He -- sex is never specified, but the name sounds male to my ears -- is a "Trading Monitor" for Lavrant City, which means his job is to arrange inspections of ships' cargo when they arrive and leave, and he's fascinated by one particular arrival, the charismatic Captain Endra YuiduJin. (I'm not actually convinced Endra is portrayed as charismatic so much as she is repeatedly described by Melizan as charismatic; but I'll let that lie, because my main issue with the story is elsewhere.) Through Malazin's recollections, we learn a bunch of stuff: that this Earth has become a waterworld; that the waters are still rising; that the population of Earth is now estimated to be half a billion, and declining; and that Endra is in search of a lost city, where the legends have it that "all the treasures lost to the rising waters remain pristine and perfect; where all men love knowledge and peace; where there is no hunger, no injustice, no cruelty, and sadness has been forgotten". She sails away in search; she returns briefly, two years later; and then is never seen again. It's a perfectly reasonable story of its type, but I can't treat it as a good-faith attempt to engage with the future of our planet because it does absolutely nothing that couldn't have been accomplished in a secondary-world fantasy setting, and a pretty cosily romanticised one at that. There isn't much injustice or cruelty visible in Lavrant City, so Endra's search seems a little pointless. In his introduction, Ryman notes that many of the stories that ended up in the issue were surprisingly hopeful, "at a time when the future looks so dark"; but to my mind, the future of "Endra -- From Memory" isn't so much hopeful as thoroughly domesticated.

Two stories which aspire to be a bit more thorny are both set in near-future America. R. R. Angell's "Remote Control" is narrated by a US army private stationed on the Mexico/US border; his assignment is to monitor the "Atco-Johnson Perimeter Stations" that keep the border clear. They're solar-powered gun turrets with webcams, essentially, and any patriotic American citizen can pay five dollars to log on and take control of one for a ten-minute stint. If they're lucky, they'll get to pop off some shots at illegal immigrants. This is, or should be, harsh stuff, and certainly has some nice touches -- "Like the training says, if someone breaks into your house and you kill them it is self-defense; a homeowner has the right to do that. They call it the Castle Precedent, and it changed the way we do everything. Only Americans patrol our borders. It would be illegal otherwise" -- but the military banter that drives the story is tiresome (even if deliberately parodic), and the ending, in which the system is effectively subverted, feels like a cop-out. You're left thinking of the much better, because more committed to the logic of its premise, version of the same story that someone like Paolo Bacigalupi would write. More ambitious is Billie Aul's "The Hour is Getting Late", in which a critic provides commentary on "Woodstock 2044", a VR-enhanced tribute to the spirit of the sixties (or, more accurately, what people in 2044 imagine the spirit of the sixties to be), while trying to avoid being manipulated back into marriage by her artist ex. Aul's problem, in a sense, is the opposite to Angell's. She does follow the logic of her concepts, for the most part -- there's the simple cynicism with which relationships are treated, for instance, or the glimpses of the lives of "Fare folk" living behind the "Manhattan wall" that keep popping up on news bulletins:

Jessica was amused by how much the hippies resembled the Fare folk. Hopefully the Fare folk were only looking for "three days of peace, love, and music". Whatever they wanted, they were going to end up back on their farms. They should know how lucky they were to have that. There were countries where people like them were just locked up in camps to starve to death. If you couldn't do work a robot couldn't do, why should you be allowed to put your carbon footprint on the planet at all?

The suggestion of complexity here is, to my mind, very efficient; you get the issue, what people think about the issue, and an idea of where the issue comes from, all in one paragraph. (Similarly, though pop culture is a notoriously treacherous area for sf, Aul manages to make the scene of 2044 feel like it has a little depth, that it's not just about aping the stuff we're familiar with.) But the telling doesn't have the vigour that it needs to make these concepts really bite; it's just sentence after straightforward, unadventurous sentence. I suspect it's intended to embody Jessica's lack of interest in and understanding of the world beyond her horizon -- in the story's final paragraph, the Fare folk attack the Wall, and she wonders, deadpan, "what in the world they thought they could accomplish by doing that". But, unfortunately, for the most part it is simply leaden. The story is worth reading -- something I'm not sure I can say about Angell's effort -- but it's in spite of this blankness of attitude, not because of it.

And, despite the implicit argument that mundane sf should be a way for sf to renew itself, I can't say that either Aul's story or Angell's really recharges my imagination of an American future. More interesting is Anil Menon's "Into the Night", in which an Indian father travels to visit his daughter, and finds that he can cope with changes in the world but not changes in the people he knows -- although the father's resistant to genetics and evolutionary biology comes across as arrogant ignorance on his part, when I suspect we're meant to read it as a failure of communication on hers. But the most provocative stories in the issue, from a mundane standpoint, are those that top and tail it, by Lavie Tidhar and Geoff Ryman, respectively.

Ryman's "Talk is Cheap" offers a richer world than anything else in the issue; or perhaps just denser. In its few pages, it packs in cultural comment, weak AI, social recategorisation, water shortages, photosynthetic skin, self-heating paint, and much more, a world where "Reality is a tiny white stable dot in the middle of all this info," and "Everything else, all the talk, is piled up sky high, prioritised, processed and offered back." It's not a new conception of the future, but the seriousness with which it is treated is enough to make the story stand out. Indeed, there's a sense in which the technical aspects of the story -- the way Ryman filters all this information through the present-tense perspective of one cranky old guy, whose job it is to go places in the real world and check their environmental qualities against records -- are more interesting than the emotional aspects, or the world itself. It's more of a good-faith attempt to portray the experience of living in a highly textured future than it is a good-faith attempt to portray that future for its own sake; but it's so effective at that portrayal that it feels churlish to complain. (As it would be to question whether all the ideas that Ryman works in are, strictly, mundane.)

Tidhar's "How to Make Paper Airplanes", meanwhile, is a brief piece set on islands in the Republic of Vanuatu. The first half of the story is pure tour-guide, a series of facts and figures about the islands that establish their separateness to the lives of us rich Westerners, despite being on the same planet; the second half introduces us to four Americans (I think) working at a small base on one of the islands, three of whom are carrying out various kinds of research, and one of whom (the narrator) is a shop-keeper. I like Lavie Tidhar's short fiction, and this has the precision of setting and emotion that I've come to expect; but neither half of "How to Make Paper Airplanes" is science fiction. The story's place in the magazine is justified, presumably, by the story that one of the researchers is writing, and the comments the others make about it:

"I'm writing a science fiction story about us," Sam Friedman says. "It has no aliens in it, no commercial space travel, no telepathy."

"You're a fucking alien," Jimmy Morgan says.

"I can tell you how the story ends," Sam says, ignoring him.

I say, "How?"

"One night," Sam says, and the candle makes his eyes twinkle, "one night we get drunk and mix up all the experiments together. Ben uses my self-fermenting coconuts for his kava-pop experiment. Jimmy hooks up a generator to power things up --"

"It's not that simple--" Jimmy starts.

"And then," Sam says, again ignoring him, "the whole thing explodes. It's a huge fireball. It makes a crater the size of Sola. But we all survive anyway, I'm not quite sure how yet."

Sounds more like infernokrusher than mundane sf, right? And the proposed story doesn't get any more plausible: it turns out that the source of the explosion is "a revolutionary new fuel", which launches a Vanuatu space programme. This despite the fact that Sam later argues that sf isn't a license to make up anything you want. The story-within-a-story is a striking contrast to what we actually see of the islands, and the comments made about which technologies are actually useful for their situation, and how contact with the West has really affected the islanders. (One particularly effective exchange reports the remarks of an islander, untranslated but dotted with words such as "virus". The point is painfully obvious.) Sam is, in other words, the sort of sf writer that mundane sf wants to get through to: the sort who don't see the world around them as a rich enough prompt for stories.

Which brings us back to the central question raised by this issue of Interzone. It's not a bad issue -- Vonarburg's story is very good, and the stories by Ryman, Tidhar and Aul all have something to recommend them -- but does it, as a whole, make a convincing case for mundane sf? Ironically, it's probably Tidhar's story -- which isn't sf at all -- that best articulates the value of what something like mundane sf could offer, which is the value of extrapolating from the world as it is, and not as we imagine it to be, or would like it to be. Too many of the others don't engage with their futures with the specificity that I'd hope for; with the exception of Ryman's story, and possibly Aul's, it's not hard to see how the same points could have been made by translating the stories into, say, space opera. But perhaps the most telling indication of the failure of these stories to reinvigorate our thinking about the future is to look at who they're about. In terms of where they're from, the protagonists are a fairly varied bunch; in terms of how long they've lived, not so much. Yarbro's story is written by an old man recalling his youth; Menon and Ryman deal with old men trying to live with the future they find themselves in; and while technically the narrator of Vonaburg's story is relatively young, the two subjects of the narrator's imagining are both elderly. Which means that mundane sf, on the evidence of Interzone 216, isn't so much about looking forwards and thinking about change as it is about coming to terms; a stance which to my mind harnesses neither the best, nor the most challenging, aspects of sf.

Moon employs the traditional element of technology to explore the concept normalcy. Lou Arrendale, a thirty-five year old man, and his co-workers are all autistic. They belong to a generation of autistics who were left behind-generations born after were able to reap the awards of medical science that treated their autism while they were still in the womb. In short, they are much better adapted to living a normal life. Although Lou and his friends received an "early intervention [that] could ameliorate the symptoms," their "limitations were real" and "immutable" (Moon 165). Their autism presented many painful obstacles despite the fact that they were made to be functioning and contributing citizens of society. In one example, Lou and his friends has pizza every Tuesday at their usual pizza parlor. They avoid going on Thursdays to avoid Hi-I'm-Jean, a waitress who treats them like freaks. In another example, Lou accompanies Marjory to the airport to pick up a friend. As Lou passes through airport security, he is suddenly harassed by a security guard: "‘If you don't have a ticket, what are you doing here? ...Spit it out.... Or do you stutter like that all the time?'" (Moon 35). Unfortunately, these outright forms of discrimination are things that Lou and his friends constantly have to with through their daily lives.

By any other standard, Lou appears "normal" and sometimes a genius. He lives on his own, he is able to drive, he buys his own groceries, cooks his own food, has friends, appreciates beauty, loves classical music, and excels in fencing. His mathematical brilliance and exceptional ability to analyze patterns allows him to work as a bioinformatics specialist in an influential pharmaceutical corporation. Furthermore, he feels human emotions despite his inability to comprehend all social nuances. When Lou faces the problem of whether or not to ask Marjory out for a date, he wonders if his autism is preventing him from be able to tell whether or not she has feelings for him. Readers may recognize that these emotions are telling of his humanity and not just something that happened to "normal" people. In allowing Lou and his friends take part in an intervention that treats some of the symptoms of autism, Moon is able to explore the concept of what is normal and not normal by using the sfnal element of technology.

Moon's novel revises sf traditions by bringing the focus back to a level in which readers can easily comprehend and relate. Instead of incorporating sfnal elements like wormholes, deep space, inhabiting other planets, and the like, her novel focuses on life on Earth, which harkens the concept of Mundane SF. Founded by Geoff Ryman, he explains that "being a Mundane boils down to avoiding old tropes and sticking more closely to what science calls facts" because he "[believes] that for the most of us, the future is here on Earth" (Trent). Aside from the possibility of curing autism, the setting and situations that Moons presents will feel very familiar throughout the novel; this encourages readers to contemplate on her themes. Readers can relate to Lou, despite his being autistic, because the discrimination he faces, his struggle with the emotions and ideas pertaining to "normalcy," and his identity crisis are all things they can relate because those are problems that occur in the here and now. This relationship between the text and the reader is not hindered by fantastical sfnal elements, which causes the readers to suspend a great part of reality.

Moon further uses technology in her novel to show the dangers in exploiting it for the sake of achieving quick solutions by juxtaposing the autistics with Mr. Crenshaw. Mr. Crenshaw, the boss, threatens Lou and his friends to take part in an operation that will alter their brains, which effectually cures them of their autism, at the expense of losing their jobs. The important issues emerge when each one of them responds differently to this opportunity. Chuy never takes part in the operation as he is happy with himself. Dale is the first to decide to participate in the operation; he painfully admits his desire to live a life in which people would treat him like any other person, not someone who is sick and inferior. Lou decides to learn about his brain and the treatment before going through with it. In the process, he discovers that he values his ability to overcome life's challenges, that meeting those challenges had fortified his character and made him wiser, and that autism is an integral part of his identity as it has made him who he is. Lou learned that by partaking in the operation, he will run the risk of losing his identity: "Yet if I lose the memory of what this is like, who I am, then I will have lost everything I've worked on for thirty-give years" (Moon 291). Through Lou's questioning his dilemma, readers become aware of the dangers of "quick fix" solutions. Lou's and his friends' worth as human beings becomes apparent, while Mr. Crenshaw's monstrosity shows through. His choice in forcing his autistic employees to take the treatment is made solely to achieve his own selfish goals: if his employees were no longer autistic, then the company would no longer have to spend money providing for supportive facilities. Furthermore, the medical research can later develop a treatment for all "normal" employees to limit their focus, which will increase work efficiency. In essence, it will make those employees a bit autistic. His idea of a quick solution to problems will obviously put many lives at risk.

Once again, Moon's novel recalls the theory of Mundane SF. This theory wonders why sf stories have moved away from Earth and preferred to continue their exploration in space and other planets and questions the usefulness in doing so. Ryman asks, "What is so un-wonderful about Earth" (Trent). Moon's novel shows that there are many situations and issues that are relevant to our lives that can be explored. Even though Mr. Crenshaw is a cardboard cutout of the greedy businessman who has no regard for human life, the fact remains that people like him exists in reality who can cause real harm to real people. In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt states, "‘The future man... seems to be possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange for something he has made himself'" (Trent). Arendt addresses the issue of people who do not care about the repercussions of their actions; she stresses the dangers in taking the things we have for granted and easily trading them off for things we create. Through Mr. Crenshaw's plot and plight, readers see that that is a perilous thing to do. Moon's novel then refines Brian Aldiss' claim that sf is "the search for a definition of man and his status in the universe" by exploring within humanity itself (Sandner).

Another reason why Moon's novel revises sfnal traditions is because it is reflective of Slipstream theory. According to Delia Sherman, the purpose of slipstream is not to "create a new category of fiction, but to establish a better way of reading border-crossing texts" (Kelly 349). Moon's novel does not focus on the advanced technology that cures autism, which would have made the novel seem more traditionally sfnal. Rather, it focuses on Lou's anguish at being threatened to losing his identity. It follows his journey to self-discovery and his choice to live life with or without autism. Without the existence of this technology in the story, Moon's novel would closer resemble mundane literature. Unlike traditional sf, which had a more solid form and purpose, this novel contains elements taken from two different genres.

Finally, Moon suggests that it can be morally correct to use technology so long as it is done responsibly. At the end of the novel, Lou decides to commit himself to the operation. Without Mr. Crenshaw forcing him to take the treatment, Lou comes to make that decision for himself: "...I think I am beginning to want to because maybe, if I change, and if it is my idea and not theirs, then maybe I can learn what I want to learn and do what I want to do" (Moon 326). He recognized that he is all right the way he is and that he does not have to do the operation, but he wants to be able to control and use his mind to his full capacity instead of being limited by his mind. Lou understands that his life experiences and his ability to continually rise and overcome challenges are what makes him grow as a person and as an individual. Just like the way he learn how to ride a bicycle himself, like his overcoming the fear of water and learning how to swim, he believes he is able to meet the next challenge and better himself. At the conclusion of the novel, Lou is rewarded by achieving his lifelong dream of becoming an astronaut. He lets it be known that it is only the beginning for him because he is free.

Even though Lou gets to become an astronaut and travel throughout space, Moon shows that the real adventure and challenges begin with people's character, mind, and heart. Ryman explains that "Mundanity is not just about a near future, but also a far future, one in which there are new wonders to take the place of the old ones" (Trent). There people who are engaged in trying to better the world they live in and some who are trying to better it for others. A plethora of challenges exists on Earth that need dire attention. Some of these challenges include social, political, economical, governmental, racial, class, and gender problems to name a few. Every little improvement people make in bettering this world is another achievement at creating a newer and better Earth. As that occurs, people will see "new wonders" beginning to "take the place of the old ones." Moon's novel certainly proves that it is not some sudden exploration out in deep space that will better the Earth, but efforts that start within. While Moon cautions against the dangers of technology, she also puts forth the hope that if technology is applied responsibly, then there can certainly be a better Earth.

Moon refines the sf tradition by implementing sfnal elements to explore her themes in The Speed of Dark. This book, which won the Nebula Award for best novel, stands on its own in a long line of sf legacy. While present-day sf appears to lack definitive boundaries, Moon's novel certainly reflects the concerns of the sf community today. In light of Mundane sf, her novel supports the idea that if any productive actions to improve life are going to be taken, they must start by addressing issues in the real world. Geoff Ryman posits that "literature destroys innocence," but it will also destroy ignorance (Trent). Whether sf will go the way of Slipstream, Singularity, Mundane SF, all or none of these, or even find a new path altogether, it does not bar the fact that sf has the power to destroy ignorance and bring enlightenment through its instinctive sense of exploration. As Lou suggests, even the darkness of ignorance, of the unknown, of fear and danger is everywhere, the speed of light, of enlightenment and knowledge, always catches up.

© 2008

Works Cited

Moon, Elizabeth. The Speed of Dark. New York: Ballantine Books, 2002.

Trent. "'Take the Third Star on the Left and on til Morning!' by Geoff Ryman." Weblog post. Mundane-SF. 16 Sep. 2007. 7 May 2008 <http://mundane-sf.blogspot.com/2007/09/take-third-star-on-left-and-on-til.html>.

Sandner, David. (2008, Spring). Definitions of Science Fiction. ENGL373: California State University, Fullerton.

The occasion (I assume) being the imminent publication of the "Mundane sf" issue of Interzone, as discussed over on the BSFA forum. It's out next Thursday, in fact, and in the meantime here's the fiction contents:

"How to Make Paper Airplanes" by Lavie Tidhar
"Endra" – from Memory by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
"The Hour is Getting Late" by Billie Aul
"Remote Control" by R.R. Angell
"The Invisibles" by Élisabeth Vonarburg
"Into the Night" by Anil Menon
"Talk is Cheap" by Geoff Ryman

If that's not enough, here's a Guardian blog piece by Damien G Walter:

The battleground for this SF smackdown would be the pages of one of the world's most influential short fiction magazines. Where literary fiction has long since abandoned the short form in favor of the fertile intellectual territory of Waterstones 3 for 2 tables, SF has continued to value short fiction as the arena where the genre innovates and evolves. Enter Interzone, Britain's longest-running SF magazine, at a time when British writers have come to dominate the field. Never one to shy away from a good dust-up, but smart enough not to step in front of a locomotive full of enraged SF fans, the editors of Interzone handed control to a team of guest editors representing the heartland of Mundanista territory, and the call went forth for stories that represented the Mundane manifesto.

No prizes for spotting the most ironic statement in this paragraph.

EDIT: You know, it's almost like some mastermind is coordinating this. Here's the first review of IZ216, which is generally positive, although it offers almost no insight into how well the issue functions as a showcase for mundane sf.

AFTER FRONT ROW: Well, that was brief, but good to hear nonetheless. Here's the Listen Again link.

But James Patrick Kelly's editorial on the Mundane SF movement in Asimov's caught my eye (see "mundane" for the full article). I've heard about this new movement, and if you're into SF, you probably have too. But this is something that I've only paid attention to peripherally. It's caused quite a stir in the SF community, with many people taking sides on the issue. But Kelly does a good job explaining the purpose of the movement without endorsing it. By the term mundane, he refers to the definition: "of this world, relating to matters of this world." He quoted Geoff Ryman, a charismatic proponent of Mundane:

We felt as if SF had accumulated so many improbable ideas and relied on them so regularly, that it had disconnected from reality. The futures it was portraying were so unlikely as to be irrelevant, if not actually harmful. Julian Todd, a British SF writer, pointed out the moral problems as well. If we keep telling ourselves that faster-than-light travel will whisk us to scores of new Earths, then we'd feel better about burning through this one." (Speech at BOREAL 2007 SF convention)

So has science fiction become more fantasy? And where does that leave the rest of SF? I think Ryman does a good job conveying his concerns and the pluses of the movement. I think this new "mundane" SF has its place. For me, though, I enjoy it all (without regard to literary movements). Sometimes I feel that literary movements can be good, and can help break out of the mold and revitalize stagnation. But ultimately, they can cause divisions and hold people down. I can't choose a side because I like space opera (such as David Weber's Honor series) just as much as I like this concern for near-future earth-based issues. I don't know if this is going to be the next new thing, and maybe it already is, but I'd like to think there's still a place for spaceships and aliens. I'm rather partial to Kristine Kathryn Rusch's "Thought Experiment" Barbarian Confessions in Asimov's; an excerpt reads:

We need more grand adventure, more heroes on journeys, more uplifting (if not downright happy) endings. Yes, we can keep the good sentence-by-sentence writing, the good characters, and the lovely descriptions the New Wave steered us to. We can even keep the dystopian fiction and the realistic, if difficult-to-read, sf novels, so long as we do them in moderation. They cannot—and should not—be the dominant subgenre on the shelves.

I think everything has its place. If Mundane becomes the next new thing, I'll gladly accept it, but I'll still love space opera, and I'll still love the classics (i.e. Heinlein and Asimov). As far as a writer, I feel like I don't need to tie myself down to any one specific sub-genre. I feel that story and character are my main focuses, but I definately feel mundane has something to offer to my writing. James Patrick Kelly's editorial reminded me that I needed to look more into what it's all about.

For anyone else who is interested in learning more, check out the Mundane-SF blog.

The little I know about the HARDLINE mundane-sf people (I don’t want to call them a movement – hopefully, they’re not a movement yet) is that they want SF to be constrained by the science of today and yesterday but NOT be expanded by the science of tomorrow or possibility (OR extreme extrapolations of today’s knowledge).

I have to agree with most of Drydenco’s sentiments with regards to this group. I’d also like to read their Manifesto...Whichever way one slices their hard-to-pin-down stance, these Mundane-sf people seem to want to limit the scope of SF (one of the qualities that makes it appealing to both writers and readers). Some writers (mostly mainstream) say that there are only a few hundred original (untold) stories left to be told in Mainstream fiction (because they have to wait for the future and anything new to become the present), but several million original (untold) stories remain in Speculative fiction. If Mundane-SFers (new word) had their way the latter number would be greatly reduced.

We should probably start a counter-movement called ‘Imaginative-SF’J

I mean, really, what’s next?

• Mundane Heroic Fantasy; or
• Mundane High Fantasy; or
• Mundane Sword & Sorcery? J

I wonder what the Mundane-SF folks would make of a recent story of mine: It featured a Technological Singularity in a historical setting.  They would probably not approve... J