Kristine Kathryn Rusch, author of (among many things) the just released
Diving into the Wreck,
is interviewed tdoay on
The Mad Hatter's Bookshelf & Book Review. Here's a taste:
MH: In an article a few months back I lamented my dearth of Science Fiction reading and the fact I felt it has lost its specialness over the years due to fact so much technology has come to fruition. Do you think the mystery is going out of Sci-Fi as we advance technologically?
KKR: No, not at all. Recently I read that we’re all living in someone else’s future. When JFK became president, all that anti-Catholic stuff that stopped the careers of so many politicians went away. We don’t even think of it any more. When I worry that tech is going to ruin SF, I only have to think of my grandmother, who also lived an sf life. She was born in the 1890s and died in the 1990s. She could remember life without toasters(!)
I wrote essays about why sf lost its specialness, most recently in my Internet Review of Science Fiction columns and also in a column for Asimov’s called "Barbarian Confessions." There’s more because I think sf wrapped itself into a tight bubble and stopped writing sensawonder stuff. If we go back to that, sf will grow again. So in some ways, “Diving” is me putting my money where my mouth is.
2 comments:
I've tended to see tech as overhyped and oversold-to lean toward the view that "futurehype" has been a bigger problem than the shock of so much invention. (I made my case for this position, in brief, in my "End of Science Fiction?" piece at The Fix last year.)
But I think she's got a point here: we may be overrelying on the hard-edged "extrapolative" approach, a greater use of other imaginative approaches perhaps injecting some extra juice into the field.
I tend to feel that its a big enough sandbox that many different authorial styles can play in it. But the bottom line is that a book must entertain before it can do anything else.
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