“We Happy Few”:
The Evolution of Popular Literature

by Don Webb

Discussion: part 3

Contributions:     Kevin Ahearn’s appears in part 1.     Ian Donnell Arbuckle’s appears in part 2.

On the one hand, Kevin, you have a good point or two. J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter did fill a gaping niche in fantasy for younger adolescents and pre-teens, and those books have been market-mined for all they’re worth. Meanwhile, film has entered science fiction mainly from the angle of special effects, while television has some good writing to its credit, as well.

Your main point seems to be that comic books and visual media have changed with the times while literature in print has not:

What used to be a viable genre has evolved into a stigma — book publishers, film makers and TV producers flee from “science fiction” — newly defined as a guarantee to lose money.

Sf publishing has not [changed with the times]. Should sf publishing evolve and finally enter the 21st Century?

And you state further that “‘Quality of writing’ is a non-issue.” Which, if I understand it at all, means, to quote a famous line from Amos ’n Andy: “Diamonds is wuthless?”

Which leaves us scratching our heads not in bewilderment so much as true confusion. Quill — or somebody — has shunned science fiction and fantasy as a drug on the market even as the film, television and even the print industries have been churning out science fiction and fantasy wholesale and making money on it hand over fist.

Ian has made some points about the visual media. What about print literature? Hasn’t it been evolving at all? The medium has been: Bewildering Stories now complements print magazines without exactly competing with them. And independent publishing is coming along, although more slowly than I expected when the Mac computer first appeared twenty years ago; perhaps it will skip a generation and really take off with e-books. We shall see.

week after week after week, SFW [Science Fiction Weekly] and other sf websites give sterling reviews to sf novels that could have been published word for word twenty years ago.

Is that good or bad? Your own argument indicates that the visual media are only now beginning to catch up with science fiction as it was twenty years ago and more. And how could they have gotten even as far as they have without science fiction and fantasy in print?

You can’t miss by quoting the old dean of science fiction, Isaac Asimov. He was right, of course: culture changes, and modern North American culture changes very rapidly compared to most. Comic books — which have to consider marketing at least as much as any other publishers — had to rethink their superheroes after the 1960’s: the Civil Rights and Vietnam era — along with women’s liberation — accomplished long-unfinished business that made the second half of the 20th century unrecognizable to the first half. In that light, one has to ask not How well have comics adapted but Are they less culturally irrelevant than they used to be?

On the other hand, Kevin, money is a recurring theme in your argument, and money seems to be the measure of... something, it’s not clear what. Popularity, perhaps. If it’s money you’re after, why write at all? To entertain and mulct the masses, become a big film corporation or buy a fast-food franchise. If writing is your bread and butter, stick with the tried and true: children’s books, cookbooks and textbooks. They’re the ones that publishers count on for a steady return; the blockbuster best-seller is rarer than a lottery jackpot.

And what has been the basis of the vaunted popularity of television and Hollywood? By your own account they have been — for all their technical innovation — extremely conservative and derivative. Every single example you cite is a retread. Does anyone expect the Hollywood money machine to produce anything else? If we want new and “evolved,” we’ll go to Sundance, other indies and foreign films. And we’ve long since reached the point where old films now look new. I rest my case.

When Asimov said to think of the future, he was talking to science fiction writers, true enough. But anyone who quotes him has to consider Asimov himself. Yes, he says change is a part of history, and yet he always held and strongly emphasized that Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose — ‘The more it changes, the more it’s the same thing’.

A case in point: our very own Cyrano de Bergerac’s The Other World. What author today can so casually toss out technological advances from four centuries in the future? And what author today dare take on sectarian obscurantism as boldly as he does? The public of three and two centuries ago had the likes of Cyrano and Voltaire. What do we have? Elmer Gantry and Inherit the Wind. But excuse me, they’re... “old.”

In less than five years the U.S. political climate has made The Other World more culturally relevant than ever. With a little imagination, an independent filmmaker might even get rich by turning it into a surprise blockbuster sensation. Yes, that’s a “sterling review” to a novel that’s 350 years old — let alone twenty. But out of date it certainly ain’t: c’est dans le vent — ‘It’s blowin’ in the wind’, downright dangerous in its own time and controversial in ours.

I’m not worried about science fiction: popular culture has adopted it wholesale into the mainstream, and it’s selling like hotcakes. What about science fiction in print? My only concern is that it’s not dangerous enough for the times. What authors today risk a fate like Cyrano’s? Bewildering Stories wants them! Popularity, for what it’s worth, will come in due course. Meanwhile, those in advance of the times will always be a “happy few.”

Copyright © 2005 by Don Webb