Richard (K) Morgan

A couple of months back, Pete Crowther asked me to write a guest editorial for the 2008 WorldCon edition of his Postscripts anthology. He gave me carte blanche, which is often an error with me. I wrote this for him. He declined to use it — too negative, he felt — but was gentlemanly enough to pay me for it anyway. Seems a shame for it not to get aired …

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Here’s a quote:

“[T]hey’re really a bunch of self-righteous condescending arrogant little pricks who are more than happy to ignore history and scientific facts when it suites [sic] them … a bunch of goddammed fucking militant, humorless, and annoying asshats for whom beatings are way too good.”

Here’s another one:

“I’m still disgusted. I don’t forgive all those nice, flaccid, mediocre people who diluted and rediluted something strong & worthwhile, just because, well, they had to make a living. They could have stayed with their day job as far as I’m concerned, because they didn’t contribute.”

Now, you would think, from the amount of passionate anger swilling around here, that we’re dealing with something major, some stark issue of life or death. Command economy socialism versus free market deregulation, perhaps. Starvation in Africa or human rights abuse in Iran. The privatization of public space, or the failures of inner city state schooling. Chinese censorship of the Internet, or the war in Iraq. You know — important stuff.

Actually, no.

What these two explosions of fury have most notably in common (apart from the fact that they were both — you guessed it — posted on the internet) is that they come from deep in the heart of the SF & Fantasy genre. There is, to be fair, an obvious qualitative difference between the two pieces of writing, which reflects a corresponding difference in source. You could say they are from opposite ends of a spectrum, so to speak. The first piece is lifted from a (fairly) randomly selected blog, whose owner was reacting to the Mundane SF manifesto (and was presumably off his anger management meds at the time). The second was posted by a respected Grand Old Man of the SF&F genre during an increasingly heated spat over the emergence of the New Weird. But beyond those differences of origin, another common factor still looms large — in both cases, the focus of all this rage is nothing more or less than the kind of SF & Fantasy people should (or more precisely shouldn’t be reading and writing.

Just that. Reading preferences.

Which leads me to ask the question — just what the hell is wrong with us?

I’m asking that in all wide-eyed innocence because I’m still a relative novice in this place. I mean, I’ve always read SF and Fantasy, for the reason I guess most people read anything — because I like it. But before the publication of my first novel, five years ago, I knew next to nothing about SF fandom, had never attended a con in my life, and was quite unaware there might be anything to warrant the wielding of such savage rhetorical weaponry. So I was a bit (actually a lot) taken aback to see these squabbles arising, and even more taken aback to learn that this kind of back-biting is nothing new in the genre. Trawl back through the short history of SF and you can see the exact same bitching and lekking oneupmanship set loose time and time again. New Wave writers lambast and laugh at their predecessors from the so-called Golden Age. Individual authors ally or square up to each other with ludicrous intensity. Lots of furious lit. crit. goes flying this way and that. Splat! Pow! Blood on the dancefloor. Oh, but the times, they are a-changing — here comes the hard-SF revival to “take back” the genre, to barricade themselves in the genre cabin with their technophilic faith and new frontier spirit and hold off the weirdos for a while. Then cyberpunk kicks down the door all over again, proclaims itself dangerous and subversive (but over here, in this corner, some New Wave purists scoff).

And so it goes, drearily onward until we wind up squabbling all over again about how cool and cutting edge and unlike other fantasy writers we are in the New Weird, or more recently how hopelessly wrong and dangerously irresponsible anyone is if they’re writing Faster than Light drives into their SF, or (see above) how goddamn fucking militant, humorless, and annoying anyone is who says it’s off base to write FTL into …

So forth.

For the last five years, I’ve stood on the sidelines of this endless scrummaging, with feelings that range from mild curiosity to irritation to fascinated disbelief. I’ve haunted the messageboards and the blogs and the con panels, I’ve even occasionally dipped my toe into one pool of critical vitriol or another — Clomping Foot of Nerdism, New Weird, “political” SF — but mostly I’ve just watched, in much the same way I guess you’d watch footage of those guys in Shia Muslim nations battering themselves in the head with sharp objects until the blood clots their hair and streams down their faces from their lacerated scalps and evidently makes them all feel really good about themselves. O-kay, guys. Whatever gets you off, I guess.

But then, finally, at Eastercon 2006, things came to a head; one panel title in particular leapt out of the Glasgow Concussion programme at me, and I realized — oh, for fuck’s sake!!! — that I’d really, really had it with this shit.

Won’t Get Fooled Again, the item in question declaimed. Why don’t we just completely trash the whole tired SF genre and try to take the discourse somewhere genuinely new?

What the hell is wrong with us?

Here’s a funny thing. Skip across the tracks to the world of crime fiction for a while, and you don’t see this shit going on. You don’t get this gnawing, mutilative thread of self-hatred, this bulemic purging of whole sub-genres or readership sub-sections as somehow unworthy. A quick trawl through a couple of dozen crime writer websites and messageboards reveals no agendas or dogme-style utterances, no towering rages or griping about how the genre’s going to shit these days, how there’s all this generic pap being published, how this strain of crime writing is so much more valid than this other strain, how maybe we shouldn’t even be reading or writing crime fiction at all, how we need to Get Back to Basics, or Rip it Up and Start Again, or any other misbegotten Year Zero bullshit.

Go on, see for yourselves — it just ain’t there.

Unsure if I was missing something, if this was just naïve grass-is-always-greenerism on my part, I did what you should always do in research — I asked a man who knows. I got in touch with Ali Karim at the Shots Magazine website, a man who was once kind enough to provide me with the perfect definition of “Noir” (it’s the antithesis of “Disney”) and who knows the crime writing world inside and out. And he concurs. You just don’t see this thrashing, squabbling more-valid-than-thou posturing among crime readers or writers. You don’t see the back-biting, you don’t see the antagonistic comparisons, you don’t see the defensive factionalism, and you don’t see the rage. What you do see, on crime writing blogs and messageboards and author websites everywhere, is a confident and unselfconscious enthusiasm for the form that doesn’t seem to need to denigrate something else in order to flourish. You see a broad and varied readership choosing from and enjoying what’s on the menu, a large, mixed bag of writers happy to serve it up for them, and above all a generous, live-and-let-live attitude that suffuses the whole genre.

(Subsequent re-direct — since posting this article, it’s been brought (rather bitchily) to my attention that there actually is some intra-genre friction within the crime fiction community; to wit, that there is an on-going rivalry between the so-called “cosy” and “hard-boiled” ends of the spectrum, that crime fiction involving cat detectives is not thought of too highly, and that a guy called Otto Penzler, a mystery bookstore owner from New York, seems to be perennially pissed off with the encroaching form of what he calls “mystery fiction chick lit” — which I guess counts as a specific sub-genre of “cosy” crime. In all fairness to Ali Karim, I must add here that he did mention these dynamics to me (though not Penzler by name), but he also discounted them as “largely good natured” and having no real dominance in the discourse. I should, of course, have included this point in the original article but issues of commissioning word count and a desire to simplify for stark comparison got the better of me. Mea Culpa, and no reflection on Ali or Shots Magazine.

I’ve since done a little more research and found, fortunately, that my sin of omission here isn’t as awful as my critics suggest. The cosy vs hardboiled debate, where it arises, appears to be conducted in what are, by SFF standards, remarkably calm and civilised tones, underlain by a basic attitude of live-and-let-live. Crime devotees, generally, seem happy to state their preferences, defend said preferences without much heat, and (here’s the crux) allow that others may legitimately not share their tastes. As often as not, the closing line on the debate seems to be Well, look, I don’t read or write that stuff myself, but if you want to, sure; and, in the case of the writers I’ll just go promote myself to someone else. (All of which stands in marked contrast to the oft-encountered SFF dynamic of Fuck that Inferior Shit, we’re doing something that matters here). And meantime it seems this guy Penzler has been quietly but eloquently called on his rant by a number of readers and writers of both cosy and hard-boiled crime alike, all of who apparently take a similar live-and-let-live line. In other words, (Penzler, perhaps, apart) what you don’t see going on within the crime community is the constant, bitching struggle for some kind of spurious legitimising ascendancy that so blights SFF. What you don’t see, above all, is any close equivalent of the obliterating rage to which our genre seems so prone.)

How do they do that?

Well, Ali and I batted that one back and forth for quite a while. Where does this rather less cannibalistic attitude come from? Is it maybe because there’s a bigger pie to share in crime fiction, more readers, more dosh, and so a lot less anxiety about why not enough people are buying my stuff, goddamnit, why don’t they appreciate what I’m doing with the genre? Is it because, aside from the money, there’s relatively more respectability in being a crime writer than in writing SF and Fantasy? Or is it perhaps that the line between reader and writer isn’t as blurred in crime writing, that comparatively few of the crime readership are themselves aspiring to write what they read, so the genre lacks the bitchy that should be me up there dynamic? Is it because crime readers are older on average, or less demanding, or less transgressive, or maybe just less bloody-minded? Is it the readers, or the writers, or both (or neither)? And back on this side of the fence, is it just a few malcontent bad apples in the SF barrel, or is it something endemic to the form? Is it maybe just down to an overdeveloped literary ghetto grievance and a lack of self-esteem?

Suffice it to say that while all this made for a fascinating conversation, neither Ali nor I could nail down any conclusive explanation for the difference. See, it is true that there’s more money around in crime fiction, the market is about five or six times as large. But that doesn’t mean crime writers are all getting rich. A Nielsen survey in 2003 found that a massive fifty percent of all crime sales the previous year were accounted for by just fifteen bestselling writers. And that leaves a lot of little guys out in the cold. Quoting the survey, an article in the Independent sounded the alert that publishers were taking a pretty savage axe to their crime lists, dropping less popular writers and cutting back on their output of new talent. And as for respectability, well, in the very same article, no lesser crime luminary than Ian Rankin was quoted as saying that the literary mainstream still seemed blind in their elitism to any idea that there might be quality writing coming out of the crime genre.

All of which will sound very familiar to anyone reading or writing in SF&F. So this difference in intra-genre tolerance isn’t about the money or the respectability — or at least, that’s not all it’s about. Maybe it does have something to do with reader profile, then — but then again an awful lot of the SF readership aren’t averse to a bit of crime fiction as well, so the readership does seem to interpenetrate, in one direction at least. And anyway, that doesn’t explain the crime writers, who, it seems, are equally laid back, tolerant and mutually supportive.

At this point, you might be forgiven for asking the question So What? So there’s a lot of bitching, lekking and squabbling in SF and Fantasy. So it’s a cannibalistic, malcontent genre. So who cares?

I care.

Because it seems to me rather a shame that right here and now, in the form of fiction that’s most fit to explore the twenty first century, at a time when our newer, sister media — movies, TV, video games — are replete with the genre’s well-worn furniture, we still can’t seem to get our fucking act together, find some faith in ourselves and just go do our thing. So you want to write Mundane SF. Good idea — go away and do it; if Geoff Ryman’s Air is anything to go by, something resembling Mundane SF might — eventually — win the genre its first Booker prize. But why the crushing need to denigrate the space opera end of SF before you start? What’s with the superior attitude? Oh, and you guys — before you start looking all smug ‘n’ shit behind this — so you lot don’t want to write (or read) mundane SF. Fine — don’t. But is it so terribly threatening when someone else does, that you have to vomit up this ocean of rage and abuse, as if the Mundanistas had come out suggesting re-education camps for the Star Trek fanbase. Is the Mundane manifesto really such an affront that established authors (who really should know better) and fans alike have to start hurling abuse around like they’re a street gang and someone said something dirty about their mothers?

And while we’re at it, all you self-professed New Weirdsters – did nailing your New Weird colours to the mast five years ago really have to mean such an avowed and out loud contempt for all that painstakingly imagined (and yes, mapped!) “consolatory” fantasy and those who like to immerse themselves in it? Was that the only way the manifesto could stand — in fake-defiant from-the-barricades revolution-chic opposition to something else? Did there — does there always — have to be an enemy? Do we have to hate before we can get passionate about what we’re doing? Or was it just a sneaking suspicion that those “consolatory” guys were going to steal readership share?

Which, of course, they inevitably will do. “Consolatory” fantasy does well. So does “consolatory” Space Opera. People like it, and so, not unreasonably, they buy it by the ton. Of course, it’s become customary in genre debates to sneer and blame this sort of thing on marketing — as if without the marketing departments, Terry Brooks fans would suddenly be marching en masse into Barnes and Noble and demanding a reprint of In Viriconium; as if marketing is what prevents the readers of Star Wars tie-in novels from developing a passion for Stanislaw Lem. I mean, come on, guys, get real — enough of the false consciousness rap, already. People know what they like (and, yes, sadly, they tend to like what they know). And a large number of such people within the SF&F readership like straightforward, by-the-numbers story-telling with a lot of sensawunda, heroes who achieve their goals, bad guys who go down hard, and a solid happy ending. In this, they are no different than the reading (or indeed TV, or cinema-going) public in general. Marketing is simply a system for shifting product to that public in as large quantities as possible. And I never met an author yet who didn’t want their books to sell in large quantities.

So. This is the landscape around us, and we all know what it looks like. What we need to do is stop qvetching about the terrain, and just decide where we’re going to pitch our bloody tents. Ian McEwan argues (obliquely, through conversation and event in The Child in Time) that good writers write for themselves, and I think probably that’s true; certainly I try never to write for anybody else. But writing for yourself does carry an opportunity cost. If you’re lucky, your self shares tastes with enough other people that your books are going to sell well; you can hand your finished product over to the marketing guys, and they’ll run with it. As Neal Asher once remarked to me, I don’t mind doing the crowd-pleasing stuff because most of the time what pleases the crowd also pleases me. But if that particular piece of serendipity doesn’t happen for you, then you’re simply going to have to make a choice. Want to make a shit-load of money? Want to make the bestseller lists? Then get on and write a three brick fantasy trilogy about a good hearted farm-boy who becomes a wizard or a warrior (or a space pilot) and defeats an evil empire. Want to write grim and gloomy portraits of emotional decay in unemployed, divorced or otherwise alienated Londoners who may — or may not! — have come from an ever so faintly different parallel universe? Prepare to keep your day job for some time to come.

Or, of course, you could reduce that parallel universe angle to such homeopathic dosage that it can be safely interpreted by mainstream critics as wholly illusory, in which case you can then make your genre-break escape bid. And the best of luck to you, if you do. Sincerely. There’s gold in them thar TLS pages, and why shouldn’t you have some of it? You might be the next Jonathan Lethem or David Mitchell in the making. But watch out — don’t allow even the whisper that you might be writing SF or Fantasy, because in the mainstream, that kind of thing still goes down about as well as lap dancers at a wedding. Sad fact, but an enduring one. The bulk of mainstreamers (and mainstream critics) are no different in this to the bulk of any other readership, including our own. They also know what they like, and like what they know. (And generally, they don’t know or like SF&F very much). Yes, they are partisan and small “c” conservative and subject to prejudice, just like the rest of us. Big surprise.

In fact, you could argue that it’s our constant mistake as a genre to look up from our constant in-house bickering and expect that the mainstream critical establishment will somehow be different; more open, more dispassionate and more even-handed than we are ourselves. It’s almost as if we’re looking to pin some kind of father-to-the-prodigal-son wisdom on these guys, and then abase ourselves to it and hope for acceptance; when what we’re really up against is just another, larger and more powerful literary sibling who really isn’t very keen to see us again, no matter how much we’re promising (no more starships or aliens, honest) to behave ourselves this time. Perhaps that’s sad and unfair, perhaps it’s just bloody obvious. Point is — you make your choice when you sit down to write; in or out, mainstream/slipstream or genre (or, if you’re lucky enough to juggle it right, both!). You weigh it up. You decide. You live with your decision, and your royalty cheques (or lack of them).

I guess in the end what I’m saying is that it’s about growing up. Not growing up in the sense of writing or reading “grown up” literature (whatever that actually is), or pretending — on some Eastercon panel or messageboard somewhere — to cast off a specious immaturity of prior literary taste in favour of more weighty and worthwhile prose. No, I’m talking about growing up in the sense of seeing both the genre and the wider world in the way they are instead of the way we’d like them to be. I’m talking about making conscious choices in what we write, and then taking responsibility for those choices, instead of railing against some crudely confected other that’s spoiling everything for us. This is, above all, about getting a sense of perspective on what we do for a living, about accepting our genre as a whole, the way the crime guys accept theirs; accepting it has facets and seeing them that way, instead of constantly turning them into factions; accepting that just because you don’t get off on a particular strain of SF&F, doesn’t mean other people don’t, can’t or shouldn’t. This is about accepting, as Iain Banks once said, that when all is said and done, we are all a part of the entertainment industry.

Is that so terrible to admit? It shouldn’t be. Entertainment looks set to become the major industry of the twenty first century. It seeps into everything we are and do; it’s as powerful a globalizing force as anything else in play right now. Not a bad place to be working, really. All we have to do is keep our perspective; shrug off that pitifully self-important delusion that we’re locked in some sort of titanic struggle for the cultural soul of humanity against hostile elites or witless hordes or evil marketing empires. Let’s save that kind of hyperbole for (some of) our fiction. Let’s get a fucking life, people, let’s get over ourselves and start enjoying this ride for its own sake — rather than constantly glowering around with militant disapproval at our fellow passengers further down the car, all on account of what they’re reading.

Enough bile. Gentlemen and ladies — let’s go to work.