Mundane SF may have managed to get on a panel at the latest WorldCon, but other than that, we haven’t heard too much about it in a while. And the Mundane SF blog hasn’t been updated in over a year (despite “we will transform the way you think about SF” proudly emblazoned on its masthead). I’m sure its advocates would claim that’s because they succeeded in their mission. But I’ve got another theory:
Mundane SF is boooooorring.
Or, more precisely: unimaginative. To be sure, there was a lot of hype a few years back as the Mundane movement hit the scene with the notion that SF should stick to “realistic” science, and enough with all the warpdrives already. Interzone clambered quickly onto the bandwagon; their “special mundane SF issue” had some good stories … and there were ways Mundane SF was a breath of fresh air: not only did it underscore how much of hard SF had become, for all intents and purposes, fantasy—-but it was also a welcome antidote to the Singularity “rapture nerds” who had been taking over so much of near-term SF, with their inane belief that they’re going to live forever if they just pop enough pills and wait for their Magic Upload to kick in …
Nonetheless, Mundane SF overreached itself . . by a considerable margin, I might add. The stipulation that we should concentrate on science that’s known in the present-day is all very well. But to take that a step further and circumscribe the Known and say that’s all there is… that faster-than-light travel is IMPOSSIBLE, along with any really disruptive technology that makes some of us say “no way” … that’s where Mundane SF trips over itself.
The real problem, of course, being one of time horizons. Some Singularity-ish mass-upload (for example) MIGHT very well happen to some future generation. Faster than light travel MIGHT yet be invented, and if/when it does, it would rank as the watershed moment from which we date the real beginning of the human era.
Or maybe not. It’s tough to admit we don’t know something, but this is the central mistake that Mundane SFers make. Like atheists—who look at the irrational certainty of believers and then commit the same error by saying that something could not, absolutely does NOT exist, Mundane SF wants to achieve certainty about stuff we don’t yet fully grok. The truth of the matter is that we understand infinitesimally little about the universe and the laws of nature. Anyone who thinks that we’re on the verge of a Final Theory of Everything is kidding themselves, when the vast bulk of the visible universe is made up of totally mysterious substances (dark matter/energy) and a theory of quantum gravity remains about as elusive as ever.
But we do know this: that eventually we are going to have to get used to the idea of our taming technologies on a scale that would make the head spin. Eventually our star is going to burn up and die, and we are going to have to either (a) go elsewhere or (b) find a way to harness that star. Sound impossible? In a billion years, a hell of a lot can happen… (though we may very well have a lot less time than that). And while it’s true that we’d better take good care of this planet in the meantime, we don’t need the Mundane Sfers to preach to us about that. As Geoff Ryman said about the movement he helped to launch, when the manifesto gets boring, burn it …but somehow it seems only fitting that rather than burn it, they’ve decided to just let it molder.
David J. Williams is the author of near-future dystopian thriller THE BURNING SKIES, and posts (almost) every Wednesday on Suvudu. Learn more about his work at www.autumnrain2110.com.
Maybe it's dying not because it's boring, but because few writers want to bother to write within it's strictures. While I don't think Mundane is going to be a huge movement like cyberpunk, saying it's dead because someone hasn't updated a blog is kind of silly.
I remember being drawn to sci-fi as a kid because of the sense of wonderment and infinite possibilities - none of which needed to be practical/pragmatic - that inspired me to delve into creating worlds/stories/futures that didn't need to have any basis in 'reality.' I can see why some might be drawn to more 'grounded' aspects of science and therefore have a preference for that type of work, but science always walks that line of elitist snobbery when it proclaims that only what it deems 'real' has any merit. Pish-poshing the 'fiction' part of science-fiction is simply trying to force some personal/narrow world-view to be the only valid one, which is insane.
Ultimately, it comes down to what it's trying to achieve; tell a good story, spark the imagination, deliver a moral lesson, promote a specific agenda... Mundane SF usually seems geared towards the latter two options (not to say that those are mutually exclusive options). What is interesting about the 'Fantasy' SF is how much it ends up inspiring reality - scientists and technicians try to emulate the futures from the stories rather than waiting for 'reality' to deliver it on a silver platter. So tomorrow's Mundane SF may very well be today's Fantasy.
I don't think Mundane SF is inherently boring. What it is is hard to write and the people involved over at the Mundane SF blog were particularly ill-suited to the task (Remember the rant about the perfidies of astrophysicists? [1]). A group somewhat less self-flagellatingly puritanical might have more luck with the idea.
Actually, scratch that: Poul Anderson put the gloomy back in Dane and managed an entire collection around drawing within the lines of known physics circa 1970 or so (Actually, I think he mostly picked a selection of stories that qualified from the roughly infinite number of stories he had written).
1: http://mundane-sf.blogspot.com/2007/07/soap-bubble-heads.html#links
which leads to
http://www.freesteel.co.uk/wpblog/2007/02/galaxy-road-south/
Would Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" be considered mundane SF?
"The Plot Against America" by Philip Roth?
"My Sister's Keeper"?
Soft science fiction set on Earth?
Apocalyptic fiction?
What about SF set in the future based on a rational expansion of technology, like "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress"?
Like atheists—who look at the irrational certainty of believers and then commit the same error by saying that something could not, absolutely does NOT exist....
You're defining the word "atheist" in a way almost none of us atheists do.
One does not to have absolute certitude of God's nonexistence to be an atheist.
Would Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" be considered mundane SF?
Yeah, prototypically mundane. Though personally, even though the book was good overall, I found some aspects of his writing style a bit annoying.
Ok, folks:
@James: I'm being a little tongue-in-cheek that it's boring by definition. There's clearly tons of stories of present-day (or immediate extrapolation from present-day) tech that are cool, it's the hard-and-fast boundary line that Ryman et. al. want to draw that gets me . . . and yeah, who can forget the rant about astrophysicists. A classic.
@Torsten: would agree that those titles qualify, though I don't know what you mean by "rational". To quote the New York Times from October 1903: "The flying machine . . might be evolved by the continuous efforts of mathematicians in from one million to ten million years." In 1903, that was "rational"--and in a nutshell, that's my problem with mundane SF.
@Dellis: Wikipedia writes that atheism is: "either the rejection of theism, or the position that deities do not exist." I'm talking about the latter category.
Consider, too, that Mundane SF, say, 15 years ago, would still be convinced that Global Warming wasn't a possibility (as it wasn't fully recognized as "fact" by the scientific community until earlier this decade). Scientific theory is always evolving--it's one reason that very few things actually fit under the realm of "law"--and even things that do are only laws in that we haven't yet figured out anything to disprove them.
Neal Stephenson's ANATHEM (as so many other writers have, I'm sure) touched on this a bit, when it discussed the idea of parallel universes having different rules of physics. While it's a reach (right now) to discuss the idea of parallel universes, would it be that far a leap that if there were parallel universes, that said universes would have different scientific "laws"?
I agree with kavka--sci-fi has always done it's job as an inspiration, not only for imagination, but for scientists as well. Where would telecommunications be without Arthur C. Clarke? Granted, the technology itself wasn't out of the realm of possibility (as I'm sure Mundane apologists would rebut), but it's the idea that some very smart people write sci-fi--and understand that questioning science is often the way to go beyond it.
Personally--as an editor of sci-fi--I don't want to read sci-fi that doesn't make me wonder. If we changed the label of the genre to "what if," I would have no problem with that at all.
"@Dellis: Wikipedia writes that atheism is: "either the rejection of theism, or the position that deities do not exist." I'm talking about the latter category."
Yes, I'm aware of that. And even under that definition you're still dead wrong.
Holding the postion that "deities do not exist" is a far cry from holding the position you accuse us atheists of holding: "saying that something could not, absolutely does NOT exist".
One can believe deities don't exist without holding that opinion with dogmatic certitude.
I suspect both of us believe vampires, as described in Bram Stoker's Dracula, don't exist. That doesn't entail that we are dogmatically incapable of being convinced should sound evidence ever be offered. Nor does it involve any unreasonableness or epistemic error on our part. It is in precisely this manner that I believe that deities don't exist. And I suspect this is true of you as well in regard to a great many deities that have been proposed historically. Can you really say you're on the fence about the existence of Apollo?
I'm "dead wrong" huh? Ah, the certainty of you atheists. There are times I envy it.
I'm on the fence about a lot of things, Dellis. As to Apollo, my views there might surprise you. No, I don't think there were a bunch of guys in white robes up on Mt. Olympus, but as to the idea that priests were in touch with *something* that they interpreted as the sun-god . . . I decline to rule that out. There are times I wonder whether paganism/polytheism might actually have *more* metaphysical basis than monotheism -- the idea that there are spirits everywhere strikes me as not at all implausible. Perhaps that even explains a lot of so-called paranormal activity. But I don't know for sure. . . which is why I'll continue to be an agnostic rather than an atheist who's so certain that what's really going on out there is nothing.