A Genre in Crisis: On Paul Di Filippo's "Wikiworld"

December 1st, 2013 LA Review of Books

                                                                     
The sign “science fiction” is now referent to two related yet distinct signifieds, and the crisis only inheres in one of them. Sf as a literary mode, as a rhetoric, has always staunchly resisted any attempt at precise functional definition, but is easy enough to locate (albeit approximately, as one might locate a fogbank, or a region of civil unrest) in the contemporary cultural landscape. As a way of exploring the relationships between people and their technologies (and the worlds constructed by those relationships), Sf is in rude health, and busily metastasizing its way into cinema, television, music, art, theory, policy strategy, and more; as Gary K. Wolfe puts it, the genre has evaporated, diffusing into other media, other generic forms. It is an increasingly active fraction of the global cultural atmosphere; modal science fiction has conquered by transcending its original materiality.

 “Science fiction”, then – the science fiction that is in crisis – is the residue left behind by that evaporative process. That residue comprises the generic-ness from which the label genre stems: in this case, the outdated stylistic tics and aesthetics of a marginal pulp-modernist medium, the clichés, the well-worn assumptions and comfortable call-backs, and the outdated institutional values in which they were nurtured and framed. The withering of the short fiction markets – which were generic sf's proving ground and home turf – has accelerated the distillation process.
To quote Wolfe, many writers started “developing strategies to write science fiction without writing in the genre of science fiction”; they emigrated outward from the genre ghetto, and found their skills in demand once they dropped its vernacular stylings and clichés. Those who chose to remain behind have, in a dialectical kind of way, responded to their sense of marginalization by doubling down still further into that generic identity, to the point that even the suggestion of reform or progress is anathema, and a certain willful flirtation with reactionary identity politics becomes an expression of resistance.
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