Q: Will things get better or worse? A: Yes!

I have made some fun of the mundane SF movement before. So it's only fair to point out that I have discovered a mundane-oriented writer who is making some waves with actual stories, as opposed to blogs, wikis, manifestoes, rants and other substitutes for fiction.

I first saw Paolo Bacigalupi's name mentioned in a flier at Boskone for a panel discussing some of the "up and coming" names in sci-fi. I didn't go to that panel, but I have since seen his name mentioned in a couple of other places, and I finally decided to search out his website.

Luckily he has a few free stories up, and I have read one of them, "The Tamarisk Hunter." I will get to reading the others soon, but I have to write something myself!

First of all, let me say it's a good story. I am a Southwesterner myself, and a future in which California steals the water of the rest of the West is all to imaginable. He's got a great sense of characterization, and is an excellent world-builder. The story is clearly on the dystopic side of things, but there's nothing wrong with that. I am going to look for Bacigalupi's book of short stories, "Pump Six." He is a welcome new voice in the genre, and is covering a field that most other writers out there are not.

That said, I still don't think that Mundane Sci-fi is going to be the salvation of the genre that its champions made it out to be, or even as big as popular sub-genres like steampunk or cyberpunk. There are two reasons for this. One has to do with marketing, and one has to do with a misused word.

Mundane champions often like to talk, correctly to be fair, about how sci-fi is losing its audience. The mundanists' reason is that the star-hopping space-opera future of sci-fi is just too hard for people to believe anymore. The implication is that what people are really aching for is stories that show us how things really are going to be.

Which couldn't make less sense. The best-selling sci-fi books, as I understand, are series and movie knockoffs like Battlestar Galactica, Star Wars and Star Trek stuff; ie the least realistic of all. The truth is that sci-fi with a shitty future has existed for decades. It used to be the shitty future was about post-nuclear radiation-glowing wastelands; if all the mundanists can do is update that to a world overwhelmed by global warming, with Lady Liberty in the Atlantic up to her tits, they have not by any means, as they promised to do, "changed the way [I] think about science fiction."

Again this is not a criticism of Bagucigalpi's writing in particular. There has always been a small but steady demand for well-written dystopias; I've tried to play around in that ballpark myself with far less success than Paolo has. But it's just natural that these are always going to be a minority of the market, because when most people buy genre books they're usually trying to escape reality, not have it rubbed in their face. There will always be a small cult market for the more challenging stuff with dweebs like me (and probably you), but it won't outsell the work that's more fun.

That brings me around to another term that's bugging me a bit, that I have seen brought up in various contexts: 'optimistic' sci-fi. This has often sloppily been used as a shorthand for the alternative to Mundane. In optimistic sci-fi we all upload our personalities to computers, hop around with warp drives and go back and time to make out with our great-grandmothers.

The idea that a future with interstellar travel must be optimistic, while a future without must not, is completely ridiculous. Phillip K. Dick, a hero of many of the Mundane sci-fi writers, used interstellar travel in most of his stories, as I've pointed out before. But no one ever called his work optimistic.

On the other side, you can write an optimistic mundane story. For that matter, that's how it was supposed to be. If you look at the manifesto (no longer available online), it was supposed to be about people figuring out how to solve the world's problems without technological magic wands.

But taking it a step further, the whole division between optimistic and pessimistic sci-fi is a bit absurd. Things don't get just better or just worse. Both things happen at the same time. Look at the twentieth century. We cured TB and smallpox, we revolutionized food production, invented the telephone, television, computer, etc. etc. Then there was the Holocaust, the Great Leap Forward, the Stalinist purges, Hiroshima and Nagasaki and countless other horrors that made all mass killing that came before look like amateur hour.

I, for one, am glad that Mundane sci-fi appears to now exist as an actual sub-genre of fiction, as opposed to a Borgesian imaginary concept of one. Mundanists could have avoided a lot of the flak they've caught if they had spent more time on their stories and less time dismissing and overgeneralizing about other people's work, as I think Bacigalupi has.

But no matter whether you're writing sensawunda space opera or smog-choked "n"-punk, the stories that are going to matter are the ones that acknowledge the future will hold unimagined wonders and horrors beyond our worst fears. Things will always get better, and they'll always get worse. The fun part is imagining how it might.

Interzone's upcoming mundane issue: does this movement have any clothes?

Pretty amazing how a month and a half can slip by when you're distracted by details like work and parenthood and such. I've written a lot of beautiful long posts in my head and not bothered to sit down and type them in. So here's one I'm actually writing.

I noticed that Interzone has a forthcoming issue on mundane sci-fi. Though I am not interested in being restrained by any of the mundanistas' rules, I think this is a good thing. I also think it is fair to treat this as a bit of a put-up-or-shut-up moment for the movement. Or as Uncle Walt from Minnesota once put it, "Where's the beef?"

Imagine someone who knew nothing about genre fiction were to come along to me and say "I've heard that there is this movement called Singularity in science fiction. What's that all about?" I'd say, "Oh, check out Charles Stross' Accelerando, or anything by Vernor Vinge." What about that cyberpunk thing back in the '80s and '90s? Start with Gibson's Neuromancer, then move on to Bruce Sterling and Snow Crash. What about urban fantasy? Try Neil Gaiman's Nevewhere and China Mieville's King Rat. Slipstream? Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet has a whole new anthology out. Paranormal romance? Anne Rice would be the prototype, and I suppose Laurell K. Hamilton the modern exemplar, for better or worse. By reading one or two books from any of these authors you could very quickly get an idea if a movement of fiction interested you or not.

And, my subgenre exploring fantasy friend might ask next, what is this mundane sci-fi movement about? Well, I'd respond, there's this Wikipedia entry, see? And a blog. I think you can see the problem here.

From the bottom of the wiki page I linked to a magazine titled "The Courier - A Mundane SF ezine", to find a blog with three entries and a hit count that makes mine look good by comparison (that's bad). I scrolled down the mundane blog, which is actually a very good blog, to see if goatchurch has any references to any stories I should read. The first post (and only recent one that was about a story) referred to a novel by a woman named Sarah Hall, who won a recent literary prize with a near-future "literary" novel, that fits the mundane rules no doubt by accident. But he is not actually saying this is an exemplar of mundane sci-fi, but rather a warning of what could happen if people don't start writing the way he wants us to.

This is exactly what I've warning you about, boys and girls. Mainstream literature is doing an end-run around the outside of SF to connect with the real future of life as we will come to know it.

Based on the description of Hall's novel, it would be fair to point out that it seems to occur within an already existing subgenre of literary fiction, the feminist dystopia/utopia that has been explored, among others, by Marge Piercy in Woman on the Edge of Time and of course Atwood in Handmaid's Tale. So goatchurch might be just a little alarmist about this.

But if he's not, and mundane sci-fi is the only thing that can save the whole genre, it's about time that we saw some stories to show for it. The Wiki says the movement was started in 2004, by Geoff Ryman and Julian Todd. I can't find the link for it but I understand this was the aspiration of the Clarion class from that year. That means an entire cohort of Clarion alumni has had more than three years to work on this concept by now. We should see mind-blowing mundane stories shooting up like fireworks left and right. I'm not saying they're not out there, but I haven't seen them.

Curiously enough, as it happens, I found a story that seems so far to fit all the mundane rules in one of the least predicted places, the opening of the January/February Analog. I think I got this back in October, according to their usual schedule (hey, it is a magazine about the future), but only forced myself to read it recently because I didn't have anything better to look at. In truth, Analog has a lot of stories that fill all the mundane checkboxes, which isn't surprising for a manifesto that is really just a string of negations. This story, "Marsbound" by Joe Haldeman, is about a family that is going to Mars because they won a lottery.

But I don't recommend that goatchurch run out and make the link just yet. In the first twenty pages of the three-part series, here's what happens: the narrator, a college-age daughter of the family, rides to the space elevator with her parents and brother. The kids secretly sneak some beer. The pilot of the spaceship that will be flying them there talks to the narrator, and he might be hitting on her, but probably not. She sees the earth from space. They play penny poker. A micrometeorite strike makes a small hole in the elevator ribbon, but it's okay because it gets fixed by ribbon repair robots (not nanos - check!). She starts to feel weightlessness. And lots of people have conversations about how space elevators work that are incredibly mind-numbing even for a geek like me. Let me just point out, as a person desperately trying to get the interest of a book agent, that if an unknown like myself sent an opening like this in a query it would get sent back with a form rejection so fast I wouldn't have to step away from the mailbox to pick it up, and rightfully so. Can anyone who is reading this really wonder why Analog's subscription rates are plummeting?

In the opening of Alastair Reynolds' Chasm City there is also a space elevator scene. But by the tenth page the cable gets blown up by a nuclear bomb, and the car's about to shoot off into space, leaving the hero to make a desperate escape. As believable? Hell no. More fun to read? Damn straight.

"Marsbound," of course, should not be taken as representative of mundane SF, since as far as I know Joe Haldeman has nothing to do with the movement. But until we start seeing some good stories under the movement label soon, stuff like this will be all they have. Within half a year or so, we'll see if the emperor is wearing any clothes.

Update
Mary Robinette Kowal pointed out that the Courier only opened their doors a couple of days ago. I didn't look to see when the journal started, so that wasn't fair. My apologies.

Sorry I can't make my stories mundane enough for you!

My first advice to these guys would be to come up with a better name. I know which definition of the word "mundane" they're using, but when a word has more than one definition you need to acknowledge that.

I agree with Live Granades' opinion on this.

But I would take it one step further. I think the people behind the mundane scifi movement utterly misunderstand the purpose of fiction. Jules Verne could be seen as an early model of the "mundane scifi" movement. I don't remember where I got it, but I read that Verne's major complaint about H.G. Wells was that "he just makes things up," whereas Verne tried to use real science and technology.

But far more people read Wells than Verne now, even though we have never had a time machine or alien invaders. I think that's because Wells understood something that Verne doesn't, which is also my motto as a writer: fiction is about people, not things.

Verne wanted to make accurate predictions about things: submarines, baloons, etc. Wells was exploring the depths of human nature by stretching the laws of reality. How else could a British person understand what colonialized people must feel like under their rule than by having alien invaders with posers beyond their own imagining come down? Or understand the ridiculousness of their class system without taking them far into future where the system has been stretched to its logical extreme?

That's not to say that mundane scifi doesn't have a future. If the people who are pushing the movement can start making stories that are better than what anyone else is doing (instead of, say, giving everyone else a pass-fail grade on a bar that means nothing to anyon but themselves), they just might, as they claim "Transform the way you think about scifi."