Kevin Ahearn says...
Either Contemporary Realism or Irrelevance?
Bewildered Ones:
Rick Carter’s (Steven Spielberg's production designer) comment at WonderCon in San Francisco — “The idea of this version of War of the Worlds is that it really takes place in our world. So it's not as though we created a new world the aliens come into. It's our world” — nutshells what’s missing in today’s published sf.
“Typical science fiction recently has a tendency to kind of make it too fantastic and sort of detach itself from reality,” added Carter. “[But] for this story ... what really appealed to me was that it was a real story, and it was a very serious take on the whole thing. What would really happen if aliens came down, and how would we address it?”
Sf publishing is “detached from reality” and is on the verge of complete irrelevancy in the new millennium because it has yet to produce a novel that confronts the multi-issues of our brave new world. Not to worry though. There is one novel the sf community can count on to sell well this summer: H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds.
Or will the original book take a back seat to its “novelization?”
Such is the state of current science fiction whose writers seem to have nothing better to do than to “hoax” so-called “vanity” publishers.
Such is the vanity of the SFWA.
Kevin Ahearn
Copyright © 2005 by Kevin Ahearn
Thank you for the letter, Kevin; it’s thought-provoking, as usual. However, one question:
Sf publishing is “detached from reality” and is on the verge of complete irrelevancy in the new millennium because it has yet to produce a novel that confronts the multi-issues of our brave new world.
Doesn’t that apply to all literature, not just science fiction? And if such an epic novel did appear, would it not be instantly declared “mainstream,” like 1984 and Brave New World ?
— Don W.
