I don't agree with everything Nick Mamatas has to say about Benjamin Kunkel (I tend to be about 40/60 with regard to his highly enjoyable blog anyway), but this is a pretty interesting line of argument:
SF, or the SF worth writing about anyway, also problematizes politics and love and whatnot. And unlike literary novels, these books often manage to proselytize. Thus, all those ugly people who nonetheless have a dozen lovers at a time thanks to Heinlein, or the Freeze Your Body types, Sea-Steading Libertarians, folks who just don't shower because it's selling out to society's rules not to smell like landfill somehow, or even that wag whose novel for young boys detailed the plans for making an atom bomb out of household goods and mail-order uranium. Everything is historicized in SF: morality, love, what it means to be human (and thus a human character) and often these things are not historicized in a way amenable to the politics of the middle-class social democrat, especially not one terrified of both socialism and democracy.What I like is the characterization of the ideal Sci Fi reader as that "self-taught weirdo who would be middle class were a world a bit fairer" which is perhaps the way many genre writers see themselves sometimes, and the majority of their readers as well. But where he sees an emergent Technocracy, I just see the same old tiresome Libertarians, Randian Objectivists, and loosely identifed right-wing para-militarist reactionaries. Moreover, there is no "Dissent" crowd beyond the popular straw man of said Libertarians, Objectivists, and Reactionaries. Either way, not my crowd.
The Singularity of the novel Kunkel is discussing is an issue primarily for the sort of novel he wrote, and those he mentioned in his essay. The novel, the "literary" novel anyway, is still the venue of choice for the emergent middle class and the thing about middle classes is that they generally have it pretty good until someone rolls out a guillotine. As Thomas Disch pointed out long ago, SF has a different audience and serves a different function. SF appealed to historically (and still does today), the self-taught weirdo who would be middle class were a world a bit fairer, or more of a meritocracy, or better appreciated the subtleties of the slide-rule and the pun. Now that the present has caught up to the future though, a few of these techno-nuts have managed to become crazy zillionaires, while the Kunkels of the world have been demoted to talking about wine and the semiotics of thongs. SF is still the house organ of Technocracy as Charles Stross has pointed out, and though Technocracy has failed so too has pre-postmodern-double-reverse-Enlightenment thought of the Dissent crowd. But SF people know how to reboot Windows. Kunkel knows how to pitch an essay over drinks.
And its sort of striking that Mamatas finds fault with Kunkel's argument where they should agree the most. That is, Mamatas sees sci-fi readers as highly individualistic, and Kunkel argues that great literature is about complex highly individualized characters. Kunkel's complaint is that dystopic novels are always about clones, zombies, or characters stripped of their individuality. In his view (and this is problematic in itself) there is no social, moral, or political argument without the fully-formed individual perspective. There can be no future without the idea of the heroic individual to inhabit it. I'm not sure I agree with this either (this argument echoes those over Gladwell's Outliers - do great men make history, or do historic moments make men great?. It seems sort of old-fashioned and overly dependendent on James Wood's ideas regarding the great Tolstoyan Realist Novel. There's no room for postmodernism - and the entire history of literary sci-fi mash-ups - in Kunkel's view, much less post-humanism).
Mamatas's complaint seems to be that Kunkel is an entitled little bitch who should just shut up. EOS:
Literary writers of the sort Kunkel discusses in his essay can't handle the future very well, so they end up falling into the pop culture traps of televised SF. (Thus Kunkel's conflation of the two is correct, but not self-aware.) More interesting SF takes swings at the centrality of the individual subject in a way which smells to Kunkel and his fellow travelers as the liquidation of the middle class. The new world to be born is absolutely terrifying—it's the killing fields, run!— and thus Kunkel did what Kunkels always do—he wrote a long essay in a minor left journal.The whole thing falls apart with the ax-gridingly annoying reference to "fellow travelers" (whoever they are), but he's right about Science Fiction's capacity for asking the big po-mo questions.
For me, the larger point is that we shouldn't confuse the problem of how we think about the future with arguments over genre fiction vs. literary fiction, or autodicats vs. ivy leaguers, or cyber punks vs. cyper preps, because at this stage of the game we're all on the same side. We're all on the outside looking in. And what's really screwed up is that there is no longer a center. There is no longer a middle class. There is no power structure against which we struggle. Our entire society has been hollowed out and emptied. What we're up against (and boy are we up against it) is not a common enemy or some sort of mystic elite, but mass inertia. Mass incompetence. Mass irresponsibility. We're bogged down by everything that is douchy and infantile in our society. Consumerism. Christianism. Celebritism. It's this whole self-centered soup of entertainment that's keeping us from thinking or writing intelligently about anything, much less the future: the waste and detritus of the never-ending now.
So when we do think of the future it is no real future at all. These dystopic futures are a blending of Horror and Science Fiction. We become steampunks or retro-futurists, because we are haunted by the past, seduced by its glamour, burdened by its nightmarish history. Science Fiction becomes not a literature for technocrats but a system of nostalgic associations, signs and countersigns, to which we always return. In this way Science Fiction cedes its most defining feature, cool logic and reason, to the irrationality of horror fiction, where we are free to revisit that which is repressed and painful or to relieve our broken-hearted selves through the romantically and Romantically doomed. As a result, the future is given over to apocalypse, pestilence, zombies, war, and sometimes, the return of ancient squidlike gods. The future is punk (or punk'd) and there is no future, no future for you.
Horror, as a genre, is the literature of despair. It is the literature of an obsessive engagement with the pain of the past that refuses healing. If the goal of art is transformation, if its purpose is to take the past and make something new, or as David Milch says, to transform the pain of the past, in its pastness, into the future tense of joy, then what horror and dystopic science fiction gives us instead is a frozen vision of postponement, deferral, and refusal. The pain always remains, the future does not arrive. It's Lovecraftian and Beckettian.
What I think is missing from our fictions, or has been lost, or abandoned, or has become unfashionable is this ability to imagine joy. Optimism. Utopia. Tomorrowland. Not technocracy, but faith or something like it. This is perhaps where individuality and character intercede.
