(((Because the star-spangled robot hooplah actively PREVENTS US
from realizing how weird life really is becoming.)))
(((Via FUTURISMIC.)))
http://www.nebulaawards.com/index.php/interview/geoff_ryman
Link: Geoff Ryman | The Nebula Awards.
Clarion means you spot where the zeitgeist is going. I think this year I gained a fresh respect for how integrated information-seeking skills and imagination are getting as we all get used to the Internet. In 2002 Clarion I saw that a whole kind of SF writer, those whose work was based on science, were increasingly outside the SF and fantasy culture.
I wanted to help get them published and I very suddenly found myself writing The Mundane Manifesto, based on some of the things the guys (and they were guys) had said. Both about old tropes driving out the new, and also an avoidance of the coming crunch in terms of oil, global warming, overpopulation, and development economics. Julian Todd and Trent Walters were particular inspirations. For example, I believe it was Julian that said that FTL gave the impression it would be easy to find and settle beautiful new Earths… which encouraged us to think we could burn through this planet and be immortal.
So Mundanity partly came out of impatience with bad science, or with tropes that gave us the SF dream for free. Also it was impatience with the moral role SF was starting to play… as an irrelevant dream of a future that was unlikely to happen. The worry is that SF now sometimes actively prevents us imagining the future.
My idea was that we’d do something like Dogme film-making. Promise not to include certain tropes in our stories. The list keeps shifting, partly because we don’t agree. But included
• No FTL, no wormholes, warps etc as magic wands around that
• No Very Fast travel without time dilation
• No time travel
• No parallel universes based on quantum uncertainty
• No telepathy
• No aliens.
More discussion resulted in outright artificial intelligence being excluded....
