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Where are Asimov’s children?August 26th, 2008 |
Saturn's Children
I just finished reading Saturn’s Children, and enjoyed it quite a lot — Charlie Stross manages to nail the late Heinlein voice quite thoroughly, and although some of the late Heinlein books are vilified in some quarters, I liked quite a lot of them. Here Stross is clearly going after Friday.
There’s quite a lot of Heinlein’s children around these days; not just stuff like the recent Variable Star posthumous collaboration, but also stuff like Scalzi’s “Old Man’s War” books (the latest of which, Zoe’s Tale, I haven’t read yet), and of course the outright homages than John Varley has been writing ever since Steel Beach.
Now, Charlie dedicates Saturn’s Children to both Heinlein and Asimov, and it made me wonder — who is writing the Asimov homages? I mean, aside from a few of Cory Doctorow’s short stories (thinking here of “I, Rowboat,” one of my favorites of his shorts, though of course “I,Robot”, also in that book, is a more direct homage), it doesn’t seem like there are a lot of folks who consciously work in this mode. Charlie is after exploring Asimovian ideas, just in Heinleinian dress, but you don’t see Asimovian dress these days.
I grew up reading them both. I fact, I make the claim to having read everything of Heinlein’s — yes, even Take Back Your Government and Tramp Royale, every short story, everything; and every scrap of Asimov fiction, even all the Lucky Starr books and all the Black Widowers (though I think I may prefer The Union Club Mysteries), even Murder at the ABA (reading all the non-fiction being unattainable).
To me, they have always represented two poles of SF. Is the Asimovian style simply more dated, or is it that the other influences of Heinlein, such as his politics and quotability, have made him more prominent in an Internet-based world and culture?
BTW, Charlie swears to me that few people get the terrible terrible pun about the chicken. Keep an eye out, and don’t be drinking something when you reach the page with the chibi dwarf ninja attack.
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I’ve never stopped reading SF since, well, since I learned to read. About half of the SF I have read seems more concerned with being different than with being interesting. They often achieve both, but emphasis is clearly in the former; the books I have read in Sean’s list definitely fit that description for me. Although many of the weird ideas or approaches have value, in general I find them tiresome and need a more relaxed book afterward.
That’s where people like Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Card, Sawyer or even Benford enter the picture. They are all extremely readable, but I can see how they may feel unsophisticated.
Oh how I despise Heinlein. I never read Heinlein when I was young, purely by fluke as I only had access to the books within physical reach – unlike young people these days. So, I tried reading Heinlein in my twenties after being told how great it was, and was found it dated and utterly un-interesting.
For me, this applies to all “golden age” science fiction. I read Asimov in my teens and loved it, but I couldn’t read it today. A diet of sophisticated, modern, adult-oriented sci-fi that is relevant to the increasing pace of technology in the 21st century has forever ruined my ability to read any sci-fi the so-called golden age.
After reading modern books like River Of Gods, Revelation Space, Hyperion, Excession, Altered Carbon, Halting State, A Fire Upon the Deep, Singularity Sky, Rainbow’s End, Acts of Conscience; there is no going back.
Frankly, I think that the Asimovian style became so dominant (in the form of 70-80′s “hard” science fiction) that trying to recreate it doesn’t come across as Asimov anymore. Definitely echoes of Asimov in nearly everything by Niven and Pournelle.
Asimov was a master of the expositional data-dump, something that has been depreciated in every form of modern fiction, not just SF.
As for the cause of the decline in the SF market: You’re soaking in it. SF was about escapism, about presenting world-changing ideas and altered worlds as distorting mirrors. And video games, even with their comparatively crappy narrative tools, are just better escape vehicles. The rise of the internet doubtless has something to do with it, as well. People are reading more than ever, but they read differently, anything more than a thousand words in a row is just a “wall of text” to be skimmed.
–Dave
I really thought he captured “Friday” incredibly, it was very much like reading Heinlein again – much more so than Variable Star, alas. And I thought the echoes of Asimov’s robot stories were there in the implications of the robot society post-human, and how they reflect their makers, warts and all – although admittedly the Asimov writing style was not there and would have been very dated if it had been. One of Heinlein’s hallmarks was that he kept adapting his style to the end, so the people in the future (including what is now our present) tended to talk/act like people in the 40′s, 50′s, 60′s, etc. as he progressed.
Raph, I haven’t read (reread) Asimov in years, and my memory of everything but the Foundation trilogy and the early robot novels and stories is pretty faded.
I could make a case that Vinge’s singularitaritan work is in the tradition of Foundation, and Ben Rosenbaum’s working on a novel that I would say is nothing else but — except that between it and Asimov there’s the influence of Vinge, Delany and LeGuin.
Somebody like Richard Morgan might be in the tradition of the Elijah Bailey robot mysteries, only his stuff reads more like Philip K. Dick meets Mickey Spillane.
Could you talk more about what you think “Asimovian dress” would look like? Maybe the problem is that Heinlein’s style is imitable, and Asimov’s isn’t.
I’ve always been of the opinion that cyberpunk killed SF. Prior to Sterling and Gibson in the 80s, if you picked up an SF book you pretty much knew what you were getting – one of the four basic stories, usually some interesting technology and character development, and it was an enjoyable read.
Then along come Sterling and Gibson, and they were great. But the hordes of cyberpunk wannabes after them weren’t. And the lack of, you know, plot and stuff in them was fairly painful, but that’s basically all we were getting, because authors and publishers are lemmings. Similarly today that’s why we’re getting so much ‘urban fantasy’. At about this time I noticed that my authors from growing up were all dying off, or at least only publishing a book every few years.
My normal plan in the bookstore would be to go in and check and see if anything new came out from my favorite authors, and if not, I’d go grab something random to fill the time. Along about this time, I hit several books in a row that were just plain unreadable.
So I basically gave up on SF about this time, and switched to reading my way through the fantasy canon. And it’s only been in the last couple of years that I’ve come back to it.
That’s an old debate these days in SF circles, Scopique. I do think that the original blogger who kicked it off this time is missing two key things though:
1, he doesn’t seem to have read very widely in the classics (or know their history — for example, the line he cites as clunky and out of place is considered a famous editorial gaffe, inserted against Asimov’s knowledge or wishes).
2, many of the authors cited require a grounding the classics to be able to appreciate. I love many of the modern authors cited, but print SF is suffering from a lack of audience and part of the reason is the extreme self-referentiality and occasional impenetrability of the field. (There’s a reason military SF and “fat fantasy” drives the publishing category these days). Frankly, Watts or McDonald are unreadable to someone who isn’t an SF expert in the first place.
The general problem of audience shrinkage is the subject of much annual bemoaning of the state of affairs every year around Comic-Con time, in fact. It may be similar to the genre issue with games, where they grow impenetrable to novices.
This is actually quite interesting, considering this article I found last week:
http://io9.com/5040839/is-sf-too-obsessed-with-its-history
I absolutely love Asimov. His great strength is that he can put two characters in a room, utterly still for a couple of chapters and make captivating reading just by what they were discussing.
As for Zoe’s Tale, I just finished rereading it and it’s amazing. John really captures the personalities of Hickory and Dickory very well, and there’s a lot of amazing scenes. Of course, the addition of Consu makes everything that much better.
Similar to the Asimov vein is, of course, Clarke. He mainly talked about pure ideas and his books had little or no visible conflict or plot, which made my main reaction when reading most Clarke books ‘That was amazing. What was the plot about?’.
I would also reccommend Alastair Reynolds, who is a totally different style altogether (big ideas, but a fast-paced plot). Check out his book ‘Chasm City’.
The Asimovian style comes, I think, in part from just how much nonfiction he wrote. There’s a book of his called “On Numbers” (actually titled “Asimov’s On Numbers”) that I can point to as an example of the narrative nonfiction he wrote a great deal of. Not many fiction writers have the experience of writing essentially as a bardic educator, for lack of a better term, and it’s his experience from this perspective that helps give his fiction novels the unique tone they often have (in my opinion).
TLDR version: Asimov cross-trained. Most authors don’t.