When you play more sports you're going to need more stadiums: the Rainbow Age of Speculative Fiction
Hey, folks,
At worldcon, I was arguing (in the rhetorical barcon sense, not the having a fight sense) with a friend about the Rainbow Age of Science Fiction, which I still maintain is the best descriptor of the current moment in genre. We have the Golden Age, the Silver Age, the New Wave, the Cyberpunks, the Grimdark Era… but what’s happening currently (and has been for about ten years) is a flowering of technicolor diversity such as publishing has never seen. It’s glorious, if you ask me.
Not just ethnic diversity (thought that too and wonderfully so), but diversity of experience and identity and abledness are blossoming like a wild garden at the height of June, and I love it.
My friend was concerned that the streams were not crossing enough, that we were all siloing ourselves too much. And I think that can be true—it’s too easy to stick to your zone and stay in your lane when reading as well as writing, and that can make any given area of work as claustrophobic as the mainstream SFF of 1972 say, when it was novel and notable that there were Black people and women writing in the genre—and some people strongly didn’t want any of us here. (Some people still don’t want us here, but at this point they have lost so resoundingly it’s just whimpering.)
And the other complication is that there is just too much good work out there to read everything. What a fine problem to have! My dad, who is only 76, and my mom, who turns 71 on Monday (Hi Mom!) both remember clearly their SF reading experience through about 1975, when it was still possible for everybody who liked genre to read every single book that came out and form an opinion on it. These days that seems like unbelievable scarcity.
We were still siloed. But there was only one big silo.
Now there are a lot of medium ones, and they’re easier to walk between.
So what is this Rainbow Age of Science Fiction? There’s some discussion of it in this interview I did with Chuck Wendig in 2011 but since then my thoughts have clarified.
Quite frankly, I think it’s about diverse writers with diverse experiences and—now—diverse influences feeling empowered to write what they want to write—the stories they feel in their hearts and their bones. Stories drawn from their true experiences—stories of oppression and the fierce joy that exists even under systems of marginalization. Stories that push back against the narrative that marginalized people are somehow bereft of a subject position, are unfeeling livestock, are wastrels or perverts. Stories of our own humanity.
And when I say “diversity of influences,” I think that’s key, frankly. I’m a member of the last generation of SF writers who will have grown up all reading the same books and seeing the same movies. The Piers Anthony to Heinlein pipeline is just gone, and while some people bemoan it (and I do think there’s academic value in reading old works even if you don’t care for them, but it’s not a moral obligation, just an avenue of self-education) I think its death is a good thing.
Today’s writers come from differing media backgrounds, and that increases and improves the wonder and diversity of their work. It makes us more different while still allowing us to be a community that loves speculative fiction, and while that means that we’re all going to spend more time outside of our comfort zones, I frankly think that’s good for us.
Stretching is how you stay nimble, after all.
How about you? What do you think of the Rainbow Age?
Best,
Bear