At the countless “advice to new writers” panels that I have participated in at science fiction conventions, someone in the audience will inevitably ask about new trends in SF—what sort of trends are we seeing, which trends would we like to see more of? The anxiety that prompts this question is understandable. The beginning writer does not want to appear out of step with the times. Yet, this is a line of inquiry I am often reluctant to respond to, not due to an inability to define the trends or due to any lack of them, but simply because I really don’t want to see twenty stories with similar themes showing up in Monday morning’s mail.

Nonetheless, two types of trends do show up. One type is the narrow and short-lived trend. It can arise from the politics and social issues of the day or simply from a call for a pirate or zeppelin anthology. The other sort of trend is broader and longer term. It may start out as a new way to define science fiction and evolve into a subgenre. In the seventies, this trend might have been the New Wave, in the eighties, Cyberpunk and Humanist SF. The trend is often initially defined with a kind of backward notation. Proponents of the trend will look around for published stories that conform to their definition of the trend. As the trend grows in appeal, authors will deliberately attempt to write fiction that incorporates the tropes of the now established trend. Observers of today’s SF have indentified a number of trends, but I will limit this editorial to two that seem to be in opposition to each other.

One example of the subgenre as trend is the recently redefined “Space Opera.” As David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer point out in their marvelous anthology, The Space Opera Renaissance, this term was initially coined in 1941 by Wilson Tucker to describe “the hacky, grinding, stinking, outworn space-ship yarn, or world-saving for that matter. . . .” The editors contend that the term was redefined in the eighties to mean “colorful, dramatic, large-scale science fiction adventure, competently and sometimes beautifully written, usually focused on a sympathetic, heroic central character, and plot action . . . usually set in the relatively distant future and in space or on other worlds, characteristically optimistic in tone.” In their anthology, the editors showcase historical examples from the early days of SF through the late nineties and early twenty-first century. An indication that there has been a resurgence in this subgenre is Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan’s original anthology, The New Space Opera. Stories by a number of Asimov’s most popular authors appear in one or both of these books. In recent years, authors writing in this tradition would seem to include Tony Daniel, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Allen M. Steele, R. Garcia y Robertson, and Charles Stross.

A counter trend to the New Space Opera has been called Mundane SF by Geoff Ryman. In an interview with Kit Reed, for InfinityPlus, Geoff defined his own mundane philosophy this way: “SF content is the future, but the function of most SF seems to be about avoiding the future. So much of the inherited tropes are actually highly unlikely. Take faster than light travel . . . there is a ghost of a possibility there, but people have run away with it. This is because they like it. It seems to open up horizons of adventure. It also conveys the message, we can burn through this planet and escape to the stars. I don’t think we can. I think we’re stuck on Earth. I want to write stories that are stuck on earth and throw out the unlikely tropes.” Mundane SF is pretty much limited by science as we know it today. The guidelines for an upcoming special Mundane SF issue of Interzone Magazine define the trend by what it is not: “Faster than light travel, psi power, nanobot technology, extraterrestrial life, computer consciousness . . . brain downloading, teleportation, and time travel.” A recent post on the mundane-sf.blogspot cited Jack Dann’s “Café Culture,” Nancy Kress’s “Safeguard,” and A.R. Morlan’s “The Hikikomori’s Cartoon Kimono” from the January 2007 issue of Asimov’s as examples of this subgenre (and flat-out excludes Charles Stross’s cover story—”Trunk and Disorderly”). Another example would surely be Paolo Bacigalupi’s “Yellow Card Man” from our December 2006 issue.

Do these two trends contradict one another? Well, I believe science fiction is large and should contain multitudes. I’m looking for a well-rounded diet of stories, and, mostly, I’m in favor of authors simply striking out in whatever direction suits the story they’re working on. Sometimes, I’m not certain that all so-called trends initially exist, or if the desire to classify stories into categories is really just a symptom of pareidolia, our need to see patterns in everything. Still, identifying a trend can be useful when doing so sets the bar higher, making demands on the author. I like all kinds of science fiction, but I love stories with large-scale, dramatic adventure and stories based on thought-out and convincing scientific premises. I’d like to see more of both. Some authors will experiment with various trends—sometimes in the same piece of fiction—others may prefer to work within a more restricted framework. Regardless of the trend of the day, though, if I find a story effective, it will probably find a home in Asimov’s.

 

Nontrends in Asimov’s: If you’ve already perused our contents page, you may have noticed a couple of atypical items. The first of these is our novel serialization from Allen M. Steele. Every once in a blue moon, Asimov’s has serialized books by writers like William Gibson, Michael Swanwick, and Robert Silverberg. When I got a look at Allen’s new Coyote novel, Galaxy Blues, I decided it was about time we did it again. This four-part serial will conclude in our February 2008 issue, several months before the novel hits your local bookstore. The other unusual event is the appearance of Isaac Asimov’s “Nightfall,” one of science fiction’s best-known classics. Readers have often told me how much they miss seeing Isaac’s stories in the magazine. For reasons explained in more detail on page 88, I thought it would be fun to begin the wrap-up of our thirtieth anniversary year with this memorable story. While reprinting landmark tales probably won’t become a trend in Asimov’s, we do plan to continue with the “memorable story” trend for the magazine’s lifetime.