About every 3 or 4 months, it seems, the blogosphere gets all-a-flutter about the demise of science fiction. The cycle seems to be coming around again. I have seen, at last count, 4 postings, all unrelated, drift through my Google Reader inbox in the last three days. Inevitably, this will mean at least 2 responses to each from other blogs I lurk at, and likely at least 1 rebuttal-response-rebuttal scenario, likely played out over on LiveJournal somewhere.

Most often, the original posts are quite well thought out. Even if they don’t compliment each other in content, they usually make some pretty strong points. Most often they focus on the “literary establishment” and how it doesn’t “take SF seriously.” Sometimes it gets wrapped up in a good, old fashioned rant about how modern day critics and theorists just don’t “get” SF because they are hung up on outdated critical methodologies. As a grad student who deals with those very methodologies, suffice it to say…

So?

SF is just a genre, folks. If anything it is becoming overwhelmed by the sheer number of sub-genres that it has spawned, just like what happened to Gothic Fiction, the genre that oh-so-many decades ago spewed forth Science Fiction.

And just where is Gothic Fiction now, you ask? I answer, “Everywhere.” The sum of its parts have become greater than the whole, and the Gothic resides in books and subjects with which it is not often associated. It has become so firmly established that Gothic elements are used in works ranging from To Kill a Mockingbird to The Road to Interview With a Vampire. Yet none of these can be said to be a truly, solely, Gothic tale. More importantly, however, can any of these stories, or any story, really, be wrapped up in a neat little bow of a single genre?

Take a look at Kindred by Octavia Butler. Most often it is found on the Science Fiction shelves. Why? Because it has time travel in it. Never mind that the time travel in question has nothing at all to do with science. Never mind that 80-90% of the novel takes place in the past, in a setting so amazingly detailed and realistic that it could arguably pass for historical fiction. Never mind that the time travel itself borders on the mystical or magical, thus making Fantasy perhaps a better tag than Science Fiction.

Better still, look at The Road by Cormac McCarthy (review being reposted soon). Borders and B&N didn’t know what to do with this one. I mean, it won the Pulitzer, it has to be literary, right? But… look what it’s about! Doesn’t a dystopic setting automatically mean a SF label? But this is also a Coming of Age story, as well as a warped kind of Hero’s Quest story. If you remove the science from the story… nothing changes, because, like Kindred, there isn’t any science anywhere in the story.

So, fear not, I know it seems like it when you watch the SciFi Original Movies, but SF hasn’t died, nor is it going to. It has grown to a point where many stories, like Kindred and The Road, incorporate Science Fiction elements in the same way that To Kill a Mockingbird incorporates Gothic elements. The genre has become so broad that it casts its influence upon stories that are not immediately recognizable as Science Fiction.

And believe it or not, this is a good thing, even for the SF die-hards that read nothing else. With the tentacles of SF reaching into the mainstream and literary worlds, it means more and more authors will be using SF elements to tell their stories. It gives us all a much wider selection to choose from, even you die-hard all-science-all-the-time types.

By the way, for those of you who haven’t read Kindred or The Road I highly recommend them both. One day, when you are in between Asher and Watts books, pick one up. I would be highly surprised if the stories don’t suck you in and spit you out a day or 2 later.