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Reducing the Miraculous to the Mundane (with apologies to Joan Didion)
Whether or not our SF authors intend to be futurists, we often look to them to answer the perennial question: what’s next? It may be true, as Arthur C Clarke maintained, that a “suffiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. That is precisely why some, like Geoff Ryman, want no part of the stuff. After all, if science can do anything, where’s the challenge in prediction?
To this end, Ryman (as he elaborates in last week’s interview with NebulaAwards.com) wants to ban the following tropes from modern science fiction:
• 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
We at Worlds Without End [okay, some of us…okay, maybe it’s just me] couldn’t agree more. That is why we will be adding Mundane SF to our list of sub-genre tags. Please look up any award winning book that you think qualifies as Mundane and tag it (I just added Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge).
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