Perhaps the reason why I am so ambivalent about this conception of the Third Artist is that I don’t like the elevation of SF above other genres. As I said in my discussion with Limyaael, all genres need to change and revitalize, otherwise they risk irrelevancy. Mystery, Romance, and Fantasy are also, in their modern forms, relatively ‘new’ as publishing categories/genres. In fact, even though mystery is maligned as formulaic, it is perhaps one of the newest genres, depending on how you define it. Obviously crime has always existed, as well as the need to control it, but there is obviously a reason that the genre burst upon the scene and became massively popular. And it’s not as if mystery, either, has remained static: just as in the fantasy genre, there are imitators and innovaters. The problem of the Third Artist is endemnic to genre. Perhaps the commentators feel that it is especially relevant to science fiction, though, because hard, realist SF is the ‘ideal’ form of the genre, and such realism is supposed to be highly mimetic, perhaps even journalistic or pseudo-historical, not deliberately ‘fiction-like’ or intertextual, whereas one can say that fantasy is supposed to be inherently ‘intertextual’ if you count mythology and folklore (ancient or modern) as texts. And so with fantasy, it’s a more ambiguous matter to differentiate unoriginal, boring referentiality from transformative, original referentiality. However, I think this is more a quantitative than a qualitative difference.
(B’sides, ALL fiction, IMHO, is supposed to make you think. All fiction is a laboratory of ideas, original or unoriginal. )
I was later talking to Meril about the supposed decline of SF; apparently it is felt by some that younger readers shun SF in favor of fantasy. But if this is so, how can people propose this ‘mundane SF’ as an antidote to the problem? If the problem is that this demographic is leaving, then how does giving them more of what they’re not interested in help, unless the idea is to attract a different demographic? Meril and I then when on to discuss how in some ways, SF’s lunch is being eaten by regular old literary fiction, because we are living in the future. Er, meaning that in some ways, advances in science, especially of the medical variety, are impacting human lives in extreme and intimate ways, meaning that they now almost fall into the realm of normal literary fiction, or very minimally speculative SF. (See the fertility industry, for one) However, the tone, style, and attractions of ‘mainstream literary fiction’ are to my eyes, often very different from popular SF. I’m stereotyping here, and generalizing greatly, but in the aggregate, it seems that mundane SF-literary SF, is less escapist. And maybe drifting entirely away from the topic, in practice, IMHO, escapism and fandom, to my mind, are highly linked.
I’ve previously discussed the mysterious process in which some sucky series gain huge fandoms, and some good series have minimal fan activity, especially of a fanfic variety. IMHO, one thing (besides romance focus: the more characteristics something has of the romance genre, the less fanfic is written about it, no matter, and maybe even because, of how good it may be) that tends to drive fandom is escapism. Now, maybe I’m wrong and this only applies to some kinds of fandom, but fandom in its most extreme and classic forms tends to be driven by shows/books that are “unrealistic” in those terms.
Anyway, this is not the only thing that drives “fannishness,” by far (and it obviously doesn’t apply to all people), it but it is one of them. So, I think, the more unescapist and realism focused a world becomes, the more it falls towards the “literary” reader, the person who does not read for “intentional moe,” or for escapism, but often for “quality,” “aesthetics” or “social relevance.” Of course, in general, there is more of that kind of reader in the SF readership than in say, fanfic fandom.
(Okay, have ended on a rather jumbled note here)
