Are Fantasy and Science fiction getting too stuck up?

[erazmus]

Having had quite some time to think about this since my last post I have a few other ideas.
In relations to science fiction, I think the short fiction venues may be suffering from professionalism. By that I mean that the editors are so entrenched in the field they've lost the outside perspective required to even try to attract new readers.Many of them, all I know of, are extremely well read in genre and in general.Naturally enough for any editor, they are looking for new ideas that excite them. Well and fine, but less sophisticated consumers don't actually need or want refined, ground-breaking SF. Its all new to them. Editors complain that they get tons of "tired old stories" about alien invasions, first contact, etc and buy virtually none of it.
But those tired old story ideas are what hooked the editors when they were young, and the ideas weren't new then.They were just new to them. And science fiction used to be a place where writers used an established set of tropes (Space Travel, Time travel, discovering or being discovered by alien races, human mutation) to discuss issues facing the world of the day. From many points of view, I might add. Some of this still goes on but the points of view is more homogenized and the discussion is less discussion and more preaching to the choir. When was the last time any story pushed a view that didn't agree with liberal heterodoxy as espoused on the modern college campus? You couldn't sell a story about dealing with the consequences of falling for the global warming fraud. Never mind if the writer believed global warming was a fraud or was just extrapolating from a current political argument to make a point, that story won't appear anywhere you're likely to find it.Same with a lot of stories, which is a damn shame. SF readers used to have a lot of fun arguing about such issues raised in stories, now the gatekeepers pretty much stomp on that.
(As an example, a rather mediocre story in the mid-fifties, Tom Godwin's "The Cold Equations" inspired an on-going disagreement between most major figures in the genre that lasted for more than twenty years and inspired dozens of other, mostly better stories espousing different views on the issue he raised. This was still going on when I got involved in the genre. Twenty two years after the stories publication. Can you imagine such an issue, such a conversation, now?)
Its hard to fault a magazine editor for either trying to keep his readers happy or looking for stories that excites him. I don't really do so now. I do think the problem exists, and the solution is to change what we offer to appeal to younger readers, say, those under thirty without college degrees. But who should do that and where, I'm not so sure I know.
One thing I'm sure would kill the genre is if it got more exposure in schools. My last child graduated High School last year, and I was deeply involved in his educational experience. I'm appalled at the modern school's ability to make anything mendacious and boring. The inability to integrate literature into the context of other subjects astounded me. How can you study colonialism in one class and Kipling in another and not have "The Man who would be King" meet in the middle? Schools have been killing an appreciation of Shakespeare for generations.We don't need them pitching in to assassinate the appeal of Asimov and Heinlein as well.
Those of us that read, write and love Fantasy and Science Fiction should take a bit of comfort, its not too late for us. Imagine how a reader or writer of short adventure stories would feel about conditions today?
Mike

[erazmus]

In my experience the proper way to get young people to pick up and read something is for their parents to forbid it. God knows my parents didn't like my reading comic books and disapproved of my choices in magazines and paperbacks when I was a teen. Parents in general disapproved of everything teenagers did when I was one, has that changed?
I hate, and I mean really hate, the games my kids played endlessly on the television the whole time they lived with me (youngest is almost twenty now). I don't care if it was Myste or Oblivion or Grand Theft Auto, I see nothing redeemable in the hours spent posted in front of such trash. I tolerated it only because I remember my own hours reading comics and paperbacks being tolerated.
But is it then impossible to compete with the flickering box with its shiny lights and mentally dulling, repetitive sequences of action? Have we finally dulled our youth to the point where their imagination really is inferior to what is happening on the screen?
When I read, and its been like this since I was eight years old, I don't see the words in front of me. I see the story played out like a Technicolor movie in real time, with surround sound and everything. I always have. Good books, mediocre books, even bad books, doesn't matter. Is it just that so many of our young people are not skilled enough readers to ignore the technical aspects of reading a story?
That cannot be true, or Harry Potter wouldn't have done as well as it was doing before the movies started. I still think that kids--and I mean thirteen year olds and up--will buy and read exciting stories in the SF (spec fiction, includes fantasy) genre, if we meet them half way and put some where they can find them that are fun and exciting to read. As long as we don't tell them it will be good for them or help them get into college or enable them to get good grades.

Mike