Here’s another repost from Assorted Nonsense V1, which inadvertantly self-destructed a month or two ago (I apologize for any weird formatting issues… I’ll clean it up eventually):

Yesterday I received a little bit of feedback on the SF doc that I produced for The Arts Tonight last Tuesday evening. Most listeners that took the time to write or post messages on forums were completely positive, just happy to see SF covered on the show, and pleased with the documentary. One listener, however, although delighted to see SF covered on CBC radio, and impressed with the calibre of conversation amongst my guests, took great exception to the music and sound clips I chose to accompany the documentary. This listener felt that the music track and clips greatly undermined the seriousness and intelligence of the subject of discussion.

At the risk of sounding like I can’t take criticism (which I can’t) I have to say that this to me is EXACTLY what is wrong with science fiction today and one of the major reasons why the genre may be doomed. The damned genre is almost completely lacking in a sense of humour. It takes itself WAY too seriously. This wasn’t always the case… consider Douglas Adams, or the original Star Trek’s Trouble With Tribbles episode. Isaac Asimov had a wonderfully quirky sense of humour. But those days are long gone.

These days practitioners of science fiction are not unlike the Academie Francaise, that august body of language police in France that are so afraid of foreign influences on their beloved language that they are effectively smothering it to death in their efforts to protect it. They don’t understand that in order for a language to survive and flourish, it must be free to grow and mutate. While science fiction has indeed grown and mutated in recent years with all the various cyber punk and post cyber punk and neo post modernist Venezeulan Beaver punk movements, there is still an enormous defensiveness on the part of both professionals and fans of the form.

I understand where they’re coming from. Science Fiction has long been ridiculed, the mainstream has pretty much never taken it seriously, so the thinking is that we have to be ultra serious about it if we hope to have any chance of ever convincing anyone else to take it seriously. So when I make a doc about it and poke a little bit of fun at it (which I believe I have a right to do, because I’m coming at it from the inside, as a fan), some people get a little bent out of shape.

But you gotta be able to laugh at yourself, folks. People that can’t laugh at themselves, that take themselves too seriously, are invariably the ones that everyone else makes fun of, because it’s so much fun trying to take the stuffing out of them. Take William Shatner for example.

William Shatner

This man has got it all figured out. If that man of all people took himself seriously he would have been out of work decades ago. But he doesn’t and he isn’t. The genre of science fiction really ought to follow his example. For only when it stops being so defensive and learns how to laugh heartily at itself will it stand a chance of surviving into the future that its writers so passionately explore.

Here are this post’s original comments
Laurence Says:
November 27th, 2005 at 4:32 am

Dead on…….sort of.
Yes, the new kids on the block are becoming WAY too serious about the genre.
But I’ve also found that, on occasion, when SF tries to be funny, it becomes boring. Folks like Larry Niven, for an example, should stop for moment before ‘being funny’. Not that he can’t be funny..it’s just that, more often than not, he ain’t.

So let’s not fall into the category error of thinking that SF HAS to be serious. It’s just that if we’re going to be humourous (like Douglas Adams), we have to be smart and do it well.  Which is NO comment on your work, Joe. I haven’t yet heard your doc. I’ll have listen at work now that I know that it’s there. (And I’ll still laugh at you for reasons that have only to do with my own personal failings as a human being.)

Terry H Says:
November 27th, 2005 at 6:21 am I can’t stand people with no sense of humor. That said, having a sense of humor about our beloved genre will not solve all of the genre’s problems – but it will make life a lot more pleasant!

  • Peter J. Says:
    November 27th, 2005 at 7:49 am Regarding current SF with humour, I have two (related) words: “Firefly” and “Serenity”.Actually, there’s a lot more out there, it just isn’t coming from the “SF” authors and so doesn’t get much notice. At a glance, as well as Adams, I have Eric Idle’s “The Road to Mars” (1999), Bradley Denton’s “Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede” (1991), and Peter Jurasik and William H. Keith Jr.’s “Diplomatic Act” (1998) on my shelf, and those are just a few that stand out as being “funny SF”.(I haven’t heard the doc yet either, by the way–I recorded the stream but haven’t gotten the time to convert it to MP3 and dump it onto my player to listen.)

    • John Says:
    November 27th, 2005 at 8:08 am Laurence hit the nail on the head with authors mixing sf and humor in their work. Generally speaking (Adams excluded), if the piece works, it works as a comedy and not as sf. Readers look to science fiction for the sense of wonder, not the humor. Which is not to say that humor cannot appear at all in a good book, just used sparingly.Outside of the fictional work, though, I think the fans are a fickle and vocal bunch. Just look at the Internet reaction to the announcement of any proposed film adaptation of a book they hold close to their hearts. The film is usually denounced before one frame of film is shot. So it does not surprise me that someone with a criticism spoke up about it.Then again, this is feedback from only a single listener. I personally have not heard the show but would have loved to. I’ve been seeing your posts about the doc for a while and was hoping to catch it on the web. Unfortunately, mysearches yielded little. (A link in your post might have helped me find it better.)

    Tom Kernaghan Says:
    November 27th, 2005 at 11:39 am While I enjoy some SF, I’m not a HUGE fan of the genre. Perhaps this makes me just the kind of person the writers in Joe’s doc want to address. I did listen to the piece and did not find the humour over the top, incongruous, or detracting in any way. The music provided historical context and texture, which worked for me. But then, I’m not part of the inside club of aficionados. I simply like good stories. And wonder and humour is what I like about all good stories. One of the reasons why I love the movie “Amadeus” so much is that genius and discovery are juxtaposed with childlike playfulness and humour. Mere competence is for adults.Look. I love Russian literature. I find Dostoevsky brilliant and, yes, funny. His main characters are so ludicrously desperate and emotional. Big problems. Big questions. Big attempts. Big failure. Biting honesty. Humour.We call this serious literature.

  • So why should SF be any different? Hey, I found Robert Sawyer’s “Calculating God” very funny at times. The female alien with the fibre optic eyeballs (or whatever they were) — very human, very sympathetic, and very funny.Hey, just aim to discover, and humour will be part of the journey. Kind of like life itself.
  • Grondzilla Says:
    November 27th, 2005 at 2:47 pm So, not to be a bit too probing here but this is all about the fact that you like Parsons, the commenter did not, right?At the risk of saying ‘Screw Em’ I’d say that anyone who finds instrumental Parson’s as being anything other *than* appropriate should consider surgical removal of the posterior lumber. People with this kind of ‘musical absolutism’ need to be patted on the head and told to carry on with whatever it was they were doing.As to your clever deviation from the comments to the point you wanted to make…not bad. The segue was a bit blunt however…you should have said that your suspicion about this person’s sense of humour lead you to a consideration about how Sci-Fi readers also have a tendency to be dour and treat their fiction of choice as Holy scripture. Bear in mind this is actually true of almost all ‘genres’ with the proponents often slavishly devoted to the worthiness of their faves. Sadly Sci-Fi has been saddled with certain preconceptions (some well founded) because it has had such an (relatively) obvious inception and stylistic baggage for 50 years. Anyone whose read the likes of Neal Stephenson or Spider Robinson or even the reasonably dour William Gibson know that funny and Sci-Fi co-exist quite nicely. One of the more telling considerations is that alot of people like Forward or Benford or Clarke *really are* Science geeks and when they are caught up in getting across an idea (or neat Sci-Fi concepts) there simply isn’t too much room in the computational facility to factor in humour (and even if they did it would likely be terrible ‘geek’ humour).I personally, have doubts about how Sawyer’s use of statistics regarding the steady decline of Sciffy Magazines translates into the death knell of the genre. It seems to me that those statistics point to the decline of Sci-Fi Mags faced with a different publishing environment that I suspect is more inimical to the survival of razorthin margined business like Analog and company. I’d like to see some stats about Sci-Fi novel sales and *then* make some kind of judgement or forecast.
  • AndrewC Says:
    November 28th, 2005 at 8:02 am Hey, no matter what people say SciFi is and can be boring. It’s trying to be a mature genre now, its grown up and can’t be silly. Heinlen, used humour, but if you look at his early hard scifi, its so serious and technical but with a quirky kid side … it was designed for kids. SciFi publishers think because the audience has grown up that it needs to be a grown up medium. China Melville is dark, creepy and kind of funny in a way. Tanya Huff has a quirky side. If you look at authors they leave the humor out of SciFi and put it into their Fantasy/Alt History work. I’m not saying that SciFi is no good, its just that humour is just not part of the style right now.

    • Joe Mahoney Says:
    November 28th, 2005 at 8:43 am Thanks for the input, one and all. John, sorry about the doc, for future reference it was streamed at www.cbc.caI should mention that Paul Darcy (who posted above) is a writer of some good funny SF (as well as some extremely creepy SF) and many of his stories are posted on his website, which you can link to from my main page.Grondzilla: I’ll work on my segues

    Lynda Williams Says:
    December 2nd, 2005 at 10:33 am Ah, yes. We want to be edgy, original, visionary outsiders — but hey, we want to get invited to the establishment status-fests, too. Damn it! Your point about the academic realm also struck a chord, Joe.

    Squire Says:
    January 14th, 2006 at 4:26 pm Nice article

  • Joe Mahoney Says:
    January 14th, 2006 at 8:14 pm Thanks Squire, and Lynda.
    •