Michael Capobianco Blows An Opportunity.

[elfs]

In an article about The Sci-Fi Channel and it's own low-budget shows, Michael Capobianco blows a beautiful opportunity to pimp his own culture and instead grouses that "A lot of the shows on the Sci-Fi are watered down versions of the real thing."

Michael Capobianco is the president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, a curious position supposedly held by a current writer since his last book was ten years ago, and he's best known for Burster, his first book in 1990. I will admit to putting Burster down lightly, finding the characters totally uninteresting. (It didn't help that the first copy I found was accidentally spliced at the printer with pages from a biography of New Kids on the Block, making it a funny but unreadable mess.)

I don't know where Capobianco is coming from, but then I don't depend upon sales for my life. I think the whole argument from "Should we dumb down our product" implies that the SF-reading community is dumber than it was a decade ago, a proposition I completely reject, and that "smart" writers can't find an audience. The mythical battle between watchers and readers is a dichotomy with an invalid premise. (What do people make of the financial success of the Warhammer 40,000 novels? A kind of portable literary methadone until the fan can get home and plug in to his digital heroin?) Iain Banks, Charlie Stross, Peter Watts, Scott Westerfeld and Jay Lake, all very smart and very different writers, have found audiences they like, and none of them seem willing to sacrifice their intelligence on the altar of mass-market appeal. At the other end of the dial the fantasy erotica writers of Ellora's Cave and Samhain Press are clearly having a ball and making a little money on the side entertaining their readers with, let's face it, werewolf and vampire porn brain candy. And there's nothing wrong with the SF/F spectrum being big enough to encompass everything from Clute's Appleseed (not to mention Shirow's cyberpunk classic Appleseed and it's progeny like Adam Warren's Hypervelocity) all the way down to the giggle-inducing Torrid Tarot trilogy.

Certainly, part of this is the article writer taking quotes from a long interview, but this man supposedly speaks for a large block of the SF-writing community. He could have talked about the Sci-Fi channel as a springboard to the ideas of science fiction, or the slow spread of SF ideas into mainstream acceptability, or that the next ideas to blow the public's mind, like The Great Filter, The Simulation Menace, or the Technological Singularity, are just now becoming apparent even to writers. Instead, he sounds bitter, and sour grapes on our behalf is simply unbecoming.

Comments

[norikos-author.livejournal.com]

Well, frankly, from everything I've seen and heard from various writers, the SFWA leadership is a best dysfunctional and at worst actively hostile to fans who don't subscribe to an us-vs-them mentality or think that SF is in some sort of gutter it has to force its way out of.

[valarltd.livejournal.com]

Hey now, I write gay werewolf porn. (Last time around the porn got reduced to 2 small scenes and the rest was spent battling Lovecraftian cultists) 8) Some of us do try to keep our fantasy/sf/paranormal from going completely LKH, with varying degrees of success.

I'd like to see more SF writers talking about the way we are, or are not, approaching future-tech. As a professional driver, flying cars are very high on my DO NOT WANT list. Yet, Israel is developing a flying robot ambulance (http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/05/the-potential-o.html?npu=1&mbid=yhp).

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Hey, I write dragon porn! What more do you want?

[valarltd.livejournal.com]

Dragon porn is good. Dragons aren't the easiest thing to write. I'm percolating one now for Kerlak Press.

I'm editing on a cyberpunk sort of thing for Ellora.

They want me to change the title. They say "Burning for Eight Days" made them think of venereal disease.

[zvi-likes-tv.livejournal.com]

Is it a Hanukkah story?

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Oh, grief, that's such a brilliant question. Dragons. Oil. Dredls.

[valarltd.livejournal.com]

yep.
Hanukkah smut, to be precise.

I just got the cover yesterday.

[mundens.livejournal.com]

Heretic! Referring to The Truth as a Menace!! :)

I would point out that many of those you listed are not American science fiction writers, and at least one that is may well be considered a "fan writer" by the ASFWA. :)

I believe Warhammer and Warhammer 40K novel popularity is driven primarily by figure-gamers not computer-gamers. The reason they do well is that they are as good as any other generic action/adventure stories. Some of the British writers of the series are quite well respected for their own work, so some of the Black Library books are surprisingly well written.

Also the setting, developed over a couple of decades now, is exceedingly rich and detailed, and is one of the most developed sci-fi / fantasy environment in existence.

I have to admit I have often thought that there would be many opportunities for nasty and totally cannon Warhammer 40K porn, given the existence of creatures such as the daemonettes of Slaanesh, the leather-clad Death Cult assassins, the Inquisitors, and the "Sisters of Battle". Though even in the exisiting stories descriptions of chaos intrusions, or Tyrrannid raids often sound quite sexual

[elfs.livejournal.com]

See, now you make me want to go and actually read some of them. Someone abandoned "Volume Three of the Grey Legions!" in the jury deliberation room. Maybe I'll snag it.

[mundens.livejournal.com]

Hmm, not one I'm familiar with under that title I'm afraid. It's possible they are packaged and named completely differently for the US market.

I admit to a certain amount of trepidation here, it's always dangerous putting a creative mind in the presence of the Chaos Gods... :)

Actually there is a huge amount of stuff that is obviously derivative in their setting, especially if you've read Moorcockian fantasy, Olaf Stapledon, or stuff by C M Kornbluth and Judith Merril like Gunner Cade, but it's all different enough that Games Workshop can trade-mark the results.

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

The SFWA has suffered, over the past year or two, from an outbreak of high-grade stupidity, chiefly linked to the former Vice-President.

The current President is the guy who beat the idiot in the last election. Things could be far worse.

"We can own Sfi-Fi in the next 10 years."

[pandakahn.livejournal.com]

I agree that Michael Capobianco blew an opportunity, but I feel that the larger issue is that of the focus and perception espoused by the SCI-FI channel itself. The idea that they had to evolve into a a place that says we are about asking "what if?" is odd. I learned that sci-fi was about asking what iff before I knew that it was a genre with robots and clones and spaceships and aliens. Why did it take these guys so long?

I am worried that by working so hard to not be the network that picks up the rejects (that is how we got Stargate SG1 after all, to name one of many many shows...)they are going to not only become a network that is sci-fi in name only, but that they will dumb down and make bland much of what makes real science fiction as important as it is.

The idea that they believe that they can own the genre, and maybe I misunderstood that comment, is a sign of the mediocrity to come I fear.


MPK