Michael Capobianco Blows An Opportunity.
May. 20th, 2008 05:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsIn 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.
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.
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Date: 2008-05-21 03:39 am (UTC)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.