CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS.
There, that ought to get your attention. Actually, this is a Request For Proposals, or if you prefer, Pitches. As we work to reanimate Stupefying Stories, one thing I’ve been pleased with and would like to develop further has been Guy Stewart’s series of non-fiction posts on topics like Creating Alien Aliens and Mining the Asteroids and the like. For as long as I’ve been in this business—and that’s been nearly 50 years now—science fiction has always claimed to be “the literature of ideas.” It purports to be the one field of literary endeavor that is unafraid to examine the big ideas about science and the future of humanity, to ask the questions no one else dares to ask, to present the most dangerous visions, to boldly go—
When I look at what’s being published, though, the genre as a whole seems to come up way short of its stated ambition. (And don’t even get me started on the evident paucity of imagination in video-media SF.) Considered more dispassionately, print-media science fiction might more honestly be described as “the literature of tropes,” stuck in a ±40-year time loop between the Astounding of the late 1930s and the Asimov’s of the early 1980s, churning back and forth through the same old ideas with only very slight variations with each new iteration. Robots, aliens, space ships, utopia, dystopia, more robots, weirder aliens, better spaceships, lather, rinse, repeat… Except for steampunk, which began as a Great Leap Backward to reboot the genre all over again with Jules Verne but ended up producing only another tired and clichéd fashion motif for cosplayers.
As it happens, in addition to science fiction, I also read Science News. And the further we progress into the real future while simultaneously retrogressing back to John Campbell in our entertainment, the more it bothers me that the gap between science fiction writers and real science is becoming an unbridgeable chasm.
Perhaps this is a stupid idea. Perhaps the denizens of SF fandom will be happier, and thus we will be better paid for our work, if we stick to recapitulating ideas that were already old when they were adapted to become Star Trek scripts in the 1960s. Another dispassionate look at the realities of the current SF marketplace would seem to support that assertion. But seriously, is this all modern science fiction has to offer? Remakes of what was successful in the past, only with slight variations to suit the conceits of the contemporary audience?
Hence this RFP. I would like to start running a weekly series of short* but fairly serious think pieces examining the conceits and assumptions that underlie our genre, with an eye towards what still works, what desperately needs to be updated or replaced, and which honored old tropes of the genre should be taken out to the edge of the camp, shot, beheaded, their corpses burned, and the ashes buried in unmarked graves, to ensure that they never rise to trouble the living again.
Does this sound like something you’d like to be a part of? I’m not looking for finished articles now, just pitches for what you might like to write about. If you have an idea, drop me a line at stupefyingstories@gmail.com. Target length and payment rates are TBD at present, as I’m still trying to gauge the level of interest in this concept.
Introspection is a scary thing, I know, but I sure hope there is more to this genre than the same old $#!+. I don’t want to be publishing stories about @#*($&*ing crashed flying saucers forever. Even if the USAF is shooting down UFOs over Lake Huron right now.
* Target length is a real issue. While I’m inclined to equate serious thinking with longer articles, here in ADHD World, anything over 250 words long seems to seriously tax the readers’ attention span. Is that also part of the problem? Modern readers can’t stay focused long enough for the writer to develop a new idea and a coherent argument, so we skip to recycling old tropes and writing in cinematic shorthand? E.g.,
[EXTERIOR, DAYLIGHT, BLUE SKY, SCATTERED CLOUDS: An F-22 Raptor sweeps into view. Zoom in on the pilot, USAF Captain Melissa Strongwill (she/her), who is intently staring ahead. Cut to 3/4 view from behind her, showing what she's seeing.]
STRONGWILL: I have a solid radar lock.
CONTROL: (crackly voice over radio) Weapons free. You are cleared to engage.
STRONGWILL: Fox One!
[Missile streaks out from F-22, impacts briefly glimpsed octagonal UFO, big explosion, UFO veers down and right, trailing smoke and obviously out of control.]
STRONGWILL: Got it! The target is going down! Repeat, the target is going down!
CONTROL: That’s confirmed. We’re tracking it. It’s going to splash about ten miles offshore. The Coast Guard has been alerted.
[etc., etc., proceed with Standard Plot #7. UFO crashes, sole occupant is rescued and imprisoned in secure facility, STRONGWILL is brought in to meet and interview alien, comes to realize that this was all a terrible mistake, the alien is humanoid, intelligent, peaceful, ambiguously gendered but very beautiful in an exotic way, STRONGWILL helps alien escape, engages in a mix of fish-out-of-water comedy, rom-com misunderstandings, chase scenes with menacing men-in-black type agents, in thrilling final reel chase scene helps alien make rendezvous with rescue craft and escape in the nick of time, and is left standing in a wheat field, pining for the hermaphroditic pansexual alien who has won her heart and opened her mind, while the MIB agents watch helplessly as the craft soars away.]
AGENT: (talking into radio) The alien got away. (radio garble) Captain Strongwill? Yes, we caught her.
STRONGWILL: (turns around to face agent) (in voice that's almost a growl) My pronouns... are they and them.
[MUSIC UP: David Bowie, "Starman"]
[ROLL CREDITS]
C’mon, admit it. Haven’t you already paid to see this movie at least three times? Wouldn’t you pay to see it again, if this time the script played up the alien’s gender fluidity and wry amusement at “primitive” human sexual morality?
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