The Future of the Writing Business, Part 2 • by Bruce Bethke

 

We science fiction folk do love our end-of-the-world scenarios. Be it from an alien invasion, a new plague, an astronomical catastrophe, a nuclear war, an ecological disaster, or what the heck, an enormous mutant star-goat, the history of our genre is just one deity-free apocalypse after another. 

Why? 

Perhaps it’s from simple failure of imagination. It’s too hard to imagine a better future that develops in a reasonably linear manner from the present (at least, not one that doesn’t look suspiciously like a Star Trek spinoff series), so let’s wipe the chalkboard clean and start over. 

Perhaps it’s even from genuine misanthropy. SF fans and writers in general tend to be an antisocial lot, dissatisfied with our civilization as it currently stands and unable to imagine any way to improve their own personal place in it, so this personal frustration sometimes expresses itself as a desire to take a wrecking ball to the whole damned thing and level it. The virtue of a science fiction apocalypse being, of course, that being secular and thus not truly the eschaton, it affords the opportunity for a post-apocalyptic world: one in which readers can readily imagine themselves—well, their idealized thinner, stronger, and less clumsy selves, anyway—to be surviving, thriving, and one of the smartest people in the world, because they are one of the elect who read science fiction.

[In Footfall Pournelle and Niven even went so far as to give the government an advisory panel of thinly disguised real science fiction writers (e.g., “Nat Reynolds,” “Wade Curtis,” and “Bob Anson”), who basically spent the novel drinking booze in a hot tub and coming up with a brilliant plan to defeat the alien invaders. It takes some real chutzpah to write yourself into a novel as your own pseudonym. Niven and Pournelle won both a Hugo and a Locus award for the damned 500-page brick and it was a NY Times #1 bestseller. This says something about science fiction fans, and it’s probably not something good.]

For being people who talk such a good game about “following the science” and all that, though, we science fiction writers don’t seem to understand that science applies to us, too. Instead, we’re frequently and easily panicked. Not only do we tend to embrace the apocalyptic vision d’jour when we write our fiction—and if I see one more “global warming” disaster story I may vomit—but we are too often all too eager to embrace the idea that the advent of this new thing means THE END OF THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY AS WE KNOW IT!

Really, really, seriously, this time!

Thus with AI story generators. 

One of the few advantages of being my age is that I’ve been able to watch the SF publishing business go through several boom and bust cycles. SF publishing is always going through boom and bust cycles. Yes, Hugo Gernsback invented the term science fiction in the 1920s and founded Amazing Stories, the world’s first SF magazine, but he went bankrupt doing so. The publishing landscape is always changing, as new technologies emerge, literary fashions come and go, and new outlets for a writer’s work are born, mature, and die.

What does this have to do with real science?

I want you to think in terms of evolutionary pressure. The AI story generators are coming. They are going to get better. The question is, are you going to be inflexible and stick to doing things exactly as you do them now, and watching your sales and markets slowly dwindle? Or are you going find a way to adapt, and perhaps even to thrive?

As you’ve probably guessed, I think SF fans as a whole are not a terribly discerning lot. I have spent my entire writing career producing work based on the assumption that my readers are at least as intelligent as I am, and then getting slapped in the face with something like Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045 and realizing, nope. Got that wrong. The temptation to become bitter and cynical is always present. I have watched writers I’ve known and really respected succumb to it. Too often, the result is a body of work that increasingly panders shamelessly to the fans’ conceits and tries to go as low, simple, and stupid as it can.

I think it finally took my becoming a grandfather to realize: it’s not the fans’ fault.

Discernment is something it takes time to develop. There is only one thing that will truly kill the SF publishing industry, and that is if we fail to bring newer, younger, and less discerning readers into the audience and give them the time to mature and become more intelligent and discerning readers. The world is not making any more SF readers my age. We lost two whole generations of potential readers to video games, because the video games provided the kind of vicarious heroic experience that boys of a certain age crave and the existing publishers stopped providing in printed fiction.

This is not a call for you to start writing this kind of fiction. It’s a warning. This is one of the types of fiction that AI story generators will conquer first, because the tropes are well-defined, the concepts simple, and the audience both undiscerning and starved for content. If it could be novelization of a video game storyboard, or an anime film, or an episode of Rocky Jones, Space Ranger, it will be AI-generated fiction.

Likewise for Imitation Tolkien. Likewise for media tie-in work. Likewise for much direct-to-Kindle paranormal romance. Our genre already abounds in formulaic and indifferently written hackwork. AIs will be able to produce this just as well and a lot faster and cheaper than humans can. If it follows a formula or is satisfied with executing a trope faithfully, it will be done by AI.

Some will find success by becoming bot-herders, and directing AIs to produce work. There already are sweatshops full of unemployed Creative Writing MFAs who sit on their butts all day, pounding out romance novels to be published under corporate pseudonyms. These people are all candidates to be replaced, and soon. The people they work for will no doubt continue to thrive, as management generally does when they replace skilled tradespeople with machines. 

It’s going to be a bad time to be merely a competent writer, content to work the tropes. “Good enough” is not going to be good enough for much longer.

On the other hand, it’s going to be a great time to be an aspirational writer. AI is not going to replace the Neil Gaimans, William Gibsons, or Charlaine Harrises of the world any time soon. If you can bring something new and different to your readers—if you can establish a sense of a direct and personal relationship with your fans—if you can establish yourself as the unquestioned master of your particular and unique brand of fiction—

Then this is going to be a great time to be a writer, because there will be so much AI-written drivel out there for you to rise above. 

Don’t hold back! Don’t settle for mediocrity! Show your unique genius! Shine!

______________________

And here we are, at the end of the time I allotted for writing today and I still haven’t gotten to the coming onslaught of the AI censorbots. Guess that gives me a topic for tomorrow.

______________________

Footnote:

I exhumed SS#11 from the vault in order to use the cover art for this post, but once I looked at the introduction I wrote for that book, I had to repeat it here.  

From the Editor’s Desk
By Bruce Bethke

Hard to believe that it’s December 2012 already. Depending on who you listen to we only have about three weeks left before the world ends, either from magnetic pole reversal, crossing the galactic ecliptic, the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, a collision with Planet X, global warming, global cooling, the return of Quetzalcoatl, President Obama and Speaker of the House Boehner joining hands, flooring it, and going full Thelma & Louise off the edge of the fiscal cliff, or the regrettable and wholly inexplicable failure of the Ancient Mayans to invent the perpetual calendar.

In any case, as we were putting together STUPEFYING STORIES 1.11 we thought: what better way to go out with a bang than with ten stories exploring the imminent eschaton, and what might come after? 

So that’s what we’re serving up this time out. Following Jon David’s delightful little introductory story, “We Talk Like Gods”—which, if January 2013 does somehow manage to arrive, will probably become our manifesto—we have ten great tales of the end of the world. From ecological catastrophes to alien invasions; from tyrannical central governments to unfettered cowboy capitalists; STUPEFYING STORIES 1.11—

It’s the end of the world, as we know it! And I feel fine.

Cheers,
Bruce Bethke
Editor, STUPEFYING STORIES

SS#11 is long since out of print and I can’t put it back into print, but I can distribute PDF review copies. So tell you what: if you subscribe or donate to the Support Stupefying Stories crowd-funding campaign in the next 72 hours, I’ll email you a PDF review copy of SS#11. 

Get it if only to read “The Relic,” by Lou Antonelli. Lou was a great talent and a good friend, and he left this world much too soon.   

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