Star Wars on Trial (31 page)

SF-y'know, the genre that includes fantasy. I have no idea how low the sales would be if we were only talking about science fiction all by its little ole self.

SF is committing the common sin of a dying literary genre. It blames its problems on the outsiders-the tie-in novels, and by extension, the barbarians at the gate-who are crowding the shelves and taking away space for "good" sf.

"Good" sf can retire to the specialty press where the Science Fiction Village can read and discuss it. It's time to return to the goshwow, sense-of-wonder stories that sf abandoned when it added literary values to its mix, the kind of stories that Star Wars, and by extension, Star Trek, Stargate and all those other media properties have had all along.'

SF's insularity is murdering the genre. Remember that publishing is a business. As a business, it is driven by sales figures, by profit and loss statements. For too long, sf has been in the loss side of the publishing column. As a result, fewer and fewer sf books are being published.

The figures I quoted above for 2004 are down from 2003. In that year, SF counted for 7% of all adult fiction books sold. In 2001, SF counted for 8%. The literary trend spirals downward while the media trend goes up. Half the new television dramas introduced in 2005 were science fiction or fantasy, or had a fantastic element. Most of the movies in the top twenty for the past five years have been SE Nearly all of the games published have been SE

If we bring even one-tenth of the people who play the games, watch the movies or read the tie-in novels into the literary side of SF, we'll revive the genre. In a few years, we could overtake mystery or even, God forbid, romance.

Let's put it another way. When Star Wars fans go to the bookstore like I did thirty years ago, they buy the latest novelization. Then they patrol the aisles for something similar-and find nothing. The books that would interest them are hidden between the jargon-filled limited-access novels that fill the shelves, behind the dystopian novels that present a world uglier than our own, the protagonists who really don't care about their fellow man/alien/whatever. A few attempts at reading that kind of book, and the SW reader returns to the tie-in shelf where the heroes are indeed heroic, the worlds are interesting and the endings are upbeat.

Recently, Publishers Weekly interviewed six sf specialty shops across the country, and asked their proprietors which books they consider must-haves. Not a single science fiction book on the lists has been published in the last five years. Fantasy novels include books published recently, but not sf.9

Science fiction, small case, is not producing novels that a large group of people want to read. And that spells the death knell for the literary genre at a time when, ironically, interest in SF is expanding.

Fantasy will take care of itself. It has kept the tropes that bring in readers. It is a growing genre. The statistics I list above do not include young adult novels, which means that the Harry Potter phenomenon is missing from the 6.4%. But the gaming novels, movie novelizations or original novels written in a media universe (like the Star Wars novels) are included in that number. Which means that the actual percentage of SF books in relation to other adult fiction titles sold is even lower than 6.4%. Significantly lower.

The literary genre, on whom we modeled this debacle, saw the error of its ways about five years ago. Now, you'll notice, literary fiction has become general fiction (see above) and publishes things sf sneers at-alternate histories set in World War II (Philip Roth, The Plot Against America) ; time travel novels (anything by Jasper Fforde) ; and scientific adventure fiction (anything by Michael Crichton). The literary genre has also reclaimed plot. Or, as Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Chabon (author of the first-draft screenplay for Spiderman 2) calls it, entertainment.

In his opening to The Best American Short Stories, Chabon writes:

Entertainment has a bad name. Serious people, some of whom write short stories, learn to mistrust and even revile it. The word wears spandex, pasties, a leisure-suit studded with blinking lights. It gives off a whiff of Coppertone and dripping Creamsicle, the fake-butter miasma of a moviehouse lobby.... Intelligent people must keep a certain distance from its productions. They must handle things that entertain them with gloves of irony and postmodern tongs. Entertainment, in short, means junk, and too much junk is bad for you....

Chabon goes on to say that those serious and intelligent people are wrong. Because they have strangled entertainment in the literary field, the field has narrowed unpleasantly. He continues:

The brain is an organ of entertainment, sensitive at any depth and over a wide spectrum. But we have learned to mistrust and despise our human aptitude for being entertained, and in that sense we get the entertainment we deserve.'o

Chabon's argument applies to the sf genre. We have gotten the entertainment we deserve, and it is slowly strangling the publishing arm of our great genre. Is current SF writing influenced by Star Wars? No, not nearly enough. We need more grand adventure, more heroes on journeys, more uplifting (if not downright happy) endings. Yes, we can keep the good sentence-by-sentence writing, the good characters and the lovely descriptions the New Wave steered us to. We can even keep the dystopian fiction and the realistic, if difficult-to-read, sf novels, so long as we do them in moderation. They cannot-and should not-be the dominant subgenre on the shelves.

Are tie-in novels taking shelf space away from SF? Hell, no. The tie-ins, from SW to Trek and beyond, are keeping SF alive. If we, the sf writers and publishers, want more shelf space, we have to earn it. We earn it by telling stories, some of them old faithfuls that the fans like to read, the things that have been published before. We earn it by entertaining. We earn it by creating characters as memorable as Luke and Han and Darth Vader.

We don't earn it by whining that a movie has encroached on our genre. Barbarians are taking over our little village!

Well, let me remind you of the things I said in the beginning of this essay. I am a barbarian in villager's clothing. I snuck into the SF Village long ago, but I sneak back out every night for a little forbidden entertainment.

Open the gates, people. We barbarians aren't here to trash your genre. We love it too. We love it for different reasons. But the village can become a city.

In fact, it needs to become a city in order to survive. So let us in. We can save the SF genre.

We're the only ones who can.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch is a best-selling novelist who has written a Star Wars novel. She's also an award-winning editor and writer, with two Hugos and a World Fantasy Award, as well as many other awards in science fiction, fantasy, romance and mystery Her most recent science fiction novel is Buried Deep. Her next is Paloma, which will appear in October. Under the name Kris Nelscott, she has just published the sixth book in her critically acclaimed Smokey Dalton series, Days of Rage. Her works have appeared in fourteen countries and thirteen languages.

THE COURTROOM

DROID JUDGE: Mr. Brin, you may call any of the three Defense witnesses to the stand.

DAVID BRIN: I'd like to thank these three witnesses for their thoughtful testimony. I have no need to cross-examine.

Speaking only for myself, I must say that I do not blame Star Wars in any central way for the decline of high-quality literary science fiction. A far bigger culprit would be projects like this one, which, over the last few years, have lured me to spend time that I might otherwise have devoted to my latest novel!

Indeed, I have little complaint over movie-book tie-ins. I know that some of the authors of Star Wars novelizations have striven hard to insert bits of actual plot logic, going to creative-even heroic-lengths to find logical explanations for fundamentally illogical events. If George Lucas had asked any of this coterie of writers to help with the later scripts, well ... just note that one movie had a pro involved-Leigh Brackett in TESB-and that film remains the favorite of nearly everybody, from highbrow to low.

Moreover, tie-in novels do encourage reading! They encourage reading of adventure stories in the right part of the bookstore ... though not the right portions of the shelf. For, without any doubt, this is all part of the boom of fantasy and the decline of SF.

I think there are "forces" at work here that are much darker than Star Wars. Something is pulling us back toward the way of life that we had almost escaped. Toward feudalism and king-worship and kowtowing to priests and gurus. Toward a steady decline in confidence. In each other. In our civilization. In democracy. In science. And in ourselves.

No, if Star Wars has damaged the power of science fiction as a genre, it is only a small player in a larger trend. For this reason, the Prosecution accepts the case that these fine witnesses presented today. We move for dismissal of this charge.

MATTHEW WOODRING STOVER: For once I agree with the Prosecution. Dismiss this charge.

DROID JUDGE: No, all the testimony on this charge was compelling, including that of Prosecution witness Lou Anders. I'm going to let the charge stand and let the jury decide.