The future is now

WITH FILMS such as Avatar, Star Trekand Iron Man 2all doing well at the box office, and shows such as Doctor Who, Life On Mars, Battlestar Galacticaand Lostattracting respectable audiences on TV and DVD, there's no question that the general public has an appetite for visual science fiction and fantasy. Printed science fiction and fantasy, on the other hand, has traditionally been less fortunate. For years, it has had to struggle hard to transcend its pulp roots and be taken seriously as a genre of literature.

In the past, some publishers have even gone so far as to remove all mention of the genre from their books in order to market them as “respectable mainstream literature”. Recent books by Cormac McCarthy, Audrey Niffenegger, Nick Harkaway, Jeanette Winterson and Margaret Atwood have all been published as mainstream fiction, despite being built around science fiction tropes such as the end of the world, genetic engineering and time travel.

Now though, all that appears to be changing.

While there are still those who patrol and defend both sides of the divide between genre fiction and the mainstream, taking pot shots at anyone daring to cross over, the signs are that the boundaries are becoming increasingly porous, and that smart, critically-acclaimed contemporary genre fiction is being produced by a new generation of unapologetically science fictional writers.

Last year, Chris Beckett's collection The Turing Testwon the mainstream Edge Hill Prize for short fiction, despite containing stories about robots, alien planets, genetic manipulation and virtual reality; and Californian writer Kim Stanley Robinson, winner of Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards and author of the bestselling Marstrilogy, criticised the Booker judges for ignoring science fiction, which he described as "the best British literature of our time".

In October, China Mieville, winner of this year’s Arthur C Clarke Award for best science fiction novel, will be guest director at the Cheltenham Literary Festival. Last month I had the pleasure of attending the Arthur C Clarke Award ceremony in London to see Mieville accept the award for a record-breaking third time. In his acceptance speech, Mieville defended science fiction readers from mainstream distain, saying: “Science fiction readers are among the most critical. They combine an extraordinary generosity with an extraordinarily rigorous critique in a way I don’t see among many other readers.”

Mieville's winning book, The City And The City, incorporates elements of science fiction, fantasy and allegory into what is essentially a police procedural set in an unusual locale. The prose and dialogue are inventive and atmospheric and the underlying concept – that two cities can occupy the same geographical location without ever interacting with each other – is played out convincingly despite its seeming implausibility.

Mieville wasn’t alone on the award shortlist. This year’s six shortlisted titles were selected from some 41 eligible submissions put forward by 17 publishing houses and imprints, demonstrating that the science fiction and fantasy genres are alive and well.

Indeed, with so many excellent British and Irish writers now working in the field, you could almost say the genres are experiencing a golden age.

There are almost as many flourishing sub-genres as there are authors writing. The books on the Clarke Award shortlist ranged from the alternate Soviet history of Adam Roberts's Yellow Blue Tibia, via Gwyneth Jones's fantasy adventure Spirit, and the fictionalised biography of Galileo's Dreamby Kim Stanley Robinson, to the swashbuckling airship piracy of Chris Wooding's Retribution Falls.

If you’re new to science fiction, this diversity can be a little off-putting. Steampunk, cyberpunk, alternate history, urban fantasy, space opera . . . where to start? The best advice I can give is that if you have friends who are already lifelong fans of the genre, you should ignore their recommendations.

They will be tempted to shower you with the books they enjoyed when they first started reading science fiction, way back when. This is not a good idea. Don’t start with the classics by Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, etc.

In most cases, the science, technology, sociology and sexual politics have all dated so badly you’ll end up throwing the book aside in disgust. Better, I think, to start with something modern, something with which you can feel an instant connection. To this end, I’ve put together a list of five books from the last five years (see panel, right), all of which manage to combine science-fiction tropes and themes with modern storytelling techniques and sensibilities.

In much the same way as the TV shows Life on Marsand the new Battlestar Galacticaattracted non-sci-fi audiences through their gritty storylines and examination of contemporary issues such as terrorism and freedom, so these books may appeal to people who wouldn't normally expect to enjoy a sci-fi novel.

These five books are my personal choice, and they represent only the tip of the iceberg. There are hundreds of other original, well-written science fiction and fantasy books out there, any of which could have made it onto this list.

So finally, why should you pick any of them up? Why should you be reading science fiction and fantasy? It’s a common misconception that science fiction writers try to predict the future in their stories. But accurately predicting the future is extremely difficult. Instead, what we try to do is to dream up plausible futures by extrapolating sociological and technological trends, and use those futures as a means of commenting on the world we see around us today. We imagine good futures and bad futures, utopias and dystopias, and explore them through the eyes of the characters in our books. We get to put ourselves in their place and live through them. In this respect, science fiction is useful as a tool, not for predicting the future, but for instead modelling a vast range of possible futures. As our society develops and changes, science fiction is there to show us what will happen if we continue along our current path.

AS SCIENCE FICTION writers, we put a lot of serious thought into the futures we construct. It's a game we play, and we like to be as plausible as possible; but the truth is, we simply do not know what will happen. We're not trying to make accurate predictions. For me, the most important function of science fiction is the way it encourages us to think about what it means to be human. Consider Winston in George Orwell's 1984, or the narrator in HG Wells' War Of The Worlds, or Robert Neville in Richard Matheson's I am Legend. There you have three fairly ordinary men thrust into unwelcome and dangerous futures. By following them, we get to vicariously experience their plights as their worlds are turned upside down and they lose – or come close to losing – everything they've ever cared about. We read those books and we wonder: "What would I do?" And when we've finished reading them, we feel as if we've lived the adventure along with the main characters. We have some inkling what it would be like to live in their worlds, and therefore gain a fresh perspective on our own.

This is the science fiction writer’s job: to comment on our world by changing it; to show us our reflections in a distorted mirror. If you refuse to read a book simply on the grounds that it might contain some speculative or fantastical elements, you could find yourself missing out on some of our most inventive and excitingly contemporary literature.

Gareth L Powell is the author of the novel Silversands(Pendragon Press, 2010) and The Last Reef And Other Stories(Elastic Press, 2008)

SCI-FI FOR STARTERS: FIVE NOVELS FROM THE PAST FIVE YEARS

9Tail Fox

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood (Gollancz), 2006.

For viewers of Life on Marsand The Wire, this is an intriguing blend of crime drama and medical speculation, in which Sergeant Bobby Zha of the San Francisco PD has to work out not only who murdered him, but also why heüs woken up in the body of a coma patient from New York.

Brasyl

by Ian MacDonald (Gollancz), 2007.

MacDonald paints Brazil as a vibrant, chaotic space rich with history and standing on the threshold of a thousand possible futures. The ideas and action come thick and fast, as the complex three-stranded plot braids together the fates of an ambitious reality TV producer in contemporary Rio, an 18thcentury Jesuit priest, and a man coming to terms with quantum computing in Sao Paulo in 2032.

Moxyland

By Lauren Beukes (Angry Robot), 2009.

Part-satire, part-stark warning, Moxylandis set in South Africa, only a stoneüs throw into the future, in a society where the difference between employment and unemployment can also be the difference between life and death; where the greatest punishment is to have your mobile phone disconnected; advertisers pay you to become addicted to their products; and the government monitors every move you make.

Nova Swing

By M John Harrison (Gollancz), 2007.

A generation ago, part of the mysterious Kefahuchi Tract fell to earth in the coastal city of Saudade. Now, years later, Vic Serotonin makes his living guiding tourists into the event site Ÿ a place where the laws of geometry and causality have assumed a dream-like elasticity. To Vic, the event site is a puzzle and an obsession Ÿ one that literally spills over into the external world when he illegally smuggles an unstable artefact out of the zone.

Black Man

By Richard Morgan (Gollancz), 2006.

Ostensibly an adrenaline-fuelled crime thriller, Black Manis also an extended meditation on the nature of masculinity. Set a century hence, at a time when the United States has fractured along religious lines, the story isnüt afraid to take a long look at the historical role of the strong alpha male, and ask whether civilised society can still afford to indulge them.