Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler
7. What do you see as the future of science fiction (SF)?
Science fiction will go wherever its readers and its writers take it, wherever society takes it. As far as subject matter is concerned, it’s always been a more open genre than any other, and yet, ironically, it’s always been preceived as narrow, simplistic, and juvenile. People who don’t read SF are all too likely to imagine that there’s nothing more to the genre than what they see presented on-screen—a special effects fest ranging from Buck Rogers to Star Trek to Star Wars—with maybe X-Files on the side. There’s so much published SF that people who try to read a little are sadly likely to wind up reading something they don’t like or worse, something that confirms their worst suspicions. So, SF is likely to be judged by its worst elements. After all, there’s plenty of bad stuff out there. Inevitably, in any writing, fiction or nonfiction, there’s more bad stuff than good. The best method, by the way, for finding SF that you’ll like is to take a look at the end-of-the-year anthologies. The ones that come to mind right now are The Year’s Best Science Fiction, edited by Gardner Dozois, and the Nebula Awards series (several editors). And there is The Norton Book of Science Fiction, edited by Ursula K. Le Guin and Brian Attebery and The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, a big multivolume, multi-editor anthology that covers much of the history of science fiction. Books like these will at least give the new reader a chance to see what’s good out there. And most of the writers who have short stories in these anthologies have also written novels. There is, in spite of everything, a lot of good reading out there.
Good stories are good stories, no matter how they’re categorized.
Octavia E. Butler
Pasadena, California
May 1999
Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents