"06 - The Future of Science Fiction by Norman Spinrad" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nebula Awards)

For one thing, it means that science fiction is moving to the center of popular consciousness, or perhaps more precisely, popular consciousness is moving to where science fiction has always been, and for reasons that transcend a few hit films, a ton of hype, and the new spate of large advances for novels.
And that is why I am convinced that the bubble will not burst this time. Of course, inevitably, some super expensive

science-fiction films will flop at the box office, and some science-fiction novels will not earn their overgenerous advances. There will be dips and skips in the curve, but it will continue upwards. Science-fiction writers will at last get what they have longed for for two generations-the opportunity to get rich within the parameters of the genre, a potential vast new audience, a central role in popular culture, perhaps ultimately even literary respectability, whatever that may still mean in an era where science fiction itself will become perhaps the dominant fictional mode.
Two and a half cheers, please!
For, of course, there is a Catch-22; and some people are not going to like it, while others who do like it may in the end find their karma in jeopardy. The ghetto walls are coming down, dismantled not from within but from without. The new readership does not represent an expansion of science-fiction fandom. The hit science-fiction films are not being scripted, for the most part, by members of the SFWA club. People like Gore Vidal, Len Deighton, and Paddy Chayevsky are writing the stuff. Certain editors of low-paying sf novel lines are wishfully predicting the end of the boom because the major-league advances are making it hard for them to buy decent books at their customary bush-league prices. Bob Gucci one, mastermind. of Omni, a new mutant magazine with ten times the circulation of any previous sf-oriented magazine, never was a member of the tribe, and that too has been a cause for grumbling.
In the future, in the near future, indeed, to some extent in the present, science fiction will no longer be the preserve of the people-writers and readers-who are deeply rooted in the history, subculture, and community within those cozy ghetto walls.
We-,and we all know who we mean by we, don't we-no longer "own" the subject matter of science fiction. We never really did, but as long as the mundane world saw no great profit, commercial or artistic, to be reaped from our little field, we could clutch our poverty to our breasts like impoverished White Russian noblemen, warmed by the illusion of the secret knowledge cherished and preserved by We Chosen Few.
Now, however, science fiction is becoming big business, culturally central, and even politically significant. Science fiction is becoming part-and perhaps ultimately a dominant part-of the mainstream of popular and literary culture. It will never be a quiet little backwater again.
The golden opportunity for fame, fortune, and general cultural esteem now presents itself to all of us, but we're playing in the big leagues now, and it remains to be seen how many of our minor-league stars will be able to hit a major-league curveball. Soon calling oneself a science-fiction writer will be neither a profession of literary uniqueness nor a passport to judgment by relaxed standards, not when larger cultural forces are taking science-fiction writers out of the literary work force at large.
But in the short and medium term we are going to find ourselves in a somewhat unique and morally dangerous position, a position that some of us have had a taste of previously, with ambivalent results-we are prime candidates for guruhood on the current turn of the Great Wheel.
As fossil fuels run out and people are forced to face the fact that the future is not going to be like the present, as our fictional visions become objects of wishful worship, as we become prime guests for television talk shows, coveted allies of the space lobby, and trendy seers, we will be tempted, individually and collectively, to use our newfound prominence to mold reality closer to our hearts' desires. Several years ago, Michel Butor seriously suggested that science fiction writers get together, decide what the future should be like, and by setting their stories and novels in this collective utopia, call this millennium into being. It was a silly idea then, but it seems a little less fanciful now.
If we ever start to take it seriously, then we and the world are in trouble. Make no mistake about it, the temptation will be there. Let us hope we will not forget that propaganda is the death of art; let us hope that unlike Caesar, we will be able to turn down the crown proffered to us by the masses with sincerity, and if not with 'smarmy humility, then at least with the saving grace of a sense of humor.