Xenophobia
11 o'clock, August 25, 2004
Andrew O’Hehir noted that “the Dogme movement is best described as a system for making imitation Ingmar Bergman films.” The authors of the Mundane Manifesto cite Neuromancer and 1984 as influences; but what they’ve got reads, to me, like a system for writing imitation Kim Stanley Robinson novels.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that — even if I’m not a Robinson fan myself. Still . . . I can’t help but hear in the Manifesto a distorted echo of SF’s chronic mainstream envy. What makes this list of SF’s chronic “Stupidities” the right one — why twelve Stupidities, and not eleven or thirteen?
The Mundanes recognize this much themselves; the last entry in the list is “Continue at will.” But why not take it farther? Why not eliminate some of the other SF motifs that they explicitly embrace, like nano and VR — surely no less abused than parallel worlds or English-speaking aliens? Why not take it as far as mainstream’s New Puritans did, and shed “all improbable or unknowable speculation about the past or the future”?
Maybe it’s a matter of timing — maybe it’s that it comes at a point when I’ve just decided that, in my own writing, it’s time to try, for a while, SF without constraints. But in the end what the Mundane Manifesto mostly comes across as, to me, is a little amusing, and a little sad.
Still, some of them, undoubtedly, will eventually realize that writing the kind of honest, thoughtful, thought-provoking SF they want to write has much less to do with what they write about than they think it does.
In the mean time, I wish them luck.
(Via Notes from Coode Street.)
"maybe it’s that it comes at a point when I’ve just decided that, in my own writing, it’s time to try, for a while, SF without constraints"
Well said. I don't think the tropes they list--FTL, aliens--are always done well, but they're still things I like to toy around with, myself. Laziness is the enemy, in my opinion, not an unrestrained imagination.