It’s becoming increasingly difficult finding science fiction that thrills me. This feels like a crisis of faith since I’ve been a lifelong science fiction reader. I keep asking myself: Is it me or science fiction?

One of the theories I’m working with suggests that I’ve just read too much science fiction. Either I’m old and jaded because I’ve read every variation on a science fictional theme, or I’ve pigged out on the genre for so long that I’m finally made myself sick. Another theory makes me wonder if I’ve just gotten too old and can’t believe in the far-out ideas of science fiction anymore. Aging has made me skeptical. One fear I have is it might be the Williamson effect. I had a friend that before he died lost interest in everything, but it took years, losing interest with the things he loved one by one.

Too disprove I’m infected the Williamson effect; I’ve been scrambling around trying to find a science fiction story that still thrills me. It’s getting harder and harder to find any science fiction story that turns me on. I still find other kinds of fiction thrilling, and I still get intellectually excited over nonfiction. That suggests it might not be the Williamson effect, but I’ve just used up science fiction.

After reading thousands and thousands of science fiction short stories and novels, which shouldn’t be a surprise. Can any genre be infinite in its appeal and scope? Science fiction has always been exciting because it offered ideas I never imagined. Now that I’m 72, it seems like current science fiction is just recycling older science fiction, and that’s getting tiring. And since I’ve lately been reading 19th and early 20th century science fiction, I’ve discovered that the Golden Age of science fiction from the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s used recycled science fiction concepts too, I’m starting to doubt there are any new science fictional concepts left to thrill me.

For years I’ve been depending on how a story was written to make a science fiction novel feel new and different. For example, The Hopkins Manuscript by R. C. Sherriff, a cozy catastrophe from 1939 charmed me because of its down-to-Earth storytelling. I remember reading Hyperion or Neuromancer when they came out, and how fresh they felt because of their prose style.

For several years I’ve been digging through forgotten authors and their works hoping to find something new and different that’s been neglected by time. For example, I just read Sex and the High Command by John Boyd. Boyd wrote eleven science fiction novels from 1968 to 1978, with the most successful being his first, The Last Starship from Earth. I found that novel tremendously exciting back in the 1960s, so I thought I’d try Sex and the High Command this week, to see if it could rekindle some science fictional thrills. It hasn’t.

Boyd based his story on the classical Greek play, Lysistrata, about Athenian women trying to end the Peloponnesian War by refusing to have sex with men. In Sex and the High Command, women of the world try to bring about world peace when they discover that an anti-aging face cream applied to their genitals rejuvenates their whole body, causes orgasms, and in some cases sets off parthenogenesis. It was later fashioned into a more convenient pill/suppository for widespread use. Women begin thinking they don’t need men, and other women feel this will give them the edge to take over world power and stop war.

The novel is told from the point of view of the panic men of the U.S. military, especially the high command and the White House. Their primary concern is getting laid. I feel this 1970 novel is meant to be a satire in the vein of Dr. Strangelove. The writing style seems inspired by Heinlein serious respect for the Navy blended with Eric Frank Russell’s spoofs on military hierarchy. Like Heinlein, Boyd had served in the Navy.

I tried hard, but Sex and the High Command never catches fire. Is it me, or is it the novel? I don’t know. I wished I had an audiobook edition with a great narrator. I felt Boyd’s prose should be hilarious, but my own inner reading voice just can’t do it justice. If it was produced by Stanley Kubrick, Sex and the High Command might be as funny as Dr. Strangelove.

This suggests another theory about my fading interest in science fiction. I’ve lost interest in science fiction before. The Cyberpunk movement rekindled it in the 1980s. And in 2002, joining Audible let me listen to science fiction, and that gave me twenty years of rediscovering all my old favorite science fiction. Maybe I’m in a down cycle, and after a fallow period, I’ll get back into the genre.

I don’t think so, though. Could Audible have just fueled twenty years of nostalgia for the genre that’s run its course? Getting old has been weird. I feel like I’m going through psychological changes that I never imagined when I was younger. Science fiction appears increasingly to me aimed at youthful minds, and my mind is getting too old for it.

But I have one last theory. The older I get the more I’m getting into the now. Each individual day seems more important. The past and future are becoming less important. The past is all about reconstruction, and the future is all about speculation. Both are abstractions. I have noticed that when I do like science fiction, it’s set closer to the present, like the film Leave the World Behind. One reason I read Sex and the High Command, is because it felt contemporary, although that was marred by pre-1960s attitudes toward women. Boyd was born in 1919.

I’ve discovered that science fiction set in the far future, or far away from Earth has much less appeal to me. Now that I think of it, all the reading I’m still excited with offers some kind of relevance to now. Maybe, this preoccupation with now has made me feel science fiction is irrelevant.

James Wallace Harris, 6/4/24

19 thoughts on “I’m Worried That I’ve Used Up Science Fiction”

  1. Hi, I haven’t responded in a while, but you touched on something that I’ve discovered about my own perspective of science fiction now that I’m older – stories set in the far future, far from earth have less appeal. At sixty-six, I find myself, more than ever before, gravitating to older sf. I just finished my third read of The War of the Worlds and have started on William Sloane’s To Walk by Night (1939, I think). And I’ve always been a big fan of the Golden Age. But I worry I may be burning out on the genre. And although I’ve recently tried a few science fiction “best sellers,” I haven’t found an author or a book that excites me, or even one I liked. Chances are, that’s just me.

    Maybe it’s time to change things up. Lined up next for me is James Michener’s Alaska or Herman Wouk’s War and Remembrance (I enjoyed the first, The Winds of War). Maybe I just need a break, a chance to whet my appetite for science fiction. Thanks for the ear, and for the comments. Russ

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    1. I reread THE WORLD OF THE WORLDS a few years ago and was impressed by how good it was. I’ve always wanted to read the two William Sloane books I keep seeing mentioned here and there. TO WALK THE NIGHT (1937) and THE EDGE OF RUNNING WATER (1939). However, they are horror and I seldom read that genre. On the other hand, they have quite a reputation for forgotten novels. NYRB Classics has reprinted both in one volume. I wish there were an audiobook edition, though.

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  2. I discovered the ClarkesWorld anthologies…marvellous..so set up for a year or so.And Allan Master’s “Top” series…hard SciFi Time and Space and A.I and Robots.

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  4. Maybe it is simply the fact that the future ain’t what it used to be. We’re (I’m 74) living in our future so we know that, now. And then there’s the fact that we haven’t much of future to look forward to these days, or perhaps more accurately stated, deal with. I was never the fan of SF you are, and I pretty much gave up on SF years ago as neither the old stuff that I enjoyed in my youth, or the new stuff held any appeal to me. I don’t miss it – there is so much to read outside of one genre. I doubt you will either, should you should decide to give it a rest.

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    1. I’m still excited about all kinds of books. I’m currently reading GOLDEN MULTITUDES: THE STORY OF BEST SELLERS IN THE UNITED STATES by Frank Luther Mott and THE SENTIMENTAL NOVEL IN AMERICA 1789-1860 by Herbert Ross Brown. Both books I’m finding endlessly fascinating. They have gotten me to reread PAMELA by Samuel Richardson. It’s considered the first English novel, and the first novel published in America. Ben Franklin printed it.

      I just started THE ORDER OF TIME by Carlo Rovelli which is mind blowing.

      I just have a life-long addiction to science fiction, and for some reason it’s lost its potency.

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      1. I’ll note those books. I’ve read a number of the books you’ve recommended, (I typed “including” at the end of the this line and for some reason the post went wonky until I deleted it and typed where you see it now. Strange.) Anyways, those books included The Signature of All Things and Lessons in Chemistry. Once I stopped looking for good SF books to read and just started looking for books to read, I’ve been reading a whole lot more books than I have for years.

        It seems clear to me from what you’ve written why it’s lost it potency – you’ve read it all now, many times, in many guises.

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  5. Hello James,

    I fear this might come across like a cheap pitch for my stuff, but I wrote my novels specifically for classic science fiction fans who increasingly struggle to find new material they like. My goal is to provide fresh content while maintaining a ‘classic’ tone and vibe. You might be an excellent judge to tell me if I succeeded.

    If you’d like to try one of my novels, I’d be happy to send you an ePub or mail a copy.

    Best wishes,

    Bert-Oliver Boehmer http://www.bertoliverboehmer.com

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  6. Interesting. Stanislaw Lem wrote an analysis back in the day where he reckoned that almost all of modern science fiction – with the notable exception of Philip K. Dick (to which I would add Samuel Delany and Roger Zelazny – are rehashes in one form or another of the stories of H.G. Wells. A quick survey of SF, especially 20th century stories, reveals some truth to this assertion.

    Yet at age 71 I find SF still holds my interest, notwithstanding that I have seriously diversified my reading into non-fiction, mainly history and science, and into related and unrelated fiction. I was reflecting a couple of days ago the difference between fiction and science fiction, and my conclusion was that there is sweet FA in the final analysis. Good stories rise on fall on the quality of their characters, their interactions with each other in the world they live in. Good writing is good writing regardless of the setting, and science fiction can no longer hide bad writing behind imaginative settings.

    To be more precise, all things being equal, I consider science fiction is the more difficult genre than so-called straight fiction as it frequently requires more world building and this is especially the case when it comes to space operas and epics such as the stories by (modern authors such as) Neal Asher, Alastair Reynolds, Iain Banks, Justina Robson, C.J. Cherryh, the James Corey duo, and so on. Having said that, all fiction is just that – fiction, so all of it requires some level of world building or invented settings.

    I must admit that the 21st century has me scratching around for new authors that interest me, especially since the revelations about the diddling occurring in the Hugo award process. Maybe real life has overtaken science fiction in many ways, for better or for worse. Who would have thought the left and right of politics in the West could become so inverted and that fascism has arisen from the “center” of politics, or that a senile old psychopath is in charge of the “free world”, or that dozens of genders is almost mandatory institutional creed or that the future is no longer American/Western… Or that a prolonged Cuban Missile Crisis 2.0 on steroids draws no more than a yawn from the collective consciousness because we’re not even aware it’s happening.

    The old chestnut of truth is stranger than fiction might be sinking its teeth into our collective asses.

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    1. I’ve also thought that too about H. G. Wells. I’ve still got a lot of Wells to read. But I’ve also been reading his contemporaries, and I find many science fictional themes that I thought originated in the 1940s or 1950s were being dealt with in the 1890s and early 1900s.

      I’m currently listening to AFTER LONDON by Richard Jefferies that came out in the 19th century. It’s amazing. It’s available on Project Gutenberg. The beginning reminds me of the nonfiction book, A WORLD WITHOUT US by Allan Weisman

      https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13944

      My current theory is that all the major science fiction concepts have been around for a very long time. I’m thinking of making a project to list them, and then create a timeline of how they were presented over the years. That means reading SF becomes academic to me, which is okay.

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  7. James: Maybe real life has overtaken science fiction in many ways … Who would have thought the left and right of politics in the West could become so inverted and that fascism has arisen from the “center” of politics, or that a senile old psychopath is in charge of the “free world”….

    Pohl and Kornbluth, for two. Leaving aside their obvious 1950s-era appurtenances, it’s interesting how many of the concerns of real-world 2024 are straight out of Gladiator At Law and The Space Merchants: environmental ‘collapse,’ Chicken Little, psychopathic gerontocrats, lawfare, merciless and totally corrupt intra-elite competition in the context of a government of financialized corporations by corporations for corporations, and so on.

    That aside, the future is in principle an infinitely renewable resource. So modern SF dealing with the novel prospects actually emerging in 21st science and technology and society — meaning, especially, those arising from the biogenetic sciences and the new physics — would be the real SF of today.

    Which in turn means the question of ‘using up science fiction’ has a lot to do with a reader’s tolerance for new SF that actually is SF, rather a recycling of the tropes that defined the old SF they read as a kid. For many readers, the new SF is going to be outside their comfort zone; they will have ‘used up science fiction.’

    Arguably, there’s not much real SF in any era. Still, authors who’ve struck me as moving SF on from the cyberpunks — who emerged forty years ago now, after all — are writers like Greg Egan, Paul McAuley, and Peter Watts. Alastair Reynolds can write this sort of stuff but hardly ever does, outside a few of his short fictions.

    PKD remains modern and a giant. Also, I’m noticing contemporary mainstream lit authors — who’ve grown up as knowledgeable about genre SF as you and I, after all — increasingly producing SF novels that are better than the SF genre publishers are producing. I’m thinking of the likes of Ned Beaumann’s Venomous Lumpsucker, Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, and Martin MacInnes’s In Ascension.

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    1. It’s funny you should mention PKD. When I’m tired of SF I can still read PKD. Earlier this year I read five of his novels. I’ve still got plenty of PKD in my TBR to keep me busy.

      I do think I’m less interested in some science fiction because I no longer believe in certain science fictional futures. Interstellar travel is too much like fantasy to me now. And, even though I’ve loved Mars my entire life and dreamed that we’d colonize it, I no longer care if we do or not.

      To me, here on Earth is where the future is the most interesting. Every day I watch YouTube videos about things happening around the world. It makes me think we’re living in a science fiction novel.

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  9. The trouble with blogs is finding or sorting through the posts to find a list of all that you’ve read. I say this because assumptions are a thing, and assumptions lead us all down paths make us look stupid.

    So, here I am about to make myself look stupid.

    Authors, old and new, which are always worth a re-read:

    Cordwainer Smith

    C J Cherryh

    Iain M Banks

    Lois McMaster-Bujold

    Eric Flint collaborations

    Niven & Pornelle collaborations

    Christopher Priest

    Allastair Reynolds

    Clifford D Simak

    Vernor Vinge

    Peter Watts

    Adrian Tchaikovsky

    Karen Traviss

    Linda Nagata

    Stephen Baxter

    Philip Jose Farmer

    Roger Zelazny

    I could go on, but I think the issue here is your outlook, and for that I suggest a change is as good as rest. Getting older is, in and of itself is not what makes people lose interest in the things that they used to enjoy.

    Rather, it is one’s core beliefs, driven by underlying assumptions that drive negative automatic thoughts, which lead to a loss of interest and joy.

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    1. Ashley, now I must wonder if my core beliefs have changed, making me like science fiction less.

      I have plenty to read, and like you said, I have lots of old favorite SF to reread. I flit about reading all kinds of books. I’m hoping I’m just flitting away from science fiction for a while because I’m interested in other types of reading.

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