I grew up in the country too - outside toilet, no mains water, no bus stop, no railway station, no phone box (no phone indoors), no street lights (no street!), so I know what you mean. I was nine when our bathroom was put it. I'd left home before the house I grew up in had mains water plumbed in. I didn't know myself when I moved directly into a city centre. But here's the thing - as I say, we've become addicted to novelty in the age of Modernism, but now we're older and have seen it all, we crave the truly new- and SF needs innovation to meet its brief. This is why we look back at when SF really WAS new and discover that those days are gone, relatively speaking- unless you're young, when of course everything still is new. In time, as the young read more, discover how what they thought was innovative was already old hat, how will that affect their consciousness? Itself a subject for an SF tale...?

Exactly. Welcome aboard and join us in the Gernsback Continuum...great to have you here...

We must hope so. I am pessimistic from my standpoint, but I'd love to be wrong on this.

Well, he gets a mention or three in Tim Power's 'The Anubis Gates' I seem to recall. Maybe I'll write something about him doing the skiffy- maybe someone else already has. ..and yep, don't sweat it, we ALL still have a lot of Silverberg to read yet...

@@outlawbookselleroriginalEven those of us who've read most of Silverberg have a lot of his work on our TBR list. 😄

My pleasure, great to have you on board.

See, you've REALLY grasped my thesis as you are already calling what you've read recently as 'Contemporary'. Once you start thinking about SF in the context of this narrative of Enlightenment, Modernism, Postmodernism, you'll see why the cracks are there. And of course Postmodernists, with their distrust of Grand Narrative as too 'Western' have to resort to building their own Grand Narrative as an alternative, proving the thesis they're against. There are other stories, they say...well yes, but they were written later. Hang in there.

Haircuts for Men! But it's interesting that British and American hauntology musical genres are slightly different, reflecting different cultures I guess.

I'd suggest reading Fisher and Reynolds on this, I have come across Vapourwave- and one of the videos I link to at the end of this one, about sampling, sees me attacking Fisher and Reynolds' idea that sampling itself could represent Modernism when to me it's clearly Postmodern as it reuses actual material create by others- pastiche in its rawest form.

@@CMZPICTURES - Agreed, but conceptually, they're the same.

Well yes, except as I say there was a period when things were new- but we're past it. Luckily, the debate goes on, there is a LOT of SF to explore then and now, so maybe I'll find some more things to admire from Today- I hope so, but I'm struggling.

Thanks and great to here from you. IP is fundamentally strange as it fails totally to look at things as equivalents and objectively- it excuses its own excessses if you will. I think I said it was World War 1 that really stared the end of all that stuff, but WW2 nailed the lid down to a degree. An SF writer I know well in his 30s thinks that IP will fade and is cyclical, I'm not so sure- I am very concerned about its foisting of orthodox opinion onto people ready to parrot it. Very Orwellian stuff!

Eliot's Wasteland is a dead shopping mall.

Exactly, Karl being one of the key ghosts of our Postmodern lives, Hegel too as 'new' narratives are created by Postmodernists to combat the 'Western Grand Narrative'. I don't think Hauntology is exclusively British as a theory, it's just that the cultural referents and works so often referred to arise from British genre fiction -especially as they link to the landscape of this small island, which has more uniformity geographically than a subcontinent like the US- I think over the pond you have multiple hauntological zones to choose from. Glad you liked it, mail me sometime.

I'm only reconciled to it under duress of evidence, so I sympathise. Thanks for your post.

I don't think that's essential, myself, but in terms of Hard SF, it has become a very important thing- but I feel the idea that SF underlines a support of the Scientific Method and objective, humanist, non-magical, evidence based paradigm is the most significant thing. I read 'New Scientist' every week and will say I'd feel moved by its contents to include them were I actively writing SF.

Well, I'll disagree with you there- I think a wider look at Modernism shows it to be a continuum that lasted many decades as I argue. But an interdisciplinary approach can be a lot to get the head around all at once.

You nailed it. Understanding Futurism is key to understanding the historical context of SF in the widest sense and a specific way.

I could not agree more, James- but you are one of those who can be truly proud in your publishing and criticism and other work in the field that ensured many great things were exposed. We owe guys like you a lot, my friend.

@@outlawbookselleroriginal Thanjs for the nod, Steve, it means a lot.

"Revolt Into Style"- one of my favourite singles, have the album too of course! Not sure if I said but I'm selling a copy of it on ebay currently too, I upgraded my old 'un. Wish I could have done Wells for A Level, you lucky chap!

@@outlawbookselleroriginal Sat at a table with George Melly (Revolt Into Style author etc of course) in a club in Slough about 1980? It involved a short performance by Melly from an armchair and a Heavy Metal performance …. Rather than The Stranglers. In my memory the band were Judas Priest, but can this really be true? Was it merely Anglewitch? No offence to them intended, but I think it actually was Priest. My memory is suitably hazy enough to be proof for having actually been there. It all feels a bit ‘The House of Rumour”.

@@outlawbookselleroriginal Sat at a table with George Melly (Revolt Into Style author etc of course) in a club in Slough about 1980? It involved a short performance by Melly from an armchair and a Heavy Metal performance …. Rather than The Stranglers. In my memory the band were Judas Priest, but can this really be true? Was it merely Anglewitch? No offence to them intended, but I think it actually was Priest. My memory is suitably hazy enough to be proof for having actually been there. It all feels a bit ‘The House of Rumour”.

I'm touched. Plenty more like this here and in the next few weeks, more polemics of this kind coming, stuff that needs saying. Stick with me, delighted to have you here.

I do like a bit of history and damn, you'e right about the artillery-thanks again!

I see 'Dancers' as a bit of a romp MM did for money, an exercise in preparing for the proto-Steampuk of the Oswald Bastable books and just a bit of British Scientific Romance indulgence- Aldiss and Priest did similar things at that point ('Frankenstein Unbound' and 'The Space Machine') - Recursive SF of a very British flavour. 'Dancers' is not Fantasy, it's SF, so it's not anachronistic- it's just that the super-advanced 'science' of the End of Time appears magical. Glad you enjoyed the vid and good to hear from an MM fan.

Well, that's the trouble with TV and SF cinema for you much of the time, still thinking it's about surface rather than ideas....

Very kind remark, thank you. I don't claim to be in the critical front rank, but I've been around a bit.

Well yes. More perceptive readers with an ability to get beyond contemporary speech patterns/styles grasp this quickly if they are reading to go beyond escapism- I see SF at its best as escaping into reality (not from it) through metaphor- the best SF is always about where we are now. PKD was very big on rejecting 'space fantasy' as SF - I disagree, as it has the Novum of advanced space travel, but if you can't add the cognitive dissonance and end with a conceptual breakthrough, then it's just general fiction set in space- which is why I think Becky Chambers - an example among many- is really bad at SF. Thanks for your comment, great to have you here.

@@outlawbookselleroriginal I appreciate the work you put into this channel. I've learned a great deal.

@@outlawbookselleroriginal I completely get where you're coming from with Space Fantasy =/= good SF, as for example, I'm not a fan of Star Wars as SF. However, I do think there's something fresh in Chambers' work. Not that this makes her works world-class, but I do think it at least makes her a good SF writer. From a queer perspective, she integrates a light-hearted approach to examining gender and pronouns (one alien species has 4 genders), polyamory (a species that sees friendship and sex as closely interlinked), and more, providing a nuanced look at how different aliens may treat family and friendship differently, like Left Hand of Darkness or Speaker for the Dead. But even on a more hard sci-fi front, we get a look at Algae-powered engines in Wafarer's #1, which is a real scientific breakthrough that is currently being explored, as well as whole books dedicated to what it's like to be a ship's computer AI integrated into an android body (Wayfarer's #2), how to deal with burial in space (Wayfarer's #3). Additionally, in the Monk and Robot novellas, we get a look at an alternative earth where robots leave and humans learn to work with nature rather than continue down a fully technologically-driven path. These ideas may be explored in previous science fiction works, but I think they meet the criteria for a novum and conceptual breakthrough.

@@JozefLewitzky -Well of course they are SF, it's on the Conceptual Breakthrough I think she's pretty weak. 'To Be Taught If Fortunate' is very limp that way and it's failure to really do something good with Pantropy- even though that's an old concept too (I think Blish' 'Seedling Stars' did this best)- was a missed opportunity. I guess we'll have to agree to disagree about her-but I will point you toward Stark Holborn-there's an interview with her on the channel and I think you'd like her work. Finally, on the gender point, I again think this is a well-worn path, but it is an example of SF reflecting the EXACT social concerns of the moment but very directly at the moment, even though I feel they are overstated, liek almost all Identity Politics issues- throughout my sixty years, I've seen vast improvements for people of colour, non-heteronormative sexuality and so on. Things really are so much better than they were on these fronts.

There is a lot in between, agreed.

I think it's hard to really identify the first 'novel' -though Petronius' 'Satyricon'- which is excellent, though fragmentary (it dates back to Nero's Rome) feels very recognisably novelistic. I tend to focus on 'Don Quixote' as the moment when Realism struck a blow at Fantasy- and Fantasy readers- and I feel it's fundamentally important and probably the most important novel ever. I now view SF as being more closely related to Realism than Fantasy, since Realism shares the same rationalist non-anachronistic philosophy as SF. SF & Fantasy are not as closely linked as many people seem to think, I'd say- but more on this in another video. Thanks for your comment.

@@outlawbookselleroriginal I think SF seems to extrapolate a new reality based as you say, on non-anachronistic elements...I think Phillip K Dick does that with his writing influenced in part, by Christian eschatology. He quotes Teilhard de Chardin in A Scanner Darkly.

See my reply to thomasp6024 above. But yeah, here's the thing - the precursor (Bear for example) is the one who counts the MOST in SF, as in all Modernism- it's just that everyone else catches on later...Iggy Pop invents stage diving in the 1960s and it becomes a thing in the 1990s, when it's already no longer Modern, just Contemporary. See what I mean? 'Blood Music' counts more than Egan etc, though yep, they refine it, take it further- but that's why I prefer Van Vogt's Space Beagle to 'Alien' - first really is best in Modernism. Having said that, the Posthumanist school can come up with good stuff when it goes Postmodern, like Stross' 'Accerlerando' sticking it in a Family Saga guise. We keep on looking, nonetheless. Thanks for your take on it.

@@outlawbookselleroriginal Thank you for your reply...

Not to disaparage youth, but I entirely get your point, Dean of Men!

True that. I agree, not to disparage them, for they truly are the hope of the future. Just can't help having a good chuckle now and then. :) @@outlawbookselleroriginal

Exactly my point. The history of Genre SF is marked by (r)evolutionary moments and quasi-movements. What do you get after Cyberpunk, itself just a moment before it became a cliche? The New Space Opera Renaissance of 1987 and after (back to the 1930s, Mr Banks!)? Some would argue the full-on Posthumanism of Vinge ('The True Names), Egan, Stross and many others- not all of it bad, I grant you, but it all resembles Stapledon and Clarke up to a point, maybe- the jury is out on that for me, but little of it is literary- Gibson had already worked it up and Bear made it keeno. The fact is that there were NO new 'moments' as such in SF after the early 90s, only recapitulation and reinvention of old tropes- OK, as I said, it gets harder and harder to be original because- as I said (again) Modernism had exposed us to ever-faster changes of novelty, made us want more and, running out of ideas, turned to new technology for them (why do people prefer analogue synthesizer sounds to digital ones? Because analogue is clunkier, prone to quirks and fails which create interesting glitches in the hands of humans). Finally, 'Harry Potter' - postmodern pastiche, meshing the classic school story with 'A Wizard of Earthsea'. 'The Hunger Games' -Robert Sheckley's 1950s kill game ideas rebooted for kids who need endless series. ho hum. Yep, it's new to them, but it ain't to us.....

Yeah, we're in the age of overly busy jackets- too much text on 'em...and I say this as someone who likes plain, non-illustrated liveries too.

You say aside from Gollancz but a lot of their covers are absolutely horrendous as well.

@@MFDOOOOM Agreed- their masterworks are tolerable (and I guess that was what I was thinking of) but their new stuff-almost all dreary fantasy is pretty bad too.

Well, you find 'new authors' all the time in bookshops, but if you're talking about SF, what you already realise is that there are huge numbers of SF novels published and marketed as mainstream fiction, so they don't get into genre displays. As I'm not very engaged -or quite frankly-interested in new authors, I can't answer your question. I have loads of old books to read, re-read and established living writers I like to keep up with. Back in the day, it wasn't the same in that there were more a lot more collections and anthologies published- these days, an author has to do really, really well or be loved by their publishers to get a collection published- largely because of all the silly people out there who 'don't like short stories' despite having short attention spans in other ways- take Jemison, a long-winded bland writer better in short forms, but her collection sells really badly. I think you've answered your own question really- there are still magazines, and small presses of quality like Newcon do regular anthologies. But for me, honestly, I go on instinct- but my instincts are very highly developed and I'm also at the stage in life where I think SF is largely played out and so I focus on quality and originality, both of which are, from my perspective in genre fiction- hard to come by. There are videos on the channel where I talk about my contemporary favourites -Chris Beckett (see the interview with him), Dave Hutchinson, Adam Roberts, Nina Allan, Emma Newman, Tom Toner- but most of these are in their fifties. As I don't think 'New' is around much any more, I don't spend an inordinate amount of time reading 'new' authors as I can tell at a glance and a few lines of prose if they're going to get me. I find M T Hill interesting. There's a review a few months back of 'In Ascension' here. But I am not going to expend lots on time and energy on the 'new' until it steps up and bites me on the ass- which it is not doing. If you dig through the backlist, you will find material about working writers you don't know, but remember- why do we think 'New' is so important? Because Modernism made it this way in our heads and people are yet to realise that what is Now is no longer new and the market structure that focuses on 'new' is still with us. Sorry if this is unhelpful, but I'm not really that interested in Now at the moment.

@@outlawbookselleroriginal Well NewCon is new to me so that in itself is definitely most helpful, thank you! My interest in the new is probably about confronting todays fears with todays perspectives if that makes sense. So for instance while I enjoyed The Purple Cloud and The Drowned World or even Make Room Make Room, something like The Water Knife or Ministry for the Future resonates much more with me personally. I also like that they tend to be based on our best current understanding of the situation so there's an element of edutainment to them.

@@CMZPICTURES -I can see that, though I would say the Ballard and Harrison addressed those issues a long time ago- but that's an aesthetic point about pioneers. I think you're right to see SF as a vehicle to examine serious concerns, though, you're on the right track with that. Must say I like Cynan Jones, but 'Stillicide' didn't work as a prose version for me though.

Agreed. Do watch the M John Harrison interview posted on the channel about 2 months back. I've known MJH since the late eighties, a total star!

It is an issue and it's depressing me too. Length is a HUGE problem with books now, I say this on the channel constantly. Fuller answer coming!

Ain't that so, Daniel. Being in the sharp end of it and seeing this all swirling around me daily is all part of my journey into the abyss- more on those very points soon. Thanks again for the Roberts post, awesome.

Yes, been selling it at work for a few years.

Well, that's an idea...with lots of implications, guess we'll see...may be good, may be bad...

Most likely bad it your want modernist content. @@outlawbookselleroriginal

Yes, that's experience and that over-exposure as I said to the century or thereabouts of ever-faster innovation washing over us. Simon Reynolds in 'Retromania' makes the point that the music of 1965 is very different from 1985, but that the music of 2010 is not that different to 1995......I wish it were different too, but it may never be the same....

May the steel gods of speculation bestow iron garlands upon you- in other words, you're very kind!

Very strong.

My kind of nerd. @@outlawbookselleroriginal

@@ashley-r-pollard Thanks Ashley- it's like those dry questions writers get about fictional stardrives while on panels at cons...LOL

Well yes. Just watch how it upsets everyone now..unintentionally, of course.

@@outlawbookselleroriginal I thought this was dense and more focused then other times you've touched on this topic. Now I understand why you hit it hard coming out of the gate! I've already noticed in the comments some people who can't distinguish between using a filter to evaluate vs understanding the historical development of ideas through space and time. They will likely accuse you of regurgitation while clinging to academic labels minted around the time you just discussed. Excellent.

Lots of food for thought there, maybe SF like music needs kick up the backside every 20 years or so . A sex pistols if you like , I know there was nothing really new there but it did re energise the scene if know what I mean . Another fascinating episode 👍🏻

@@waltera13 - yeah, they'll miss the point as ever. The other videos in this area were me riffing and feeling it out, trying them as surrounding context for the SF, but I felt it needed synthesizing together at last. Cheers for this.

@@themojocorpse1290 -Yes, but what will the kick be now, my friend? I think the Pistols did bring something new in, arguably from McClaren's Situationist background- there's a great book called 'One Chord Wonders: Power & Meaning in Punk Rock' from the 80s that was reissued a while back, looks at the semiotics of "Holidays in the Sun"- very cool.

I think you're presenting an optimistic and constructive view of the future of SF- which is to your credit- but I think the real issue when one has read a lot of it and studied its development is that its core is inextricably linked in an historical sense to the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and Modernism because those moments explain how SF arose and became a thing: it was both a response to, an illustration of and a key cultural development around innovation in thought, technology and art becoming non-representational. Unfortunately, all this -SF and these triggers for it- hapenned before and during the slow rise of multiculturalism, feminism and so on, so it is partially and accident of History that SF is inextricably linked to these things, which is what allowed (primarily) white European men to largely monopolise the genre in its initial 60 odd years of innovation before Postmodernism kicked in and artistic change slowed down. Having said that Delany has pointed out how we don't know the identities - gender, racial, whatever- of the vast mass of pulp writers (especially before 1925 when the genre was named). Also, there have been hugely important female writers in the genre from the start- from Shelley to C L Moore and Leigh Brackett, from Judith Merrill to LeGuin and Russ. The fact is that Feminism, Identity Politics, Gender issues and Multiculturalism were tackled in SF in major ways in the 1960s and 1970s- it's just that younger, less experienced readers think that because these things are zeitgeist now, that they are 'New' in SF: they've not. The majority of SF writers until that point- and readers- were white European men (but not all right wing, patriarchal or straight) because that is where political history was at that point. Those guys got there first, before most women, before most people of colour- and as for sexuality, as people only came out of closets in major ways from the late 1960s on (remember, it was illegal to be homosexual even in most liberal countries then) we can't really say about that aspect - Clarke, Burroughs, Delany, Russ and others were gay or bisexual at the least. Identity Politics is not new in SF, in the same way that 'Cli-Fi' isn't new. The real issue is that finding of truly new innovative things to say and that's where the real problem for SF is: and that's where the writers of the last 30 years have struggled and are struggling more. You mention Becky Chambers- other than a touchy-feely vision of hope and human kindness, what 'new thing' is she offering? Well, Maureen F McHugh did it in the early 90s. Like Philip K Dick said, 'Space Fantasy isn't SF,' and she really is not offering us a Conceptual Breakthrough, just a reflection of the Utopianism people believe will come out of Identity Politics, there is no bucket of water in the face in her stories, just a cosy blanket. It won't happen- because it's not a person's identity that matters, but their individuality, which can be anything- being in a 'minority' doesn't immediately mean you're virtuous, not does (theoretically) being of the mainstream mean you're bad. The most dangerous thing that comes out of these assumptions is Orthodoxy- Orwell understood this, which is why 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' remains super-relevant. I sincerely hope you are right, but I have to say that your very words of a new synthesis refers only to a new Grand Narrative, a Postmodern one of the endless play of surfaces, collage and pastiche. It isn't Modern, it's simply artisanship. SF spoke from outside 'Norms' even when it echoed developments in the Western Tradition-it was Outsider Art until 'Star Wars' dragged it into the mainstream and into the infantile gutter. The Identity Politics led SF of today can, sadly, be reduced to publishers virtue signalling by focusing on 'diversity' that is OK as long as we're all the same within the diversity: they're not understanding that to be diverse, you have to allow exclusivity as much as inclusivity.

As for the Aztec thing, by the way, Christopher Evans did this in 'Aztec Century' in 1994. Thanks for your comment, by the way, but to convince me- and I am willing, believe me- you'll have to come up with something genuinely New. Remember I've worked in selling SF books for decades and am familiar with all the currently 'hot' properties like Martine and Chambers. I'd say read some backlist, look at who pioneered ideas first and when, then think again- and of recent SF, I'd recommend Adam Roberts to you: 'The Thing Itself' and 'Purgatory Mount' are very worth a look. Thanks again and take care, I love your enthusiasm and eloquence.

@@outlawbookselleroriginal Stellar response. First, I wanted to acknowledge that I agree with almost everything you've said, just wanted to add a bit more. My feeling, to make a comparison to music, is that Science Fiction has already completed its classical, Jazz, and probably Rock phases. I don't think people expect new composers of music to outdo the classical ones in that style, but people will admit that music did evolve past it in a different way. So, in a way, it depends on your standard. Looking at newer formers of art, like video games, to take a fresh example, have almost their entire history in the last 50 years. It would be strange to say nothing new is happening with them in the last 30 years, and so historians looking through video game history will likely have a lot of say about their development. The same goes for social media such as KZfaq videos. Currently, the two mediums are still relatively 'outsider' in the sense of not respected by 'the establishment' - but I think it's highly likely they'll get their due eventually. When we look back at the novel, many literary critics of the form argue that the novel peaked in the 1800s, and that after 1900, there is almost nothing new under the sun. Which would be strange to say for science fiction and fantasy as genres, as they had barely begun at that point! Imo, having a certain standard of looking at what a novel is prevents seeing the 'newness' of novels post-1900 for those critics. I wouldn't even necessarily say they're wrong based on their own criteria for what they consider 'new' in novels, but there is something much too sweeping of a generalization to say there is nothing new happening since 1900.

@@outlawbookselleroriginal Added your suggestions to my list! Thank you for taking the time to write excellent replies. I like older SF and newer about equally, but I'm nowhere near as well-read, so a lot of the newer stuff is genuinely new to me, and the style of writing is often more comfortable for me than some older works.

@@outlawbookselleroriginal Just on a side note, Harry Harrison did the Aztec thing in 1969, in his book Captive Universe. Great book, one of my favorites by the author. You're absolutely right, of course: there's nothing NEW going on in the SF world, there hasn't been for a LONG time. The problem with these Millennials is they think nothing of value came before them, it was all just the evil old "Patriarchy", whatever...

I can only agree wholeheartedly and many, many thanks for your kind words.

Samuel Delany, Sun Ra and George Clinton seemed to be doing afro-futurism long before the contemporary period - I struggle to see how it displays a thought process 'unique to now'.

@@michaeldaly1495 Right. And don't forget Osibisa, with its Roger Dean album covers---in the 70's.

@@psychonaut5921 Oh yes, great band, I did forget about them, thanks.

You beat me to it on these examples, artists I've listened to for years- although I like Clinton's work, Sun Ra always seemed like pulp silliness with his Saturnian claims- don't get me wrong, I love Modern Jazz- another area where Modernism ended some time ago.

Thanks for your comment. I get what you are saying about authorship- authenticity is arguably important here, with people of colour/African descent/African birth-residence having a claim to being 'real' Afrofuturism, but let's look at Chronology - they've appropriated the term 'Futurism' from a European Modernist art movement that existed decades earlier-if you've not read Marinetti's novel do so, I'd say. It's also interesting how one of the most lauded 'Afrofuturist' icons of today - Wakanda, the fictional country of Marvel's Black Panther was actually created by two brilliant Jewish creators- Lee and Kirby. And of course, Wakanda is a myth that has distinct Grand Narrative flavour- a scientific/industrial powerhouse realm that is 'the most advanced society on Earth'. This is inescapably Futurist in the original sense- as I'm sure you're aware, Futurism initially allied itself to the original Italian version of Fascism and one outcome of the latter two decades later was Italy's Imperial ambition in Abyssinia (later Ethiopia), where they heinously used poison gas. Ironically, Abyssinia was an Empire too- ruled by the Emperor Haile Selassie (who ruled the country from 1930-1974). Considered divine, he was rescued from the Axis by the British- my partner's father was a crew member on the ship that brought him to live in safety in the city I reside in for the duration of WW2- I used to know someone who worked at the house in the city which is now a memorial to him. However, read 'The Emperor' by Ryszard Kapuscinski and this deity of Rastafarianism is revealed as a common or garden despot in the old European Imperial style- or rather in the style of despots everywhere through history. So even a 'sacred' African narrative of a mythical, mystical 'Back To Africa' movement to escape the West's 'Babylon' is undermined by this. In GIbson's 'Neuromancer', there is of course the wonderful sequence onboard a Rastafarian orbital colony- and when Case jacks Maelcum, one of the Rude Boys, into the Matrix, Maelcum says 'Babylon,', invoking the evil of the West- and Case's experience of the Sublime- his Romantic legacy. This is ironic, as Gibson is also clearly saying something about Case's divorce from the 'real' world. As I say, regretfully, because of the way history ran, white male SF writers got there first- Modernism, pioneering. Africa's mass literacy simply didn't exist when Genre SF got going, most narrative was oral tradition. Luckily, we've seen numerous black SF writers come up since then, from the 1930s onwards. So authors of colour are not 'novel' or 'modern' now, not new- the cardinal example is Samuel R Delany, who started publishing in the early 1960s, employed multi-ethnic characters and won Nebulas in the same decade: Modern SF tackled identity politics decades ago, as I said, it's just that a mass of the readership have never heard of him- despite his fame and vital role in SF history- and his contemporaries. This will change with the Amazon Prime adaptation of 'Nova'. Some of the recent and forthcoming Radium Age paperback series from MIT have also revealed interesting examples of non-white SF from the Scientific Romance period, worth a look. So Modernism, looked at historically, trumps contemporary Afrofuturism (chornologically), which borrows from established pioneers, though I do get your point about the 'spiritual' authenticity of authors of colour. But we're talking about Fiction- can a great author not convey the experience of racism and outsiderdom authetically? I'd say they can. My people, the Welsh, have been a subject nation and people for 700 years- like many cultures, we've experienced colonialism, it's a universal experience through history, same as slavery. All cultures have, in their time, enslaved and exploited others. Finally, style and space opera. Your point only proves my thesis: the New Wave largely abandoned Outer Space- read Ballard and Malzberg's work on astronauts- as it was a sigil of conservatism and reactionary Golden age attitudes, writers and writing. Going back to it is arguably Lowest Common Denominator, pandering to people's film and TV and gaming expectations of what 'real sci-fi' is,when the writing that spawned SF screens is so much more. But good post from you- if you want to see real rhetoric/prestidigitation at work on Space Opera, watch my interview with M John Harrison, who speaks of the irony of his late trilogy.

Thanks for your comment, but I am going to continue to disagree. I don't confuse the two at all as I'm argusing partly for a more accurate usage. The word 'Modern' is the root of 'Modernist' and the two are inextricably linked as a consequence- you wouldn't have Modernism without 'the Modern', though I did speak about the everyday usage of 'Modern'- which given history, Modernism, the history of cultural production and the way the arts reinvented themselves through the Modern, the word 'Contemporary' - which is more specific than 'Modern' in indicating 'Now'- has better, more exact usage connotation than 'Modern', as it both acts as a synonym and acknowledges the end of the Modern era. I've had these kind of semantic disagreements before- it's about the difference between exact meaning and poor usage- just because 'most people' say "Modern"- which actually indicates in some ways how they think by default because of our advanced tech that artistic innovation is still taking place- doesn't mean it's right. It's like the difference between 'Railway Station' and 'Train Station' - the first is correct, the latter is poor usage and it sounds so ungainly on the ear. Any railway expert of any kind will say 'Railway Station' (or 'Railroad Station' in the USA) because those are the original designations. Language changes, yes, but it's the subtle meanings that matter- such as the meaning of Modern from 'Just now' to an historical and cultural period. People say it out of habit. Take the cross-Atlantic difference between 'Bookshop' and 'Bookstore' - a bookshop sells books and North Americans go shopping, not storing. A bookstore is somewhere that just stores books, so even though it's long established as a usage, its meaning is incorrect in terms of shopping. But it is an old usage, hence Book Depository being a US usage that differentiates a storage facility from a retail outlet. This may sound pedantic, but to be clear about language, one often has to be very specific. Re innovation, yes, I'm aware of this- there is now a Revisionist tendency in Postmodern theory (and this is one of many reasons why 'Contemporary' is a better word to use, since innovation is inextricably linked to the Modern) to challenge the idea that there has ever been anything other than the artisanship of craft, which is clearly nonsense chronologically when you look at history- culturally and more broadly speaking-since the Enlightenment. There are some small notable examples of proto-Modernism and even proo-Postmodernism in earlier literature, but these are exceptions that prove the rule. This argument is simply part of Postmodernism's supposed 'distrust of Grand Narratives' and the Western tradition of rapid innovation merging in an Identity Politics based attack on that tradition- ironic, of course, as Postmodernism has to construct it's own Grand Narratives to do so.

@@outlawbookselleroriginal True, you did elaborate and I commented somewhat prematurely. My issue with "contemporary" is that it's relative to the respective topic (e.g. Lewis is contemporary to Tolkien), while "modern" is relative to the utterance it appears in. Thus I'd argue "contemporary" cannot replace "modern" and "modern" cannot be permanently affixed to any one period, as much as the modernists would have liked and have tried to do that.

@@thomasrdiehl - 'Contemporary' is not just relative to the respective topic - for example, 'Lewis was a contemporary of Tolkien,' (note the A)- and of course as you know they were part of an affinity group. Contemporary is used in the sense -for example - 'our contemporary world' - it means, 'what it is happening now' in the same way as 'current'. 'Current' has dropped from favour- for example, in bookselling in the UK, it was very common to see 'Current Affairs' as a heading for a section of interdisciplinary books about just that 'current affairs'. 'Modern' in this sense is now just common parlance, where 'Current' has fallen from favour, yet 'Contemporary' allows the exclusion of the Modern period. 'The End of History and the Last Man' by Fukuyama- published in the early 90s- is another example of writing that indicates that the Modern is over and replaced by the endlessly contemporary- the Postmodern. It has been long accepted in critical thinking, human science and philosophical circles that Modern was a period that is now over.