Wiki-stumbling:
Geoff Ryman has contrasted mundane science fiction with regular science fiction through the desire of teenagers to leave their parents’ homes. Ryman sees too much of regular science fiction being based on an “adolescent desire to run away from our world.” However, Ryman notes that humans are not truly considered grown-up until they “create a new home of their own,” which is what mundane science fiction aims to do.
This seems to me to be where “real” SF is still being written. Most cutting-edge SF gets ossified and tossed off into sub-genres like military SF, cyberpunk, etc. Some of these sub-genres still have some life in them — I’m currently reading John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series, which is quite good — but it seems mundane SF is where good work is still being done.
8 months ago