I imagine many of you have by now seen Paul Kincaid's essay "The Widening Gyre", exploring his dissatisfaction with several of last year's Year's Best short fiction volumes; it's been a topic of discussion on the Coode Street podcast for the last two weeks, and inspired discussion to the effect that you shouldn't really expect the words Year's Best in a title to actually mean the year's best, pace Cheryl Morgan here.

The core of Paul's argument, though, goes to the fiction itself, that "the genres of the fantastic themselves have reached a state of exhaustion" and that science fiction in particular has "lost confidence that the future can be comprehended." The second of the two Coode Street podcasts linked above is particularly interesting for the discussion of those words, "exhaustion" and "confidence", what they imply and Paul's work-in-progress attempts to articulate how he is experiencing recent sf. I want to try to separate some concepts that come up in the essay, though, by pulling out this quote:

It feels like an extract from something longer, or perhaps it should be seen as another iteration (with the Grant and DeNiro) of the trope in which neither author nor reader is expected to fully comprehend the future being presented. The result is a sense of something perpetually just beyond our reach and therefore doesn’t quite satisfy as a story.

I want to talk about knowability and conviction, which for Paul seem to be aspects of the same elephant. I'm not so sure. For starters, there are several definitions of 'knowable' that come through in the essay.

The story under discussion in the quote above is Paul McAuley's Sturgeon Award-winning "The Choice" (excerpt), which (from memory) it wouldn't have occurred to me to group with Gavin Grant's "Widows in the World" and Alan DeNiro's "Walking Stick Fires"; McAuley's story may have alien artefacts intruding onto a drowned Earth, but it doesn't have the singularity gloss of the other two, there's a much more immediate connection to our present lived experience. What Paul says about the story being "just beyond our reach" does strike me as accurate -- but not because the world described is one we cannot know; rather because of that extract-sense he describes, that we are not shown everything, that the world is larger than this story. And that's a sense I actually like to get from my science fiction, the distinction between the in principle knowable and the in practice knowable. Paul seems to be arguing for more of the latter, that this equates to futures authors and readers can believe in: I'm not so sure. Nor am I sure how desirable such an equivalence is, to the point where the idea of "fully comprehending" feels improbable, feels like it could easily be consolatory.

At the same time, I found myself nodding along to much of Nader Elhefnawy's response, pushing back against the notion of accelerating change:

This raises an obvious question: if change is not so rapid as many suggest, then why the continued attachment to the theme? Part of it may simply be the sheer power of the hype, to which science fiction has been especially subject. That fact by itself means that even those who don't share the expectation can still find interest in it [...]

However, an emphasis on the world as incomprehensible can have yet another function, namely that of dodge. To throw up one's hands in confusion is a convenient way of avoiding the serious social and ethical and political questions raised by our problems (as with our ecological crisis). This can seem an understandable response to their genuinely intimidating largeness, but being overwhelmed hardly seems to account for the whole tendency. There is, too, the fact that so many of the obvious responses to such problems - substantive critique of the prevailing orthodoxies, efforts to envision really meaningful alternatives, despair in the absence of such - are regarded as naive, disreputable or simply risky for the career-minded, encouraging the ever-present temptation to self-censor. Postmodernism, after all, has always concealed a significant amount of evasion behind its smugly enunciated epistemological doubts, and postmodern science fiction has been an exception to the pattern. Indeed, the lack of conviction Kincaid finds in the writing is best understood as a parallel to that lack of conviction pervading our cultural and political life.

That is to say, the notion of singularity as dodge, as another kind of consolation, that this sort of unknowability can result from a lack of conviction also has the ring of veracity to it. I think that's part of the thrust of Paul's essay, for all that Nader starts out from a disagreement with one of Paul's assertions. But even here I don't think the link is axiomatic. I don't, for instance, actually feel "Widows in the World" is a dodge, given the specifics of the story; I certainly don't feel that it lacks conviction. It may be that its conviction is expressed through its use of language and the discussion of familial relationships that it constructs, and not through its worldbuilding (if that separation is possible, which I'm not convinced about). But it certainly feels to me like a story that cares about its material, that is more than just a game.