Clive Thompson has a fascinating piece on science fiction in the latest Wired, “Why Sci-Fi Is the Last Bastion of Philosophical Writing.“  The article kicks off with a nice discussion of Cory Doctorow’s After the Seige (from his latest collection, Overclocked), but closes with the broader question:

So, then, why does sci-fi … get short shrift among serious adult readers? Probably because the genre tolerates execrable prose stylists. Plus, many of sci-fi’s most famous authors — like Robert Heinlein and Philip K. Dick — have positively deranged notions about the inner lives of women.

But the worm is turning. For whatever reasons — maybe the reality fatigue I’ve felt — a lot of literary writers are trying their hand at speculative fiction. Philip Roth used a “counterfactual” history — what if Nazi sympathizers in the US won the 1940 election? — to explore anti-Semitism in The Plot Against America. Cormac McCarthy muses on the nature of morality in the Hobbesian anarchy of his novel The Road. Then there’s the genre-bending likes of Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Susanna Clarke, and Margaret Atwood (whom I like to think of as a sci-fi novelist trapped inside a literary author).

Those aren’t writers whose books are adorned with embossed dragons. But that doesn’t mean they don’t owe that dragon a large debt.

Here at UCSD, we also think the worm is turning, although not because literary authors are writing science fiction so much as the fact that the world is changing so fast — both via technological advances and thanks to global warming — that science fiction provides unique opportunities to envision alternative futures.  Kim Stanley Robinson describes it as ”this science fiction novel that we are all living in.”  That’s why the interest at UCSD in hosting Clarion extends beyond the Literature Department, which has always viewed the divide between ‘high’ and ‘low’ literature as artificial, and into the sciences, the social sciences, and our various research units.

By the way, as to the ”execrable prose stylists” problem that Clive refers to, I’d have to say he’s not reading the same authors I am.  But if that worries you, one option is to attend the annual Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop.  Applications are being accepted now — for information, check here.