Mundane science fiction


Mundane science fiction is a subgenre of science fiction; usually hard science fiction which is characterized by its setting on Earth or within the Solar System, and a lack of interstellar travel, intergalactic travel or human contact with extraterrestrials. Mundane science fiction focuses on stories set on or near the Earth, with a believable use of technology and science as it exists at the time the story is written or which is a plausible extension of existing technology. Mundane science fiction works explore topics such as environmental degradation, robotics, virtual reality, enhanced genomes, nanotechnology, and quantum mechanics.
It rarely involves interstellar travel or communication with alien civilization. The genre's writers believe that warp drives, the use of wormholes, and other forms of faster-than-light travel are scientific fantasies rather than serious speculation about a possible future. According to them, unfounded speculation about interstellar travel can lead to an illusion of a universe abundant with planets as hospitable to life as Earth, which encourages wasteful attitude to the abundance on Earth.
Scientists have not uncovered any evidence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. Although absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence, mundane science fiction writers believe it is unlikely that alien intelligence will overcome the physical constraints on interstellar travel any better than we can. As such, mundane science fiction writers imagine a future on Earth and within the solar system and believe it is highly unlikely that intelligent life survives elsewhere in this solar system. Alternative universes, parallel worlds, magic and the supernatural, time travel and teleportation are similarly avoided in mundane science fiction.

History

Precursor movements: 1950-1960s

Chris Nakashima-Brown's article in The New York Review of Science Fiction states that "otwithstanding the scientific gloss on which science fiction seems to depend, a great deal of the genre concerns “fantasies about the escape from science — the escape from the subtly nihilistic dominion of reason in the post-Enlightenment West, into a generically unbound Jungian Disneyland...”. In the Golden Age of Science Fiction, stodgy tales of space opera
using "bland prose" and "formulas of planetary romances, über-robots, and cold equations" dominated. SF writer Thomas Disch says that the preference for weak, implausible depictions of science in sci fi is an “American aspect of our “lie-loving” culture” used by readers for escapism. That said, some Golden Age writers such as Theodore Sturgeon, Philip José Farmer, and Ray Bradbury had more of a gift for transcending these formulas and developing nuanced characters and stories.
In the 1960s, "Disch, Aldiss, Harlan Ellison, J. G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock, and others launched the New Wave ". "Stylistic experimentation" in the writing and new topics meant less formulas and cliches. The authors had a profound "skepticism about science and technology", and there was an examination of “inner space”
, "feminist...critiques, and ecology.
J.G. Ballard believed that the Golden Age of Science Fiction’s focus on advanced interstellar spaceships was “clichéd and unilluminating”, preferring to write stories about humans’ “next five minutes”, the “near future”, which is “immediately recognisable to us, but invariably with a pretty unpleasant twist or three.”
“MSF stories already existed before the term was coined”; as such, its “naming” by Ryman “…only marks a high point in SF’s social and ecological consciousness and conscience.” Maddelena says that Ryman developed his idea of the MSF subgenre by examining “what works best” in science fiction classic stories and novels. She says setting MSF in the real world may help SF writers avoid having excess “explanation and exposition”, an issue that often plagues poor SF writing.

2000s

The goals of MSF were predated by sociologist Wayne Brekhus in 2000, who published “A Mundane Manifesto”, calling for “analytically interesting studies of the socially uninteresting.” He argues for a focus on the “mundane” because the “extraordinary draws disproportionate theoretical attention from researchers”, which weakens the development of theory and creates a distorted image of reality. He stated that he hoped that the humanities would also focus on the mundane.
As well, in 2001, the sci-fi website SF Futurismic: Near Future Science Fiction and Fact
is against the traditional forms of SF, and instead calls for an examination of the impact of scientific discoveries on human society. Futurismic is against all “fantasy, horror, and space opera, as well as offworld SF, distant futures, aliens, alternate histories, and time travel”. Futurismic accepts fiction that is mundane, “post-cyberpunk sf, satirical/gonzo futurism, and realistic near future hard sf.”
MSF describes a change “already in effect” and claims it has “ideological significance”.

Launch of movement

The mundane science fiction movement, inspired by an idea of Julian Todd, was founded in 2004 during the Clarion workshop by novelist Geoff Ryman among others. Ryman claims that the MSF Manifesto was “jokey” and that it was not intended to be a “serious” statement. The authors of the MSF Manifesto, apart from Ryman, are anonymous. The beliefs of the movement were later codified as the Mundane Manifesto.
The authors of the Manifesto stated that they are “pissed off and needing a tight girdle of discipline to restrain our sf imaginative silhouettes”. Ryman explained the MSF Manifesto in a speech to BORÉAL’s 2007 Science Fiction convention in Montreal.
Writer Kate McKinney Maddalena states that the Canadian-born and now UK-based Ryman probably intends “mundane” to mean “of the world”, rather than “boring”, following the British sense of the word “mundane”. The MSF blog was first used as a forum for debate about the new subgenre. By 2009, blog participants were existent MSF from the SF literature, and looking for newly-published MSF.
Ryman has contrasted mundane science fiction with most 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.
Mike Brotherton defines mundane science fiction as “science fiction that improbably anticipates no new discoveries or technologies and makes some narrow-minded assumptions that are unwarranted”.

Publications

Published as subgenre

In 2007 the British sci fi magazine Interzone devoted an issue to the subgenre.
The 2009 short story collection When It Changed: Science Into Fiction, edited by Ryman, is a collection of mundane science fiction stories, each written by a science fiction author with advice from a scientist, and with an endnote by that scientist explaining the plausibility of the story.

Other works considered in line with subgenre

A review of the 1992 novel China Mountain Zhang noted that the story's world, while different, felt ordinary and believable.

Reception

Science fiction writer Rudy Rucker wrote a response to the Mundane Manifesto on his blog. Rucker says he "prefer to continue searching for ways to be less and less Mundane" in his science fiction. He points out that alternate universes are "quite popular in modern physics", and he says perhaps there are other worlds in other dimensions. He notes that fiction writers outside of sci fi use stories about time travel, so it is of interest to him to explore it in fiction, even though it is implausible. While Rucker is somewhat aligned with the MSF, in that he too “rejects the “escapist” tendencies of science fiction”, and he calls for transrealism, an approach in which art “deal with the world the way it actually is”, Rucker argues that the elements of SF that MSF advocates reject are “symbolic of archetypal modes of perception” that are needed in SF.
In Jim Kelly's Asimov Science Fiction essay in January 2008, he wondered, “how was MundaneSF all that different from what had up until then been called hard science fiction?”. Niall Harrison argues that the collection of MSF stories in Interzone #216 does not devleop “a convincing case for mundane sf.” Linda Nagata says the term "mundane" has the "implication of "boring"? To me, the term is another marketing disaster."
Hard science fiction author Mike Brotherton says he does not write mundane science fiction because he finds it “boring and uninteresting” and he does not like the Manifesto’s claim that “we know what is most probable”. While he agrees that faster than light travel is improbable, he says that interstellar travel and finding Earth-like planets may be possible. Brotherton disagrees with the Manifesto’s emphasis on avoiding depictions of an “abundance of resources”, claiming that Malthusian scenarios have not arisen.
The Mundane Manifesto has been called anthropocentric. The concern in MSF about wasting the abundance of Earth is influenced by the "...moral climate that permeates North American and British nature writing". MSF is intended "more as compass than chimera". Ian McDonald agreed with many MSF tenets on his LiveJournal blog, but he points out that a lot of existing SF qualifies as MSF; as such, he asks, what is the point of creating a new subgenre for content that already exists. James Patrick Kelly wrote about MSF in his column in Asimov’s Science Fiction, stating that he agrees with many of its elements.
Science fiction writer Claire L. Evans called it a “controversial recent sub-genre” in 2009. and she calls the Manifesto a “much-attacked” text. She calls MSF a “useful category for an already-existing genre of science fiction, calling MSF an “embarrassing taxonomological mistake”. Maddalena says that SF connoisseurs disagreed with MSF’s call to avoid “unlikely” technologies or futures, as these speculative futures are sci-fi writers’ “rebellious bread and butter”.
Roger Luckhurst, a professor in Modern and Contemporary Literature at London’s Birkbeck College, says the MSF movement was developed because writers did not want “…to imagine shiny, hard futures give a] sense of sliding from one version of our present into something slightly alienated”.
A critic from Fantastic Worlds, a sci-fi journal, criticizes the “very selective use of "science" in Mundane science-fiction”. One MSF advocate criticizes depictions of rocket flight in mainstream SF, saying rocket flight is “pretty much played out” in real life technology; the Fantastic Worlds critic points out that in 2011, there are a dozen competitors in rockets in the “major boom” in spaceflight. The goal of MSF seems to be to paint a “depressing” view of the future, so MSF advocates “carefully pick and choose only those aspects of scientific reality which are unpleasant, rejecting those which offer felicitous solutions.”
Science fiction writer Kay Kenyon calls MSF “a useful handle for sf stories of their type”, but he criticizes the large number of “crappy Mundane SF”, its claim that stories set outside the Solar System create “a wasteful attitude toward Earth”, as there are “environmental cautionary tales” set in other planets outside our Solar System. He disagrees with the MSF claim that writers will tell better stories about “dreams, hopes and feelings” if they are set on Earth with humans. Kenyon argues that fictional aliens are an “extended metaphor on the human condition.”
Emmet Byrne and Susannah Schouweiler call MSF the Dogme 95 of science fiction, a reference to the film manifesto launched in 1995. Danish directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, created the "Dogme 95 Manifesto" and the "Vows of Chastity". These were rules to create films based on the traditional values of story, acting, and theme, and excluding the use of elaborate special effects or technology. It was supposedly created as an attempt to "take back power for the director as artist", as opposed to the studio.
Barry Kirwin argues that science fiction has, since its inception, “explor what was conceivable, and not necessarily what was thought possible.” Kirwin is against MSF’s stricture to only write about “what we know today”. Kirwin defends SF set on “strange, alien environments”, because it allows SF authors to explore how people might react to such as setting, thus examining "human psychology, the human condition, and potential human futures.”

Authors

Authors who have written fiction considered as MSF, either long after the creation of their oeuvre or at the time their works were create, include:
A reviewer from ‘’Boing Boing’’ calls Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel Aurora the “…most significant novel in the mundane science fiction form.” Aurora is about a generation ship on a multiple century journey to another Earth-like planet in the Tau Ceti system, which takes 150 years.
Judith Merril’s 1948 story, “That Only a Mother” described the effects of radiation. Ann Warren Griffith’s 1953 story, “Captive Audience” is about advertising strategies.
MSF shares “characteristics with cyberpunk, postcyberpunk, and near-future science fiction”.
William Gibson’s novels show a “near future urban” world
Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix depicts the impacts of global capitalism. With MSF, the “core and the canon” works are “less clear” than with cyberpunk.

Films and television shows

Films such as Gattaca, about a society based on genetic testing and ranking, and Moon, about a lonely mining operation on the Moon, "fit the Mundane Manifesto’s interest in near-future realism, even if they don’t directly deal with the beauties and heartbreaks of the Earth". Other examples are "French filmmaker Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil or the film version of Children of Men, from P.D. James' novel, which shows a "heart-wrenching film of a grim, near-future Earth".
In 2019, UK television critic Hugh Montgomery identified MSF television series and films which are set in the near future and which use plausible technologies; his list includes Black Mirror; The Handmaid’s Tale ; Osmosis ; Years and Years ; and the film Children of Men, set in a world torn apart by terrorism, refugee crises, and ecological catastrophes.