this is why we don't read the Golden Age anymore.

There are so many histories of the future.

Spinning through timespace, studying this apocalypse, a key part of my undercover mission is studying stories about the future. When and where and how were we optimistic? Cynical? When were we right? How were we wrong? The history of speculative fiction is full of examples of all of that - sometimes in the same work!

The "Golden Age"* of Science Fiction is generally considered to last from the late 30s to the 60s, sandwiched between the pulp era and the New Wave. Think Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Ray Bradbury. They wrote "the rules" of science fiction that would dominate for decades.

(the boundaries of the "Golden Age"* are up for debate, as is just how golden it really was, and for who - lots of those authors kept writing well into the 70s and 80s, producing some of their most memorable works)

But those writers have meant very little to me in my journey as a science fiction writer (with the exception of Ray Bradbury, whose short stories I adore and whose prose fucking sings). I've bounced off all the Asimov I've read, and barely skimmed the surface of Heinlein and Herbert. There's a lot that I can enjoy in the Golden Age, and a lot of ways in which I think it still exerts a positive influence on the genre. But I rarely read it, and when I do I often come away with a bad taste in my mouth.

As any contemporary science fiction writer can probably attest, this is a problem. For many die-hard genre readers, failure to worship at the altar of The Great White Dudes is an unforgivable sin. So it's not something I talk about very often, lest I incur the Wrath of the Fanboys.

But recently I attended Launchpad, a very excellent week-long workshop in astronomy and physics at the University of Wyoming, specifically for science fiction writers and other writers who can help evangelize the science of the stars. And I did get very excited about lots of stuff like neutron stars, ice giants, gravity, the electromagnetic spectrum - "hard science" things that never really stirred my storytelling brain the way, say, "soft sciences" like history and resistance and anthropology did. And I heard an instructor praising the science of an Arthur C. Clarke novel I'd never read before - Rendezvous with Rama - so I figured, why not, let's give it a shot.

Turns out - it's good! It's fine!

It's okay. It's weird and the characters are cardboard but the very big ideas and the worldbuilding of the alien world of Rama are pretty exciting and compelling.

For me, the best part of the book wasn't in the book at all. It was in the introduction, by Ken Liu - one of my absolute favorite science fiction writers, author of "The Paper Menagerie," a 100000% must of a short story. Ken's intro says lots of nice things about the book, as we expect of an introduction, but it does flag "This is not a novel interested in interrogating systems of privilege or power... absent from it are voices questioning or objecting to the colonialist assumptions infusing sections of the text."

And then Ken says:

And that totally blew my mind! Because the connection is deeply meaningful: between the laws of physics, and the present political system.

Golden Age* writers, by and large, have absolute faith in both. And that makes me, as a queer reader and one who believes in toppling patriarchy, profoundly uncomfortable.

Lots of Golden Age* SF is "hard" - it's very concerned with getting the science right, with skipping any shortcuts or touches of fantasy, magic, etc. And, listen, I love science, and in a political moment like the one we're living out in the year 2025 of Earth 57-7 (where "science" is demonized and establishment medicine is ignored and kids aren't being vaccinated and elected officials are claiming the earth is 5,000 years old and research is being slashed and we're shooting ourselves in the foot over and over again) it's great to see science celebrated.

I've got nothing against science. What I don't love is the unquestioned belief that the systems undergirding how science happens are perfect and just, and the confidence that just because the needs and demands of those authors were being centered, that it was working well for everyone. The failure to grasp how white supremacy and misogyny were built into health and medicine, resulting in disastrous outcomes for millions of people. The inability to see how that oppression and exclusion continue to manifest in healthcare inequality. The belief that Western science, which divorces the object of study from its context and turns every element of the natural world into a resource to be exploited, is the only way to practice science, and that alternative and indigenous heritages of scientific knowledge-making are invalid.

This is why I think that so many contemporary writers and readers of science fiction no longer connect with the Golden Age authors. They feel like fossils, like followers of an extinct faith. The light they are following has turned toxic, dangerous.

I don't want to ruin anything for anyone. If you love Rendezvous with Rama or I, Robot, that's awesome, I'm not here to yuck your yum.

But for me, that's not where the bold exciting throbbing heart of the genre is. Those are interesting valuable fossils of a bygone era.

If you want to read the folks who are engaging with the same science and the same ideas but through a lens that de-centers the same old stories and storytellers, you should be reading Aliette de Bodard, N.K. Jemisin, Sarah Pinsker, Justin C. Key, Ann Leckie, Octavia Butler, Ursula Le Guin, Ted Chiang, Becky Chambers, Mary Robinette Kowal, Ray Nayler, Sofia Samatar, Malka Older, Arkady Martine, and so so so many more!

And if you're currently writing science fiction in the year 2025 of Earth 57-7, you need to be aware of what's happening here and now. You might not like it, you might not agree with who's winning Hugos and you might not love who's on the bestseller list, but you can't just be living in the past.

We're forging the future here, after all.

* I put "Golden Age" in quotation marks because it wasn't golden for authors who were women, queer, of color, basically anyone who wasn't a cis het white bloke.