The Way the Future Never Was

So you���ve probably heard about this Sad Puppies/Rabid Puppies thing.

I���m reading Brad Torgersen���s Sad Puppies 3 manifesto (which I use not as a pejorative, but as an honest-to-goodness genre term) from a few weeks ago, and��� I���m just really confused. Maybe somebody can help me out here.

After an extended metaphor about breakfast cereals, Torgersen states what he considers the problem:

A few decades ago, if you saw a lovely spaceship on a book cover, with a gorgeous planet in the background, you could be pretty sure you were going to get a rousing space adventure featuring starships and distant, amazing worlds. If you saw a barbarian swinging an axe? You were going to get a rousing fantasy epic with broad-chested heroes who slay monsters, and run off with beautiful women. Battle-armored interstellar jump troops shooting up alien invaders? Yup. A gritty military SF war story, where the humans defeat the odds and save the Earth. And so on, and so forth.

These days, you can���t be sure.

The book has a spaceship on the cover, but is it really going to be a story about space exploration and pioneering derring-do? Or is the story merely about racial prejudice and exploitation, with interplanetary or interstellar trappings?

There���s a sword-swinger on the cover, but is it really about knights battling dragons? Or are the dragons suddenly the good guys, and the sword-swingers are the oppressive colonizers of Dragon Land?

A planet, framed by a galactic backdrop. Could it be an actual bona fide space opera? Heroes and princesses and laser blasters? No, wait. It���s about sexism and the oppression of women.

Finally, a book with a painting of a person wearing a mechanized suit of armor! Holding a rifle! War story ahoy! Nope, wait. It���s actually about gay and transgender issues.

Or it could be about the evils of capitalism and the despotism of the wealthy.

So��� huh. OK, it sounds like Torgersen doesn���t like metaphor in his SF. If it���s got a spaceship on the cover, and it���s got themes that don���t have to do with spaceships, it���s apparently a problem. In a long-but-well-worth-your-time blog post on the 2015 Hugos debacle, Philip Sandifer describes this as ���the spectacle of a grown man complaining about how he just can���t judge a book by its cover anymore.���

But this is where I get really confused, folks: what the hell era of SF is he talking about? Later in the post he indicates that he���s talking about the 1960s through the 1980s... which I���d say is a period pretty well defined by the metaphorical treatment of social and political ideas in SF. If you want to go back to a time when rocket ships and ray guns really meant just rocket ships and ray guns, you���d have to go back to the 1940s. And there are surely people who like Golden Age SF quite a bit, but for my tastes, I think it wasn���t really until the dawn of the digest era in the 1950s that SF got really, really good. 

So I���m really confused. I can���t even recognize the picture that Torgersen paints as a caricature of SF publishing history. And since he coyly generalizes, you can���t even identify what books or authors he has particular problems with. (One name that���s emerged as one of his major b��tes noirs is John Scalzi���whose Old Man's War series has its sociopolitical scales tipped so far in favor of gee-whiz adventure that it should float Torgersen���s boat right out of the bathtub.) (It's pretty militaristic, too, if that's a factor.)

He says he���s OK with SF about social and political issues, as long as we don���t ���put these things so much on permanent display, [so] that the stuff which originally made the field attractive in the first place ��� To Boldly Go Where No One Has Gone Before! ��� is pushed to the side���. But to thousands of readers, ���boldly going��� means exploring just those issues that Torgersen has a problem with. And exploring those issues in SFnal terms is a time-honored tradition, going back a decade or so before the time that he considers the good old days.

For a lot of us, SF���s ability to deal with current problems in metaphorical terms is the whole point. It���s why we got interested in the genre, and why we���ve stuck with it���because there will always be new quesitons, and new angles on them. Does Brad Torgersen really want SF to be a genre about space ships and ray guns with no resonance with current society? Does he really want SF authors to abandon the time-honored tradition of exploring social issues with SFnal metaphor? That sounds to me like an SF that���s afraid of the future.