The folks at Mundane SF are at it again with their derision. Here is my response to the post that was made about Sarah Hall, the winner of UK's John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.

You were building up to something that I would have agreed with before you made your massively hasty generalization about "Science Fiction" as a collective unit.

Sure there are over-used standards and stock footage used in science fiction these days, but a lot of other genres and story types have their won set of such things. I think what you fail to accept is that there is a huge collective of science fiction out there that isn't Mundane but doesn't use your "tropes" you speak so highly of. Not all near-future science fiction is Mundane, and it shouldn't be because we're allowed to speculate as science fiction writers - that's part of that whole idea behind 'creativity'. 'Soft' science fiction has, for years, been very different from what you see as rehashing of Golden Age science fiction. Not everything is a rehash; not everyone is writing about aliens and lasers.

What I think Mundane SF - as a movement - fails to understand is that fiction is entertainment foremost before it is educational. If people want to learn about global warming, they pick up An Inconvenient Truth; they don't go out and find a science fiction book that writers about global warming. The idea that all other writers of science fiction are harming the rest of society by not writing about what is going on or what might happen in regards to real-world events is pretentious and close-minded.

I think this same mentality of chastisement toward science fiction - or even more broadly to speculative fiction - is the same one that drives writers like Cormac McCarthy to scoff at people who say that he's written science fiction. Genre doesn't mean uneducated; in fact, I might argue that it takes a hell of a lot more intuitive knowledge and understanding of the world to write not only commentary about that world but put it in a world completely unlike our own. It's called creativity. It doesn't come easily to a lot of people.