There are many, many ways to analyze and categorize the stories, all valuable to varying degrees. We could pull things apart and put them back together in hundreds of different ways. In the end, do the artifical lines around the sub-genre matter when the lines around the entire SF genre itself are fading to the point of non-existence? Where would you place a story about a Greek goddess relying on current technology twenty years from now? Mundane fantasy?
Completely unrealistic is a story about a human relying on near-current technology even in the near future. Unless all of society becomes unable to afford any further scientific work through, say, immediate global catastrophe, technology and scientific theories WILL be continue to change at an increasing rate, especially with more of the world entering into serious scientific endeavors. It wasn't that long ago that we thought that gender was determined in the developing human fetus by a surge of hormones from the mother. We had a huge shift in understanding and progressed to the point at which gender can be selected in an amazingly short period of time. Advances come in fits and starts, leaps and lulls. Anti-gravity technology is in the news. FTL drives might not really be so far away
I think the only real challenge for SF writers is to imagine in which areas of society the huge leaps will come, in what order, and what will be the consequences.
... and, btw, I think there
... and, btw, I think there is a parallel to be drawn to fantasy. Consider the plethora of vampire stories out there right now. You can find hip-hop vampires, reluctant vampires, vampire assassins, vampire detectives, and there seems to even be a surprisingly strong sub-genre for lesbian vampires. Werewolves are up and coming. And they're all pretty fangless creatures, as far as I can see, if you will forgive the completely intentional pun: They've had the horror leeched out of them to make them palatable, or they've been so highly sexualized (as with Anne Rice's monstrosities) that the stories are essentially blood-porn.
Is that really any worse than the flood of high-fantasy knockoffs that began to consume the fantasy shelves in the 70s? Maybe not, but then maybe they reflected the same phenomenon. Lord of the Rings wasn't the problem; it was the people who copied its tropes without understanding the importance of them being arranged in a particular way.
What would a "mundane fantasy" be like? Well, I don't think the problem's the same, to start with. You don't have "impossibles" that you can just bar, you've merely got tropes that have been trivialized, and since it's always possible to take them seriously again, it's silly to bar them. That said, I think you can see a lot of contemporary fantasy that either reshuffles the old tropes with new ideas (I think Garth Nix's "Mister Monday" and Abhorsen stories are good examples of this) or completely transposes the fantasy into a new modern context (China Mieville's King Rat or just about anything by Neil Gaiman).
But maybe you could do a mundane fantasy. Maybe you just restrict yourself to the events of everyday life, and try to make something fantastic out of that. It would be really hard. That's kind of what Lucius Shepard was doing in "Stars Seen Through Stone" (F&SF in March or April, I think); it's also what Fritz Leiber used to do so well with so many of his stories (like "Smoke Ghost" or "The Girl with the Hungry Eyes"), or Avram Davidson did in "And All the Seas With Oysters" (which had me looking askance at wire coat hangers for years).
It would be a really valuable exercise, in other words. Much like the writing exercises people do where they're not allowed to say what they're trying to show, or where they must write only in dialog. I see Mundane in much the same way: You use it to get you someplace, and then move on from there.
Mundane Fantasy vs. Magical Realism
I think a lot of the heat
I think a lot of the heat over predicting technology (or science) is a red herring. The greatest passion in Ryman's talk seems to me to be around the concept of wish-fulfillment, and what kind of attitudes the bulk of SF creates, and especially this idea that the genre selects for stuff that is essentially geared to help us forget about the mess we might very well be in around here.
Dangerous escapism, if you will: Stuff that gives us license to be complacent, because hell, we'll just all go to Mars. Or Tau Ceti. Or upload ourselves into chunks of orbiting computronium.
I think it misses the point a little to cite counter-examples, because they're mostly either old or not mainstream or both, and anyway are not really part of what Ryman's objecting to, which is the vague beast of "mainstream SF". And when Ryman says "mainstream", I think it's pretty clear that he means the main stream of the genre, not the main mass market, especially when he says stuff like this:
This idea that "SF" might "want" something is particularly interesting to me, and I think it might be behind what's really pissing some people off, because it insinuates that we're not aware of why we make some things successful and not others.Too, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that Ryman is talking about "literature". He wants more of it. He thinks the proper function of "literature" is to unbalance people. Rudy Rucker, who's also critical of the Mundane Manifesto, wants the same thing:
Much of the discussion seems to be around, as you put it, where we cut the pie. Or rather, I would say, where we imagine cutting the pie. Because, for example, Geoff Ryman and Rudy Rucker are really after more or less the same thing, and they both know it and aren't afraid to admit the fact. Rudy seems to think Geoff's methods are misguided. Maybe they are. Or maybe the methods aren't as serious as we make them out to be. Maybe they really are about forcing yourself to think differently -- to think about stories without the traditional tropes, to seriously ask yourself whether they're crutches or not.
Reflection