It's a Citation. But Probably Not the One You Were Expecting.

Every now and again when bored (usually when I should be grading) I search my own name on Google, Google Scholar, and Google Books to see what comes up. Are people talking about me? More specifically, are people citing me and I don't know about it? Google Scholar indexes some of this, but it doesn't catch everything, especially if your name is spelled wrong. If you have a more common name, this is probably a waste of your time, but I am one of exactly two Steven Mollmanns who has ever existed, so there aren't really any false positives, except for "Steve Mollman," who probably wonders why people ask him about his Star Trek books from time to time.

The most recent time I did this, I was surprised to find that I had been cited in a work of science fiction scholarship... surprised because the work of mine that was cited was not a work of sf criticism, but one of my Star Trek novels! Google Books' snippet view didn't yield much insight, so I requested the book from ILL.

Gary Westfahl's book is called The Rise and Fall of American Science Fiction, from the 1920s to the 1960s, but its last chapter is actually about the present day. Westfahl's point is that those who invented the genre of sf, and those scholars who study it, see it as a genre of endless possibilities, but that the sf that actually gets sold and read the most is formulaic: "science fiction today has finally become what Gernsback, Campbell, and others vigorously resisted, a genuine form of popular fiction, as an overwhelming majority of its works now rigidly follow some standard conventions" (243).

He decides to document this by going into a Barnes & Noble in January 2012 and cataloguing every single sf book on the shelf in the "New" area. There are 75 books in total... and one of them was my and Michael Schuster's own Star Trek novel, A Choice of Catastrophes. What dismays him is that 75% of the books are in series; what interests him is that the majority of authors are ones that are "unknown to scholars" (243). (He seems to take "in a series" as shorthand for "formulaic," which seems a bit unfair to, say, N. K. Jemisin.)

He does not mention A Choice of Catastrophes specifically; it only appears in an end note giving the complete list of books he saw (266-7n18). He does, however, say this:

However, optimists might continue, one cannot dismiss all series fiction as derivative junk until one has read it, for talented writers may find ways to stimulatingly stretch generic boundaries even within such confines.... It does seem more probably, though, that all of these novels are no better or worse than others of their kind, despite the best efforts of their writers. (As evidence, I note that I once began reading a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine novel, Warchild [1994], written by the iconoclastic fantasy writer Esther M. Friesner, hoping to find a fresh and original approach to the franchise; however, I abandoned the book when I found that the book utterly lacked Friesner's trademark humor and was just as dull as all of the other Star Trek novels I had read.) (244)

Ouch! I, actually, really like Warchild and think it's one of the better "numbered" DS9 novels, but the things that appeal to me about the book are, I think, pretty unlikely to appeal to him, which is how well it captures the characters and world of the series, but with the added depth you can get from prose. Is it "fresh and original," does it "stretch generic boundaries"? Kind of, but in the somewhat limited way of Star Trek novels at their best.

That said, I do kind of agree with this:

Writers in earlier generations shared certain ideas about science fiction..., that they endeavored to apply when writing.... [M]ost contemporary writers grew up without any exposure to the genre's traditions, having learned their trade almost exclusively from watching Star Trek and Star Wars, and they never even attempt to write anything exceeding those expectations.... (245)

He phrases it pretty uncharitably, but whenever Hugo season comes around, I do end up feeling like there's a subset of contemporary sf writers (especially those writing Tor.com novellas) who learned everything they know about writing from watching Joss Whedon television shows. Which, okay, fine, whatever... but prose sf can do something else and something different, and I am sympathetic to Westfahl's desire for more of that. Maybe someday I will read the whole book. (Who am I kidding? It's due back to the library May 1, and probably at that point I will forget all about it.)

As my friend Cari pointed out, though, a citation is a citation. Though Google Scholar doesn't seem to have scraped it, of course, and I have no idea how to inform it that Steve Mollmann the Star Trek writer is also Steven Mollmann the sf critic in any case!