Writer's Block with a Capital W

Please read these two articles first:
1. At a Loss for Words (Article by Michael Anderson. Via Professor Zero.)
2. No More Lily-White Futures and Monochrome Myths (Article by N.K. Jemison at ABW).

(EDIT: I'm overwhelmed by the many ideas in the articles. From all those threads, I'm picking out writer's block as something that speaks to me.)

So. Ralph Ellison. One celebrated novel and then, what, forty years of near silence? Talk about writer's block!

I've read Invisible Man, in which Ellison did address a lot of problems with mainstream U.S. culture. I don't know much about Ellison's life. But personally I think I have followed something like the path of appeasement of the mainstream U.S. culture that Anderson attributes to Ellison after the publication of Invisible Man. And I've been badly blocked myself. Until lately, I never realized that there might have been a connection between those two things. Recently I've gotten off that path of appeasement, and the block has receded amazingly so far.

It reminds me of a story. In the 1970s, John Varley, a white science-fiction writer, wrote The Ophiuchi Hotline. In Varley's story, a race of creatures have survived for millions of years in the antiseptic environment of artificial habitats in deep space. They can meet their own material needs, change their DNA, etc. -- but they can't maintain their closed culture indefinitely. They would die out if they stopped finding and internalizing other cultures. One big difference between U.S. mainstream culture and Varley's space aliens: the aliens knew that fact.

Most of the white American writers I'm familiar with seem to suffer from alienation. While the writers may know it, they're still totally helpless against it. It's useless to even go to most white American writers for help with alienation. Everybody complains about it but nobody does anything about it! (There are exceptions. I think Vonnegut tried to do something about it. He made it pretty clear that what's wrong with the culture is its immorality. And by immorality he meant things like killing people. Not hiphop music or tattoos or gay sex.)

So. N.K. Jemison's article about racism in science fiction. SF seems to be dying. (EDIT: I don't want to pick on Varley, a brilliantly original man who wrote some of my favorite stories. But he seems to be writing about like woolly mammoths now.) And SF continues to reject writers from outside the mainstream culture. I doubt that the folks inside mainstream SF see a connection between those two things. But a closed culture is a dead culture.

Imagine what SF might look like in ten years ... if it would only unplug its tender pink ears and listen to people who have something new to say? I think the patient can be revived, made stronger than ever. But only if he will let the doctors reach out to him, stop treating them as if they were asking him for a favor, and listen.

It's only SF. Unfortunately U.S. mainstream culture as a whole seems to have a similar problem.

(EDIT: A note of hope. Looking around the blog-neighborhood, I wonder whether we might be in a time like the beginning of the civil rights movement. The culture may be in for some new ideas after all.)

(EEDIT: Plus, Jesus Christ, it's science fiction! We say we want to talk to Dolphins, to creatures from Betelgeuse; we claim we need to liberate the Artificial Intelligences. But we can't take the baby step of reading books written by human beings on our own planet, living ten blocks away, living next door, who have had a different experience? WHAT science fiction? How did it even last this long?)


EDIT: Acknowledgement
Afrofuturism ideas and links at ebogjonson helped me think about this.

EDIT: Belated Acknowledgement 5/31/07
I was also reading Professor Zero on writing and blockage at the time I wrote this.