THE LITERATURE OF NERDS GOES MAINSTREAM

By MICHAEL KRANTZ

Back in the 1950s, science-fiction literature earned a reputation as the opiate of supernerdy teenage boys: sturdy but unimaginative prose that waxed rhapsodic about G-forces and interstellar trajectories. It wasn't quite fair even then; early works by authors such as Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke relied as much on clever plot twists and thought-provoking views of societal evolution as on visions of rocket ships and interplanetary travel. Still, there was sufficient truth for the stereotype to sting.

But while sci-fi may never fully shed its dweeby image, the reality has evolved along with the rest of pop culture. Readers can choose from a wide array of subgenres, including Tolkienesque fantasy, high-tech cyberpunk, horror sci-fi, feminist sci-fi, techno-thriller sci-fi, gay and lesbian sci-fi and even sci-fi erotica. Readership and authorship have broadened too: women now account for a third of the science-fiction audience, compared with just 10% in the '50s, and such writers as Ursula Le Guin and Octavia E. Butler (one of sci-fi's few African-American authors) are no longer considered invaders in a men's club.

As a result, the books have moved from the publishing industry's paperback margins to its Big Money mainstream. The number of sci-fi titles has more than doubled since the early '70s, from fewer than 1,000 titles a year to 2,000, with a remarkable third appearing first in hard cover, according to Charles N. Brown, publisher of Locus, the trade magazine and industry bible.

The most popular genre, however, is one sci-fi purists disdain: endlessly replicating paperbacks based on movies and TV shows, notably Star Wars and Star Trek. "Movie tie-ins outsell regular science fiction by quite a bit," Brown says with a sniff. "We don't consider them real science fiction." A bit more acceptable, though still off the point, are traditional sword-and-sorcery fantasies like Robert Jordan's A Crown of Swords (Tor), which debuted at No. 2 on last week's New York Times list.

But for longtime readers like Brown, the real sci-fi is "hard" sci-fi. It's the literary equivalent of a whiskey shot: bracing, no-nonsense extrapolation of today's science. And it's coming back after years of neglect. The colonization of Mars, for example--a quintessential hard sci-fi subject--inspired Kim Stanley Robinson's Blue Mars (Bantam). The third volume in his acclaimed Mars trilogy, it's a painstakingly plotted epic that follows a group of pioneers across centuries as they transform the Red Planet into an ecologically friendly refuge. "We're acting as the conscience and subconscious of the scientific world," says Greg Bear, author of 16 novels, most of them hard sci-fi. "We dream what scientists would like to achieve."

Then there's cyberpunk, the Net-based genre whose grim, dehumanized vision of the future dominated sci-fi during the late '80s. Its seminal work was the 1984 classic Neuromancer, by William Gibson, who never was happy being pigeonholed as a cyberpunk writer. "It wasn't our term," he says. "It's one of those labels." And although he did invent the word cyberspace, says Gibson, "I had to spend years and years figuring out what it meant." In the past few years, cyberpunk has lost some of its glitter, perhaps because cruising the Net has become so commonplace.

So its creators are focusing on fresher paranoias: Gibson's new novel, Idoru (Putnam), due in September, is a ghost story of sorts. And a second September book, Holy Fire (Bantam), by Bruce Sterling, another godfather of cyberpunk, is about intergenerational war. It's set 100 years in the future, in an age ruled by a wealthy centenarian gerontocracy whose disenfranchised children are readying a revolution based on the terrifying new cognitive landscapes offered by man-computer interfaces.

The book is a haunting and lyrical triumph, one of the few cyberpunk-influenced novels to weave a believable and emotionally involving vision of mankind's cultural and technological future from the reality of the vast Net already developing around us. That's all one can reasonably ask of science fiction: show us new worlds and make us believe our descendants might live there someday.

But will those descendants even read sci-fi? "When I started working here 20 years ago, we were getting the 12- and 13-year-olds," says Michael Franklin, manager of New York City's Science Fiction Shop. "We're still getting the same people--but now they're 32 and 33." Where have all the teenage gearheads gone? The Web. Nintendo. The Cineplex Odeon. "It's awful, a terrible habit!" says one of Holy Fire's 21st century Gen Xers. "Reading is so bad for you, it destroys your eyes and hurts your posture and makes you fat." How ironic: the gravest threat to science-fiction literature's future is precisely the future its authors predicted.

--By Michael Krantz. Reported by Andrea Sachs/New York

With reporting by Andrea Sachs/New York