SF in the New York Times

A science fiction review on the main page of the New York Times website? Are you kidding me? Has SF at last arrived?After raving over David Marusek's gorgeous, emotionally engaging, and (of critical importance here) accessible SF short stories, reviewer, Dave Itzkoff, goes on to bemoan the in-crowd geekiness of Marusek's novel, Counting Heads. I haven't yet read Marusek's novel, but I was stunned by this comment in Itzkoff's review:"Why does contemporary science fiction have to be so geeky?"Of course these words got my hackles up. I love geeks, am a geek, and detest the society-wide scientific illiteracy that prevents Jane and John Doe from appreciating the poetry of quantum mechanics, artificial intelligence, microbial communication, and other popular SF subjects. But whether or not Itzkoff's complaint about Marusek's novel is valid (I'll withhold judgement until I read it) I do think he asks a fair question of SF in general. And I have my own question to add: is the science fiction readership shrinking because science fiction is growing ever more specialized? Are we writing for each other rather than the general public?Compare, if you will, William Gibson to Ian McDonald.Gibson's Neuromancer is perhaps one of the best-loved science fiction novels ever written, inspiring hard core SF fans while luring mainstream readers. Gibson cleared a place for Cyberpunk at the big table of mainstream culture. It wasn't merely the weird allure of his punky nihilists either. It was hard core technofantasy that required no degree in computer science to understand. Gibson was, in fact, computer illiterate when he wrote it. Like all great writers, he lured the reader into his alien world by providing just enough clues to keep its weird terrain understandable.Ian McDonald, on the other hand, eschews even a nod to user-friendliness. Pick up River of Gods and you are thrown head first into an unfamiliar techno-fantasy with few if any guideposts. Personally, I enjoyed the ride. But AI is my schtick. I've clocked countless hours of research on the subject. As much as I loved the book, I could not in good faith recommend it to anyone outside hardcore SF fandom. In fact, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who's not an AI geek.There is nothing inherently impenetrable about artificial intelligence. It touches on themes that are familiar to everyone: identity, physicality, human nature, immortality, freedom, slavery. So I'm not sure why it has become de rigueur to write from within a cocoon of expertise so dense only fellow experts and geeks know what you're talking about. Would anything have been lost if River of Gods had seduced the lay reader with a touch of user-friendliness? Would hardcore SF geeks have dismissed it? I wonder.I also wonder just how small the SF readership can get before it vanishes. Maybe Itzkoff is asking the question we should be asking of ourselves. Maybe even hard SF writers should think about building bridges rather than cocoons.