The really exciting science fiction is boring

It may not look thrilling .. a scientist indicates an image of one of the first cloned human embryos at the Newcastle Institute of Human Genetics in 2005. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod

OK, I admit it, sci-fi is boring. After endless Star Trek re-runs, innumerable badly scripted Hollywood movies and a thousand video games with pixel-deep narrative, the once wondrous ideas of sci-fi have become yawn-inducing. Fortunately for me, beyond the world of tedious mass media sci-fi, lies the exciting world of literary science fiction or "SF" constantly producing new ideas to satisfy my hunger for wonder. Now a radical sect of SF writers and critics claim that SF needs to abandon all those wondrous ideas, and concentrate instead on the everyday and the mundane. All hail the Mundane Revolution!

Founded by SF writer Geoff Ryman, the Mundane movement has incited a barrage of criticism and insults. At the heart of the Mundane manifesto is a simple idea. Science fiction has become associated with powerful myths like faster-than-light travel and alien civilisations, myths that have been much overused and have no basis in scientific fact. The Mundanistas claim that unless SF can abandon these myths, in favour of scientific realities like biotechnology or environmental change, it will become as dull and boring as mass media sci-fi.

The Mundane manifesto was perfectly pitched to infuriate the SF community. On the one hand it aimed a casual insult at SF readers who enjoyed the powerful myths it criticised. On the other it alienated the science-obsessed "Hard SF" faction who felt directly attacked by the Mundansitas. The attitudes of both sides hardened around a series of wonderfully arrogant statements issuing from the Mundanista camp, claiming in no uncertain terms that theirs was the one true way to SF heaven. Go ahead and prove it, came the response from the rest of the SF world.

The battleground for this SF smackdown would be the pages of one of the world's most influential short fiction magazines. Where literary fiction has long since abandoned the short form in favor of the fertile intellectual territory of Waterstones 3 for 2 tables, SF has continued to value short fiction as the arena where the genre innovates and evolves. Enter Interzone, Britain's longest-running SF magazine, at a time when British writers have come to dominate the field. Never one to shy away from a good dust-up, but smart enough not to step in front of a locomotive full of enraged SF fans, the editors of Interzone handed control to a team of guest editors representing the heartland of Mundanista territory, and the call went forth for stories that represented the Mundane manifesto.

The result is the Interzone Mundane SF Special, debuting on May 8. The featured stories come from Lavie Tidhar, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Billie Aul, RR Angell, Elisabeth Vonarburg, Anil Menon and Geoff Ryman, a lineup that favours new talent over established reputation. The stories tap into the rich vein of technological change hovering in the very near future.

The effects of climate change and the potential wonders and horrors of bio-technology loom large, as does the impact of the internet on politics, society and the individual. But very real, very human emotion lies at the heart of these stories, conveyed with a sense of literary style that puts most literary fiction to shame.

But the Mundane manifesto succeeds by being anything but mundane. The seven stories in Interzone #216 celebrate the real core value of SF - the sense of wonder that it can inspire in readers. From its early days in pulp magazines like Amazing Stories, SF has evolved to serve readers' desire for wonder. From rocketships and rayguns to cyborgs, virtual reality and the technological singularity, the history of SF has been a history of finding new ideas to spark the sense of wonder in readers.

Mundane SF succeeds by understanding that the most amazing and wondrous possibilities now lie not in the depths of space or the far future, but right here on planet Earth in our very near future. A wave of technology promises (or perhaps threatens) to effect such enormous change that the next 20 years will make the last 100 look positively sedate in comparison. Mundane SF is the literature exploring how those changes will change our lives, and for all of us living through them it should be essential reading.