Saturday, August 30, 2008
Sunday, August 17, 2008
In Praise of "Science Fiction"
Like many readers of science fiction I have always felt a little apologetic about it. I have a degree in English literature; I have read and loved plenty of great writing; yet here I am spending my time on stuff some of which is so devoid of stylistic felicity that it makes me wince. Worse than that, isn't there something intrinsically trivial, jejeune about the subject matter? It's not about the real world, events that have happened or could have happened. Much of it is not even about real beings or creatures, or even (like the Iliad and the Odyssey) about imaginary beings invested with substance by cultural tradition and consensus.
Yet in science fiction I find one of our time's greatest outpourings of creativity and wisdom. One obstacle to seeing this is that several distinct types of writing have been mixed together indistinguishably under the label "science fiction." The simplest and least consequential form is the "space opera," which is a kind of adventure story set in a universe of the author's own devising, with the story often revolving around combat of some kind. Often it takes little imagination to see it as a western transposed into space, and indeed at least one science fiction movie of this type (Outlander) is readily recognized as a retelling of a classic western (High Noon).
At its worst science fiction is like a comic book (and I would argue that at their best, comic books too are noteworthy literature). In its intermediate rankings it is no worse than a western or a mystery. And at its best, it represents something between the mythical literature of Homer and the essays of Orwell.
Science fiction is a natural outgrowth of the Enlightenment, that revolutionary explosion of thought that made us realize collectively for the first time that we might unravel the mysteries of the physical world, and learn to control it, in a manner and at a speed that our ancestors could not imagine. There had been earlier outliers, geniuses like Da Vinci, but before the Enlightenment the average person's world changed slowly; one died in pretty much the same circumstances that his parents had died, and their parents before them. One certainly did not expect miracles like great iron horses that raced across the countryside or pulled plows whose size would have staggered the imaginations of one's forebears, let alone messages that leapt across continents in an instant, or airborne carriages that crossed oceans in a few hours. Yet the Enlightenment made all these changes, and more, inevitable. And as they began to appear, and as the rate of appearance accelerated, those of a certain bent inevitably began to project this process into the future. If today men can build an unsinkable ship of iron, why not tomorrow a ship of iron that travels underwater? If today a vessel that travels through the air a hundred times as fast as a man can walk, why not tomorrow a vessel that crosses the void between stars a million times as fast, or a trillion?
This view of science fiction's origins does not, of course, provide a defense against the "space opera" canard. But the great science fiction does not merely marvel at technological change. It may, quite often does, lament it. The great science fiction is built around a thought experiment on what these technological changes will mean to those who experience them. And it is always, contrary to the canard, about the real world -- the one we are creating for, or at least threatening to leave to, our children. The great science fiction recognizes that technology is the tail wagging the dog of human destiny, and that if we do not think about where it is taking us, we are certain to be surprised, and perhaps not pleasantly.
Two modern science fiction writers have brought the art of future-tech writing to a new height. Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash and, more so, The Diamond Age are must reading for anyone who wants a taste of where some of our near-future technology may take us. William Gibson (Neuromancer), the best known of the cyberpunk authors, gives an invaluable taste of what virtual reality may come to mean when technology catches up with imagination. Future-tech warnings also abound in science fiction cinema, from The Forbin Project to Terminator.
But great science fiction is not necessarily about technology at all. It may even rest on patently unsound or impossible premises about the physical universe -- which is where the supposed demarcation between science fiction and "fantasy" fiction begins to break down. Once the speculative form was invented, there was no reason not to use it to explore political and social trends and ideas and to expose aspects of them the author found especially worthy of note. Some of the very best science fiction addresses extremely topical issues such as war and empire (LeGuin, The Word for World Is Forest; Lessing, Canopus in Argos series, esp. The Sentimental Agents; Haldeman, The Forever War; Card, Ender's War and sequels), gender identity and culture (LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness; Lessing, The Marriages of Zones Two, Three, and Four), sexual liberation (Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land, et al.), and of course ecological ruin (Stewart's Earth Abides, Robinson's Mars series, Three Californias series, Science in the Capital series; and films: Silent Running, Soylent Green, The Omega Man, Planet of the Apes, Artificial Intelligence, Wall-E).
In fact, some of the very best speculative fiction has been unjustifiably excused from bearing the "science fiction" label, either because its authors were considered too substantial, or the books themselves too good, to bear such a tag: Orwell's 1984, Huxley's Brave New World, Levin's This Perfect Day, Shute's On the Beach -- nothing distinguishes these from dozens of novels in the science fiction section of the library except that the writing is, most of the time, quite a bit better.
And here I have to confess that I can't read all science fiction, or even, perhaps, most of it. A few years ago I bought a newish entry by Poul Anderson, thinking nostalgically that I had seen that name a lot in my sci-fi obsessed youth. I couldn't read it, and I now suppose there was a reason I couldn't remember more than the name. Numerous other disappointments have led me to exercise extreme care in picking up a science fiction book to read. My adverse reactions even extend to the hallowed Isaac Asimov, whose legendary quantum of output is inversely proportional, I'm afraid, to its literary quality.
But the older I get, the clearer it becomes that my reading of science fiction has had a profound and lasting effect in shaping my intellectual universe. It is not an accident that George Orwell, probably the greatest English language essayist of our times, resorted to hypothetical fiction when he really wanted to make an urgent point. His two great exercises in that genre, 1984 and Animal Farm, have become abiding classics, and if the former is science fiction while the latter is fantasy, it only demonstrates the arbitrariness of these labels.
Despite what I said about the role of the Enlightenment, there has always been storytelling built around a world that is not only imaginary in the sense that the characters are invented, but imaginary in the sense that the reality in which they exist differs in one or more dramatic respects from the one in which the audience existed. Once these were called fairy tales or fables. Whatever tag we attach to them, they have always provided a way to look at some aspect of ourselves with a freedom and starkness that a more realistic framework would not allow. It is a noble and ancient tradition, and its modern practitioners should receive more attention than their forebears did, if only because the worlds they describe may become real, in their essence, in a way that Mother Goose never dreamt of.
Yet in science fiction I find one of our time's greatest outpourings of creativity and wisdom. One obstacle to seeing this is that several distinct types of writing have been mixed together indistinguishably under the label "science fiction." The simplest and least consequential form is the "space opera," which is a kind of adventure story set in a universe of the author's own devising, with the story often revolving around combat of some kind. Often it takes little imagination to see it as a western transposed into space, and indeed at least one science fiction movie of this type (Outlander) is readily recognized as a retelling of a classic western (High Noon).
At its worst science fiction is like a comic book (and I would argue that at their best, comic books too are noteworthy literature). In its intermediate rankings it is no worse than a western or a mystery. And at its best, it represents something between the mythical literature of Homer and the essays of Orwell.
Science fiction is a natural outgrowth of the Enlightenment, that revolutionary explosion of thought that made us realize collectively for the first time that we might unravel the mysteries of the physical world, and learn to control it, in a manner and at a speed that our ancestors could not imagine. There had been earlier outliers, geniuses like Da Vinci, but before the Enlightenment the average person's world changed slowly; one died in pretty much the same circumstances that his parents had died, and their parents before them. One certainly did not expect miracles like great iron horses that raced across the countryside or pulled plows whose size would have staggered the imaginations of one's forebears, let alone messages that leapt across continents in an instant, or airborne carriages that crossed oceans in a few hours. Yet the Enlightenment made all these changes, and more, inevitable. And as they began to appear, and as the rate of appearance accelerated, those of a certain bent inevitably began to project this process into the future. If today men can build an unsinkable ship of iron, why not tomorrow a ship of iron that travels underwater? If today a vessel that travels through the air a hundred times as fast as a man can walk, why not tomorrow a vessel that crosses the void between stars a million times as fast, or a trillion?
This view of science fiction's origins does not, of course, provide a defense against the "space opera" canard. But the great science fiction does not merely marvel at technological change. It may, quite often does, lament it. The great science fiction is built around a thought experiment on what these technological changes will mean to those who experience them. And it is always, contrary to the canard, about the real world -- the one we are creating for, or at least threatening to leave to, our children. The great science fiction recognizes that technology is the tail wagging the dog of human destiny, and that if we do not think about where it is taking us, we are certain to be surprised, and perhaps not pleasantly.
Two modern science fiction writers have brought the art of future-tech writing to a new height. Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash and, more so, The Diamond Age are must reading for anyone who wants a taste of where some of our near-future technology may take us. William Gibson (Neuromancer), the best known of the cyberpunk authors, gives an invaluable taste of what virtual reality may come to mean when technology catches up with imagination. Future-tech warnings also abound in science fiction cinema, from The Forbin Project to Terminator.
But great science fiction is not necessarily about technology at all. It may even rest on patently unsound or impossible premises about the physical universe -- which is where the supposed demarcation between science fiction and "fantasy" fiction begins to break down. Once the speculative form was invented, there was no reason not to use it to explore political and social trends and ideas and to expose aspects of them the author found especially worthy of note. Some of the very best science fiction addresses extremely topical issues such as war and empire (LeGuin, The Word for World Is Forest; Lessing, Canopus in Argos series, esp. The Sentimental Agents; Haldeman, The Forever War; Card, Ender's War and sequels), gender identity and culture (LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness; Lessing, The Marriages of Zones Two, Three, and Four), sexual liberation (Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land, et al.), and of course ecological ruin (Stewart's Earth Abides, Robinson's Mars series, Three Californias series, Science in the Capital series; and films: Silent Running, Soylent Green, The Omega Man, Planet of the Apes, Artificial Intelligence, Wall-E).
In fact, some of the very best speculative fiction has been unjustifiably excused from bearing the "science fiction" label, either because its authors were considered too substantial, or the books themselves too good, to bear such a tag: Orwell's 1984, Huxley's Brave New World, Levin's This Perfect Day, Shute's On the Beach -- nothing distinguishes these from dozens of novels in the science fiction section of the library except that the writing is, most of the time, quite a bit better.
And here I have to confess that I can't read all science fiction, or even, perhaps, most of it. A few years ago I bought a newish entry by Poul Anderson, thinking nostalgically that I had seen that name a lot in my sci-fi obsessed youth. I couldn't read it, and I now suppose there was a reason I couldn't remember more than the name. Numerous other disappointments have led me to exercise extreme care in picking up a science fiction book to read. My adverse reactions even extend to the hallowed Isaac Asimov, whose legendary quantum of output is inversely proportional, I'm afraid, to its literary quality.
But the older I get, the clearer it becomes that my reading of science fiction has had a profound and lasting effect in shaping my intellectual universe. It is not an accident that George Orwell, probably the greatest English language essayist of our times, resorted to hypothetical fiction when he really wanted to make an urgent point. His two great exercises in that genre, 1984 and Animal Farm, have become abiding classics, and if the former is science fiction while the latter is fantasy, it only demonstrates the arbitrariness of these labels.
Despite what I said about the role of the Enlightenment, there has always been storytelling built around a world that is not only imaginary in the sense that the characters are invented, but imaginary in the sense that the reality in which they exist differs in one or more dramatic respects from the one in which the audience existed. Once these were called fairy tales or fables. Whatever tag we attach to them, they have always provided a way to look at some aspect of ourselves with a freedom and starkness that a more realistic framework would not allow. It is a noble and ancient tradition, and its modern practitioners should receive more attention than their forebears did, if only because the worlds they describe may become real, in their essence, in a way that Mother Goose never dreamt of.
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