November 2010

One of my colleagues recently asked me what I thought about the academic texts on science fiction we had been reading over the semester.  Specifically, she was curious about my opinion on the inside and the outside, and who, more or less, has the “right” to comment upon the genre.  Before I get into that, I need to explain what I mean by the inside and the outside. There are two kinds of science fiction critics (or maybe more than two, but I’m only dealing with two for this post):  the critic who grew up in the “community” and transitioned into academia (the inside) and the non-fan who, by some twist of fate, perhaps, came to the genre having never had much interest in it before (the outside). The latter group might be comprised of fans, or it might not, but the first group most definitely is a fan-based critical circle, since the impetus for shifting to academia as a “science fiction critic” has everything to do with their experience with the genre. In principle, I have no problem with the outside.  They are just as capable of talking about the genre as anyone else, and their opinions and knowledge may add something new to science fiction studies.  Likewise, I have no problem with the inside, since having an intimate connection with the genre lends a kind of unflinching passion to academic life (as an academic, I can attest to the fact that many academics seem to lack passion for their field, or at least seem to lack that passion).  But neither group is without flaws, and it’s when the flaws become noticeable in the critical product that I start to have a big problem. You see, sometimes those who are on the inside are often incapable of thinking on the outside.  They have become so “obsessed” with the field in which they have extended themselves academically that they are largely incapable of dealing with the genre within its own terms and within the theoretical frameworks that exist outside of genre entirely.  These are the folks who write about how much they love SF rather than about what SF does.  These are also folks who should probably remain fans, since being an academic (within the academic world, obviously, since one should be able to separate the two) requires (or should require) a certain level of objectivity and intellectual breadth.  For me, this has always been a problem, because waxing lyrical about my favorite science fiction texts means very little in the academic world (we care about “why” more than we care about “thought”).  I’ve had to separate my fan side from my academic side enough so that the two only overlap in a very small space (as in a Venn diagram, for example).  Some people can’t do this, though, and they need to understand that they’re doing the genre no favors by flooding the academic world with love that, inevitably, has very little meaning in terms of its substance and what it actually offers academics and the field in general (remember that academics, who may be fans, are still different beasts altogether). However, things become even more complicated when one starts to talk about the outside.  In the last few years, there has been (or seems to have been) a surge of academics working on SF who have never done so before.  Some of them have simply felt it was time to shift things over to other things they enjoy, but a good portion of them are individuals who have come to the genre without even understanding it as a genre and as a fan-element (i.e. as popular culture).  This latter group is the problem group.  These are the folks who treat books like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as though it is a remarkably original post-apocalyptic novel, intentionally ignoring that The Road essentially lifts every cliche and plot from the sea of post-apocalyptic novels that preceded it.  These are the individuals who treat everything but a very small handful of SF texts with derision, isolating their work entirely from the critical framework of science fiction studies.  They proclaim by action that they are “the outside,” proudly and with flare.  They’re not interested in learning about the genre (except, perhaps, cursorily) nor about what makes SF texts function (which is essential to any academic project on an SF text). Now you might say that the outsider group I have just described is comprised of lazy academics.  Perhaps they are, but that doesn’t change the fact that some of them get a lot of respect for talking about SF in an obviously lip-service sort of way.  What they’re really interested in are the texts they happened to like (maybe they didn’t even know they were reading SF until it was too late or someone pointed it out to them).  And these folks I have a huge problem with.  It’s a territorial thing.  I don’t care if outsiders come to SF, learn it, and write articles/books about it.  They’re adding something valuable to the discussion.  But I do care about people who come to SF with a clear unwillingness to address the genre on its own terms.  That would be akin to a non-canon (genre-fiction only) reader waltzing over to Charles Dickens and claiming it as their own without looking at the historical and critical framework set up by Dickensian scholars.  To me, that’s a slap in the face. To put it another way:  if you have no intention of being a fan, then don’t write about texts within my genre.  Outsiders can be fans.  They might not like some of the stuff in the SF world (hell, even I don’t), but they are still willing to see the value in the genre and find their niche within it.  They can become fans (perhaps not obsessive ones, but that doesn’t seem necessary).  SF deserves passion from its academics.  But when academics come to the field without embedding themselves into the field (even slightly), they

Now to continue from where I left off in the post you can find here (based on this post by Joseph Robert Lewis). II.  Science Fiction and Its Reflection on the Present Since I have already established that science fiction isn’t actually about the future, it seems prudent to now consider how Lewis’ own logic on that particular point works against him (and, thus, how understanding science fiction as a generic practice is crucial to not only writing and reading it, but also to even talking about it).  Lewis’ second point of contention with science fiction as a written practice is that SF is a killer of drama: Think about your modern life for a moment. Thanks to the phone in your pocket, you’re never lost, never out of touch, never without access to detailed information. And you can photograph or video anything that happens so you have records or evidence. So you’re not going to have a lot of drama related to being lost, confused, or miscommunicating anything. He claims that this logic is the foundation for why he perceives SF to be a genre that only functions in short form (he cites Asimov and Dick as examples, since namedropping is better than actually supporting one’s claim with facts) and that the genre’s focus on technology makes it prone to imaginary conflict (i.e. that it embellishes or fictionalizes its conflicts to make them more than they actually are, such as in imagining robot rebellions) and mundanity.  He, thus, refutes all major conflicts that have appeared in science fiction since its inception as nothing but operatic fancy (space opera), since, in his reality, these things cannot have happened. It should seem ironic at this point that Lewis’ claims are based on his own inability to think about how the present actually operates and how it influences visions of the future.  Cell phones don’t always work, miscommunication occurs all the time, your GPS is imperfect (and sometimes sends you on strange paths it shouldn’t), and the reality that everything can be recorded and distributed, generally speaking, presents new problems that didn’t exist thirty years ago.  To think that the prevalence of technology in our daily lives means that our daily lives are without drama–that empires and nation states are not forced to change with the sudden infusion of transparency in state apparatuses built on controlling analogue- and proto-digital-based information systems, and so forth–is to say far more about one’s perception of life than about the present in general. The interesting truth of the matter is that the present is loaded with drama, whether of a personal or political nature.  Technology simply changes the dynamic.  What once was a system of information transfer based on “old” media like television news programs, newspapers, magazines, and books has simply been thinned out by new forms of technology that make access to information (which is not necessarily good, in contrast to what Lewis implies in his post) easier.  But how amusing that we as a society still have many of the same problems we always had:  we still have imperialist states, massive poverty, politics-as-usual, social and emotional strife, personal and public problems (from the relatively mundane to the catastrophic), and much more.  Life hasn’t become boring; many of us have simply stopped looking around, secure in our little bubbles.  SF is, perhaps, a response to that, since it is the only genre with a dedicated author-base that is fascinated with how the present will be influenced by futures (close and distant) in which the dynamics have changed (slightly or greatly).  Galactic empires, for example, may experience similar problems that we do today, but on grander scales.  And even in the distant future, there are individuals who, contrary to Lewis’ assumption, will be a part of remarkably dramatic events on remarkably different worlds.  SF is all about drama; it is, to repeat in a different way, all about staging the drama of the present (and the past) in radically new ways. Lewis, of course, doesn’t want to think about this.  He spends more time ejecting classic SF themes from his bizarre view of realism than he does in trying to understand where he has misstepped.  At one point he suggests that when technology goes haywire, it won’t result in robot rebellions; this statement might be true, but only because science fiction has shown us in almost every way possible why we must be careful about creating intelligence from nothing–the future’s absence of robot rebellions effectively relies on an intimate understanding of SF’s look at the theme (one which, in many cases, is allegorical for humanity’s questions about itself). What this all boils down to is one writer’s failure to imagine.  SF is an imaginative genre, much like fantasy.  True, it is a conceptually limiting one in those terms, simply because the possibilities for true (and serious) science fiction are not endless, but finite and subject to the reality from which it draws its themes and the reality in which it is based.  But Lewis’ inability to actually consider how the very conditions he presents might be problematic (such as when he argues that all information will be monitored in the future, making it nearly impossible for rebel groups to do much of anything)–and, thus, drama producing–suggests that his biggest problem is in putting the pieces of a speculative puzzle together in his mind–in engaging with SF on its own terms (see Moylan, Delany, et. al. on this).  As a writer, Lewis doesn’t seem to be able to look past his own nose.  Once you delve into the actual dramatic elements, he discounts them as impossible, failing to realize that what seems impossible is probably more likely than ever (intelligent robots are likely to be here by 2030, if not sooner).  SF isn’t the genre Lewis thinks it is.  It’s a genre of complex thematic elements and technological/social splendor.  There’s a reason why it is often called the genre of ideas:  because as much as contemporary critics have

I suppose we have to get used to people saying really idiotic things about science fiction.  Whether it’s some blogger telling us that science fiction is dead (again) or a non-reader telling us that science fiction isn’t literature, there seems to always be someone saying something wrong about the genre.  This, however, is a new kind of wrong.  Blogger and self-published writer Joseph Robert Lewis has written a post about why writing fantasy is better than writing science fiction, a seemingly personal sort of thing, but which bases its claims on an essentially childish understanding of the genre.  And, as we all know, when someone is wrong on the Internet, you have to correct them.  But where to begin? I.  It’s Not About the Future Lewis opens things up with a fundamental misunderstanding of science fiction.  Namely that to write (good) science fiction you need to understand the future, which is impossible…But to write “fantasy” you only need to understand the past, which is less impossible and people expect you to make stuff up, as opposed to actually predict the future on some level. If only that were true.  The problem?  Science fiction isn’t about the future.  It’s only set there.  Lewis assumes that setting determines what the genre is about, but since that doesn’t even work within his own logic (since there are plenty of fantasy stories set in the present, and, thus, for Lewis, must be about the present — see urban fantasy) it is remarkably faulty.  Science fiction has never been about the future; it has always been about the past and the present.  Hence the oft repeated claim (an accurate one, I might add) that science fiction is allegorical; something about the future cannot be allegorical, since the future, by definition, hasn’t happened yet.  Whether traditional fantasy is about the past is debatable (most of it isn’t), but science fiction and the past/present are bosom buddies, and understanding that is crucial to understanding the genre. When one looks through the archives of science fiction, one finds stories about a range of topics:  empires, alien encounters, technology gone wrong, rebellion, dystopian police states, and so on.  And what all of these topics have in common is that they are extrapolations of past and present problems/events.  Whether a science fiction story’s future is accurate is irrelevant.  I sense a hint of that old axiom in Lewis’ first point, but it is, as always, a faulty one precisely because we can’t know the future.  The future is a guessing game, and so science fiction writers only occupy themselves with future settings rather than future truths, leading us back, once again, to the genre’s love affair with the past and the present.  After all, Asimov’s Foundation trilogy is not so much about future galactic civilizations as it is about attempting to apply (read:  extrapolate) economics and psychohistory to a larger entity than a single nation state.  Asimov was working through the idea of predictive economic models (and, thus, economic collapse), something that people during his day, and today, are constantly trying to build and understand to avert collapse, since even rich people don’t want economic collapses (generally speaking); Foundation, thus, could be read as an allegory for the Great Depression–which he lived through as a young boy–and earlier economic collapses and the politics involved (though, perhaps, this reading is too obvious).  Then there’s Kage Baker–to use a more recent author–whose Mars novels–set, obviously, in the future–are less about predicting the future than transplanting capitalist and religious themes into interplanetary settings, thus presenting yet another allegory for past–and even present–events in which the capitalist-religious enterprise (associated as it was with colonialism and imperialism, and even postcolonial conditions/ing) fought over control of land and person–themes that play throughout her novels. So the idea that science fiction authors are interested in understanding the future is patently false.  The truth:  science fiction authors are obsessed with either their past, present, or both.  This is in stark contrast to traditional fantasy–the form Lewis is occupied with–which is often little more than a repetition of Tolkien-esque fantasy narratives, without much in terms of variation.  To be fair to Tolkien, he was occupied with the past, and his work reflects as much, but the level to which most fantasy writers are occupied with the past and with transplanting the past into their work is far lower than (good) writers of science fiction.  That’s not a slight on fantasy, per se, because what fantasy has managed to offer is the adventure that Golden Age science fiction did, and that contemporary science fiction has been lacking, but it is important to note that a great deal of fantasy isn’t actually doing anything new with the past, which is the opposite with science fiction.  Of course, there are fantasy novels which contain serious themes and that break the mold, such as the work of China Mieville and Jeff VanderMeer, and even less stylistically adventurous novels like those of Karen Miller (whose fantasy tales are often heavily political, while also being occupied with the trappings of the fantasy genre–and breaking them apart, as in her Kingmaker, Kingbreaker duology).  But they are exceptions, much like Tolkien. I’ll have more to say in a second post about other things that Lewis brings up in his rant.  For now, I’ll leave you with what has been said here.