How Important is Science Fact in Science Fiction?
I’ve heard the question a few times before, but I can’t remember if I’ve ever addressed it from my personal perspective (as a writer and as a reader). Science fiction, for me, has always been as much about its science as it is about its fiction, but always within a certain futurological perspective — that is that I see science fiction as being about extrapolative and progressive science (cyberpunk, space opera, hard SF, etc.), rather than about extrapolative and alt-historical science (alternate history, steampunk, etc.). But one thing that I’ve never held firm to is the idea that the science must be factual in order for something to be considered science fiction. For me, the science in science fiction only needs to feel plausible. When I read science fiction, I’m not looking for stories that are actually accurate based on real scientific knowledge (of the now or the then). I need to believe the world being relayed to me is real, even if the technology within it is far beyond anything we have today or even impossible based on what little science knowledge I have. Even bad science can be written in a way that sounds good, which I think is more important to science fiction as a social genre than limiting oneself to scientific rigor. SF certainly is about science, but only insofar as it is about how science changes us. For this reason, I think much of the science in SF can be metaphorical rather than strictly factual. Writing plausible science, however, is never an easy task. More often than not, I think it can be done by being consistent without excessive info-dumping. The longer an author spends talking about how something works, the more likely it is for me to start seeing the holes. That’s not to say that info-dumping isn’t good to a certain extent. In fact, I’d argue that treating the technology too lightly can reveal different kinds of holes (ones tied to the worldbuilding rather than to the logic). For most writers, I think the balance is easy to manage. I’ve only read a few books in which the holes in the world’s logic were so obvious that I had to stop reading, and most of them were not published by major publishers of SF (or even reputable small presses). But perhaps my lax standards in regards to science have something to do with the fact that I’m an English major and not a scientist (though I’m no illiterate when it comes to science). I suspect that many scientists are frequently annoyed by what “passes” for science fiction these days. They see the holes all the time, right down to the core. How about you, though? How important to you is science fact to science fiction?
Good vs. Evil and the Simple World That Never Was
(Or the Problem of Absolutes in Fantasy Literature) Good vs. evil. It forms the basis of our religions and fills the narratives of our stories, myths, legends, and day-to-day conversations. But the more I look at the world, the more I get the sense that such a simple dichotomy never existed. Nothing is ever so simple as “good vs. evil.” There are always tugs and pulls from other parties, some of which are so torn between the good and evil spectrums that they seem to reflect a strange and un-containable neutralism. Some people, however, aren’t interested in those tugs and pulls. They want to see the world in absolutes. A recent discussion I had with an older man on Facebook (we’ll call him Bob) bears this reality out. When talking about U.S. involvement in imperialist projects around the world, I pointed out that the U.S. often does great wrong, and that very few “pure” good acts exist. Bob took this to mean that the I was saying that the U.S. is always wrong, and that the rest of the world is always right. When I tried to explain that I was actually pointing out the problem of trying to talk about U.S. involvement in absolutes, he shrunk away and left the conversation. He didn’t know how to handle the fact that the world isn’t actually a pure dichotomy; he wanted to think of the U.S. as occasionally incorrect, but more often than not very much right in its military and economic involvement in the rest of the world. The fact that doing “good” elsewhere often hurts people didn’t occur to him (when I said as much, he accused me of wanting the people of Libya to be murdered by Gaddafi, which couldn’t be farther from the truth). Bob is obviously not alone (though perhaps the particulars of his viewpoint make him a minority). In the fantasy literature community, there is a whole segment of readers who clamber for the opportunity to read the next fantasy novel where the good guys and the bad guys are clearly laid out. I suspect this group is small, in part because some of these individuals demonstrate an underlying or explicit sexism/racism in their calls for more Tolkien or C. S. Lewis (again, this group may be a minority even among those who like “good vs. evil). Fantasy literature hasn’t moved completely away from these simple notions; there have always been people who desire such a simple view of the world. But the overall feel of fantasy to me is like a gray-ing up of the medieval model. George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones is not The Princess Bride (William Goldman) or The Never-ending Story (Michael Ende). Even the proliferation of the new fantasy anti-hero suggests that the genre has been moving away from simple worlds for a good while. But moving away doesn’t change the world we live in or the people who are readers, leaders, and so on. In the U.S., we’ve seen more and more people who see the world in black and white getting their fair share of air time, rejecting the notion of grays outright. Politicians routinely use the “good vs. evil” model to wage cultural wars in the country. Paying close attention to the last election makes it clear that partisan logic is one which holds to that simple world view. But what makes us desire “good vs. evil?” Is it the sheer simplicity of it? Thinking in terms of hard dichotomies might mean that we don’t have to think about the subtle nuances of our lives. We can look at single actions and say “they are good” and “they are evil” without having to wade through the complexities of history, culture, and so on. Maybe it’s because the more we realize that the world is gray, the more we also realize that any decision we make has consequences somewhere else — that is that our actions reverberate elsewhere like socio-economic earthquakes. Because the world never was a simple one (at least, not in recorded history; perhaps the “good vs. evil” dichotomy is a part of our primitive, pre-civilization hangups). Why do you think we are so attached to “good vs. evil?” Why are you attached to it, and do you think fantasy is moving away from such dichotomies? ——————————————————————- Notes: I’ve tried to refrain from talking about the United Kingdom because I don’t feel as though I can adequately talk about the people who live there. If anyone from the U.K. would like to chime in on this topic, feel free to do so in the comments. I don’t want to suggest that the fantasy works I’ve mentioned above do not contain areas of grey. They do, but the overwhelming sense in Tolkien or The Princess Bride or The Never-ending Story seems to confirm the absolutist “good vs. evil” narrative.
The Reviewer Matters: On the NYT Review of “A Game of Thrones”
If you haven’t seen the blogosphere throwing a fit yet about this New York Times review of the TV adaptation of “A Game of Thrones,” then prepare yourself. It was bound to happen that some hack of that lovely “literary” culture would come along to talk about something they barely understand: this time A Game of Thrones and fantasy in general. Some choice quotes, though, are: The bigger question, though, is: What is “Game of Thrones” doing on HBO? The series claims as one of its executive producers the screenwriter and best-selling author David Benioff, whose excellent script for Spike Lee’s post-9/11 meditation, “25th Hour,” did not suggest a writer with Middle Earth proclivities. Five years ago, however, Mr. Benioff began reading George R. R. Martin’s series of books, “A Song of Ice and Fire,” fell in love and sought to adapt “Game of Thrones,” one of the installments. (Because we all know that no non-genre writer could possibly fall in love with a genre property and suddenly want to be involved in genre things, right?) And: The imagined historical universe of “Game of Thrones” gives license for unhindered bed-jumping — here sibling intimacy is hardly confined to emotional exchange. (Because there was no unhindered bed-jumping in realistic feudal societies…) And: The true perversion, though, is the sense you get that all of this illicitness has been tossed in as a little something for the ladies, out of a justifiable fear, perhaps, that no woman alive would watch otherwise. While I do not doubt that there are women in the world who read books like Mr. Martin’s, I can honestly say that I have never met a single woman who has stood up in indignation at her book club and refused to read the latest from Lorrie Moore unless everyone agreed to “The Hobbit” first. “Game of Thrones” is boy fiction patronizingly turned out to reach the population’s other half. (Because women don’t like swords and medieval sex parties and dragons and other things like that…) And, finally: If you are not averse to the Dungeons & Dragons aesthetic, the series might be worth the effort. If you are nearly anyone else, you will hunger for HBO to get back to the business of languages for which we already have a dictionary. (Because the only people who enjoy fantasy are people who like D&D…) Read the review on your own to get a better sense of the biases and absurdities of the author, which I’m not going to refute here. Instead, I want to talk about the responsibility of editorial departments and the reviewer. Aidan of A Dribble of Ink has already responded to the NYT review, the body of which I take some issues with. He wrote: There’s an argument out there that the NYT should have handed the television show to a reviewer with a taste for and a history with Fantasy literature and cinema. I don’t fully agree with this, however. One assumes that the early viewership of the show will primarily be made up of fans of Martin’s series, an already established audience, but as the show moves on (and garners more critical acclaim, as it has everywhere besides the NYT), that audience will continue to grow and reach outside the typical circle of core Fantasy consumers. Does one need to be immersed in 60′s corporate politicking to enjoy Mad Men? No. Does one have to understand the Tudor dynasty to enjoy The Tudors? Aidan does eventually argue that Bellafante, who wrote the NYT review, should have been open-minded enough to immerse herself in the medium (fantasy), and that she shouldn’t have been selected for the job, but I still take issue with the criticism over proper reviewer selection. This is because it seems absurd to me to select anyone who demonstrates a clear bias against a particular genre, or who has no familiarity with it. It is difficult to expect someone to write a fair review of something they are not familiar with. I certainly could not write anything remotely fair about a book on Swedish politics, in part because I don’t know anything about the topic, but also because non-fiction books are not my specialty. My review would be unfair to the source material. In the case of Bellafante, though, her credibility as a genre review is questionable at best. On the New York Times alone, only seven of her last two-hundred articles deal with television shows we might call speculative fiction (Flash Forward, Warehouse 13, Virtuality, The Event, Supernatural, and Spartacus: Gods of the Arena). Of those seven, one is on a fantasy show (Supernatural) and one is on a show that might be called fantasy depending on how much liberty one has to take with a historical period to make it unreal enough to qualify as alternate history (Spartacus: Gods of the Arena). Can you guess which works Bellafante dislikes most? If you guessed the two fantasy properties (roughly defined), then you should give yourself a cookie. Bellafante’s reviews of fantasy TV contains such a clear level of bias that it’s a wonder anyone is handing her fantasy properties to begin with. About Supernatural, she had this to say: Asking anyone to explain the story line succinctly is like demanding a 15-second account of the Hundred Years’ War. “Supernatural” is intricately plot intensive, and perhaps you need the flower-bud brain cells of youth really to keep up. And: If you are neither 15 years old nor the sort of person for whom the term fan fiction has an ounce of resonance, then chances are that ”Supernatural” is not in your DVR queue or even in your frame of reference. It seems to me that the issue here is with the editor who selected Bellafante for the review (or selected her review, in the event that the NYT is run by submission). What would compel an editor to select a reviewer who a) does not have a track record as a fantasy
Can Science Fiction Survive the Future?
I’ve been thinking a lot about this question lately. It has nothing to do with the publishing industry, sales, or anything like that (at least, not directly). What I’m really curious about is the ability for science fiction to be science fiction as time progresses: will we always have science fiction, or will it die because the genre ceases to have a setting which sets it apart from the present enough to make it recognizable as a distinct genre? Since I don’t consider alternate history to be science fiction (it fits in its own genre, in my mind), there is a very real possibility that our future will make setting SF in a radically different environment (a defamiliarized zone, to link this whole discussion to Fredric Jameson) near impossible. Or will it? Would we still consider books about alien encounters science fiction even if the means to travel between worlds becomes relatively simple? Or would such stories become fantasies? When I first began thinking about this question, it occurred to me that many of the definitions we use to describe SF, even in a fairly general sense — such as Darko Suvin’s “cognitive estrangement” or Fredric Jameson’s own manipulation of that concept — become obsolete as the present encroaches on the allegorical past/present/future commonly associated with SF. How can something be SF if it represents our immediate reality? That, to me, seems more like mimetic/realistic fiction than anything else. How do we define a genre like “SF” when it is indistinguishable from realistic fiction? These are the kinds of questions I’m curious about. Maybe you all will join in and give me your thoughts. Comment away.
Guest Post: “The Weird West Subgenre” by Lincoln Crisler
Your kind host has asked me to introduce you to the wonderful world of the Weird West (and in doing so, to the unassailably awesome aesthetics of the alliteration!). If you like steampunk or alternate history, you might like Weird West stories. That Wild Wild West movie that came out a decade or two ago could be held up as an example of either subgenre: steampunk because of the machinery and Weird West because of the setting and the machinery. There’s a bit of overlap with steampunk and Weird West because the time of the American West is pretty much the upper limit of the steampunk time period; that is, before the Industrial Revolution kicked into high gear in the United States and made steampunk-type technology not quite as farfetched anymore. But I digress. The untamed American West of the 1830s to 1920s is rife with possibilities for writers and readers of speculative fiction. You have an entire half-continent or so that’s just beginning to become habitable by Western European standards, you have unknown Native American tribes and people of Mexican descent with cultures, gods and rituals that no one understands and you have a sense of lawlessness that can’t quite be captured as thouroughly in any other milieu. You have people traveling west because they love to take risks, because they’re on the run from a shady past, because they’re greedy; all of which are excellent motivations for characters. Even better, you have lots of guns. So what separates the Weird West from a Louis L’Amour novel, you might be wondering. After all, most of the stuff I talked about in the above paragraph sounds like good material, but not exactly weird. This is where you extrapolate. The machines from Wild Wild West are Weird West material because robots in the Old West are pretty strange and even impossible, right? That’s the Weird West. Those indigenous tribes, with their strange gods and practices; what if they practice magic? What if they can raise the dead? What happens if you send a mysterious risk-taker and a greedy outlaw into a situation like that? Hell, you could even have a dead civilization story or disappearing colony a’la Roanoke; a society with technology at or below that of the Wild West could disappear without a trace in the matter of a couple hundred years, and there’s a lot of unexplored territory out there, pardner. It’s a setting that can breathe new life into old tropes; sure, you’ve read lots of books about wizards, but how many wizard vs. cowboy stories can you think of? The zombie apocalypse seems inescapable when depicted in modern times when people have kevlar and automatic weapons; how much worse would it be in a society that doesn’t even have penicillin? The Old West was a far more uncertain time than any era any living have survived yet, and writers can use this tension to create high-impact stories that readers will enjoy and found unique. How do I know all this, you might be wondering. The answer is my latest book, WILD, available starting this month from Damnation Books. A mysterious problem solver, a slippery outlaw, a dutiful deputy and a former Mexican Army medic find themselves in over their heads when they investigate the mysterious disappearance of a former war hero, legislator, prosecutor and tax collector. My would-be heroes find themselves face to face with the spellcraft of an unknown culture and face down the forces of darkness in their own little corner of the world. I even did a bit of that extrapolation stuff I preached a couple paragraphs ago; the whole shebang is loosely based on the real-life unsolved disappearance of a southwestern war hero, legislator, prosecutor and tax collector. So far, the result has earned some pretty good reviews. My book is available anywhere you could possibly want to buy it, and if you’d like to take your Weird West foray a bit farther, I suggest the Jonah Hex comics, the Dark Tower novel series by Stephen King and just about anything by Joe Lansdale, for starters. Thanks for reading! —————————————————- Lincoln Crisler’s debut novella, WILD, is due in March from Damnation Books. He has also authored a pair of short story collections, Magick & Misery (2009, Black Bed Sheet) and Despairs & Delights (2008, Arctic Wolf). A United States Army combat veteran and non-commissioned officer, Lincoln lives in Augusta, Georgia with his wife and two of his three children. You can visit his website at www.lincolncrisler.info.
New Weird and Scifi Strange: Part Three — The Existence of Unsure Things
(Read Part One and Part Two) III. The Strange is Coming? When I initially began work on the series of which this is a part, I had always intended to end with a post about Scifi Strange. I thought I would write a long, definition-based post about Scifi Strange and its problems. But then it occurred to me that I’ve technically already done the definition thing elsewhere–i.e., for a conference. Why rewrite the same basic information if you can simply update the language and add little bits where necessary? With that in mind, below is an updated version of the Scifi Strange piece of a paper I wrote and presented in the Summer of 2010 (for a conference in England): Whether Scifi Strange is actually a new movement or subgenre is probably not apparent at the present moment. The problem with Scifi Strange as I see it is that Sanford has attempted too much of a catch-all with his definition, throwing in all manner of science fiction stories that, while certainly strange, have very little in common beyond their basic strangeness–a feature that can be said about most genre fiction. But there are exceptions, such as a number of Sanford’s stories and the works of authors like Ted Chiang and Kij Johnson. And what those stories are doing is absolutely a development that is very unusual, somewhat experimental, and an extension or response to New Weird, whether intentional or otherwise. While New Weird places heavy focus on urban spaces with defined contours, familiar locations, and so on, many of the stories that I would label as Scifi Strange detail locations that are spatially disconnected. By this, I mean that the locations are often not named, given little context within the human spectrum of space exploration, and generally seem to exist in a bizarre vacuum that culturally separates the inhabitants from other species—usually humans—but doesn’t place the inhabitants in a local vacuum, which would make the environments alien to them. These spaces are detailed in similar fashion as what might be found in New Weird texts, though understandably less so due to the short form. As a prime example of this, we can look at Jason Sanford’s “The Ships Like Clouds, Risen By Their Rain” and Ted Chiang’s “Exhalation.” Both stories occur on other planets, contain alien ecologies (to us, but not to the characters), and faint (or absent) implications for the existence of Earth exists. Earth is not relevant to the stories, nor is the fact that humanity has moved to the stars; we, just like the characters, are disconnected from familiar locations. Sanford’s story takes place on a strange world of mud inhabited by humans who have lived there for centuries. It is a world where ships in the shape of clouds appear and fly across the planet, often pouring rain on the human settlements on the planet, resulting in floods, which, in turn, require the residents to build upwards into the sky, continuously, else they be buried alive in the mud. Chiang’s story is told as a written historical account of the final days of the last sentient machine on a planet closed off from the universe by a massive metal sphere, within which they have discovered that the air pressure is equalizing, leading to the eventual cessation of brain activity for the humanoid beings that live there. Both stories lack the coordinates readers need to orient ourselves within their universes and privilege the “alien” spaces over the familiar space of Earth, and Earth itself (as we know or might recognize it) is marked by near-total absence. At best, we have human characters to identify with, but the cognitive dissonance of Scifi Strange is in the displacement of character and audience from familiarity, leaving no place to hold on to. They are utterly alien experiences. This is the function of Scifi Strange and the authors who write it (assuming it actually exists). But because Scifi Strange is a new development, it’s impossible to know whether this will develop into something centralizes–even partially–in the same why that New Weird seemed to be when it first began to gain attention in the early 2000s. If it does, and it can be identified, I suspect Scifi Strange will continue to embody the spatial disconnection that makes the works of Ted Chiang and Jason Sanford fascinating. Perhaps in another few years, there will be nothing more than a handful more stories with similar narrative themes, or, if we’re lucky, we’ll see Scifi Strange become a “real” subgenre. Then again, some people hate new subgenres more than they do the genre they claim to love. Maybe a Scifi Strange hate-fest will do it some good. Science fiction seems to be doing just fine considering it’s been “dead” for decades… Some other reading on Scifi Strange: Response to Jeff VanderMeer on Scifi Strange by Jason Sanford The Online Scifi Strange Anthology by Jason Sanford The Noticing of My Noticing of Scifi Strange (a collection of links) by Jason Sanford Podcast Interview w/ Jason Sanford And there you go. Feel free to lob your complaints in the comments! P.S.: I may have more to say about this, but I think leaving this post as is will be a good start to a discussion. Your comments might inspire me to throw out a few more things.