Insistence of Vision (2 page)

The Heresy of Science Fiction

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What is Science Fiction?

Arguments fill books, resonating across hotel bars, internet discussion groups, and academic conferences. It matters for many reasons, not least because this genre encompasses just about everything that’s not limited to the mundane here and now, or a primly defined past.

Up till the early 18th century, when Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding fed a growing appetite for “realism” in fiction, nearly all previous storytelling contained elements of the fantastic – from tribal campfire-legends to Gilgamesh and the Odyssey, to Dante and Swift. So why did literature change, about three centuries ago?

All through the long preceding period,
life and death
were capricious on a daily basis, but
society
seemed relatively changeless from one generation to the next – ruled by chiefs or kings or noble families, defined by the same traditions and stiff social orders. This era of personal danger amid social stability stretched on for millennium after millennium – during which epics overflowed with surreal, earth-shaking events and the awe-inspiring antics of demigods.

Then a shift happened. Peoples’ physical lives became more predictable. Increasingly, from about 1700 onward, you and your children had a chance of living out your natural spans. But civilization itself started quaking and twisting with change. Your daughter would likely survive childbirth. But her worldviews and behavior might veer in shocking directions. Your son’s choice of profession could be puzzling or even bewildering. Your neighbors might even begin questioning the king or the gods – not just in fables but in real life!

Amid this shift, public tastes in literature moved away from bold what-if images of heroes challenging heaven, toward close-in obsessions with realistic characters who seemed almost-like-you, in settings only a little more dramatic or dangerous than the place where you lived.

Having made that observation - and having pondered it for years - I’m still not sure what to conclude. Is there a total
sum of instability
that humans can bear, and a minimum they need? When uncertainty shifted a bit, from personal upheavals to the social and national scene, did that alter what we wanted from our legends?

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Into this period of transformation, science fiction was born. The true grandchild of Homer, Murasaki, Shelley and Swift, yet denounced as a bastard from the start, by those who proclaimed (ignoring 6000 years of human history) that fiction should always be myopic, close, realistic and timidly omphaloskeptic, a trend that accelerated when “literature” became a field for high-brow academic dons. The possibility of social, technological and human change could be admitted... even explored a little... but the consensus on a thousand university campuses was consistent and two-fold.

Proper explorations of how change impacts human beings should:

1 - deal with the immediate near-term, and

2 - treat change as a loathsome thing.

This obsession is as unfair to fantasy as it is to science fiction. Indeed, as I said, nearly all pre-1700s storytelling incorporated fantastic imagery and other-worldly powers. Both fantasy and science fiction carry on that tradition, shrugging off the disdain and constraining prescriptions of parochial mavens.

But the two cousin genres part company over the matter of
time.

Is Sci Fi the wrong name?

Certainly “science fiction” gives a false impression that the genre is about science. The image engendered is a nerdy one. And when people use zero-sum thinking, they often conclude:
“if these stories have a lot of brains, then they must lack heart.”
A laughable dichotomy, if you’ve ever read works by Tiptree, Butler, Sturgeon, LeGuin or Zelazny.

Indeed, only about ten percent of SF authors are scientifically trained (as I am). It turns out that doesn’t matter much, for two reasons.

First, some of the best “hard” SF dealing with truly cutting-edge scientific matters, has been written by former English majors, like Greg Bear, Nancy Kress and Kim Stanley Robinson, who could not close an equation if their lives depended on it. Their secret? To be fascinated by the times they live in! To seek out pioneers in any field, plying them with pizza and beer, till they explain something new and wonderful, in terms that any reader could understand. To go – literarily – where no writer has gone before.

Second, while few SF writers are scientists, nearly all of them devour
history.
It is the one topic nearly all of us immerse ourselves within, exploring the minutia and vast sweeping trends of times and generations that led up to ours.

Indeed, I’ve long felt that SF should have been named
Speculative History,
because it deals most often in thought experiments about that grand epic, the story of us. Sending characters into the past, or exploring alternate ways things might have gone. Or else – most often – pondering how the great drama might
extend further,
into tomorrow’s undiscovered country.

Oh, we can make do with “science fiction” as the term for what we do. But
time
remains the core dimension, vastly more important to our stories, our passions, our obsessions, than technology or even outer space.

Where/when is your Golden Age?

Elsewhere I contrast two perspectives on the Time Flow of Wisdom.

By far dominant in nearly all human societies has been a
Look Back
attitude... a nostalgic belief that the past contained at least one shining moment – or Golden Age - when people and their endeavors were better than today. A pinnacle of grace from which later generations fell, doomed forever to lament the passing of Eden, or Atlantis, or Numenor…. You find this theme in everything from the Bible to Tolkien to Crichton - a dour reflex that views change as synonymous with deterioration. The grouchiness of grampas who proclaim that everything - even folks - had been finer in the past.

Compare this attitude to the uppity
Look Ahead
zeitgeist: That humanity is on a rough and difficult, but ultimately rewarding upward path. That past utopias were fables. That any glowing, better age must lie ahead of us, to be achieved through skill and science, via mixtures of cooperation, competition and negotiation… along with (one hopes) greater wisdom. And if we cannot build it, then our grandchildren might be worthy of the task.

The paramount example of this world-view would be - of course -
Star Trek
, though authors like Iain Banks and Vernor Vinge carry the torch of long-term optimism very well. Neal Stephenson’s
Hieroglyph
project attempts to coalesce more writers around this tradition, encouraging belief in the potential of tomorrow.

Indeed, the notion of improvability used to be much more popular than it is now. Golden Age science fiction fizzed with belief in a better, hand-made tomorrow, a motif that has nearly vanished in the last decade or two.

Oh, don’t get me wrong! The stylish rebels of the New Age SF movement were right to wield brilliant metaphors and splash cold water over the unabashedly uncritical, too-deferential worship of technological progress. If criticism is the only known antidote to error, science fiction (as we’ll see) must be a veritable cauldron of criticism! By poking sticks into the path ahead, SF is a major source of error-detection, providing its greatest service.

Still, the genre retains this notion. That it is
possible
– perhaps just barely – that our brightest days may lie ahead. Indeed, that is science fiction’s greatest trait, distinguishing it from almost all other genres.

The Fundamental Difference

No, I do not claim that all fantasy is about the past, nor does all sci fi explore the future. Certainly, a story or film’s
tools
and
furnishings
don’t decide whether a tale falls in one category or another.
Star Wars
is filled with lasers and spaceships, yet it is fantasy in every way that counts. The novels of Anne and Todd McCaffrey contain dragons and medieval crafts, yet Anne maintained, with vigor and great justification, that she wrote science fiction.

Putting aside superficialities, what difference flows much deeper than the choice of vehicles and weapons? Is there something basic?

Fantasy is the mother genre, going back to campfire tales and epics of knightly chivalry, with deep roots in the font of our dreams.

We’ve already commented that Science Fiction is the brash offshoot emerging from this ancient tradition. SF retains the boldness and heroic imagery, only then delivers a
twist
, having to do with human improvability. With its altered view of time, SF tends to locate its golden ages – if any – up ahead.

Do you believe it is possible for children to learn from the mistakes of their parents? For them to become greater, wiser, mightier… and for them to raise a better generation, still?

Whether or not they actually do this… and they often won’t… is it at least possible?

The implicit notion is that children who ponder earlier mistakes might then do something even more unexpected. They might learn from some mistakes that are still
hypothetical
, by experiencing them vicariously in fiction!

By that token does science fiction claim a messianic power to alter destiny? Well, well. Below, I discuss the “self-preventing prophecy.”

Even so – and supposing that our heirs (perhaps barely) overcome obstacles on their way to becoming better beings than ourselves, won’t they thereupon forge on to make
new
mistakes, all their own?

We don’t need the so-called “eternal verities” that are taught by lit-professors in a myriad universities. What we need is the agility to face an eternal onslaught of challenges, wrought by an endless tide of change.

I believe the root that defines science fiction is that word,
change
. SF rebels against all literary foundations by embracing the notion that disruptions happen. Upheavals can knock the props from under daily life, or social institutions, and even shake the characters’ foundation beliefs. Sci fi deems it truly interesting to explore how people deal with that, for well or ill.

Even when a science fiction dystopia warns against
bad
change, it is relishing, exulting, expanding upon what Einstein called the
gedankenexperiment
or thought experiment. This process – seated in uniquely human organs called the prefrontal lobes – is what enables us to ponder the uniquely promethean question:
what if?

And also -
if this happens how will you deal with it?

Science fiction takes the thought experiment seriously.

New Definitions

Not that children always choose to learn from their parent’s mistakes! When they don’t, when they are obstinately stupid and miss opportunities, then you get a science fiction tragedy… far more horrifying than anything described in Aristotle’s
Poetics
.

Take an older legend with many fantastic elements –
Oedipus Rex.
Aristotle describes the most compelling part of the tale of the ill-fated King of Thebes, how the audience must weep – and we do! – watching Oedipus writhe futilely against pre-ordained fate. Empathy and sympathy are there!

But not ambition. The playwright, players and watchers do not ponder: “Hey king, try this!” No remake or variation or sequel will visit justice upon the gods who appointed this tragedy. No one suggests a change in Olympian government.

And here is where we differ, nowadays. A science fiction tragedy can portray people suffering, just as in older tragedies – or with even greater angst, as when we feel the death of billions and the wreck of all hope, in
On The Beach,
or
The Road.
But there is this one crucial difference. The implication that things did not
have
to be this way.

It wasn’t “fate.” We – or the characters – could have done better! There was, at some point, a chance to change our own destiny. Tragedy ensued, when we failed to heed warnings. But that other path was possible. Children
might
have learned from their parents’ mistakes.

One type of destiny makes you cry in sympathy. The tale of Oedipus is powerful stuff. But for millennia, the deep moral lesson – taught in all “Campbellian myths” has been –
resistance is futile.
The overall situation, absolute rule by capricious power, remains the same.

The new type of tragedy – a cautionary tale – may change your future decisions. It could alter destiny by setting an example – in fiction – of a failure mode that members of the audience then set forth (with grimly-set jaw) to correct! As millions who read
Nineteen Eighty-Four
vowed to fight Big Brother, and other millions who watched
Soylent Green
became fervent environmentalists.

Violating a core tenet of Aristotle, sci fi contemplates the possibility – even just a slim one – of successfully defying Fate.

The Rulers of Destiny

In contrast, what is the implicit assumption in most fantasy tales, novels and films? Apparently, the form of governance that ruled most human societies since the discovery of grain must always govern us. Royalty and lordly families. Priestly castes and solitary, secretive mages… the roll call of standard characters going back at least four thousand years.

Oh, in your typical fantasy kingly rulers may topple and shift, but the abiding assumptions and social castes generally do not.

(I will set aside, for now, some of the hybrid sub-genres like “urban fantasy” whose top practitioners, like the great Tim Powers, weave magical elements into an
attitude
toward knowledge and problem-solving that seems far more like science fiction. I deem this a very hopeful trend… if we can do without faux aristocratic and over-used vampires, please?)

Mind you, I’ll never deny that fantasy has immense attractions, some that I have drawn upon, myself. Feudalism resonates, deep inside us. We fantasize about being the king or wizard; it seems to be in our genes. We are all – after all - descended from the harems of tough and perseverant fellows who succeeded at one goal: achieving the number one spot in that kind of system.