Month: February 2009

Defining Science Fiction

I just started reading Fast Forward 2, an original anthology of science fiction edited by Lou Anders and I had to stop in the middle of the first story to write this.  Anders begins the book with two quotes about science fiction, this is the second:

Science fiction is the holy fool of literature. It can say what it likes and get away with an examination of truly radical and subversive ideas because no one takes it seriously. When it’s at its best, we’re generally in trouble. Science fiction flourished during the social and economic upheavals of the 1930s, during the Cold War, and during the Iron Age of the 1980s. It should be flourishing now, damn it, but too many people who used to hang out with it have wandered off into some kind of fluffy make-believe world or other. Real science fiction doesn’t make stuff up. It turns reality up to eleven. It takes stuff from contemporary weather—stuff no one else has bothered or dared to question—and uses it to make an end run on reality. It not only shows us what could happen if things carry on the way they are, but it pushes what’s going on to the extremes of absurdity. That’s not its job: that’s its nature. And what’s happened to science fiction lately, it isn’t natural. It’s pale and lank and kind of out of focus. It needs to straighten up and fly right. It needs to reconnect with the world’s weather, and get medieval on reality’s ass. – Paul McAuley

Starting your collection with this quote is pretty much like Babe Ruth coming up to bat and pointing to where he’s about to hit a ball into orbit.  This makes me both excited and worried.  I want these stories to be great.  In his introduction, “The Age of Accelerating Returns” Anders goes on to classify four purposes for science fiction:

  • “It can be predictive, and it’s always fun to talk about that, but this is its least important aspect.”
  • “More important, it can be preventative, …”
  • “Third, SF’s importance lies also in its ability to actually inspire the future.”
  • “Finally, SF is the literature of the open mind — the literature that acknowledges change and encourages thinking outside the box — and that in itself is a good thing, even if the science on display is nonsense.”

But these four attributes could have described Hot, Flat and Crowded, the new non-fiction book by Thomas Friedman.  Science fiction is notoriously hard to define, but I feel great empathy for what Anders is trying to do.

To me science fiction are stories about the future, which ropes in Anders’ four purposes nicely:  predictive, preventative, inspirational and speculative, but does that list include all the aspects of great science fiction?  I think Anders left off one really important attribute:  inventiveness.  Think about the story “The Menace from Earth” by Robert A. Heinlein.  Heinlein imagines that if people colonize the Moon it will be possible to have human powered flight in the air tanks.  Now this sport might come to pass and it will fall under Anders’ third attribute of inspiring the future, but that’s not what I’m getting at.

Heinlein did some brainstorming and figured out with low gravity and the right air pressure people could fly by strapping on artificial wings.  Whether or not it ever comes true, this is very inventive.  There is little chance that time machines will ever be invented, but what a far out invention of the mind it was for H. G. Wells to conceived of time machines for fiction.

Science fiction is like a game with many different rules on how to play.  Sort of like Monopoly.  Some families have invented their own rules on how to use the board and pieces to play the game.  Personally, I think science fiction is at its best when writers limited themselves to working within the boundary of contemporary science, but that’s not everyone’s way to play the game of making up science fiction stories.  Rudy Rucker invents his ass off, but its not always scientific.  Of course, by my rules that’s easily solved, I just say he writes fantasy.  I also love fantasy stories.  By the way, I don’t see calling a story fantasy as a slight.

I just finished rereading Hyperion by Dan Simmons.  It’s not predictive, preventative, inspirational, speculative or inventive, not in the way we’ve been discussing those attributes, but it’s considered an epic science fiction novel.  Dan Simmons takes almost every known cliche science fictional idea and mixes those ingredients with a plot stolen from Chaucer and produces a wondrous story.  Is it science fiction or fantasy?  Does it matter?

By my rules, I would call Hyperion fantasy.  A fantastic, colorful, vivid, fantasy.  I don’t think most readers care to split hairs between the label of science fiction and fantasy.  If it contains rocketships, it’s science fiction, if it has magic, it’s fantasy.  The real defining attribute is great story telling.

But doesn’t that spoil the game in some way?  Without the challenge of playing within the rules, doesn’t that lessen the achievement?  Science in our society is already a slippery concept.  Shouldn’t science fiction be scientific to the best of our knowledge?  If science fiction stories are just supposed to be fun and nothing more, then it doesn’t matter.  If science fiction writers are saying something serious about the future, then shouldn’t it matter how we define science fiction?

I have a theory about this.  I think the public has never taken science fiction serious, so it doesn’t expect much from the genre, nor does it care how the form is defined.  So few writers try to say something real about the future that when one does, readers will judge that story by its own merits and not by the genre, such as The Road by Cormac McCarthy.  In other words, science fiction will get no respect in the world at large.  And that might be cool with many people, since most science fiction fans prefer their field to be wild and wooly, rather than academic and disciplined.

I now shall go off and read the stories in Anders’ collection and see if they lived up to their introduction.

JWH – 2/8/9

The Fate of SF Magazines

Over at Slashdot.org they posted a news announcement with comments, “Difficult Times for SF Magazines” that is very worth reading if you’re worried about the fate of SF magazines.  The main announcement was Realms of Fantasy will cease publication with the April issue and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction has dropped it’s schedule from monthly to bi-monthly.  The folks leaving comments make some interesting points about the state of SF, with many writers lamenting that SF isn’t what it used to be.

Here’s a comment from Moridineas that I particularly liked:

The difference between then and now–imho–is that the Asimovs, Heinleins, de Camps, etc etc etc are gone, and they haven’t really been replaced. My other opinion is that s.f. was largely a product of the zeitgeist of the what, roughly 50 years that it roughly flourished (1920-1970 or so?). We’ve got HDTVs, the Internet, Star Trek and Star Wars on TV, rovers on Mars, decoding DNA, etc etc. The sense of wonder in s.f. is largely gone because we take so much for granted that was virtually unimaginable back then.

Here’s another worthy comment to consider and was echoed by others from Steeleye Brad:

Ugh, agreeing with this. I ended my subscription to Analog around a year and a half ago, when I realized that the story quality had really gone down the shitter. I found myself starting to read a story, but then quitting 1-2 pages in because they were just so terrible. When I would get an issue and go through every story like this, I gave up. Stories with neat concepts completely ruined by confusing writing and indecipherable plots, lame tales where it was screamingly obvious the main character was an author’s self-insert, and vomit-inducing non-stories that served only to let the author express their political views (normally this is ok, except when the author’s soap-boxing completely drowns out and overwhelms the story).

Ultimately the topic degenerates into the pros and cons of publishing on the Internet and sidestepping the issue of content and whether or not the decline of the SF magazines represents a loss of interest in SF or if its an issue of declining story quality.  I brought up this topic in two online SF book clubs and the common comment is they don’t find the stories very engaging.  Second to that is many people have busy lives and let all their magazines go unread.

I started subscribing to the SF magazines back in the 1960s and kept subscribing until very recently.  I was most faithful to F&SF over the decades.  Currently I get F&SF and Asimov’s, but both are up for renewal and I’m not sure I want to renew, at least the paper edition.  I might subscribe to digital editions at Fictionwise.com.

To be honest I don’t read them.  I try every once in awhile.  I have a tremendous nostalgia that makes me want to keep reading these old friends, but when I try I seldom find stories that grab me.  And it’s not the ideas, but the characterization.  I think when I was young I loved the stories just for the ideas and I wasn’t savvy enough about story telling to know the stories were badly told.  Now, after decades of reading great stories I can’t overlook this.

Now don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of far out stories out there, it’s just a matter of finding them.  Maybe what’s needed is for the genre to get down to one magazine.  Refocus the field of science fiction.  And since the magazine publishing and distribution industry is so screwed, maybe the short story market should move to a different format.  I’d suggest a trade or mass market paperback series published quarterly to start with edited by team of editors to get the very best and diverse kind of story.  Tie the publication to a web 2.0 site where readers can discuss the stories and vote on them and interact with the writers.  Also get Audible.com to do an unabridged audio edition of the book each quarter, as well as publishing it in the Kindle, Sony and all the Fictionwise ebook editions.

I think we need a modern day Hugo Gernsback or John W. Campbell to reinvent the field of science fiction.  The number one goal should be to eliminate fantasy stories from the mix and develop real science fiction stories.  The next goal should be to find well written engaging stories that focus on good characterization.  Publish stories that grab people and make them keep reading, and not stories that you have to struggle to the end for a payoff.

Science fiction has reinvented itself many times.  I lament the passing of every genre magazine and worry about F&SF, Asimov’s and Analog, the old big three that now have circulations that are a tiny fraction of their glory days.  I can’t tell if this trend means science fiction itself is dying.  It does feel like we’re on the downward slope of the right hand side of the bell curve.

I’m a member of two online SF book clubs that focus on the classics of science fiction, and like many of the folk who left comments on Slashdot, feel SF golden age was really from 1950-1970, the Heinlein-Asimov-Clarke era.  I think there was another bulge of SF fans with a generation that grew up with writers like Vernor Vinge, Dan Simmons, Neil Stephenson, David Brin, Greg Bear, John Varley, etc.  And currently there’s a ripple bulge with writers like John Scalzi, Charles Stross, Greg Egan, Stephen Baxter, Alastair Reynolds and others.

Whether SF will ever have another golden age with over hundred thousand people subscribing to its top SF magazine is hard to predict.  Like I said, with a new Campbell or Gernsback discovering a new team of Heinlein-Asimov-Clarke level writers it could happen.

JWH – 2/1/9