Category: Uncategorized

by James Wallace Harris, Wednesday, July 5, 2017

I have a new essay up at Book Riot, “What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Science Fiction?” It’s always fun to see other sites publish something I’ve written. And it’s an essay I’m proud of and want people to read. However, I’m not sure it’s the essay I intended to write. I don’t know if you have ever written an essay but if you have, do the thoughts you want to write ever come out the in the words you type?

Inspiration is often a vague idea, or maybe just a feeling. When you start writing about that momentary impulse other ideas start flowing out too. Ideas you haven’t thought of before, or planned. Quite often an essay will take off in a new direction, even a better direction. When I first started writing “What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Science Fiction?” I planned to list and categorize all the main topics of science fiction. I felt there were a finite set of topics we label as science fiction. The essay covered that somewhat, but not in the way I planned. It veered off into another thought, that science fictional ideas are descended from myths, religion and fantasy stories. I ended up saying when we talk about science fiction we’re talking about ideas that we’ve been talking about ever since we shared Europe with the Neanderthals. Science fiction has redefined some of those ancient desires. The few that have any kind of scientific possibility we call science fiction, the rest we call fantasy, religion, or myths.

Since I hang out in book clubs and forums devoted to science fiction I talk and write about science fiction a lot. More often than not we end up talking about stories, storytelling, plots, characters, authors, publishing, reviewing, cover art, and all the things that go into the making of the genre of science fiction, but not the actual philosophy of science fiction. It usually comes down to whether or not the story entertained us, rather than did the story have an original speculative idea.

I actually believe science fiction is a very limited area of discourse. I believe science fiction is the act of speculating about specific unknown aspects of reality. I believe reading a story that makes us think about life on alien worlds is science fictional, but I believe that’s different from enjoying an adventure story that’s set on another world with aliens.

I often wonder if the stories we’ve inherited from myths and religions are the entertainment versions of once serious speculations about reality. That one-day science fiction from the 20th century will be like us reading about Greek mythology. Will they ask, “Did they believe these stories were true?”

When Robert A. Heinlein wrote stories about people living on the Moon in the 1950s he thought his stories were speculating about the possibility of colonizing the Moon. He wanted his stories to inspire a generation that would actually go into space and build the high frontier. Now we read those stories for entertainment or nostalgia.

I’ve always believed the science fiction magazine was where the cutting edge of science fictional ideas first appeared. But few people read those magazines anymore. I’m out of touch with most of the popular SF novels. Few of them seem to be serious science fiction speculation. People want a thrill ride, not philosophy.

I’m not sure all the serious speculative ideas of science fiction haven’t become part of our everyday culture. Forbes, a magazine devoted to business regularly covers astronomy, cosmology, theoretical physics, and space travel at its website. Artificial intelligence and robots are now part of the corporate bottom line. Miracles of biotechnology and engineering are on the news every day.

So what are we talking about when we talk about science fiction? I worry science fiction is a dying area of philosophy that’s being transformed into entertainment category. For Example, why is a sequel to Blade Runner coming out soon, and not an honest version of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? PKD was a weird-ass philosopher, not a writer of action hero adventure stories. In many ways, movie and television science fiction is stuck in the era of Planet Stories and never reached what was going on in Galaxy, F&SF and IF in the 1950s, much less what came out in the 1960s and 1970s.

p.s.

I used the essay as a post of the Facebook group Space Opera Pulp and some of the people also said that movie science fiction wasn’t like what we used to read. So maybe I’m not alone in thinking science fiction is changing.

JWH

by James Wallace Harris, Wednesday, May 10, 2017

I’m a liberal atheist who’s always voted Democratic – but I look like a Republican – an old white guy. That’s getting to be a problem. Women and people of color are being political disenfranchised by the current political regime. I don’t think I’m being paranoid when I think they’re starting to hate old white guys. I don’t even blame them. Not only that, I’m getting tired of old white guys coming up and immediately telling me their weird-ass political ideas assuming I’m a member of their secret fraternity. I’m totally freaked out people will think I’m a Trump supporter because of my looks.

It’s a good thing I don’t want to be a politician because this country doesn’t need any more old white guys wanting to run the joint. I do want to be a writer, and unfortunately, there’s a long legacy of wordy old white bastards hogging the literary canon. I write for a site that works very hard to promote diversity in reading. I feel guilty even submitting essays. Yet, I’m very thankful to be their token old white guy. I’ve always been for diversity but I’m learning even more by hanging out at Book Riot.

The trouble is there’s a large segment of our country that wishes we all looked alike. Yesterday, The Atlantic reported “It Was Cultural Anxiety That Drove White, Working-Class Voters to Trump” and not economic anxiety. These people want to return to a paternalistic white past where women and people of color don’t disturb their vision of a homogeneous America. Recently, I’ve heard second-hand personal stories and read many reports in the news about people going up to Hispanic folks and telling them they should go home. That’s incredibly shameful. Knowing the president and leaders in Congress inspires such horrendous behavior makes watching shows like The Handmaid’s Tale unnerving. I thought climate change was dooming our future, but alt-right politics is going to destroy us first.

Not only do the Republicans not see anything wrong in having all old white guy committees, they take pride in claiming they don’t play identity politics. They even jockey with each other to out-do their denials claiming nothing is wrong. But it’s very wrong! The fact they can’t see their evilness is equal to Trump’s own anosognosia. Their blind spots are so huge it’s surprising they can see at all.

What really bothers me is their claim to be Christians, a religion based on teaching compassion. If these old Republican white guys are really going to church every Sunday they should stop. If they haven’t gotten the message after all these years then they are wasting their time. I’m an atheist that quit the church when I was twelve, but I did learn this in Sunday school at age five:

Jesus loves the little children,
All the children of the world.
Red and yellow, black and white,
All are precious in His sight,
Jesus loves the little children of the world.

Obviously, they didn’t. Women are half the world, and the whole world is diverse. Why can’t they see that? I think I know why, but it’s a terrible thing to think about another human being. Women, minorities, and immigrants tend to vote Democratic. Republican’s in their single-mindedness to lower their taxes will do anything, and I mean anything, to achieve that goal. In other words, greed has driven them blind, even to the point of abandoning their faith and becoming hateful.

They have sold their souls to lower their taxes.

I just want people to know that I might look like those zombies, but I ain’t one of them.

JWH

by James Wallace Harris, Tuesday, May 9, 2017 (reprinted from SF Signal)

[Because All the Birds in the Sky is up for a Hugo award I thought I’d reprint my review from last year.]

“Too late, too late” the birds chorused.

Our futures are different in every generation. Back in 1966, my generation, the Baby Boomers, feared nuclear annihilation, hoped for colonies on Mars among other dreams, but nothing was certain, and we were surprised by the Internet and the Hubble Telescope. In 2016, I am concerned for the current generation, because their futures of climate catastrophe and mass extinctions do seem inevitable. How do young science fiction readers find hope in their futures? And what unexpected amazements awaits them?

Is science fiction ever about the future? Isn’t it always about the present? Science fiction represents the hopes and anxieties of each generation about their future. Science fiction set in the far future, like stories about interstellar travel, represents a kind of extreme optimism, whereas science fiction set in a middling distance of interplanetary travel, represents another kind of hope, a hope that we can build that future today if we only would. Science fiction set in the near future, often explores our fears more than our dreams. Writing near future SF requires juggling the hard cold facts of today against dreams for better tomorrows. Science fiction is each generation’s barometer measuring its faith in their futures.

All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders walks the razor’s edge of a very near future science fiction, confronting the obvious dooms while still offering hopes. Anders impressed me with her faith in our future. She accomplishes her task with a light touch, producing a novel that is a joy to read, yet is as deep as you’re willing to dig. I expect many to speed along in this story because of its shiny science fiction bits, but those who read slower, analyzing its fantasy and literary symbolism will find deeper concerns to contemplate.

At the surface of this novel is a love story between Patricia Delfine and Laurence Armstead that begins in their troubled childhood. Patricia survives by discovering the old religion of magic, while Laurence endures by mastering technology and science. They cope emotionally by sharing their misery, until outside forces split them up. Years later they rediscover one another only to find they have taken radically divergent philosophical paths. Their beginning reminds me a of Among Others by Jo Walton, and how children of genre find themselves by finding people like themselves.

All the Birds in the Sky is getting great reviews and buzz. How you read this book will determine how you label it, fantasy or science fiction, because the story apparently asks us to take sides. All the Birds in the Sky is a horse of many different colors, making it hard to categorize.

At first, I thought All the Birds in the Sky as three weddings: a marriage of science fiction and fantasy, a marriage of YA and adult, and a marriage of genre and literary. The novel makes us feel Cory Doctorow and J.K. Rowling should have tied the knot long ago. It also feels quite natural to bolt a YA section onto the beginning of a novel that’s meant for adults.

All the Birds in the Sky is a fast, fun read, but it’s about children being bullied by their parents and peers, who become adults during the climate apocalypse. How fun can that be? It is. The story does have talking animals and intelligent computers that are enchanting, and a serial killer assassin that feels like someone from The Grand Budapest Hotel, which for me was the only weird thing in the story that didn’t work (but I might change my mind in later readings).

Because All the Birds in the Sky is set in San Francisco, it makes me wonder if it’s a counter-culture novel too, but not the counter-cultures I knew, of Beatniks and Hippies, but Geek counter-culture from Silicon Valley startups and Maker subcultures. I also wonder if the novel isn’t a jab at Silicon Valley, who some San Franciscans believe is destroying their city. (Watch San Francisco 2.0 on HBO to see what I mean.)

All the Birds in the Sky are about two forces at war: magic and science. The novel begins with Patricia as a small child learning she can converse with birds. This is a very strange way to begin a science fiction novel, but Anders eventually makes it work for me. I totally get the Wired-Maker-SF side of this story because of my background. I just didn’t understand Patricia’s story at first, of talking animals, magic and secret covens of witches and wizards. I never played Dungeons and Dragons or read The Lord of the Rings. My only knowledge of magic comes from reading the Harry Potter books. The whole magic angle didn’t work for me until I reread some chapters. Then it clicked. I don’t believe Anders added magic to her story just to have a genre mashup, its integral to her message.

Good writers make their stories ambiguous, which allows readers to find their own meaning. However, that leaves us never knowing if we found the meaning, if there truly is one. But once I found a symbolic way to interpret the magic in All the Birds in the Sky, I was quite satisfied with this novel. I’d love to read how others interpreted the magic, but to do so in public would create spoilers.

I believe Anders is offering philosophical inspiration to young people. She knows they face grim futures. She wants young people to have faith they can solve the problems they’ve inherited. To understand how we must save ourselves is to understand how we must change ourselves. Any current science fiction written about the near future needs to involve ideas from books like This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein. Not only is mankind the cause of our future doom, but so are our intellectual approaches to politics, economics, sociology, spirituality, psychology and self-expression.

Climate change is such a large bump in the road to the future that I’m not sure science fiction can ignore it. Anders knows that. To stop climate change requires changing ourselves, and how we interact with reality. There will be no wizards or scientists that can work that kind of magic, but Anders does offer hope in her ending. At least in the way I’ve read her story. I wonder what younger readers make of it. Birds and animals do have a say in Anders’ novel. Has Anders read The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert? Not only is human society altering the biosphere and climate, but we’re killing off all our fellow species. If animals could talk, what would they say? My guess is Anders knows about such books, but doesn’t feel the need to weave their heaviness into her story. Both rising seas and dying animals are on the perimeters of her plot. The real conflict is between two people who love each other but embrace opposing philosophies. So the story becomes fantasy v. science fiction, but not really. Isn’t it nature v. science?

“Almost too late,” the pigeon said.