Jeremiah Tolbert

Jason has a nice post up about the demands placed on sci­ence fic­tion writ­ers who write believ­able near-​​future SF today.  You should read it.  I think he’s wrong, but you should read it.*

I think focus­ing on the sci­ence aspects of sci­ence fic­tion is miss­ing the point.  Science fic­tion is fic­tion first, and only tan­gen­tially about sci­ence.  Some of my favorite SF tales arguably have zero sci­ence in them.  I’d even go so far as to say sci­ence fic­tion is just a genre of fic­tion with a set of tropes that some­times involve sci­ence, or the future, but doesn’t always, and doesn’t have to.  But let’s focus on the idea of near-​​future SF.  It’s a small sub­set of what’s writ­ten, but it is a subset.

Jason says:

To write fully believ­able, near future sci­ence fic­tion today, you almost need to be vora­cious anti­so­cial poly­math, deeply con­ver­sant in half a dozen tech­ni­cal fields, as well as famil­iar with ongo­ing social, eco­nomic, and envi­ron­men­tal change.

First of all, to have any kind off suc­cess­ful writ­ing career, you need to be some­what anti­so­cial because you rarely make enough money to do it full time, which means you use leisure time to do it, and often a lot of leisure time, which means you won’t be see­ing your friends much.  It’s a soli­tary pur­suit for the most part.  But that’s not what I wanted to say about that quote.  This is:

I take excep­tion to is the notion that you need to be deeply con­ver­sant in any­thing.  I think you just need to do research to the point where what you have to say doesn’t break the sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief and I think that’s a long ways from being a poly­math.   You don’t need to be an expert on any­thing but people.

One of the appeals to a cer­tain kind of writer of SF is that they get to do research.  These writ­ers some­times have a ten­dency to inflict their research upon the reader whether it mat­ters or not.  As I get older, I care a lot less about the believ­abil­ity of the sci­ence in my sto­ries than I do about the actual story and the char­ac­ters.  I was recently read­ing a nice space opera by a friend of mine, and as I was dig­ging through info-​​term-​​dense para­graph after para­graph talk­ing about tech­nolo­gies under­ly­ing star­ship mechan­ics and such, I thought–I have been con­di­tioned to find this accept­able in a story, I kind of enjoy it because I am a big nerd, but I don’t think it makes the story any bet­ter.  Senswunda’s one thing–I dig that.  But I only care about the details so long as they relate to the core of the story, and a lot of times in this kind of SF, they don’t.  The Analog mafia might like that sort of thing, but I don’t.  I don’t need equa­tions in my fic­tion, and I rarely find that they improve it.

I also don’t like my SF to be pred­ica­tive.  I don’t like it to be real­is­tic, nec­es­sar­ily.  Neither does most of the world.  Your sci­ence fic­tion does not need to be well-​​researched, and you do not need to be an expert on quan­tum mechan­ics to write sci­ence fic­tion.  In fact, I would argue that the more con­ver­sant you are in these details, and the more you force into your novel or story, the smaller your audi­ence is.  Star Wars doesn’t trou­ble itself with the mechan­ics of FTL.  It’s pretty damned suc­cess­ful with audiences.

Jason con­cludes with a very nice zinger:

Otherwise, your fic­tion will soon read like that Golden Age lit, filled with space­ships manned by human cal­cu­la­tors and spin­ning reels of tape.

That’s the uni­ver­sal fail­ing of ALL near-​​future SF, no mat­ter how well researched it is.  They couldn’t get it right when tech­nol­ogy wasn’t accel­er­at­ing as fast in the 50s, and near-​​future SF writ­ers are prob­a­bly not get­ting it right now either with things clip­ping along faster.  So why bother?  Getting it “right” is not the point.  It shouldn’t be about any­thing the now through the lens of tools that SF has devel­oped.  You can say things about the future that you can’t say about the present. Projecting those com­ments onto the future gives you a lit­tle dis­tance to say those things.  That’s the pri­mary rea­son we set stuff in the future.  It might as well all be alter­nate his­tory, or alter­nate uni­verse sto­ries. The inclu­sion of alt his­tory in the SF greater genre just proves my point here.  You can’t write a What-​​If story with­out extrap­o­lat­ing from the present (or past).  It’s an exam­i­na­tion of what the truth really is through the fic­tion of what wasn’t or what could be (a depar­ture from the truth).

If you’re intim­i­dated by the accel­er­at­ing advance of the future, don’t let that stop you from writ­ing SF.  You don’t have to write it that way.  Personally, I take great enjoy­ment in throw­ing real­ity out the win­dow when I write my SF.    SF has only ever been about believ­abil­ity to a small sub­set of read­ers.  Believability in the con­text of tech, any­way.  It, like all lit­er­a­ture, does revolve around the believ­abil­ity of human action and emo­tion, how­ever.  Keep that in mind and you’ll write great fic­tion, and very few peo­ple will care about that other stuff. Nobody looks at the tech in 1984 and com­plains about it.

By now you should real­ize that I don’t really think Jason is wrong.  I just wrote that head­line to get your atten­tion so you could watch me hash out for myself what I think is impor­tant about sci­ence fic­tion.  Jason and every­one else who wants to can go about try­ing to mas­ter every field they want to include in their fic­tion, and try to make the near-​​future believ­able with mul­ti­ple points of advance­ment. I applaud it.  A not-​​small num­ber of peo­ple will read it and enjoy it, maybe includ­ing myself from time to time. They’ll almost cer­tainly get some­thing wrong and some  will bitch and moan about it too.  I just don’t find these kinds of sto­ries very mem­o­rable.  You might get lucky and nail some pre­dic­tion on the head and then become a foot­note in his­tory for hav­ing some fore­sight (see Arthur C. Clarke and the prediction/​invention of satel­lites. We know he did it, but I couldn’t tell you in what story).  But you don’t need it to write good stories.

My opin­ion and approach? Forget all of that.  The core of a story is time­less, and none of that really mat­ters.  Understand peo­ple before you under­stand quan­tum mechan­ics or net­work infra­struc­ture.  That’ll take you much fur­ther in fic­tion than any other knowl­edge set.  Senswunda exists inde­pen­dently of pre­dic­tion, and that is what mat­ters to me.  If that makes me more of a fan­tasy writer than a SF writer, then so be it.

So no, Jason Stoddard is not really wrong.  He’s just wrong for me.  You can make up your own mind about what you think.