JeremiahTolbert.com: SF Writer Web Designer Photographer

Jason Stoddard is Wrong about Science Fiction

Filed Under: Speculative Fiction, Writing Advice

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.

TAGS: criticism, jasonstoddard, literature, My Writing, near-future, Science fiction

POSTED: 3:34 pm Tue December 09 2008 |