Posts Tagged ‘literature’

Jason Stoddard is Wrong about Science Fiction

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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.

Some Recent Reading: Michael Chabon and Adam-​​Troy Castro

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I thor­oughly enjoyedThe Yiddish Policeman’s Union .  The com­bi­na­tion of alt-​​history, exotic-​​to-​​me jew­ish and Alaskan cul­ture, and noir detec­tive thriller was just the kind of thing I needed to read right now.   But more than the con­cept, I was engaged by the char­ac­ters of Landsman and Berko Schemets.   Science fic­tion has been accused of not hav­ing mem­o­rable char­ac­ters, and I sup­port that opin­ion.  I can name the num­ber of mem­o­rable SF/​F char­ac­ters on one two hands.  It takes both my hands and feet just to name the mem­o­rable char­ac­ters from Dickens.  There’s a def­i­nite dif­fer­ence there. For the strong char­ac­ters alone, I’m inclined to say this is more lit fic than sci fic.

The sec­ond book I read in October was Emmissaries for the Dead by Adam-​​Troy Castro.  This was a free­bie at WorldCon, snatched up at the same party I got the Chabon book.  I for­get the pub­lisher hold­ing that party, but I owe JJA for get­ting me in.  It was the best event I attended at the con, and not just because I got eight books out of it.  I had some nice con­ver­sa­tions with some really sharp people.

As to the book itself, it was trans­par­ent to me that this is a fresh­man out­ing.  I’ve been read­ing Castro’s short fic­tion for some time, but I don’t think he has found his foot­ing in the novel realm yet.  I picked this one up because it too had a noir murder-​​mystery pitch on the back cover, but with the added appeal of a strange con­structed ecosys­tem with sen­suwunda appeal.  Unfortunately, the narrator’s per­son­al­ity grated on me.  Andrea Cort, but I don’t know that I will remem­ber her six months from now. I don’t want to go into too much detail about this book because I would rather you read some of it your­self and decide whether it’s for you than go on my opin­ion.  It undoubt­edly suf­fers from fol­low­ing so closely my read­ing of the Chabon, which is a lit­tle unfair.  But I fin­ished it, which is more than I can say about the last half-​​dozen SF nov­els I’ve tried to read.

Today’s Hypothesis About What Science Fiction Is

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Science fic­tion is a body of lit­er­a­ture in which it is held implicit and true that tech­nol­ogy, and by that exten­sion, human­ity, can change the world for bet­ter or worse. It holds true, essen­tially, that the world is muta­ble, and not static.

This would require that there is a body of lit­er­a­ture that does not hold this true. Thoughts?