In Defence of Science Fiction

"Years ago I was working in Schenectady for General Electric, completely surrounded by machines and ideas for machines, so I wrote a novel about people and machines, and machines frequently got the best of it, as machines will. ...And I learned from the reviewers that I was a science-fiction writer.

I didn't know that. I supposed that I was writing a novel about life, about things I could not avoid seeing and hearing in Schenectady, a very real town, awkwardly set in the gruesome now. I have been a sore-headed occupant of a file-drawer labeled 'science- fiction' ever since, and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a tall white fixture in a comfort station*." Kurt Vonnegut, 1965

Not just serious critics, Kurt: sadly, a large proportion of the reading public considers science fiction to be so much badly-made toilet paper. I'd tell you why, but I've never been able to understand it; how could a literature that gave us Shakespeare's "The Tempest" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream," Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein," H. G. Wells, Edgar Allan Poe, the entire western mythological canon from Greco-Roman to Biblical (from which modern literary writers do not hesitate to steal themes, plots, characters and symbols), Thomas More, Francis Bacon, Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels," George Orwell, Ray Bradbury, Margaret Atwood and--of course--yourself, be considered inherently unserious? How is it that the same people who gobble up Harry Potter novels--which, besides being fantasy, are poorly-written fantasies for children--sneer and turn up their noses at the genre that gave birth to them? How is it that the same people who are trooping into theatres to watch Wicked--which at least has the merit of being good fantasy--have no idea that a fantasy is what they're paying to see?

What is it that they think the Narnia chronicles and Alice in Wonderland and Charlotte's Web and the Wizard of Oz are? How is that generations of people who have grown up steeped in speculative fiction treat it with such disdain and ignorance upon reaching adulthood? What is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind if not science fiction?

Kurt, would you mind if I told you something that really bugs me? It's about Battlestar Galactica. No, don't get me wrong, I love the show. And that's only partly because of the large number of very attractive men running around in skimpy uniforms (any chance we could impose on earth militaries to adopt them? No? Shame). I love that it's doing well, too, and attracting audiences who think they don't like sci fi. What bugs me is when these audiences say, "It's not science fiction because it's about people."

All good fiction is about people! Every science fiction novel I've ever read is about people. Sure, some of the human characters haven't been particularly well-drawn, but that's true of most historical and mainstream novels I've read, too. Science fiction doesn't have a lock on hackery. And whenever someone says that--"I love BSG but I don't like science fiction; BSG is different because it's about people"--I want to scream. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World was about what--telephones? Airplanes? Puppies? Was The Handmaid's Tale about household appliances? It's as if the idea of science fiction as contaminating is so deeply entrenched in the culture that as soon as someone realizes that they like a story, a book or a movie with a machine in it they must immediately distance that work from the genre. "I like this, so it can't be sci fi, because sci fi is crap" instead of "I like this; hey, maybe sci fi isn't crap!"

And why is it that anything set in the past, whether by a few decades or a few centuries, becomes a "period piece" and acquires a veneer of respectability no matter how nonsensical the premise or characters, when anything set in the future, whether by a few decades or a few centuries, becomes the butt of a lot of jokes involving skinny adolescent boys and social misfits wearing Klingon costumes? I can't tell you how much it bugs me to watch or read something purporting to be "historical fiction" only to come across a female character so preposterously modern that, if she actually existed in the time and place specified, she would have been burned at the stake as a witch or clapped in an insane asylum (both of which fates regularly met unconventional women until about 75 years ago). I'm about as fond of that as I am of the male science fiction writers who can project a technological society ten million years into the future that is radically different from our own in every way except gender politics, because they can't imagine a world without free female domestic labour. However, while the number of diehard sex essentialists in the science fiction genre is shrinking all the time, it seems that the Athena Character (so named for the way in which these strong female characters seem to have sprung into adulthood fully formed, without having been meaningfully molded by their society in any way, as if they had never been children) is a staple of modern historical fiction.

Not that this is an easy position to take, as a woman and mother. You and I both know that there are plenty of intelligent, well-drawn, interesting female characters, including mothers, all over the science fiction genre; but try to convince anyone else of that. The sexism of the field is as deeply entrenched in the popular imagination now as it was in the 1950s, when the reputation was actually deserved, and the works of Octavia Butler, Ursula le Guin, Patricia McKillip, Sherri S. Tepper, Liz Williams and dozens of other feminist science fiction writers has not apparently done much to dispel it. How could anyone still be amazed that BSG has important female characters? If nothing else, Alien ought to have cemented the female kick-ass sci-fi protagonist in the culture. And it's almost thirty years old.

Apparently, what I'm supposed to like--as a woman and a mother--is a bright pink book with a black silhouette of a stylized woman either carrying shopping bags or pushing a stroller. And I don't. Maybe there's something wonderful between those revolting covers; but if there is, I doubt it's for me. I don't want novels that validate my experiences. I want novels that validate my interests and passions. Give me a novel of possibilities, of weighty ideas; give me a novel where an entire system is drawn out with all the detail of a spider's web, and the human characters are struggling with their lives in the context of this system, just as all people do, ourselves included, only we are so enmeshed in the system of our own times that we rarely have the chance to step back and see it, whole and clear. Give me the chance to separate myself from the seeming inevitabilities and inertias of the world I live in, give me a reason to believe that a pull here and a twist there and a whisper might shift it. I already know about shoe shopping and makeup and gossip and mean girl politics and the mind-fuck of the first year of motherhood and what modern life is like. And they're killing me, so give me something else. Give me hope.

Not that you deal much in hope, Kurt. Your work is amusing, but dystopian. Still, a happy ending's a happy ending, even if it is a race of seal-like human-descendents one million years in the future who have lost their overly-large and troublesome brains.

It's not that I don't love literary and mainstream fiction, too. But the literary and mainstream fiction I love tends distinctly towards speculative fiction themes--Oryx and Crake? Science fiction. Blind Assassin? Science fiction embedded within historical. Not Wanted on the Voyage? Fantasy. Wicked? Fantasy. Self? Fantasy. The exceptions are notable for being so rare--Unless. Austen. Dickens. (Though the latter two are clearly separated from my own time and place, and Dickens was not above fantasy, as his Christmas novels show.) Even Wuthering Heights has fantastical elements, and I prefer it to the other Bronte works. I loved L.M. Montgomery, but don't tell me she didn't dabble in fantasy, with all of her ghosts and eerie premonitions.

And it's not that I'm above casting a disparaging eye on certain genres in the privacy of my own library. I've never met a romance novel I could finish, or a western novel I could start. But I recognize that this isn't a lack in the genre or in myself; it is simply a difference in temperament. In order to critique any piece of art, you need to understand what the artist was trying to do. If you can't, you are not qualified to judge it. (There are exceptions: if, for instance, the spirit of the piece, its impulses and motivations, are inherently derogatory or hateful towards a particular group.) OK, I can't stand romance novels; but that doesn't translate into romance novels being inherently stupid. Yet there are a lot--a LOT--of critics and members of the general public who seem to think that every worthwhile work of art must be directed at an audience of people just like them. They don't see that if you can't understand what an artist was trying to do you are in no position to judge whether or not they were able to do it.

Maybe the need to construct and defend hierarchies is so deep within the human psyche that the world literally needs a literary pissing-ground. Depressing thought.

It's robots and spaceships, or dragons and princesses. Right? No. Wrong wrong wrong. Is Battlestar Galactica about robots and spaceships? No! It's about what makes us human, and how we determine right from wrong, and how we decide to do the right thing, and how when we think we're doing the right thing we're often not. Is Lord of the Rings about dragons and princesses? No! Tolkein wrote those books as an exploration of Catholocism. The themes of good and evil, predestination, and the importance of individuals are as strong in his work as they are in the work of any mainstream author.

But here I sit, wondering if maybe I should write myself out of the genre now. Learn how to write realism, though it bores me, simply because otherwise I'm going to end up stuck right beside you in that drawer. Not that I'm ever going to be world-famous; but that's not the point. Most of the world's six billion people will never get the faintest whiff of a clue that I'm there. But even if all I ever do is publish a handful of stories, I hate to think of them thought of as inherently trashy because other people think that serious literature has to contain volvos and condo towers. Can anything be further from the truth? Did you see the reaction of sci fi writers and the SF blogosphere when Kristine Kathryn Rusch published her piece about how science fiction needs to back away from literary writing and revert to the Star Wars model in order to be commercially successful? I could have heard the keys pounding if I were standing on the rings of Saturn.

How did it happen that you have, on the one hand, "serious critics" deciding that the entire genre is Star Wars in drag, and that's why it's trash; and on the other hand, other critics deciding that what we need is a little more Star Wars? Given that every novel, movie and TV show to break out of the genre ghetto and become a success and a classic with mainstream audiences, with the exception of Star Wars, was not Star Wars, I'd say they're both wrong. Bladerunner! Aliens! The Time Traveller's Wife is science fiction! How does anyone read The Time Traveller's Wife and decide they loved it, but still hate sci fi?

"Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it's the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself. ...Science fiction is central to everything we've ever done, and people who make fun of science fiction writers don't know what they're talking about." Ray Bradbury

Ray's right--except that I'll put words in his mouth and extend it to readers, too. You know it, and I know it. In any event, I could no more stop myself from writing and reading science fiction and fantasy than I could make myself care about grey hairs or whatever Lindsay Lohan's latest public spectacle is supposed to have been. And I don't want to.

Screw it. Anyone who can't tell the difference between a drawer in a filing cabinet and a public urinal has no opinions worth paying mind to.

Posted by Andrea at February 1, 2007 9:48 AM under Books

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