Since when?

I was just reading Bruce Sterling's Heavy Weather and near the end there's a little expository section when a woman running a net-based correlation service/Delphic oracle asks the stormchasers for their opinions:

"My question is: When do you think the human race conclusively lost control over its own destiny?"

Answers range from Columbus to the French Revolution, and from 1914 to 1968. MY first thought was "Around the point where we started using sharp sticks to dig out grubs, probably." My second thought was, "Wait, when did we have control?" Looking at the great waves of change in our development as a species, the great events of history, NONE of them have been changes that we have decided upon as a species. It's always been my contention that when the aliens finally get here (my apologies to the flying saucer crowd, but I don't think that they've been here yet), they're going to look around and say, "What, could you people not agree on anything?"

It's a very science fiction concept to think in terms of humanity as a species, as a group which might actually have some kind of unified goal. Right now we show perilously little sign of anything close to that, and I have to wonder if we will manage to stumble through all of the problems that we've created for ourselves until we get to a point where we're all working together. (Apparently one of the attractions of Star Trek in its various incarnations is that it suggests a future in which we act as a species, ignoring the minor divisions of race, creed and nation.)

And even then, who knows? One envisions the dinosaurs complacently affixing their claw prints to some kind of planetary accord for lizards, right before the comet comes screaming into the atmosphere...

- Sid

The Good, The Bad, and the Tardis

 

In short, the straw of a manufactured realism with which the sf writer makes his particular literary bricks must be entirely convincing to the reader in its own right, or the whole story will lose its power to convince.

- Gordon R. Dickson

The future depicted in a good SF story ought to be in fact possible, or at least plausible.

- Frederik Pohl

A lot of the definitions of science fiction that I've read tend to deal with what makes for good science fiction - not a bad thing to have definitions that concentrate on quality, although I think that some of the motivation for that sort of definition comes from a kind of defensiveness about the genre, as per Sturgeon's Law. 

For a perfect example of the line that divides good SF from bad SF, let us turn to the popular media - okay, the BBC, but still - and take a look at the reborn Doctor Who. 

In the first season, with the excellent Christopher Eccleston capably filling the Doctor's shoes, there was a two-part episode: The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances. Set in WWII London, the Doctor is presented with the odd phenomenon of an inhumanly powerful child, wandering the streets in a gas mask while looking for his mother. Even odder, the child's condition appears to be contagious - people are mysteriously changing into gas-mask faced entities requesting their mummy. 

This is explained as being the work of military medical nanobots from a crashed spaceship, nanobots that have no idea that the model they are using to rebuild the population of London is in fact a flawed one (people not normally having gas masks for faces, even in London) and the boy's powers being the result of being brought up to alien military spec. 

This would qualify as "good" SF by my standards: an apparently inexplicable situation which is logically explained within the context established by the plot. 

Sadly, David Tennant, Mr. Eccleston's equally gifted replacement, is not always as ably supported by plotline. In The Idiot's Lantern, once again people are falling prey to a mysterious ailment, this time in 1953 London: after watching television, their faces vanish. (I've often thought that might happen.) 

After seeing a sort of corral full of faceless victims, the Doctor finds a room full of TVs, each one containing a missing face. Apparently this is because an alien entity known as the Wire is stealing energy from people. 

What? Why in the world would that cause their faces to vanish? How do these faceless, mouthless, noseless remnants breathe? Shouldn't they all be dead in about four minutes? Sadly, this episode rings the bell for bad SF, where the science fiction element is really just for show, intended to create an interesting visual effect but with nothing in the plot to explain why and how such a thing would happen. 

And, as a postscript to the whole thing, it really does make me wonder if I'd feel safe living in London.

- Sid

Picture if you will.

It must be so much easier to be a mainstream author, half the work of writing a book is already done. Why do I say that? For a mainstream author, the scene can be set in a few words: "New York, 1961." For the great majority of readers, that's all they need to summon up the setting. That image may be historically inaccurate - not everyone may know that the Yankees won the World Series that year - but that great majority will probably share a reasonably consistent vision of the Big Apple at the start of the 60's.

Pity the poor SF author! "New York, 3111." Pleasant though it might be to stop there, it's really just the beginning. New York in 3111 might be any one of an infinite number of New Yorks, and it seems unlikely that the reader will summon up a picture of Manhattan heading off for the near stars inside a gravity-polarized spindizzy bubble without a little guidance from the author. (Cities in Flight, James Blish. Took me less than five minutes to find the year that NY NY goes "Okie", I'm vaguely proud of myself.)

And save some of your pity for fantasy authors - at least people know what New York is! After the expectant reader is informed that it is the 3rd of Grune in the Year of the Reversed Ptarmigan in the Century of the Anchovy in the city of Ankh-Morpork, said reader may well be even more expectant.

The fulfillment of that expectation is the great strength of fantasy or science fiction, but tends to be handled in different ways. Some authors, like William Gibson, blend the process of setting the stage into the narrative - or, like William Gibson again, just go for it, and it's the reader's job to keep up. (Compare Neuromancer to Count Zero - there's a bit of overt scene-setting in Neuromancer, but Gibson certainly doesn't waste anyone's time explaining things in Count Zero, sequel or not.) Others choose to do a deliberate introduction of some sort: The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester is a good example of a brief prefactory statement before jumping in with both feet, and I'd be spoiled for choice if I started looking for books with a second chapter that draws a map of the world, as it were. I am in no way critical of this approach, those chapters are usually beautiful, wonderful and marvellous, the author standing centre stage and describing their vision directly to the audience.

But my great personal irritant is the cliché of the expository speech, wherein the kindly but agèd scientist/wizard/elder/brood master is continually talking about why it is that things are as they are. Now, I grant you, this can be done with grace and style, and I'm willing to admit that dialogue is a useful tool - after all, there are times when the reader needs to get some backstory or nothing will make any sense at all, and having an uninformed hobbit or two asking leading questions certainly makes life easier. However, there have been many times when I've thought to myself, "Yes yes, here we go, the Old One is going to give us a little talk...You know as well as I do, young one, that ever since the time of the Great Struggle with the Darkness..." There should be some sort of demerit system for any sentence in a science fiction or fantasy novel that starts, "You know as well as I do" or anything along those lines.

- Sid

"Happy birthday, dear Ted..."

Today is February 26th, and we commemorate the birthday of Theodore Sturgeon (1918-1985), perhaps best known for "Sturgeon's Law", the short version of which is:

Ninety per cent of everything is crud.

For some odd reason, it's almost always quoted as "crap" rather than "crud", but the concept is still clear.

Less well known is the fact that Sturgeon's Law is pulled from a defense of science fiction, although a somewhat backhanded defense:

When people talk about the mystery novel, they mention The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep. When they talk about the western, they say there's The Way West and Shane. But when they talk about science fiction, they call it 'that Buck Rogers stuff,' and they say 'ninety percent of science fiction is crud.' Well, they're right. Ninety percent of science fiction is crud. But then ninety percent of everything is crud, and it's the ten percent that isn't crud that is important. and the ten percent of science fiction that isn't crud is as good as or better than anything being written anywhere.

Hmmm...the picture above is the better part of my science fiction and fantasy library, and I can't really consider 90% of it to be crud (or crap). Mr. Sturgeon's comment dates from the 1953 World Science Fiction convention, and it's possible that the genre has progressed a bit since then, but it's equally possible that I've just avoided the 90% that fails to meet the critical standard below which lies crud - or crap. It's an interesting question: for every Dune, Left Hand of Darkness, or Neuromancer that gets published, how many Gor novels (or the equivalent) make their way onto paper?

- Sid

A rose by any other name.

I just picked up my copy of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction - no easy task, at 1395 pages and 2 and 7/8 inches thick in trade paperback it's big enough to use as a bookend - and, in a moment of whimsy, looked up the term "Science Fiction". Surprisingly, there's no entry, and I couldn't seem to find anything in the Introduction or the "Contents of This Book". 

Oddly enough, there are listings for alternative names, such as the British "scientific romance" of the pre-WWII years, and the original "Scientifiction" of Hugo Gernsback's invention - even a quick hit-and-run on "sci-fi", apparently now being pronounced "skiffy" - but no actual definatory entry on "science fiction". You'd think if you were going to knock off close to 1500 pages on a topic, you'd spare a word or two on what it was you were discussing. 

 All right, then, what is science fiction? 

 Many of the available definitions seem to aim more at distinguishing SF from fantasy than anything else. Chapters, the major Canadian book chain, separates the two genres into separate sections, albeit with mixed success. I recently suggested to an undeserving victim who was ringing up my purchases that, as a basic rule of thumb, the ones with space ships on the covers are often SF, and the ones with dragons are usually fantasy. (Not a hard distinction, but a useful filter for the uninitiated.) 

However, there are obviously more subtle distinctions in play at Chapters: Batman novelizations are in the science fiction section, whereas Spiderman is fantasy. Hmmm... 

But, I digress - space ships and dragons aside, is there a functioning definition of science fiction in play? Thanks to Google™, we are quickly presented with over two million links for the search terms "science fiction definitions". (Apparently a few people have an opinion on this.) For the most part, I suspect that most people, albeit unwittingly, use the Damon Knight definition:

Science fiction means what we point to when we say it.

In other words, whatever we want to be SF, is. Personally, in spite of all the involved, thoughtful, and philosophical definitions that have been put forward, I've always had a strong affection for Philip K. Dick's take on the question, from the introduction to The Golden Man:

The SF writer sees not just possibilities but wild possibilities. It's not just "What if–", it's "My God, what if–!"

And we shall proceed on that basis - it's not just "what if".

- Sid