sci-fi

Maybe there’s more than one final frontier

James Wallace Harris asks the intriguing question, Has the Universe Gotten Too Big for Science Fiction? But I think his reasoning is built upon a deeply flawed and limited definition of science fiction that can’t help but exclude things that fit squarely within the genre, like the recent films District 9 and Moon:

District 9 uses outer space aliens as a metaphor for a story about immigration xenophobia and racism. And even though District 9 opens with a magnificent flying saucer orbiting perfectly over Johannesburg, South Africa, with max-gnarly alien aliens, I still don’t consider it science fiction. Why? Real science fiction is about exploring the cutting edge of reality, and District 9 uses its aliens like other movies use angels or dragons to tell a fable. More than that, District 9 models its action after video games rather than modern science fiction magazine stories – but does District 9 model the emerging post-modern SF magazine stories?

District 9, he says, “uses science fiction as a metaphor for human xenophobia, rather than being speculative fiction about first contact with a non-human intelligence.” But I’d suggest that most if not all science fiction uses its subjects as metaphor. The genre is not, strictly speaking, a predictive tool; despite its name, it need not be defined solely by an ability to scientifically (much less accurately) speculate on the future, on technology, or on alien physiology and human contact with same. Because of its futuristic trappings of spaceships and aliens and intelligent machines, I think we sometimes forget that good science fiction is like any good fiction: ultimately it’s about us, as people, here and now.

I’m willing to go as far as Ursula K. Le Guin, who suggests a distinction between the more scientifically minded SF and the more anything-goes sci-fi, but I think that’s a fine line, and that they’re more like twin aspects of science fiction than two independent, mutually exclusive genres unto themselves. And even Le Guin admits of SF that “some of it is literarily self-aware enough to treat its metaphors as metaphors.”

I have not yet seen District 9, but I hesitate to exclude it from science fiction simply because first contact with a non-human intelligence might actually play out differently, or because it looks at how we might treat an alien species more as a metaphor for how we have treated our own. Maybe it’s a different type of science fiction than some; maybe it’s more sci-fi than SF; or maybe it just (to borrow a phrase from Harlan Ellison) uses some of the furniture of the genre. But does that mean it isn’t science fiction, that it should be cast out from the umbrella of that name?

I think we’ve moved past the point where it’s the “science” half that wholly and completely defines the genre.

Moving on, I’m not at all sure I understand Harris’ reason for excluding Moon from science fiction — even if, unfortunately, I’ve not yet seen that film either. Harris writes:

Science fiction has always been about the future, it always embraced modernism, showing absolute faith in science with the relentless belief that we will eventually comprehend reality. Ivy League intellectuals have always considered the SF genre to be a literature for dreamy adolescents, so maybe it’s just taken science fiction a bit longer than the rest of the literary world to grow up and face the post-modern world of uncertainty.

I don’t agree with that definition of the genre — be it sci-fi or SF — at all. How is science fiction that looks inward, or that speculates on a less than gleaming and perfect future, or that acknowledges the uncertainty we all understandably have about the future — which by its (or at least our) very nature is unknowable — how is any of that suddenly not science fiction? I think the genre can absolutely shake off the embrace of modernism, doubt the infallibility of science, and throw into question our ability to understand reality. Moreover, I think it has an obligation to do so, above and beyond any “sensawunda” its stories might sometimes provide. Science fiction can celebrate science, positivity, and a gung-ho spirit of adventure and exploration. But that’s not all it can do, and I think we’d severely handicap the genre by imposing on it such a narrow definition.

That’s why, for instance, I think David J. Williams is wrong when he suggests that Mundane SF is dead simply because he personally finds it boring. Or that the confusingly named SFFE was wrong when they suggested that positivity and enthusiasm should be championed above all else. (To the point where it was implied that the alternative wasn’t just bad science fiction, but genuinely unethical.) I think the genre is a lot more accommodating and expansive than some people, or their definitions, would allow. I think there are lots of different types of science fiction, and stories within the genre that slip in and out of those different types, that adopt certain elements (or pieces of furniture) to tell interesting and important tales. Rather than narrow our focus and say things like, “This isn’t science fiction, because it doesn’t do…”, maybe we should embrace the wide variety of things the genre does do. Maybe we should expand our definitions.

I think the genre, and certainly we its readers and viewers, would be richer for it.

Sunday various

  • Well here’s a shocker: a zombie apocalypse really would wipe out mankind. So say Canadian researchers, anyhow, and I’ve learned to trust Canadians on matters zombie-related. [via]
  • From the “Are You Sure That Isn’t from The Onion Department”: “College Grad Sues College Because She Can’t Find a Job.” [via]
  • I had real problems with Ron Moore’s Battlestar Galactica near the end — not as much as some people, maybe, but still enough that I have yet to finish watching the final season. (It’s telling how much I wasn’t enjoying it that I was able to stop, months ago, midway through the cliffhanger mutiny episodes, and not really feel compelled to continue.) But how can it not be too early for yet another remake? The elements that Moore didn’t adapt were the cheesy Star Wars-ripoffs of the original show. Who, besides maybe Glen Larson and Dirk Benedict, is crying out for that? And so soon?
  • Fox News gets okay to misinform public:

    In its six-page written decision, the Court of Appeals held that the Federal Communications Commission position against news distortion is only a “policy,” not a promulgated law, rule, or regulation.

    Well that’s reassuring.[via]

  • And finally, uniting all robots under a single operating system? Yeah, that couldn’t possibly go wrong… [via]

Friday various

  • I think it’s great that Monty Python is being honored for outstanding contribution to film and television, and I hope some or all of the show is recorded and made available. But I can still remember when Python reunions were rare events, and a little part of me kind of misses that. That said, when I read the award ceremony would be held in New York, I absolutely did wonder about the possibility of getting tickets. (Unlikely, I know, and probably just as well. That’s the evening of my sister’s wedding rehearsal — which, as a groomsman and her brother, I should probably attend.)

  • Speaking of comedy reunions, the Kids in the Hall are get back together again…for a murder mystery miniseries? It sounds interesting if nothing else.

  • Remaking Yellow Submarine? In “that creepy 3-D motion-capture technology” used in The Polar Express and Beowulf? Okay, Robert Zemeckis needs to be stopped.

  • So you say you’ve never read Bradley Denton’s award-winning SF novel Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede, and you’d like to do so before the movie version comes out? Well, Mr. or Ms. Hypothetical-Type-Person, you’re in luck: Denton is making a free, Creative-Commons-licensed copy available at his website. (And at ManyBooks.net.) It’s been years since I read the book, but I remember being pleasantly surprised at the time. I think it’s time I re-read it.

  • And finally, ladies and gentlemen, the Batman fish. Whatever happened to the gilled crusader? [via]

Tales from the future

This just in: science fiction is just as bad at predicting the future as everybody else.

Good science fiction isn’t really about prognostication. Good science fiction, despite its futuristic settings and sometimes predictive imaginings, is just like any other fiction: about describing the present. It’s like Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness:

Yes, indeed the people in it are androgynous, but that doesn’t mean that I’m predicting that in a millennium or so we will all be androgynous, or announcing that I think we damned well ought to be androgynous. I’m merely observing, in the peculiar, devious, and thought-experimental manner proper to science fiction, that if you look at us at certain odd times of day in certain weathers, we already are. I am not predicting, or prescribing. I am describing. I am describing certain aspects of psychological reality in the novelist’s way, which is by inventing elaborately circumstantial lies.

Yet reporters keep playing the game of “what science fiction got right and what science fiction got wrong.” Twenty-five years after Neuromancer was first published, PC World gets into the act, suggesting that “Neuromancer is important because of its astounding predictive power.”

This seems like an interesting exercise — I’ll admit, it’s amusing to see how we do, or do not, live in Gibson’s imagined future world — but it sort of misses the point. Whatever its considerable strengths or continued relevance, Neuromancer is much more a book about 1984, about its present, than about the future we now live in. What it gets “right” or “wrong” is sort of beside the point. For one, Mark Sullivan’s article acknowledges right up front, in quoting Jack Womack’s intro to the book’s 2000 re-release, that Neuromancer was as much a direct influence on the future (particularly the development of the internet) as a prediction of it. “what if the act of writing it down, in fact,” asked Womack, “brought it about?”

And for another, Sullivan might want to read another Gibson story, “The Gernsback Continuum“. Science fiction has been getting things wrong since day one, and that’s very often a good thing.

Then again, as Ken Jennings writes:

“…it occurred to me the other day that we are finally getting to the future promised by bad ’50s science fiction. No rocket packs or flying cars, but consider the following. One distinctive (and oft-ridiculed) thing about old sci-fi was the dorkiness of its attempts to suggest the vocabulary of the future. “The Maidbot was vacu-cleaning as I Flashfried my Soysage and read my digipape, so I didn’t hear you trying to Vidphone me!”

A lot of the clumsy made-up words seemed to be brand names, despite the fact that trademarks almost never became verbs–at least not in 20th-century American English. (In the U.K., vacuuming is still called “Hoovering,” but I can’t think of a colloquial American example.)

But in the last decade, for the first time in history, trade names have started to become verbs. I can Google, I can Twitter. As awkward as it sounds, I can even Facebook. Will I someday be able to Twitter and Google as the maidbot flashfries me up some Soysage? Fingers crossed.