Does Science Fiction Have to be About the Present?
01/11/2003 . Source: Ken MacLeod 

SF author Ken MacLeod has a theory that SF can be more illuminating about the time of its writing than about that of its imagined future.

In articles and interviews which I've ruthlessly recycled as talks at SF conventions, I've put forward a by no means original thesis that SF can be more illuminating about the time of its writing than about that of its imagined future.

In an interview or Q&A session at Swecon 2003, Alastair Reynolds pointed out that while there may be some truth in this, there are a great number of stories that aren't - even unconsciously - about the present, but quite straightforward and conscientious attempts to imagine what the real future might be like. He mentioned Arthur C. Clarke's The City and the Stars.

Good point, I thought, and stole it at once. It's about time I came up with another topic for SF convention talks. Especially as the next one I'm due to give is in Dublin, and too many people there might well have heard me rambling on about SF-as-contemporary-reference before. (Some of them may have read this by then. They can have fun seeing how much I've changed my mind in the meantime.)

Besides, that whole argument gets uncomfortably close to a capitulation to the oft-heard claim (which deserves to become known as the Atwood Defence) that what is really interesting and important about SF just is its contemporary reference; that some novel that might superficially appear to be SF (because it's, say, set in the future after some genetically engineered plague has wiped out most of the human race) isn't really SF but satire, and really about the present, and not related to that vulgar stuff about rockets and rayguns and talking squids in outer space, and therefore may deserve serious consideration and can be safely opened without risk of releasing alien germs to which normal Earth readers have no natural immunity and which could sweep through the entire literary community and all die, oh, the embarrassment.

So, with space helmets on, brass bras brightly polished, and phasers set to stun, let's boldly go in search of SF that really is about the future, and whose contemporary reference is reduced to as close to a trace element as humanly possible.

Interestingly enough, the division between what I'll boldly call pure SF and SF-as-satire cuts across, rather than between, a lot of the themes and tropes and subject areas of SF. Let's start with the most obvious: stories set in the far future. Clarke's The City and the Stars, already mentioned, or Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker are undoubtedly novels which, while inevitably of their time, are not fundamentally interested in or secretly about their time.

They are about the far future of humanity and the universe. But what about Michael Moorcock's 'Dancers at the End of Time' stories? They are about an opulent, irresponsible decadence, about ennui, about fin de siecle, rather than the literal end of time.

On to the second most obvious: post-apocalypse stories. It seems to me that Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz is a story that can be understood without much reference to the time in which it was written, and gains little from applying a knowledge of that time to it. It looks at a post-catastrophe recovery of civilization sub specie aeternatis. The closest it comes to contemporary comment is in its final section, set a thousand or so years in the future, and in the eerie sense that section conveys that our civilization is a post-catastrophe recovery civilization, as indeed it is.

Robert Heinlein's Farnham's Freehold, on the other hand, is so embarrassingly about contemporary concerns, as refracted through the nastier parts of Heinlein's mind, that to discuss it is to push at the fallout shelter's open door and let in all kinds of toxic and radioactive stuff.

In this novel the descendants of Black Americans have come out on top after a nuclear war, and become slave-holding (and slave-castrating) cannibals. If that doesn't reflect racial and sexual fears I don't know what does. Whether you cut the Dean of Science Fiction some slack and read it in the spirit of Swift's A Modest Proposal, or read it (as I do) as a racist tract maybe one notch above The Turner Diaries, it has to be thrown out of court as a serious attempt to examine what a post-nuclear world might be like.

(More examples later.)

For now, though, I want to raise the possibility that the (British) New Wave is exactly what Mike Harrison recently accused Charlie Stross of saying it was: the source of all that was wrong with British SF for thirty years. (I take no position on whether Charlie said that or Mike misunderstood him - I've read most of the now famous New Weird discussion, and I can't be arsed.)

It marked a turn from rationality to irrationality, from outer space to inner, from exploring the universe to inspecting navel fluff, and from popularity to respectability. Yes, 90% of Trad SF was crap. 90% of New Wave SF was crap, and boring, miserabilist, depressing crap at that. It was an abandonment of everything that justifies SF as a genre, in favour of what is acceptable to mundanes.

What is it that distinguishes, and justifies, SF as a genre?

For thousands of years, people have been huddled around the campfire, telling stories. The stories were about what went on around the campfire (who was sleeping with whom, who had become king and who had plotted to depose him, etc) and about the figures that were seen in the enormous distorted human shadows that the campfire projected onto the surrounding darkness: gods and demons, ghosts and monsters.

Then, some time around the seventeenth century, the sun came up.

'Nature, and Nature's laws, lay hid in night. God said "Let Newton be!" and all was light.'

Science fiction is the stories we tell about the surrounding landscape that then became visible, the world seen in Newton's light. As Swedish SF critic John-Henri Holmberg has said, it's the literary expression of the Enlightenment.

It's often not a very good literary expression. I'm not defending cardboard characters, clunky plots, chunky exposition or any other literary sins of SF. What I want to take issue with is the criterion of judging SF by its degree of closeness to 'realistic' or 'fantastic' literature, the literature of the campfire and the dark.

One of the most insidious ways of doing that is to privilege SF that deals imaginatively with social and political issues. Speculative political fancies have been respectable since Plato, who is more or less the Form of Respectability in the Western canon. Thomas More could write an approving speculative fiction about communism and remain respectable, not only canon but canonized.

The most respectable work of recent SF is very likely Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed. To outflank any unwanted agreement, let me say right away that this isn't because it's feminist, because it isn't - it's Mills and Boon monogamist to the bone, as well as subtly homophobic and biological-sex-essentialist; and it isn't because it's communist or anarchist. James P. Hogan gave a much more attractive and indeed more plausible depiction of a communist anarchy in Voyage From Yesteryear, and I don't see that book on academic SF courses.

No, The Dispossessed is respectable because it's an SF book that people with no interest in SF can read comfortably. Its sole real SF content, the theory of the ansible, can whizz right over their heads. It might as well be radio. The real focus of interest is all the cosy familiar campfire stuff about the Individual versus Society, and Society versus Society, which plugs it neatly into the Great Tradition. In short, it's SF for people who don't like SF.

SF isn't fundamentally about that. Getting that right is good, don't get me wrong. Do for heaven's sake have some understanding of human beings before writing about them, at least to the extent that you do write about them. But what SF is fundamentally about is not the Individual versus Society, or Society versus Society, but humanity in the universe.

SF needn't thereby lose in human relevance and universality, because the situation it posits is both objectively true and universal to the human being, as a knowing subject confronting a knowable object. If SF about that is despised and rejected, rather than criticised and improved in terms of its own project, then both the Individual and Society are, in the long run, in deeper shit than any dystopia.

And that, comrades, is the real social relevance of SF.