Real Science Fiction

[ann_leckie]

Or, “What have the Romans ever done for us?”

I’m looking at what is likely the homestretch on the WiP, or at least the first complete draft of it. So of course I’m thinking about blog posts right now instead of writing.

It is notoriously difficult to define “science fiction” but a common attempt to do so–to wall off stuff that isn’t “really” science fiction from the proper stuff–is to assert that a real science fiction story wouldn’t survive the removal of the science fictiony bits, where, I don’t know, I guess “fake” science fiction is just Westerns with spaceships instead of horses or somesuch.

I never thought much about this except to think that well, sure, that would probably be a succinct way to define the most science fictiony of science fiction.

But the more I’ve thought about it, recently, the less satisfied I’ve been with this. I’m not sure there are any stories that fit this requirement.

Here’s the thing. Almost any story, you could remove some or other bit of it, replace it with some more present-world (or past world) analogue, and it would still be recognizably the same story on some level.

Let’s take Star Trek. Okay, some of you may consider ST to be “fake” science fiction. I’ll lay my cards on the table and tell you I laugh when I see someone call ST “hard science fiction. I consider it to be space opera. But let’s consider it a moment, shall we? At first glance all the aliens and the transporter and that utopian Federation of Planets stuff, and you’d think you couldn’t remove it, but let’s set it back a couple centuries, build the Enterprise out of wood, make Kirk into Horatio Hornblower and change the Klingons to French, the Romulans to Spanish. (I know, I know, the Klingons are actually stand-ins for the Russians, and the Vulcans/Romulans for the Chinese but that’s not helping the cause of “can’t remove the skiffy elements” is it.) You could take Star Trek and remove it’s snfal elements and still end up with basically the same stories.

That was an easy one, right? A gimme? Sure, maybe. But consider–there’s always–always–a level of abstraction available at which a story with whatever elements removed qualifies as “the same.” And the reverse is true–there’s always a level of specificity at which the removal of very small things means a large change. I mean, you could go very close-up on Star Trek and say that without dilithium crystals and tribbles, very specifically, it wouldn’t be the same. And it wouldn’t!

So it’s just about how much change it can take before too much violence is done to the original, right? Well, no. Any change is going to do violence to the original. Traduttore tradittore, after all. And the question of how much violence to the original is too much isn’t hard and fast.

I’m sure someone is going to comment insisting that Star Trek is one thing, but story Foo would actually really be irreparably changed by the removal of element Bar, and thus am I refuted. But seriously, there are almost no sfnal elements that couldn’t be framed some other way, no blackhole that can’t become an inescapable whirlpool, no alien that can’t become the denizen of some far away island, and while we’re at it whole planets get treated basically like smallish islands of one sort or another in quite a lot of sf anyway so that’s an easy enough transition to make. The question of whether that non-sfnal framing constitutes an obviously different story, or one recognizably the same if superficially different, is not one that can be answered easily, not in any really objective way.

And I can’t help noticing how often this particular criterion is used to delegitimize stories as “real” science fiction that by any other measure would more than qualify. It’s not just that the critic doesn’t really like this work, no, sadly the story is just not “really” science fiction, because if you take away the robots and the spaceships and the cloning and the black holes and the aliens and the interstellar civilizations and the fact that it’s set way in the future, well, it’s still a story about people wanting something and struggling to get it. Not really science fiction, see?

And well, sure, you take all that away and no, it’s not science fiction. But you had to take it away to begin with, didn’t you.

Mirrored from Ann Leckie.

Comments

[c-maxx.livejournal.com]

Indeed, as you say, the science-fictiony elements make if SF, and I think some classical lit might be SF for the same reason--

The Odyssey? It has SFy elements in what pass for science in those days- narcotic food, sirens songs, one-eyed beasties... One could argue fantasy, but I find it more of an SF story. And he went home and cleaned house, just as Breq has attempted to do, and just as thrillingly! Rereading, have been enjoying Ancillary 2 and 3 as stand-alone novels-quite as good on their own...

Or The Yiddish Policeman's Ball, if I remember the title correctly, tho i think it may actually be classed as SF by many critics, tho really more of a Hammett-Chandler story in substance, but yes, SF as well!

So maybe the cavilers are going at it backwards- instead of eliminating this and that as SF, include more stories of other types. Genesis, anyone?

[ann-leckie.livejournal.com]

Oh, the Yiddish Policeman's Union! Yes, definitely SF--it's very firmly Alternate History. And also, as you say, a detective novel that without the alt hist would be pretty firmly that.

And I'm all for being inclusive instead of exclusive.

[dacuteturtle.livejournal.com]

When I was compiling my list of SF and Fantasy from the 1970s (and that list still isn't done) (see http://theendhavenproject.blogspot.com/p/top-fantasy-and-science-fiction-authors.html), I ran into the same basic problem. What's real SF? Rather than solve the problem, thus making myself a gatekeeper, I decided to accept everything SFF to the maximum extent, even if I personally disagreed. The only real exception was children's stories, because that's a rabbit hole that I'm not ready to head down.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

It sounds like the people who are trying to make the argument that the SF elements have to be unremovable are arguing for some sort of fiction-of-ideas thing, like, "let's make a story that talks about the implications of gene splicing" or "let's make a story that talks about quantum entanglement," but on the one hand, yes: anything that's interesting as a problem relating to gene splicing or quantum entanglement can also be discussed through some other vector, and on the other, if you want to talk purely about only the science of whatever it is, then really you're ending up with an essay, not a story.

[paulliver.livejournal.com]

It allows us to relate to those problems through the medium of the human heart.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I think this is true of good fiction of any variety, but yes: true for science fiction.

[damerell.livejournal.com]

I think of that as a sufficient but not necessary criterion. There's plenty of other ways something can be SF, but when you have a story about the social consequences of a technological change (say, Bujold's uterine replicators) it's almost bound to be SF.

I read (apropos of nothing much) an odd article about how Star Trek isn't like the modern (American) Navy, one of the standout points being how implausible the five-year mission is. Hang on, I thought - it might be implausible now, but Captain Cook (or Captain Hornblower) would have found it well within the realms of possibility...

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Good point re: the five-year mission). Didn't it take Magellan's expedition something like three years to circumnavigate the globe? (This question brought to you by a dogged refusal to simply google the answer...)

[damerell.livejournal.com]

Yes. Good one, too, although I think James Cook is ahead with three three-year voyages.

Aha, still better, though, is Anson's circumnavigation in 1740, which not only took the best part of four years but suffered horrendous casualties amongst the redshirts^W crew.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

No matter what point in history you choose, it's always risky business being a redshirt. Or an ancillary (not that anyone chooses to be one of those).

[damerell.livejournal.com]

Am I allowed to choose to be one of Cochrane's redshirts? That's a fairly safe berth, considering. :-)

(FTAOD I mean Thomas Cochrane 1775-1860 not the inventor of warp drive :-)

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I had to look him up, but he sounds like an excellent captain for whom to be a redshirt (and yeah, warp-drive Cochraine was more of a loner... furthermore, I can't help thinking of him as Farmer Hoggett from Babe, since the same actor played both.

[paulliver.livejournal.com]

Personally, I suspect the growing Hollywood interest in Sf is that it allows them to make action movies with bigger bad guys and bigger bangs involving bigger bucks.

But great SF allows us to look at concepts from a new angle. What would society be like if we were all the same gender most of the year? Would a Nazi society fall apart the same way the Soviet Union did? What if robots were a new underclass?

And since that angle is not our own normal viewpoint, it is a safer distance, making it an easier medicine to swallow. Like how detective stories uncover corruption in society with the spoonful of sugar of a mystery plot.

Great Sf doesn't mean merely entertaining SF isn't SF, at least not to me. It just means some books are better than others.

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

I think of science fiction as a frame within which you can tell any kind of story. You can have a science fiction mystery, a science fiction comedy, a science fiction Regency romance, a science fiction literary drama, a science fiction Western (which is where I put ClassicTrek), a science fiction tragedy, a science fiction thriller, a science fiction horror story -- you name it, and it can be written within the frame of science fiction. Which means that I am at unreconciliable odds with the people who say that there's some ineluctable "thing" that makes a story science fiction and if it doesn't have that, then it isn't.

However, it's not as easy as "take a story in Genre X and add science-fictional elements". I actually saw a book once which had tried to do that. I don't remember the title or author; it was something I picked up off the rack at the grocery store, read a few pages, and it was painfully obvious that the author had taken a standard Western and done search-and-replace on specific terms (asteroid for ranch, rocket-scooter for horse, etc.) without having given any thought to the other changes which would be introduced by those substitutions. It was terrible, and not just in the point-and-laugh way. I almost wish I'd bought it, just to have proof that it actually existed!