SF: One Way to Separate the Wheat from the Chaff

Isaac Asimov on the Golden Age of SF

Since the Golden Age of SF, science fiction has been a genre deeply rooted in its own history. John Campbell, the editor of Astounding Science Fiction, essentially created the genre, at least as a marketing concept, when he published the work of writers such as Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, and others. As Asimov says in the above video, Campbell cultivated writers who were scientifically literate, which is true but is only part of the story.

When the general public thinks of science fiction, they tend to think of the tropes created by these authors, such as sentient robots, interplanetary travel and alien civilizations, lasers and other large scale weapons, among many other things. And writers are often lauded for their prescience and inspirations regarding new technologies. But the fundamental optimism regarding Golden Age SF, that core idea that humanity would conquer and colonize space, was slowly shown to be more fantastic than real, built on the fallacious idea that matter can travel faster than the speed of light. This was often elided by pseudoscience (tachyons, warp drives, radical acts of quantum tunnelling, etc.), or merely ignored, but it was never more than hope-against-hope fantasy.

Another set of tropes were created by the cyberpunks, whose narratives largely remained earthbound, opting instead for fantasies focused on the emerging world of information technology, and the vanishing ideal of virtual reality. We contemporaries live in a world saturated by information technology, so the concept is more than cogent to our own lives, though VR is stuck at the level of videogames, MMORPG like World of Warcraft and 3D movies.

A common trope in a good deal of contemporary SF is the Singularity. The singularity is an idea posited by Mathematician and SF author Vernor Vinge. Singularity is a loaded term in mathematics, but it can be loosely described as the point where predictions break down. What Vinge means when he evokes the singularity is that individual computer capacity will soon surpass that of us humans, and then, ?

This is generally manifest in stories by large, artificial intelligences that will be more powerful than humans, and at that point, all bets are off. The problem with the singularity is addressed well by Neal Stephenson:

I have a personal mental block as far as the Singularity prediction is concerned. My thoughts are more in line with those of Jaron Lanier, who points out that while hardware might be getting faster all the time, software is shit (I am paraphrasing his argument). And without software to do something useful with all that hardware, the hardware’s nothing more than a really complicated space heater.

Throughout its history, SF has been plagued with this idea that its authors' imaginings of near and far futures were somehow prescient. Just as historical novelists are supposed to create accurate versions of the past, science fiction novelists have been tasked with accurately recreating out future. Of course some surprise and are able to follow through on that difficult task.

But I'd argue that this is a small part of what makes science fiction interesting. As SF novelist/critic Samuel R. Delany claims:

There are few 'ideas' in science fiction.

The resonance between an idea and a landscape is what it's all about.

Like any fiction, storytelling is more imperative than scientific concept. I'd argue that setting is less of an issue than the confrontation with something that is fundamentally unknown (much SF takes place in a world as mimetic as the ones written by so-called realists, but invaded by something other, be it aliens, human created tech that somehow is able to surprise its creators, etc.)

Setting is a significant part of SF inasmuch as it involves suspension of disbelief. Suspension of disbelief is a fundamental part of how narrative works, but a tricky beast to pin down. Some readers (or consumers of story via books, TV, movies, etc.) become so engrossed in a story that they literally believe it to be true. Though it might be blasphemous to say this, most children do not believe that Harry Potter actually exists outside of novels, movies, and assorted tie-ins. But for the reader who is truly engaged by Ms. Rowling's creations, the novels have satisfied a criteria described by Delany (quoting his teacher Charles Olson) as "keep[ing] their fictions up to the real."

Small wonder then, that the most intruiging work in SF has come from writers from or inspired by the "New Wave" school. The New Wave (not to be confused with the synthesizer-infused hair-sculpted school of pop music that was popular when I was a teenager) was a group of writers who grew up reading Golden Age SF, but who were as focused on literature, character, and language.

There are a lot of remarkable writers who came from this school of novelists, who, despite the fact that they are less well known than Golden Age novelists like Asimov and Clarke, have had as large an influence on literature and culture as those two iconic figures. But, in order to keep this post from becoming unreadably long, that will have to wait for another missive.