I don’t get it. Really, I don’t. But I hear it a lot – every time I say something about recommending something outside the comfort zone of my reading group…
-I don’t usually read science fiction…I didn’t know I was writing it, for that seminar: Last Drive In was set a (very) few years in the future, but as far as I was concerned it was contemporary fiction. I mean, you can go back at least a few decades without it being called Historical Fiction.
- If you say science fiction you’ll think things we saw when we were kids or the pictures you went to because your boyfriend insisted.
Woman’s Hour’s introduction to a feature on SF. Poor deluded little boyfriend.
- Science fiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that. That isn’t this book at all.
Margaret Atwood, on The Handmaid’s Tale. She later changed her mind and is happy to describe some of her fiction as SF. Maybe winning the Arthur C Clarke prize for Science Fiction helped persuade her...
In a seminar last year I did a compare-and-contrast between The Handmaid’s Tale – given MA’s original statement- and Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5. S5 DOES contain space travel to other planets, and time travel, and aliens in flying saucers. It is NOT science fiction. It’s a story of a man fucked up by his wartime experience in Dresden and escaping into an alternate reality. If that’s SF, then Don Quixote is Sword and Sorcery...
The strange thing is, Science Fiction pretty much generally DOES NOT CONTAIN FLYING SAUCERS. Not prose science fiction, anyway. Flying saucers stepped straight off the front pages of the newspapers (these were factual reports by airforce pilots) into an emerging genre of allegorical Cold War, Alien Invasion fiction. Valid enough in itself, but with little relation to the extant science fiction literature, already at least several decades old – maybe going on 200 years old.
Look at the cover art of the SF Pulp magazines contemporary with the Flying Saucer hysteria (http://www.sfcovers.net/mainnav.htm). You will see rocket ships. Flying battleships. Flying skyscrapers. Little that could even tentatively be described as a Flying Saucer.
I’m not about to start writing a history of SF literature. Read Brian Aldiss’ Billion Year Spree. In fact, read everything written and edited by Brian Aldiss http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/jun/16/sciencefictionfantasyandhorror.artsandhumanities (start with Hothouse and don’t miss the Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus).
And when it comes to movies, just remember how Star Wars opens:
Long Ago
In a galaxy far, far away...
SF doesn’t start like that. Fairy Tales do (and don’t get me wrong, I love fairy tales!)
One of the other problems with SF is the term itself. I mean, I only dabble myself, but to some degree I’ve been aware as terms of speculative fiction, slipstream, new weird, new wave fabulist – or, stepping back, scientific romance. ‘Course, the geekstream like their sadly threatened hard SciFi, based on ‘real’ science and preferably written by ‘real’ scientists (Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein … maybe even ‘Doc’ Smith, a Chemical Engineer). But… any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from magic. That’s Clarke’s Law.
Who writes SF? There are a bunch of authors who are tagged as genre authors and would therefore, even if they wanted to, have problems getting anything else published. Apart from that, it seems like every bugger else does. For better or worse, they all dabble – Will Self (Book of Dave), David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas), Kazuo Ishiguro (Never Let Me Go). Ian (M) Banks has this whole dual identity thing going on. Kingsley Amis was a huge fan of pulp SF and wrote it himself as well as writing about it. What about Salman Rushdie’s first novel (Grimus)? Doris Lessing (Canopus in Argos)? Back to EM Forster (The Machine Stops). Fill in your own favourites.
Was a time when the majority of what I read was SF. Hard SF, real Golden Age stuff. Now, I like my SF soft and slipstreamy. I like things that blur boundaries – even if it still turns off those ‘literary fiction or nothing’ types. For some reason cross-genre detective fiction- science fiction works: Harry Harrison’s Make Room, Make Room! (filmed as Soylent Green), Asimov’s Caves of Steel, China Miéville’s fantastic latest novel The City and The City – even Robert Harris’ Fatherland (Alternate Histories usually attached to SF).
One more crossover… cinematic, this time: 2 years after Star Wars:
Alien.
Usually described as the most successful SF/Horror crossover, both Ridley Scott’s direction and HR Giger’s designs emphasise the sheer Gothic weirdout isolation of deep space. But the real point is… this isn’t unification. Like Richard Matheson’s vampires in I Am Legend (The Omega Man (Charlton Heston), I Am Legend (Will Smith)*), the reason horror/ gothic sits so comfortably with SF is because this isn’t unification, it’s reunification. The real roots of SF are in not just the scientific creation of Mary Shelley/ Dr. Frankenstein’s creature, but in its Gothic sensibilities. Science Fiction is Gothic Fiction.
And that is all I’ll tell you. Because that is all I know.
*I Am Legend also influenced George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. All genres meet somewhere…
MY short random bibliography/ filmography:
EM Forster The Machine Stops, story.
Rudyard Kipling – Wireless, story.
Richard Matheson I am Legend (The Omega Man)
Matheson The Incredible Shrinking Man
Alien
Village of the Damned
Dark City
Brian W. Aldiss Hothouse
Aldiss Billion Year Spree
Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus
Frank Herbert Dune
Robert Heinlein Stranger in a Strange Land
Anna Kavan Ice
Margaret Atwood The Handmaid’s Tale
Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse 5
District 9
China Miéville The City and the City
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