Our science fiction isn't your father's SF

The February 2010 issue of Asimov's contains an amazing story in "Stone Wall Truth" by Caroline M. Yoachim. This story is set in a far future village which exists alongside the ancient remnants of a high-technology wall. When a new ruler takes control of the land, he sends his vanquished foes to this village, where they are cut open and strung to a wall. The wall not only keeps these people alive but reveals to them their inner devils and hells. Once that is done, the person is sewn back together and allowed to live--if people can truly live after having witnessed the darkness within the minds and souls of all humans.

This is one of those rare stories I immediately reread upon finish it. In fact, I felt the same way reading this story as I did last year about Eugie Foster's novelette "Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast" (which won a well-deserved Nebula Award and is a finalist for the Hugo). Like Foster's novelette, Yoachim's story also struck me as a perfect example of SciFi Strange and will be on my list of the year's best stories. But that said, I also knew many science fiction fans would have the same issue with Yoachim's story as with the other SciFi Strange stories I love. Because every single aspect of the story isn't explained, for many people a story like this simply can't be called science fiction.

Sure enough, when I looked for reviews on the story I found these comments in Tangent Online by Carl Slaughter. While Carl praises the story, he asks "What is the source of the wall's power?  The author doesn't say.  We don't discover the origin and nature of the wall.  Nor the identity of the Ancients who built it, nor the time and place of the story.  Thus the story is a masterpiece, but a masterpiece of fantasy rather than science fiction."

That review drives me crazy with its narrow view on what qualifies as science fiction (although I totally agree with Carl that the story is a masterpiece). The truth is there are many accepted tropes in science fiction which are not technically possible or can't be accurately explained, including faster than light travel, time travel, dimensional travel and so on. However, if an author uses these tropes in their story they're okay and still writing science fiction. But if an author tries to explore a possible future technology but don't explain said technology in mind-numbing detail, they aren't SF.

I have a mouth and I must scream! Which, by the way, refers to another famous science fiction story which doesn't explain how everything works. I mean, a computer the size of a planet which can trap people inside it for all eternity? Provide me a précis on how that is possible under what we currenty know about science and technology. It isn't. But Ellison's classic story is still pure science fiction.

Part of the problem is that the science fiction genre has become too narrow in what it accepts as legitimate SF. We live in a world where our most advanced theoretical sciences like quantum mechanics are almost philosophical in nature. But instead of allowing our science fiction to be as equally free to explore the universe, we box it in. And ironically, we're not even consistent in how we do this. For example, people screamed when the last Star Trek film tripped into the red matter realm, but they didn't say a word about universal translators, transporters, and Spock being the offspring of two totally different alien species. But all these conventions are accepted as SF without a second thought.

This is made even more amusing when you consider that the science in many older SF classics was flat out wrong when the authors originally wrote them. For example, in Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, the book opens with the discovery that Mars is inhabited, and even mentions Martian canals. Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles deals with a similarly occupied Mars. However, when the authors wrote those science fiction classics it was known to science that Mars was a hostile environment which did not contain advanced life. So why were those books accepted as being part of the SF genre?

Likewise, in Gene Wolfe's classic Book of the New Sun series, the science and setting are so far in the future that the science behind everything is more fantasy than real.  Again, the science isn't explained to the Nth degree, but the books are accepted as being science fiction.

What these examples prove is that being part of the science fiction genre is about more than simply writing accurately about science. It is also about exploring ideas and visions and possible futures. So why the different standard when new writers like Yoachim and Foster do that very thing? I have yet to read a convincing explanation for this divide.

I suspect that just as science has expanded into disconcerting places in the last decade, some people are disturbed by where science fiction is going these days. So they simply wave their hand and state that certain stories can't possibly be science fiction.

Which is too bad. Because while our science fiction may not be your father's SF, all these stories belong to the same genre.

Comments

[mmfiore]

Einstein was right about the shortcomings of Quantum Mechanics and so therefore String Theory is also the incorrect approach. As an alternative to Quantum Theory there is a new theory that describes and explains the mysteries of physical reality. While not disrespecting the value of Quantum Mechanics as a tool to explain the role of quanta in our universe. This theory states that there is also a classical explanation for the paradoxes such as EPR and the Wave-Particle Duality. The Theory is called the Theory of Super Relativity. This theory is a philosophical attempt to reconnect the physical universe to realism and deterministic concepts. It explains the mysterious.

[Nick Mamatas]

Seems like a lot to balance on the back of a capsule review from Tangent.

[Jason Sanford]

Perhaps. But I've heard those same comments from other editors and reviewers about both Eugie's story and other SciFi Strange stories I love. So while the Tangent review was merely given as an example, the sentiment expressed there is not uncommon.

[PhilRM]

Roger Zelazny was perfectly well aware that Mars and Venus as depicted in "A Rose for Ecclesiastes" and "The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth" did not exist (in fact, he was in a hurry to write both of those stories before their settings became ludicrously anachronistic); shall we exclude these stories from the canon of science fiction as well?

A while back, Alexander Jablokov mentioned on his blog that he was on a panel somewhere with the title "Is Hard Science Fiction Just a Style?" (or words to that effect). Nearly all of the time, the answer to that question is "yes". It isn't just the standard tropes (like FTL) that you allude to, either: just recently I read a story (it's in Dozois' latest YBSF) where the author's understanding of the physics of interstellar space seems to have been derived from watching the movie "Sunshine". (Newsflash: if ejected into space, you will not instantly freeze solid.) This is scarcely an isolated example. "The Cold Equations" is just wrong, wrong, wrong - but scientific accuracy is scarcely the point of that story. The collapsar jumps across the galaxy in "The Forever War" are so much handwaving - but no one has ever created a better metaphor for the displacement and alienation of combat than Haldeman.

If we were to restrict science fiction to stories in which the science was actually correct (or at least not demonstrably wrong), we would be left with a tiny sliver of the field. When it is done well, such fiction can be remarkable, e.g., Paul McAuley's "The Quiet War" and "Gardens of the Sun", which despite occasional bouts of infodumpiness presents a you-are-there depiction of the actual outer solar system (as best we know it) that is so astonishingly rendered you would think he'd actually visited. But why on Earth (or any other planet) would we want to adopt such an absurdly narrow viewpoint?

[Dylan Fox]

What really irritated me about Star Trek: Reboot was that all the ‘science’ was just thrown in there with us expected to swallow it without question or explanation. Throughout nearly all the other Star Trek iterations, it has a history of explaining things. FTL travel, transporters, universal translators... They all have some in-universe ‘scientific’ explanation to them. It’s one of the things I love about the franchise.

Star Wars, on the other hand... when people start trying to explain light sabers, the Force, hyperspace, I get equally annoyed. Because it’s not what those films are about.

Both franchises are arguably sci-fi. I really don’t think there’s a clear line between sci-fi and fantasy. I mean, what do you do with some Steampunk fiction which bases its science on our understanding of science 100-200 years ago, on a lot of scientific rules that have since been disproven? It’s a sliding scale with someone like Arthur C. Clarke near one end, and Tolkien near the other.

Or maybe it’s more like a circle, with Clarke and Tolkien on opposite sides. I mean, you push sci-fi or fantasy to its extremes and you end up getting the other. Increasingly, I’m thinking we should get rid of the sci-fi/fantasy divide. Why not have mystical angels and personality uploads in the same story? If people stop worrying about being on the right side of the line, they’ll have so much more freedom.

[Ian Sales]

If these stories are all part of the science fiction genre as you say, why do you need your own label, "SciFi Strange", for them?

(Incidentally, I agree they're sf; I disagree that they need some new arbitrary label.)

[Jason Sanford]

SciFi Strange is merely my term for a trend I see in the current SF genre. It's a similar term to cyberpunk or the New Wave Movement--not meant to replace science fiction as a label, but to define a part of the genre.

[Will]

There's a certain irony in that Stonewall Truth appeared in Asimov's. I understand Isaac Asimov had a similar complaint about Ursula LeGuin's novel The Lathe of Heaven. I think we can all agree that science fiction is not limited to the old school of explaining how everything works. But since there is still a difference between SF & fantasy, I would like to see a follow up post that describes how JS would distinguish between the 2.

[Bob Blough]

I couldn't agree with you more. I find it interesting that as the Book of the New Sun was being published each book was argued about individually - was it SF? Was it Fantasy? It won the Locus Award for fantasy three years running (two of the books were published in the same year - the other one came in 2nd that year). So, it's not a new battle. I love things that are not wholly explained in my SF. There is still mystery today in how things work or even exist so why should the future be any different?

[Bryan]

Great post. I always defined scifi vs fantasy as simply lasers vs swords (futuristic va ancient if you prefer) where, as with Star Wars, a combination is classified scifi. I'm a scientist. I lean toward fantasy, with a prefernce toward worlds without unexplainable magic systems. I've never heard of the level of scientific explanation as the deciding factor between scifi and fantasy. Leaving some things unexplained is good writing, not a category.

[Jason Sanford]

Bob, Bryan, and others: I totally agree that the best fiction always retains a sense of mystery about life. That's why I love science fiction where everything isn't diced and flayed and cut until everything is explained.

Will: Interesting idea. I'll see if I can't pull together my thoughts for a post on the differences between SF and fantasy.