Can litfic ever measure up to fantasy or sf?

Fantasy and science fiction writer and fan Jo Walton had an interesting post up today about whether mainstream, literary fiction can ever be as good as the best science fiction and fantasy novels:

In one section, she states that some well-regarded people think Middlemarch the best novel in the world, ever. I stopped and looked suspiciously at this, turned the idea around a few times, and cautiously considered that in fact perhaps Middlemarch did deserve to be considered in the same company as Lord of the Rings, Cyteen, A Fire Upon the Deep, The Disposessed and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. (That grinding sound you hear? F.R. Leavis turning in his grave?) But you know, not really. Because it’s just an awful lot easier if you get the world ready made for you. That’s my main objection to people who say mainstream and fanfic can be as good as original SF. People can juggle two balls awfully well, and Middlemarch and Dark Reflections both do that, in their different ways, about as well as it can be done. But that still can’t really compare to people who are juggling four.

Please do not think this is the usual reverse snobbery of a certain kind of science fiction fan denying that traditional literary values are worthless; what Jo is saying is much more interesting than that. She argues that all other things being equal, writing a good literay novel is easier than writing a sf/fantasy novel, because in the second case the writer has not just to invent the plot and characters and such, but the entire world in which their story takes place and make this world accesible to their readers. Mainstream authors on the other hand do not need to do so, as they can confidently assume their readers has a certain familiarity with the world in which their novels take place.

It’s an interesting, almost seductive theory, but I don’t think it’s right. For I start I think that Jo both underestimates the work mainstream authors have to do to make their settings convincing and overestimates how much science fiction writers need to do. Just like a mainstream author does not need to explain what a car or horse is, neither does a sf writer need to explain how a hyperdrive works or what a positronic brain is. We know already, because we’ve seen these concepts in movies and television series, in cartoons even, not to mention some eighty odd years of science fiction stories. Meanwhile any mainstream author who doesn’t set their story in a setting that is right here and right now will have readers to whom this setting is new, who may not stumble over things like horses and cars, but who will stumble over say the position of women in society.

Take Jane Austen for example, writing in a society in which women almost literally had no rights at all, where women had to marry or face starvation. This is a setting that is almost unimaginable to a modern audience, yet the genius of Austen lies in making clear this essential horror even to us, without writing for us. That is a feat few science fiction authors can emulate.

Mainstream writers also have another set of balls to juggle that sf/fantasy authors need not bother with: making sure that the settings they create “feel real” to their readers. Asimov could imagine Trantor anyway he wanted it to look, because Trantor is not real. But Ian Rankin needs to make sure the Edinburgh of his novels is simular enough to the real one to convince those readers who know it….

So no, I don’t think sf writers juggle more balls than mainstream writers. Just different balls, at times.

Scratch another dearly loved sf myth

New research seems to show mordern human evolution is supercharged:

In a study published in the Dec. 10 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a team led by University of Wisconsin-Madison anthropologist John Hawks estimates that positive selection just in the past 5,000 years alone — around the period of the Stone Age — has occurred at a rate roughly 100 times higher than any other period of human evolution. Many of the new genetic adjustments are occurring around changes in the human diet brought on by the advent of agriculture, and resistance to epidemic diseases that became major killers after the growth of human civilizations.

“In evolutionary terms, cultures that grow slowly are at a disadvantage, but the massive growth of human populations has led to far more genetic mutations,” says Hawks. “And every mutation that is advantageous to people has a chance of being selected and driven toward fixation. What we are catching is an exceptional time.”

The findings may lead to a very broad rethinking of human evolution, Hawks says, especially in the view that modern culture has essentially relaxed the need for physical genetic changes in humans to improve survival. Adds Hawks: “We are more different genetically from people living 5,000 years ago than they were different from Neanderthals.”

Science fiction’s dirty little secret is that it tends to believe in pseudoscience more often than it does in real science; even supposedly “hard” science fiction is littered with impossible or just wrong science. The idea that evolution has “stopped” is one of them, usually used in a setting which contrasts the brave manly colonists of Proycon B with the teeming soulles dependent masses ruled by an incompetent, corrupt bureaucracy of Earth. So much for that idea.

Cory Doctorow

I’m not sure I actually like Cory Doctorow, either as a blogger or an esseff writer. Boing Boing used to be on my blogroll until it got too up itself for me, and I’ve tried his fiction but haven’t managed to finish any of it. Part of what annoys me about him is his relentless self promotion, part his equally relentless, somewhat naive techno exuberance. The combination just sets my teeth on edge.

A good example was linked to by Making Light the other day, a short called “Other People’s Money“, which was written for Forbes. The excerpt below showcases what I dislike about Doctorow’s writing:

“You’d have thought I’d learned my lesson by then, but no, sir. I am the original glutton for punishment. After Bubble 2.0, I took my best coders, our CFO, and a dozen of our users and did a little health-care startup, brokering carbon-neutral medical travel plans to Fortune 500s. Today that sounds like old hat, but back then, it was sexy. No one seriously believed that we could get out from under the HMOs, but between Virgin’s cheap bulk-ticket sales and the stellar medical deals in Venezuela, Argentina and Cuba, it was the only cost-effective way. And once the IWWWW signed up 80 percent of the U.S. workforce through World of Starcraft guilds, no employer could afford to skimp on health insurance.
The word would go out during that night’s raids and by the morning, you’d have picket lines in front of every branch office.

The whole story is like that, one long infodump laced with buzzwords and jargon to show what Doctorow thinks could be our future. It’s near future and of a type that I should like, like much of Doctorow’s work, as it’s simular to what people like Neal Stephenson and Bruce Sterling have also written. There’s one great difference though, in that their stories were grounded in a political and sociological awareness that I find lacking with Doctorow.

Brasyl – Ian McDonald

Cover of Brasyl


Brasyl
Ian McDonald
404 pages
published in 2007

Call Ian McDonald the anti-Niven. Whereas Larry Niven has often been accused of writing all his characters as if they belong at an early sixties Californian cocktail party, McDonald’s characters always come across as belonging to the particular ethnic and cultural background they’re said to belong to. This is because McDonald, like the best science fiction writers is genuinely interested in culture as well as science, and genuinely interested in cultures other than his own. He has a knack for painting a picture of a given culture, whether real or invented, through the judicious use of background detail and character interests. So far I’ve not yet read a McDonald novel in which the world he created didn’t convince me. His latest novel, Brasyl, continues that trend. It’s set, of course, in that perpetual country of the future: Brazil.

Comparisons with McDonald’s 2004 novel River of Gods are therefore quickly made, though unjustified. Apart from that both novels take place in countries that are not often used as a setting in science fiction and apart from these settings being an essential part of them, not just an exotic background for some displaced westerners adventure to take place against, the two novels have nothing much in common. Which is just as well.

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Happy birthday Sputnik

Sputnik 1

fifty years ago today the first manmade object reached orbit. Science fiction fans everywhere thought it would be the start of mankind’s thriumphant conquest of space, even if it was the Russkies who did it, but it didn’t quite work out that way. While we’re using satellites for all kinds of important stuff, that whole idea that humanity had to leave its cradle behind seemed a lot less attractive in reality than science fiction had made it seem — quite a lot harder as well. We’re struggling to get a space station capable of keeping half a dozen astronauts living there for a month or two up and running, let alone that we can get the million inhabitants L5 colonies O’Neill dreams up going. For now, the future seems to be Earth orbit satellites and unmanned probes to the rest of the Solar System, plus the occasional hype of a new Moon or Mars programme

Should we be disappointed with this? That we have no giant space colonies, no Moonbase, no exploration of Mars, no interstellar expeditions? Or should we be happy instead with the things we do have: a Solar System far more interesting and odd than anybody had ever imagined, Earthbound telescopes powerful enough to detect planets around other stars, extrasolar planets where nobody would’ve believed planets could exist, an universe fastly more wonderful than any science fiction writer ever imagined?

Me, I’d rather go for wonder than for disappointment; I just wish much of science fiction would do the same and embrace the universe we live in rather than the universe we wished we lived in. Too much modern science fiction wallows in nostalgia or tries to refit the real universe into the old cliches.