Sean Michael, one of the few men on the Internet who uses his real name, writes this comment:
My view is the reason why so many SF fans don’t seem to consider CS Lewis’ “Space Trilogy” to be SF is because Lewis was a convinced and devout Christian. IOW, some fans fell for the false line that Christianity is opposed to science.
“Fell for it” is putting it mildly. Anyone who falls for the line of argument that science fiction can only be written by secularists, or by or about secular topics, displays an alarming gullibility, not to mention an ignorance of the origins of the genre.
Jules Verne, the founder of the genre, was a Roman Catholic; HG Wells was a committed atheist and socialist, and delighted in penning desolate visions of a godless world drifting as a speck through an indifferent universe; but on the other hand Olaf Stapledon (the forgotten third of the trio of SF founders) put a monotheistic Creator-god of the Gnostic sort on stage as a character in STARMAKER, and made spiritual development one of the central themes of man’s future evolution (along with, risibly enough, communism) in his majestic LAST AND FIRST MEN.
If “science fiction” is defined as that which must take place in a philosophically naturalist type universe, then, by that definition, the book version of WAR OF THE WORLDS is science fiction, but the movie version is not, for the microbes which destroy the Martian invaders in the movie version are explicitly credited to the benevolent providence of God.
If “science fiction” is defined as that which must take place in a philosophically naturalist type universe, then, by that definition, any book which has supernatural powers, psychics, psionics, witches, or ghosts is not real science fiction. This eliminates Arthur C Clarke’s CHILDHOOD’S END, Isaac Asimov’s FOUNDATION, and Robert Heinlein’s STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND as well as his STARSHIP TROOPERS.
I submit that any definition of Science Fiction that eliminates the most famous works of most famous writers in SF is a very bad definition indeed.
Time does not permit more now. I will return to this discussion when my schedule relents.
Well, it may be open to debate as to whether or not he was a “proper” SF author (seeing as the majority of his fiction writing was either Fantasy or SF, I really don’t see the problem here) but he was as much a fanboy (or fangirl) as any of us.
See this interview done, before his death in 1963, with Kingsley Amis and Brian Aldiss and printed in the 1965 British SF anthology “Spectrum IV” edited by Robert Conquest and Kingsley Amis. Now, the quibblers may like to quibble about Lewis’s right to be called a SF author but by Klono’s gadolinium guts, I’d like to see anyone throw cold water on Brian Aldiss’s claim to the title!
Basically, if Aldiss was happy to discuss SF with Lewis as a fellow-author, that should be good enough for anyone – unless they think that skiffy only counts if it’s one of those “dreary sociological dramas”, as Aldiss refers to them.
If writing fantasy excludes you from the genre, then Bob Heinlein (author of MAGIC INCORPORATED and GLORY ROAD) and Jack Vance (author of THE DYING EARTH) and HG Wells (author of ‘The Man Who Could Work Miracles’) and Ursula K LeGuin (authoress of the Earthsea novels) all get excluded.
No, I think if you author three science fiction shorts or one science fiction novel, you count as a proper SF writer, if someone pays you for them. I will include screenplays and comic books in that definition.
Writing fantasy also would exclude Isaac Asimov (for the Azazel stories), Poul Anderson, Sprague de Camp, Harlan Ellison, Philip Jose Farmer, Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, Andre Norton, Robert Silverberg, and Jack Vance — and that’s just going through the list of SFWA Grand Masters, and listing obvious cases only.
Not to forget that most hard-core of hard SF writers, Larry Niven, who wrote “The Magic Goes Away” set in Atlantis.
SF fans often debate why the SF and the Fantasy are shelved together, since one is make-believe leavened with faux Shakespearean archaisms, forsooth, and the other is make-believe leavened with parsecs of technobabble. The answer is that the same group of guys write both and read both.
Hi, “deiseach”:
I am flattered some comments of mine about CS Lewis inspired Mr. Wright to start a separate “blog” using them. And I read the link you gave to Lewis’ discussion of SF with interest.
Mention of Lewis should remind us as well of his friend JRR Tolkien. The latter is usually considered a fantasy writer, but Tolkien was an SF reader as well. I’ll quote a bit from his letter to Charlotte and Denis Plimmer (of 8 Feb. 1967): “I read quite a lot–or more truly, try to read many books (notably–so called Science Fiction and Fantasy).” And this is part of a note Tolkien added to this passage: “I have read all that E.R. Eddison wrote, in spite of his peculiarly bad nomenclature and personal philosophy. I was greatly taken by the book that was (I believe) the runner up when THE L.R. was given the Fantasy Award: DEATH OF GRASS. I enjoy the S.F. of Isaac Asimov.” I took both these quotes from page 377 of THE LETTERS OF JRR TOLKIEN.
Considering how DIFFERENT Tolkien and Asimov were, I’m fascinated to know he liked at least the early to middle SF of Asimov. And considering what a fan geek of Poul Anderson I am, I would be very interested to know what Tolkien thought of Anderson’s works (assuming he had read any of them).
Sincerely, Sean M. Brooks
Not to mention that that definition counts out Star Wars…
Oh… Wait. No it doesn’t.
Nevermind.
STAR WARS is as much science fiction as LONE RANGER is a Western, or better yet, WILD WILD WEST: it is a popular member of the genre who pays not to much attention to accuracy.
What is ironic is that among my Grandpa’s generation, science fiction meant “Stuff like what HG Wells and Jules Verne wrote” and among my Dad’s generation “Stuff like what Asimov, Clark, and Heinlein wrote” but among my children’s generation, science fiction means, “Stuff like STAR TREK and STAR WARS.”
The definition of a genre cannot exclude the exemplary defining work of the genre for its generation. If our definition of “Vampire stories” excludes COUNT DRACULA, we need a new definition.
That won’t stop the usual suspects, though. There are critics out there who claim that The Lord of the Rings is not fantasy. If you dropped an anvil on their heads, they’d probably say it was not an anvil, but a mere Norwegian Anvil Substitute.
Drop another one.
What do they say LoTR is?
‘Generic fantasy’. Since it is not subversive literature, it is not real fantasy, but a cheap nasty knockoff. (All commercial things, in this view, are cheap nasty knockoffs.)
I have addressed these critics in my essay ‘Superversive’, which indeed is where I originally got my nom de blog. If you want to know a bit more about what these critics say and how they justify it, you can find it there.
If, by “generic” they mean “defined the genre in a fashion such that all subsequent writers in the field are compared to this work, either as following in the same style or deliberately contrasting with it”, then I agree, it is generic.
If they mean “Pfft! Everyone was writing about elves and dwarves and fairies and unicorns and dragons, what’s so special here?” then O Aulë Mahal, it is time to re-forge Angainor for the binding of more fools.
There was a debate on Twitter recently where the SFnal nature of Lewis was debated…he had, as you might expect, defenders and detractors.
There could not possibly have been a debate. Tweets are limited to 140 characters. No real debate can take place in that context.
Signed
Ye Olde Curmudgeon
Amazingly, you managed to fit that into 140 characters. I salute you, Sir.
I would say that the Space Trilogy is about as much Science Fiction as Star Wars. That is, much fiction, little science. Neither spend all too much time discussing the physical properties that drive their stories, and instead spend time building stories in the universes that assume these fantastical devices.
(This is not to argue that they are or are not Science Fiction; merely that they occupy the same realm in relationship to the continuum of types of Science Fiction, which run the gamut from “hard” sci-fi like 2001 to “historical” sci-fi like Singing In The Rain to “soft” sci-fi like Star Trek to “fantasy-like” sci-fi like James Cameron’s Avatar. Fans will debate my categories to be sure)
“Out of the Silent Planet” is the most SF-nal of the trilogy, as he decided to have his hero arrive there via rocket-ship powered by technobabble, and there are three species of alien living there, and we get a small amount of “the reason Martian vegetation is like this is because…” type exposition.
But his Perelandra is as (un)realistic as Ray Bradbury’s Mars, and if anyone denies that Ray was a writer of SF, on this International Talk Like A Pirate Day I will hoist the Jolly Roger and let my cutlass settle matters between us, matey!
If we’re going to confine SF to mean “hard SF with no hand-waving about FTL or aliens and lots of maths and engineering”, then that’s a good half of the genre as traditionally defined that has to be dumped. It’s even worse if it means “hard SF with no hand-waving about FTL or aliens but with huge info-dumps of maths and engineering and not a very lively prose style”. Verne may have been interested in writing as ” hard SF” as he could, given 19th century science, but at least he could write interesting characters and intriguing plots, which is why I’ll happily re-read “Journey to the Centre of the Earth” or “From the Earth to the Moon” but will not, not any longer, slog my way through doorstoppers by modern authors.
It’s even worse if it means “hard SF with no hand-waving about FTL or aliens but with huge info-dumps of maths and engineering and not a very lively prose style”.
Reminds me of a fellow I once knew who defined fantasy as ‘any work of fiction without diagrams’.
Betcha I could write a fantasy story — with dragons and everything — with diagrams.
If they aren’t schematics of gosh-wow electronic devices, they aren’t proper diagrams. No True Scotsman and all that, you know.
All I have to do is power them with electric elementals.
And slide-rules! You have to have slide-rules!
Naomi Novik got there first.
I don’t think it’s sensible to confine SF to “hard” SF, for the reasons you just mentioned, and a dozen more that spring to mind.
But I do think there is some difference between “hard” SF and “soft” SF, and that it’s okay to acknowledge that. Our world of talking dolphins, warp drives, and sentient computers has a very big tent
I entirely agree there is a difference between hard and soft SF. In Hard SF the technobabble is based on real or realistic sounding science. Some Hard SF actually mentions real science from time to time, and this is a feature, not a bug. I still recall with joy the description of how a spacesuit works in Heinlein’s HAVE SPACE SUIT WILL TRAVEL — it is one of the high points of that enjoyable juvenile. But a lecture on how the ansible of Glenly Ai worked in LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS would have spoilt the mood, and LeGuin wisely attempted no such thing.
As much as I approve of Ray Bradbury, I believe he was was making a joke by calling SINGING IN THE RAIN an SF story. He used the definition that John W Campbell Junior liked to use, and Campbell was the quintessential “Hard” SF guru and trainblazer, and must be given lion’s share of the credit for having invented the genre: the impact of new technology on people’s lives. Well, that definition leaves out the sense of wonder at marvels, technical and otherwise, which forms the backbone of Ray Bradbury’s life’s work — it almost like a definition meant to exclude him, to exclude Harlan Ellison and Jack Vance and Ursula K LeGuin and Michael Moorcock and the luminaries of “soft” SF, which emphasizes the human element and literary qualities (sometimes to their detriment, when they go overboard, in my opinion).
So, no. There is not a single fanboy, not one, who would walk into a bookstore with FOUNDATION by Asimov under one arm, and STARSHIP TROOPERS by RAH under another, and GALACTIC PATROL by EE “Doc” Smith in his left back pocket and A PRINCESS OF MARS by ERB in his right, and, upon asking a well informed clerk where to get a book just like these, in the same mood and flavor and genre, would be directed to pick up a copy of SINGING IN THE RAIN, and who would not feel cheated by that clerk.
That is the rule of thumb for how to tell what is and is not in the same genre: if it is what you want to read when you have finished a book in the genre, and you hanker for something just like it.
The thing is, when I then consider books like Rainbows End, Neuromancer, or Snow Crash, I wouldn’t consider them to be anything like the books you just mentioned. Yet I have a very hard time not calling them Science Fiction.
I kind of think that Science Fiction is a pretty big umbrella, like I said, that has a large continuum under it, and quite a few things that seem to be on the borderline (The Gate to Women’s Country springs to mind).
And I don’t entirely know what to make of shows like CSI, where they regularly perform technological miracles that rival reversing the quantum polarity of the warp core.
(I will, however, grant that lumping Singing in the Rain as Science Fiction is tenuous at best; though I wonder, in a world sans talking pictures, would we still think the same?)
I don’t mean to sound sarcastic, but do you think NEUROMANCER would sell more copies if it was shelved with the Westerns or the Whodunnits? Pirate stories? Romances?
No, I humbly suggest you adopt my definition of science fiction, which is, science fiction is what science fiction readers look for when they are looking for a book like the last one they read by HG Wells, Jules Verne, Olaf Stabledon, Jack Williamson, Edgar Rice Burroughs, EE “Doc Smith, Edmund “World-wrecker” Hamilton, Andre Norton, AE van Vogt, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, GIbson, Stevenson, LeGuin, Niven, Zelazny … you get my drift. If you categorize “science fiction” to mean something that excludes award winning and universally acknowledged master of the genre, your category is too narrow.
CSI is not science fiction in any way, shape or form, any more the James Bond is science fiction. The presence or absence of gadgets that do not exist in reality is not part of the definition of science fiction. Science fiction is that branch of wonder-tales, romance, and cautionary tale which relies on the verisimilitude of science, or some aspect of the scientific world view (which is why Psionics is science fiction whereas ghost stories are fantasy) to help the suspension of disbelief when describing an unreal world that is meant to be unreal, that relies on that unreality for its appeal, either a future world or a version of the present or past with some clearly nonreal, but allegedly scientifically explainable, element: prop, scene, character, or trope.
It is not the unreality of James Bond’s unreal car that makes the movie appeal to the audience. No one would walk out of STAR WARS, and hankering for the same kind of film with the same kind of appeal, would walk into GOLDFINGER.
And, yes, SINGING IN THE RAIN is about as much “science fiction” as is GONE WITH THE WIND. After all, the technology of the repeating rifle altered the nature of war during the Civil War and made it much more violent, and the use of the steam engine trains did also, and the ramifications of this, the first technological and scientific war in history, had a deep affect on the lives of the heroine. Ray Bradbury (I hope) was poking fun at people who take definitions too literally.
Ray Bradbury (I hope) was poking fun at people who take definitions too literally.
Yes; but he was also pointing out how definitions don’t actually define, and some of the qualities that are supposed to be sure-fire identifiers of SF are actually fairly easy to find outside it.
We don’t get the gee-whiz SensaWunda™ from talking pictures, because the novelty wore off by about 1931. We do still get SensaWunda from zap guns and FTL ships, because we haven’t got those things even yet and the novelty has never had a chance to wear off. But the ponderous folk who try to define what is SF and what isn’t never want to bring in a term like SensaWunda to do it. That might crack their stone faces, or something.
Given that we’ve had submarines for decades now, do we still get the SensaWunda from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea? Or are we only really counting things in the context they were first published?
Since most of us have never been on a submarine, and none of us have ever been on one as palatial as Verne’s Nautilus, — and furthermore, since we have never seen the things beneath the sea that Verne made up for Captain Nemo to see, — yes, I would say the SensaWunda is still to be found there.
I would also suggest just rereading the thing so see if the wonder is present. It was for me when I read it.
My rereading Verne made me want to get a GOOD translation of his work. Those available in the public domain leave out some good stuff, or so I’ve heard. Can anyone recommend a good translation?
When I read it, I garnered none of those things. I found Verne’s endless desire to explain his science to be dull.
In general, very, very little Science Fiction has inspired any real sense of wonder or awe in me. The main exception I can think of is A Fire Upon the Deep, where some of the ideas have stayed with me long after reading it.
Well, based on the conversation, it just sounds like you are not that interested in science fiction per se, but just where it overlaps with other types of adventure fiction or whatnot that interests you.
Myself, I read almost nothing but SF in my youth, and it formed the skeleton of my imagination. There is no idea I can bring to mind at the moment which I did not first encounter, usually in a simplified or satirical form, somewhere in SFF before I read a mainstream account of it. My interest in lifelong philosophy, for example, sprang from my reading WORLD OF NULL A by AE van Vogt at a young age. Likewise for my interest in astronomy and physics.
I’d say that’s fairly accurate. I was always confused at the people, growing up, who avoided science fiction because it was “science fiction”. The division being that fierce seems, to me, to be kind of silly.
I do not think it is silly. Science fiction requires a leap of imagination which many people cannot make without losing their footing and losing their suspension of disbelief. Such tales simply seem too unreal to them to be convincing.
Likewise, many readers cannot make the imaginative leap of sympathizing with someone unlike their modern American selves, which is why we have the odd spectacle of historical romances, or, worse, lightweight sword & sorcery books set in a faux Middle Ages (which I call “Elk Operas”) where all the characters of all races and ranks and of both sexes act and think and talk exactly like postchristian multiculti egalitarian leftwingers from Fresno, California.
There is a revulsion toward science fiction which, at least in the old days, before STAR WARS made SFF mainstream, came from the Establishment literati, which (to my amusement) always seemed to puzzle and wound the SF guys. Authors like Kurt Vonnegut and Margaret Atwood would write sciffy and stoutly maintain that what they wrote was not SF.
What the wounded SFians did not recognized was what the mainstream recognized very well: the world view and the partisan philosophy dominant in the establishment literary field was antithetical to the heroism, the optimism, the Cambellian promise and can-do attitude of Golden Age SF. The only books that won praise and acknowledgement from the literati were dystopias: NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR, BRAVE NEW WORLD, and FAHRENHEIT 451.
The rejection by the muggles was deliberate, and the control of the imagination of the whole populous was at stake. The literati, in love with dismal rubbish like ULYSSES by James Joyce, reacted like vampires to a cross to any literature which spoke to the common man’s love of adventure and wonder.
Hm, what is the etymology of “Elk Opera”? I get that it’s probably parallel to “Space Opera”, but I’m not sure where the “Elk” comes in.
Your point is taken. I often forget that I am more willing than many people to accept imagination, and “unrealistic” rules. Though, such doesn’t seemed to have hurt the “summer blockbuster” film, which these days more often than not has sci-fi elements, if not full-on sci-fi.
I have a general disdain for the Literary Establishment. Their divisions are silly and arbitrary, and they seem to care more about being armchair sociologists (who don’t have to actually attempt to gather real data like sociologists theoretically do) than they do actually exploring the human condition. There are an awful lot of them that can provide any of a dozen critiques (“feminist”, “Marxist”, and other drollery), but are incapable of writing an interesting story.
Oops. I meant “Elf Opera.”
Elf Opera makes a lot more sense. I like that term; I might end up using it elsewhere, if you don’t mind.
Definitely. Verne being a good writer, he can convincingly write characters who are astounded and excited by the situation they find themselves in, and you the reader are convinced by their excitement and astonishment.
The bad modern writers may have a revolutionary new technology powering the first spaceship on a mission to colonise a moon of Jupiter, but by crikey, they insist on telling you that this will take five (or ten or even fifteen) years to get there, and they make you feel every minute of the journey by having their cardboard characters stand around debating politics or economics or what have you for the duration (often times giving religion and/or conservative social attitudes a gratuitious kick in the teeth for good measure, which doesn’t endear them to an Ultramontanist semi-Jansenist Irish Catholic such as myself).
You could, as a joke about the “hard” or “mundane” SF proponents, classify “Singing in the Rain” as a sample of that school: take the realistic limits of the physical world, operating under the constraints of the laws of science as we understand them, and extrapolating from them in a strictly-defined fashion so as to exclude impossibilities like FTL or the likes, invent a new technology and describe its effects upon the citizens of that world.
Though it’s more likely that Ray, God bless the man, was describing the way that it did seem like gosh-wow living-in-the-future what will they think of next scientific marvels when movies suddenly had speech! by real people! talking at the time!
It’s the way those of us old enough to remember vinyl records, or manual typewriters, or (God save the mark) log tables and slide rules remember the thrill of ‘the future is now!’ when things like electronic calculators and mobile phones and personal computers first came on the scene, in a way that the children of today who have never known a world without the magic electronic box can not appreciate.
I think you misunderstand me. I am saying that Neuromancer is Science Fiction, but is not “just like” A Princess of Mars. They have different settings, themes, character archetypes, and so on. They are both fundamentally not like Starship Troopers. Again, radically different settings and themes. After reading one, you do not seek out one of the other two to scratch the same itch.
What ties them together is that they all in some degree posit science as a means to accomplish plot goals.
Your definition here:
Seems much more reasonable.
Though, I’m trying to remember if the original Star Wars makes any such appeal to science beyond the existence of things in space. I don’t think it did.
Neither would they walk into Robocop. It has a different appeal than both of those.
No, here you and I must disagree at a fundamental level. The only reason I read NEUROMANCER, and what I enjoyed about it was that it was just like A PRINCESS OF MARS and STARSHIP TROOPERS. The differences in plot, setting, and theme are trivial.
Science fiction is not a genre like ‘tragedy’ which requires the same theme the downfall of flawed greatness, nor a genre like ‘Western’ which requires a western setting, nor a genre like “Count Dracula Stories” which requires a character like Count Dracula.
When you say there is no resemblance between ROBOCOP and STAR WARS, I can only assume you are being intentionally obtuse. Do you think one of them a romantic comedy and the other is a pirate sea-story? Perhaps you will next tell me that HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES in not in the game genre as THE MALTESE FALCON, because the appeal of Sherlock Holmes is not the same as the appeal of Sam Spade.
The appeal is exactly the same. Both are wonder tales which take their verisimilitude from the tropes of science (or, in the case of STAR WARS, from the tropes of science fiction serial chapterplays like Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon, an homage to the genre rather than within the genre itself, which is why the film also appealed to muggles.)
I also cannot fathom how you can quote my definition with approval, but not the rule of thumb used to deduce the definition.
What I am suggesting is that you think like Linnaeus rather than like Euclid. Euclid defines a triangle by proscription: any plane figure not matching the definition is by definition not a triangle. Linnaeus defined the species and variety of an animal by looking at the animal first, and then seeing what they all have in common.
Our data, the irreducible ground from which we must begin, is the agreement that science fiction exists as a genre and some stories are clearly and unambiguously part of it. They are part of it because fans and readers and writers and editors and bookstore owners SEEK EACH OTHER OUT and look for “something” some magical quality, that is the same between all of them.
The task is to identify that magical quality.
The genus and species exists. Our task is to sift through the data to see what they all have in common, to see what makes them common. What is the thing the science fiction readers seek? Merely denying that the effect happens, merely denying that ROBOCOP and STAR WARS are like each other, is tantamount to refusing to admit that the genus and species exists. But to deny the phenomenon — to say that ROBOCOP and STAR WARS, because of trivial differences of surface features, are therefore not in the same genus and species — that is pure humbug.
*I* went to see ROBOCOP because it was in the same genre as STAR WARS. It was the science fiction elements of that movie *and nothing else* which made it appeal to me. If the robot was removed from ROBOCOP, and the film had been merely about corporate intrigue, I would have been disgusted. Likewise, if STAR WARS had been filmed without any science fiction tropes, say, as a Western or a Chop-socky action film, nothing would have made me see it.
We obviously disagree on a fundamental observation. You claim that Neuromancer, A Princess of Mars, and Starship Troopers are just like each other. I claim they are not.
When I think of how stories are similar, I think of the similarities between their themes, their plots, their characters, the tropes they happen to trigger–the things that make a story a story. Not the trivial things such as whether they use science or not-science to explain their premises.
I read Neuromancer because I was interested at that time in reading a gritty book positing a five-minutes-from-now future. I read A Princess of Mars because I was interested in a quick romp through killing grunts and saving princesses. I saw Robocop because I was interested in a story where a cop killed by corruption gets resurrected and destroys that corruption.
The appeal to me about those three things was radically different.
Some of this, I suspect, must be generational. Such a great volume of media I have been exposed to is Science Fiction or Fantasy, because it’s everywhere. Identifying it as a different genre as a method of categorization to determine appeal makes no sense.
Or rather, it makes about as much sense as specifying “anime” as a genre.
Science Fiction is more like a modifier to me, rather than a staid genre. In the tent of Science Fiction, you can have detective stories, romance stories, good-vs-evil stories, military stories, and so on. I consume these media because I like the stories and the characters. Not because it happens to have SCIENCE!
If Robocop had been about a person being resurrected by hand-waved magic instead of hand-waved science, I would likely have found it just as interesting. If Star Wars had been about wizards running around with swords, I would likely have found it just as interesting.
And the observation I make about fans/readers/writers/editors is that they clump under the banner of Science Fiction/Fantasy because it’s convenient, but when it comes down to it, they’re interested in stories. I don’t often see the same people who read Conan the Barbarian also reading Mercedes Lackey’s romances. To group them together simply because both are about magical lands seems absurd.
“You claim that Neuromancer, A Princess of Mars, and Starship Troopers are just like each other. I claim they are not.”
There is no room for discussion here, I am afraid. If you honestly think that these three books should not be placed on the same shelf in the bookstore, and that I and other readers of the genre do not seek after other books in our genre when we are hankering for more of the same, the misunderstanding between is is too fundamental for discussion. I cannot take seriously someone who claims these are not science fiction, or that since all are stories, therefore the genre does not exist.
I am a science fiction writer, my dear sir. My field exists. It is sharply distinct from mainstream genres, Westerns, detective stories, spy thrillers, love stories and so on, and is vaguely distinct from fantasy, though obviously less so. The distaste of the muggles for all things sciencefictional should be a clue.
Whatever it is that makes a fan of detective fiction (one who has no taste for SF) not a fan of tales by Larry Niven and Isaac Asimov and Randall Garret, that extra act of imagination needed to set a detective story in magical Europe or a world with positronic robots, that is the defining essential of the genre. SF is defined by setting, props, and tropes: the expectations of the world in an SF story are not the real world of here-and-now.
If to you, the science fictional elements in the story add nothing to your enjoyment, I suggest you stop reading in the genre immediately. If you read A PRINCESS OF MARS and did not enjoy, nay, did not even notice the clever speculation Edgar Rice Burroughs brought to bear on the question of life on a dying world, and to you the two hurling moons or the many legged beasties added no zest of romance, then the book was wasted on you. If you don’t like and don’t notice the speculation, why read speculative fiction? You can get just as much action as from a Western or a Pirate story, or more so.
I suggest you take your claim that the field does not exist to the editor of a science fiction magazine, and tell him that he should buy stories about Blackbeard or the Three Musketeers or Paul Bunyan or Saint Joan of Arc without bothering about things like mindreaders and time travelers and space aliens and future stuff. Tell him his genre does not exist. Explain to him that his method of selecting which stories to buy and which not to buy has no basis in fact; and explain to the science fiction readership that they likewise do not have the taste (or lack thereof) needed to discover that there is nothing about these stories which make them different from any others.
Then come back and tell me what he says. I will be in the anime section of the movie store at my local mall.
It would then seem I cannot take seriously someone who claims that when I say “these are science fiction” that I am saying they are not science fiction. Or an author who considers things such as plot, mood, flavor, themes, and character archetypes as trivial parts of a story compared to whether its hand-waving includes science or not.
Is a story which does not take place in the Old West, or have any characters from the Old West, properly called a Western? Is a story which has no love nor romance in it, or have any characters who fall in love or fall out of love, properly called a Romance? Or a story with a happy ending and no tragic characters, properly called a Tragedy? A story with no comedy, is it properly called a Comedy? A stories with no spies a spy story?
Some genres are defined by mood. All tragedies must be tragic. Some genres are defined by plot. All detective stories must have a crime and a detective. Some genres are defined by flavor. All fantasy stories must taste of the fantastic.
I would say a Western could have a happy ending or a tragic. Hence the tragic mood is not necessary to the definition of a Western. I would say a Western could have a detective story plot, or a romance angle. Hence the detective plot and the romance angle are not necessary to the definition of a Western. I would also say a romance could be set in the Old West as easily as GONE WITH THE WIND was set in the Old South. Location is not part of the definition of a Love Story. But location is part of the definition of a Western.
The Horror genre is even more expansive. They can be set in future or past in any country with any combination of characters and situation, provided only that the effect of fear and eerie terror is produced. A horror story can be set in the old West as easily as in Providence or Pluto. Ironically, a horror can even be a comedy — I am thinking of some of Joss Whedan’s work.
Again, a detective story must have a detective. One or more character must be trying to solve the mystery in order for it to be a detective story. A superhero story must have a superhero in it. These stories are defined by the character.
So what defines the science fiction genre?
If your answer is that nothing does, you are thinking in an imprecise fashion. You fail to distinguish a constant from a variable. You said that if three science fiction stories have different settings, moods, and themes, that there is nothing they have in common which makes them science fiction stories.
If you see no connection nor correlation between ROBOCOP, NEUROMANCER and A PRINCESS OF MARS, let me ask you this: could any of those tales have been told without the counterfactual scientific assumptions in their premises? Could A PRINCESS OF MARS have been set on earth with no loss to the appeal of the story?
Could ROBOCOP have been a story a cop with no robotics in it, without losing the theme of the dehumanization of a good man? Could NEUROMANCER have been written set in Jerusalem of the Eleventh Century, with no Japanese megacorps and no neural interfaces, without losing the mood and point of the story?
Does that mean that the science fictional elements, life on other planets, robots, neural interfaces and so on, are necessary to make these stories be what they are, or does that mean the science fiction elements are, as you so oddly put it, merely hand-waving? Is it a constant or a variable?
Your answer seems to be that A PRINCESS OF MARS was just a swashbuckler, not a space-swashbuckler; that ROBOCOP was just a corporate corruption story not a robot corporate corruption story where a man retains his humanity after it is cyborgized out of him; that NEUROMANCER was just a thriller, not a dystopian near-futuristic thriller.
Myself, I cannot even imagine these stories without their science fictional premises. There is no story in ROBOCOP is the cop is not turned into a robot. It is not a story about a cop being bribed by a heartless corporation: it is a story about a man whose humanity is surgically removed when he is made into a machine, and his soul finds it again. You cannot do that story without a counterfactual premise. There is no story in HAVE SPACE SUIT, WILL TRAVEL if there is no space suit; there is no story in FRANKENSTEIN if Doctor Frankenstein does not bring his monster to life.
Let me ask you a more personal question, if I may do so without giving offense: Why do you read science fiction at all, if you don’t care whether the science fictional bits are present or not?
I would say that science fiction is a sub-group of what a lot of people call speculative fiction. Speculative fiction is fiction that takes a premise that does not correspond with reality (which I’ve heard termed a conceit) and constructs a story in a universe in which that premise is true. Fantasy is where that conceit relies on “magic”; science fiction where it relies on “science”. (And in cases of both, it would appear”fantasy” trumps).
I do not, however, consider “science fiction” to be exclusive. You can have a sci-fi western (Firefly), a sci-fi coming-of-age story (My Teacher is an Alien), a sci-fi romance (Matched)…
I see a connection between Neuromancer, A Princess of Mars, and Robocop, in that they fall under “science fiction”. They all use a conceit that relies on science and works from there. But I still don’t consider them “just like” each other.
(The confusion, it seems, is what we mean by “just like”. I mean it to mean things like theme and how it makes me feel. My reaction to Neuromancer was very different from my reaction to A Princess of Mars. It’s hard for two things that provoke such different reactions in me to, in my mind, be considered “just like” each other)
I do think Robocop could have been done with magic instead of technology, maintaining the theme of dehumanization. A Princess of Mars could probably have been done on Earth, with some different MacGuffin to kill Carter instead of the atmosphere machine.
Neuromancer would be more difficult, I admit. It relies very heavily on its conceit.
I don’t think that for all science fiction, the science fiction elements are necessary to make them what they are. Some, it becomes moreso (the Ender series becomes difficult sans relativity, for instance).
I read science fiction because I read stories. I read “mainstream” fiction because I read stories. I read mysteries because I read stories. I read fantasy because I read stories. I read “classic” literature because I read stories. To me, what is important is what the author does within their conceit, not what the conceit is. I like well-constructed and well-thought-out universes, regardless of being science fiction or not.
The question is a bit like asking why I watch anime. I watch anime because I like watching good stories, and there are good stories that are anime. Some stories would be difficult to tell outside of anime, and would probably lose something. But it’s absurd to me to claim that anime is a genre under which we should exclusively classify television shows and movies, as though Azumanga Daioh and Serial Experiments Lain are anything alike aside from being animated in Japan. It can be useful as a descriptor, but not a genre. The difference between tags and folders, as it were.
But, I have encountered a great many people who claim that anime is a genre, and refuse to watch anything that’s not anime, because they care more about the medium than they do the story. I imagine there’s a lot of people who feel similarly about science fiction, that the conceit being (ostensibly) science matters more than the story.
That the ivory tower of the literary establishment also shares this feeling, that the conceit matters more than the story (hence their rejection of science fiction off the cuff) does indeed bother me, and to my mind is yet another strike against such an attitude.
Hear, hear. This seems so akin to the definition I hold (“science fiction is the mythology of a scientific age”), that I would not breathe a word against it. I am glad we agree on the main point, since we seemed to be disagreeing about much else.
No one I know considers science fiction to be exclusive. Nor, for that matter, is any genre. You can have a sci-fi horror story, a romantic story which is also a musical comedy, a coming of age story which is also a sea story, and so on.
Logically, if the genres use different dimensions of the story for their definition, any tale could be in one or more genres.
By “the dimensions of the story” I mean, for example, detective stories have a detective character; tragedies have a tragic mood; Westerns have a Western setting. Furthermore, comedies have jokes, or at least droll situations, and musicals have music. Opera has a particular kind of music, albeit “Rock Operas” borrow some of the tropes and machinery of Opera and wed it to modern pop music. These elements are limited to a certain type of presentation. One can have Westerns as books or movies or radio plays; but one cannot have a musical as a book (with the exception of MAD magazine doing a satire, I suppose). “Anime” like opera, is a type of presentation. Albeit some movie makers have made very good use of the tropes of Anime for live action films, as a general rule, Anime must be animated, and usually in a particular style with particular tropes. THUNDERCATS might be considered “Anime” because of its style but JOHNNY QUEST cannot be.
The difficulty in defining science fiction boils down to the fact that no one ever mentions, or rarely, one other thing stories have aside from character, theme, setting, props, mood and presentation. They have laws; they have assumptions about what is and what is not possible events, who are and who are not believable characters.
This is often confused with “setting” since the laws are easiest to change by changing the setting. John Carter goes to Mars and he can jump tremendous distances like a superman. On that world, men can fly my means of the Eighth Barsoomian ray. But this is not, strictly speaking, a matter of setting, since you could set a story on Mars without these elements, or set a story on Earth (SUPERMAN springs to mind) where the elements are present with a different conceit.
According to the “laws” of ROBOCOP you can have a main character who has literally lost his humanity by being turned into some horrible cyborg, something which we in the here-and-now cannot do. (Albeit anyone who betrays his soul for a mess of pottage or feels ground into inhumanity by his circumstances or loyalties understands the symbolism). You could do a very similar character with a vampire story or a fairy tale about a man under an enchantment. But you could not have a story with a man literally turned into a nonhuman in a Western or a Pirate story (unless they stepped into SFF territory by introducing Barbary Witches or Voodoo curses and the like).
In speculative fiction the “laws” are different from those of present day Earth as understood by the scientific world view. In Science Fiction the change in the laws is due to something not alien to the scientific worldview, such as the future having changes or other worlds having other technologies; in fantasies the change in laws is due to something akin to the medieval or ancient world view, which admitted of marvels and magic and divine meddling for good or ill.
So, let us add another dimension to our notion of a story: plot, character, theme, setting & props, and laws. The conceit of an SFF tale is that the laws differ from the known laws of the quotidian world.
By this definition, a story is arguably SFF if its “laws” differ from the here and now. (I say “arguably” because comedy or horror can have unearthly conceits without being something that would appeal naturally to an SFF reader.)
Well, yes. I was not talking about the ways in which the SF stories differed. That is no clue to define what the mysterious characteristic might be that makes them the same.
I put it to you this way: my current contract with my publisher says that I will produce a science fiction story next, not a fantasy. To me and to him and to my readership, that term “science fiction story” has a meaning. It is written in a legal contract that binds me by my oath of honor. The contract does not put any limit on what I do in terms of character, plot, theme, or setting. I did not contract for a story set on Mars.
I put it to you another way: earlier in my writing career, I made a contract with an anthology to write a “Dying Earth” short story for a Jack Vance anthology. It was a legal contract which bound me to produce a story in a certain mood (it had to be a homage to Vance) but also in a certain and specific setting, Vance’s “The Dying Earth”. The story would have been rejected, and I would have been in violation of the contract, had I not set the story in that setting.
However, I was at liberty to produce comedy or tragedy, to use Vance’s characters or invent my own (I did both. Guyal of Sfere appears as my star) and I could make it any plot, any theme. (I chose a detective story, introduced a Vancean “Effectuator” and made the theme the central question of the Dying Earth books, namely, the moral character of men who think only in the short term.)
Now any argument that there is no linking tissue between my “Dying Earth” story and the other “Dying Earth” stories in the same volume is a nonstarter. Nor can anyone soberly make the argument that the point and the whole point of the anthology was to produce stories in homage to the Dying Earth of Jack Vance. My argument is hardly an argument at all, but merely an observation: the thing that makes all the stories in that volume ones that the editors and writers and readers agree are defined as “Dying Earth” stories is a quality that can be detected when you are in the mood for a Dying Earth story, and you have read EYES OF THE OVERWORLD and RHIALTO THE MARVELOUS and you want something more, and something “just like” that.
If I had written a perfectly well-crafted story about Kerth Gersen hunting down the unexpected one remaining henchmen or scion of one of the five supercriminals of the Oikumene known as the Demon Princes, I would indeed have written a “Jack Vancean” story, but it would not have been a “Dying Earth” story. Likewise, if I had set a story on the dying continent of Zothique of Clark Ashton Smith or beneath the dim red sun of Gene Wolfe’s Urth, it would once again have been a dying earth story, but not a “Dying Earth” story. Do you see my point?
It is defining what that “just like” quality happens to be which makes the discussion of what the definition of “A Dying Earth” story (or a “Science Fiction” story) an interesting discussion. The elements of the story which are irrelevant to the discussion of what makes them the same, that is, the very elements you list as being not the same, are logically irrelevant to the discussion.
We were not, I hope, exchanging anecdotes personally about your personal taste in books or mine. The A PRINCESS OF MARS does not have a robotic cop anywhere in its pages, nor ROBOCOP have a single space princess to rescue, does not make one of them science fiction and the other one not.
And it is simply a fact that there is a body of readers, writers, editors and booksellers who seek out A PRINCESS OF MARS and ROBOCOP for that one element, whatever it is, which is the same between them. The differences between the two is not what makes them sit on the same bookshelf in the bookstore.
Again, returning to my example: if I wrote a story like A PRINCESS OF MARS or a story like ROBOCOP, then I would have lived up to the terms of my contract with my publisher. But if I wrote a story like THE PRINCESS BRIDE or like THE BIG SLEEP, I would not have done, no matter what other elements of mood, theme, character, or plot were or were not present.
Be that as it may, what has it to do with our discussion? I am not arguing that bad science fiction is the same as good science fiction, nor am I arguing that narrow and illiberal tastes in reading is to be praised. I am arguing that an aria from an opera is not the same as a ballad is not the same as a march.
You are using the word “genre” in some specialized fashion unknown to me. I am merely referring to a species of stories, grouped by a family resemblance.
That is an excellent way of putting it. I would generally agree.
And yes, if you have a contract to write an SFF story, then you need to write an SFF story to fulfill that contract.
It seems to me that what I was hearing you say was that something being classified as SFF meant that it was Something Different, to the point where two books that are SFF will always be more similar than any SFF would be with any non-SFF book. This is what I vehemently disagree with.
However, there are people who seek out SFF books purely because of the definition of SFF–that the Laws are different. People like imagining reality with different laws. And, in fact, people may find a general set of Laws they like to wander within, changing the details. Space Opera would be such a thing, defined by a certain set of Laws and Tropes.
I don’t necessarily belong to that group, though on introspection, it’s because to me in all stories the Laws are up for grabs. Even in stories set ostensibly in our quotidian reality, I find that the Laws are different. Examples include as mentioned CSI and James Bond, and it flourishes through our current television and movie landscape.
The issue, I think is one of degree. Most people wouldn’t consider CSI to be SFF, because the Laws it breaks are either ones most people aren’t aware of or wouldn’t make good television. But fundamentally, I either have to note that CSI is unrealistic, or state that it exists in a different world in which the basic principles of information theory are different.
(Tangentially, this is why I always found the Literary Establishment’s fetishism of Magical Realism to make absolutely no sense. Magical Realism is defined as books that are Fantasy, but meet the Literary Establishment’s criteria for “real” literature (which probably means that it is a piece of trash that attempts armchair sociology while talking about “oppression”); and also in my experience, have inconsistent Laws)
What I would generally use to separate speculative fiction from non-speculative fiction would be both the importance of differing Laws to the plot/setting, and the degree to which they differ from our own.
Your dimensions of the story is a good way of breaking it down; I would generally agree.
All this circling around, again, I would agree with you that the Space Trilogy is SFF just like Star Wars is SFF. I would also still say that they tend not to be in the Hard SFF camp; their Laws run a bit far afield of our own world’s. Star Wars is certainly a Space Opera. I’d probably put the Space Trilogy as running a gamut between Planetary Romance, theology thinly disguised by narrative, and character drama SFF.
But I still wouldn’t consider them to be “just like” Rainbows End, despite the fact that it, too, is SFF.
I am actually suggesting a different approach to the act of defining the genre, an organic family-resemblance approach, which consists of two steps. (1) You notice the you and other readers see a resemblance or likeness between one thing you like in a book and other books where you seek the same thing and (2) then you say what that thing is. Hence, I am more comfy defining space opera as “Yarns like what EE Doc Smith tells, or STAR WARS” than I am defining space opera as “Simplistic or archetypal characters of an heroic mode set against a background of mighty swashbuckling deeds, high adventure, lighthearted (or shallow) in approach, with emphasis on gigantic effects and larger-than-life events, especially in terms of ultimately destructive weapons, in a futuristic setting.”
As a lawyer, I tend to think of laws as things which guide and defend, not which bind and chain, so I am not one of those people who say, “Since STAR WARS is Space Opera, it is not ‘real’ science fiction.” Humbug on that. If that is what you thought I was up to, perish the thought!
In that case, we can lay the argument to rest. I did not say that. I said nothing about degrees of difference between genres.
There seems to be a certain attitude of snobbery that offends you, which are acting as if I supported or defending, and you wanted to argue against. Fair enough. There are people who do not read outside genre lines. There are even people who do not watch Black and White movies. Like you, I regard them as philistines lacking either the taste or the courage to read widely.
Myself, I have read everything from the ILIAD in its original Greek to PARADISE LOST in its original English to SUPERMAN’S PAL JIMMY OLSEN by Jack Kirby and THE SHADOW’S SHADOW by Maxwell Grant. I admire great art by the high and fine standards of great art and also I admire popular dreck by dreck standards (which, in their own way, can be as exacting as fine standards). I have no preference for “hard” sf over “soft” sf or high fantasy over sword and sorcery, but I do judge each by its own yardstick, and I do note that not each one requires the same level of craftsmanship.
So, rest assured, I am not a snob, except that I have a snobbish love of lowbrow things.
I think that is an accurate summary.
I say, bring on the spaceships!
Star Wars was about wizards running around with swords.
Au Contraire! I beg to differ. Star Wars was about wizards running around with swords. IN SPACE! That makes it science fiction.
Wizards running around with swords in the Old West would make it a Western.
I stand corrected!
Ah, bu beware. The most recent troll haunting these pages accuses anyone who apologizes for a misunderstanding of being guilty of genocide. I adore that the Left has such a nice, keen and exacting sense of proportion.
Your examples make me think of how I reacted when I went to the cinema to see “The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires.” I went in expecting to see a vampire film, albeit one set in China. This is not exactly what I got (luckily, I also liked chop-socky films, so at least I didn’t waste the admission price).
It pays to have a low brow and broad tastes
Though the one thing that did make me laugh in “Robocop 2″ was the declaration that Irish Catholics make the best (or at least, the most stable) cyborgs. So there’s hope for me yet, come the dawn of our robot overlords!
Well, if authors of mainstream literature have been permitted to dabble in the field of SF/Fantasy (e.g. Rudyard Kipling with his two “A.B.C. ” stories of the Aerial Board of Control set in 2065), then I propose that it is equally sauce for the gander for SF/Fantasy authors to dabble in conventional literary forms outside the field.
And so they do. AE van Vogt wrote a manstream book about prisoners in China called THE VIOLENT MALE. I think I am the only person on Earth who read it.
Being a fan of (and occasional writer in) the Alternate History genre, I’d be interested to see how others define that genre. I don’t believe that any speculation in a book or movie about “what might have happened if thus and such” necessarily qualifies that work as Alternate History. I believe that an actual walk down the path not taken is needed. However, I’m a something of a purist when it comes to AH, and therefore I think a story begins to wander outside the boundaries of the genre when a writer like Harry Turtledove, say, introduces aliens into a story; I believe that at that point the story should properly be classified as strictly Science Fiction as opposed to AH.
In other words, a cop saying “Boy, things would be different if Kennedy had lived” as an aside in an otherwise conventional story doesn’t make the story AH. A cop in a world where JFK was still alive on November 23, 1963, with whatever subsequent effects the writer introduces, is AH. A cop in a world where JFK lives who sees a spaceship land is SF.
I can’t honestly, say, though that I have a formal definition.
Once again, I recommend my method of defining genres. A genre exists when you find there are certain books you look for when you are in the mood to read a book that is “just like” another book. What characteristics “just like” have is a matter of family resemblance rather than formal definition.
So a book that is “just like” the stuff written by Jules Verne and HG Wells is “science fiction.” A book that is “just like” the stuff written by EE Doc Smith is “space opera.” A book that is “just like” STARSHIP TROOPERS is “military SF.”
By this definition, any book that is “just like” Harry Turtledove is “alternate history.” If you are a purist, it means the thing you are looking for has a narrow and exacting definition. A DRAGON IN WAITING by John M. Ford may not cut it.
In this case, I presume the “thing you are looking for” is setting. In an alternate history, the setting must be the real world, within real history, with the one unreal conceit that one major historical event differed, and the appeal is the nicety and nuance of examining the ramification of that one major event change. I would even be bold enough to say that alternate should be as parallel as reasonable, so that things not touched by that one major change are the same — because without this, the timeline is just random, too many events differ by too much, and the appeal of speculation about what might have happened is lost.
I wonder about something like Robert Harris’ Fatherland which was immensely popular when it came out, and was treated with critical respect – probably because not a shadow of genre taint marred its pedigree. This was a serious literary treatment of an envisioning of how alternate historical development would work out – and not one mention by anyone, that I could see, that this kind of thing had been going on in the grubby corners of SF for decades.
Not even a single, solitary mention of Philip K. Dick’s “The Man in the High Castle”, though that surely deserves at least a footnote in any discussion of this kind. Harris’s bestseller seems to have inspired (or at least popularised) the professional historians who engage in what they prefer to term counterfactual history, and nobody need bear the shame of popular lowbrow trash like those kinds of pulp novels, because this is Serious History and Serious Literature.
I feel an urge to point out that way back in the 1950s and 1960s, when I became an avid movie-viewer, before modern society tried to divvy everything up into sub-categories, I loved “Science Fiction”, sometimes called “Monster” movies. But in that day, Godzilla, Frankenstein, and Night of the Living Dead all qualified. I long for the departed time when not everything had to be organized to the nth degree and I could enjoy giant monsters with the same enthusiasm as Solaris.
Again, I will say the advantage of my method of defining “genre” in terms of reader’s tastes rather than in terms of some bloodless academic proscription. Those movies are “science fiction” since they are “just like” one another, that is, they are alike in that they rest on a contra-factual and fantastical conceit. But they are not “just like” one another in that one is horror, one is giant Lizard horror representing the danger of the Atomic Bomb, and one is self-made horror showing the irony of the monster not really being the monster but the doctor, who creates without love or forethought, et cetera.
My approach would allow one to say the genres have both a big-tent and a small-tent version of the definition, depending on the need the definition serves.
As Mr. Michaels stated it, this seems to be a complete non-sequitor. It is the same argument as if one were to say Star Wars is not science fiction because Lucas is a Buddhist (Methodist). Or Sara King (though I haven’t read her) doesn’t produce science fiction because she is a vegan.
That there is Christianity in Lewis’ trilogy does not make it not science fiction. Ransom was in a space ship and was on Mars with three different alien species for crêpes sake. Case closed. While I would hear argument against putting God in story from a technical stand point of tension and conflict, the elements of faith, of men of faith is no sensible reason for exclusion. Technically I think stories are better when men of faith are on their own, having belief in, but no help from their god. Especially of Christian “toned” stories as the side that MUST win purely even within its own logic, saps suspense.
And what of Blish’s A Case of Conscience? How in the freak would that, by the same logic, not be science fiction? May as well define my dog as a fig leaf. How about the excellent A Canticle for Leibowitz?
I don’t know the faith, or lack thereof, of Mr. Simmons but his priest’s tale in Hyperion was one of the best things I have read.
Does Gene Wolfe get the boot as well?
Not to mention Tim Powers.
It may be that those who dismiss Lewis’s novels as not being SF are falling into the same error as mentioned in that interview I linked to above:
“Aldiss: But I am surprised that you put it this way round. I would have thought that you constructed Perelandra for the didactic purpose.
Lewis: Yes, everyone thinks that. They are quite wrong.”
If the assumption is that the Space Trilogy was written for the purpose of smuggling in Christian proselytisation under the cover of SF, in the manner of sugaring the pill to make it easier to swallow, then no wonder they reject the work. But that is not how it was written at all, so they should give at least “Out of the Silent Planet” the benefit of the doubt.
Myself, I would happily read novels about the End of the World, but nothing would convince me to try the “Left Behind” series (even in a “they’re so bad, they’re good” mode of reading them) – though I have read Lord of the World by Robert Hugh Benson, which is a religious SF dystopia, with great enjoyment, probably because of the description of the volors, the airships of the time, which makes them sound at least part-organic:
“Once again before he moved there came a long cry from overhead, startlingly beautiful and piercing, and, as he lifted his eyes from the glimpse of the steady river which alone had refused to be transformed, he saw high above him against the heavy illuminated clouds, a long slender object, glowing with soft light, slide northwards and vanish on outstretched wings. That musical cry, he told himself, was the voice of one of the European line of volors announcing its arrival in the capital of Great Britain.”