Reports of the death of SF are greatly exaggerated
Here is an article on a topic science fiction fans have some interest in. The death of Science Fiction. Mr. Richard Harter says
My opinion: I also think that science fiction will die off as a genre, not because it will be gone, but only because it will no longer be unique. It will be absorbed into the mainstream. Once the common man is used to technological change as a fact of life, literature whose main point is awe and wonder or fear of technological change will not stand out.
We have already seen this, for example, in spy fiction. A recent James Bond movie had an invisible car. HG Wells’ wrote a story about an invisible man. Wells’ story was SF because he speculated scientifically about what the invisible men of myth would actually have to be like to be plausibly invisible: i.e. naked. Wells also asked what invisibility could plausibly be used for: i.e. terror. The invisible car of James Bond, on the other hand, was merely a gadget. What had once been a challenge to the imagination, was now a background gimmick. People outside the SF ghetto are using our tropes.
And this trend is paralleled within the ghetto by what we might call the “de-scientification of science fiction.”
I have met people, and I mean college-educated people working in technical fields, who are scientifically illiterate. One young fellow told me the gravity of the Earth was caused by its spin. I asked him if people were weightless at the North Pole. Another stalwart told me that matter was not made of energy. I asked him where carbon atoms come from. I cannot tell you how often I have seen people mistake a solar system for a galaxy. (Hint: galaxies are bigger.) I cannot tell you how often I have met folk who simply disbelieve in the speed of light as a barrier. Well, what happens if you go just under the speed of light and double your acceleration? Wouldn’t that make you go faster? One might as well ask how rockets fly in space when there is no air for the explosions to push against.
The modern science fiction readers I know personally cannot make this same boast of scientific literacy. What they read is STAR WARS type space extravaganza, or they read Robert Jordan or read George RR Martin — but not his “Dying of the Light” or other stories set in that universe. They watch FIREFLY, which is some of the best SF on TV. But FIREFLY also is a little unclear about the different between a solar system and a galaxy (I had to watch the SERENITY movie before I was sure the whole ‘Verse’ universe was one highly terraformed solar system, and no FTL). They do not know their Einstein and hardly seen to know their Newton.
(Kudos, by the way, to Bab 5 for having ships in space move like space craft, not like World War I aircraft or like Ironclad sea-craft.)
I am not picking bad SF to mock here: I am picking some of the best, most entertaining, SFF of the recent years. But most of it has otherworldly or extraterrestrial backgrounds and props merely to be props, for mood and atmosphere. Indeed, the most annoying single moment in the STAR WARS sexology is the scene where Qui-Gon-Gin measures the mitochlorine (or whatever) count in the bloodstream of Young Moppet Skywalker and announces that “The Force” is a side effect of microscopic organisms. The moment broke the mood.
What is pertinent to my point here is that it broke the mood by entering the Hard-SF subghetto, not by leaving it. A universe where psychic phenomena have a mechanical cause that can be investigated by science is a Hard-SF universe. A universe where the force is a mysterious mystical aura of life-energy that can be ‘followed’ that way one follows the Way of the Tao, is not a Hard-SF universe.
Without even knowing what he had done, George Lucas had bungled from one genre to another: the fans were told that the flaming, disembodied head of the Great and Powerful Force was in fact controlled by the little old man behind the curtain, microorganisms in the bloodstream. Well, they are fans of Science Fiction whereas George Lucas is a fan of Buck Rogers cliffhanger serials, so they thought to ask the questions he did not ask: if Force-ness is genetic, why not breed for it? For that matter, why not stick captured Jedi in the Juice machine, drain and filter their blood, and inject students with a concentration of mitochloridian bodies, to increase their Jedi powers? Dr. McCoy was able to make the Star Trek crew into telekinetics by injecting them with extract of Plato’s Stepchildren. Does the entire galaxy of long long ago and far far away have no one as clued in as Dr. Bones McCoy?
(Of course, science fiction people also asked question like whether or not Logan’s claws could penetrate Steve Rogers’ shield, or whether the Enterprise could handle a Star Destroyer. Ho! What a waste of time! They should really be asking whether the galaxy of long ago and far away is not, in fact, Lundmark’s Nebula. Palpatine is clearly the Tyrant of Thrale, and Vader is a form of flesh energized by Gharlane of Eddore. (The answers are no and no. Admantium cannot pierce Admantium-Vibranium, and Imperial weapon systems can blast planets into asteroids in one shot, whereas Federation phasers can merely shoot from orbit to surface.) For that matter, the Founders from the Delta Quadrant are clearly the shape-changing Skrull.)
There is some hard SF still out there, don’t get me wrong: I would list Will McCarthy and Stephen Baxter as frontrunners. But by and large, as technological change becomes the expected background noise of the culture, not a mind-staggering novelty, the visions of the visionaries of wonder will attracted less and less attention, even as the tropes and backgrounds of SF become well-known cultural currency in the mainstream.
Stories told in AD 3000 will no doubt still have flying cars or cloaks of invisibility in their tall tales, howsoever they tell them, around whatever version of the futuristic campfire they have in that day. They will also have fantastic tales of great deeds, farm boys becoming knights to rescue the princess from the ogre’s enchanted castle, or space-farm-boys becoming jedi-knights to rescue the space-princess from the Evil Galactic Empire’s super-spacebattlefortress. Science Fiction, in that sense, will not pass away. Instead, the mainstream fiction that insists on here-and-now realism will pass away, that so called ‘fiction’ that makes a virtue of its lack of imagination, that shall pass away. The old tales, the tales of gods and giants, will return, merely clothed in space armor.
By AD 3000, science fiction will simply be called fiction.
Mr. Harter again:
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
