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All texts copyright Farah Mendlesohn
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The following was written for Maggie Butt’s anthology of essays, http://tinyurl.com/6dtyda
The title of this chapter is taken from a Jewish tradition: it is the question you ask a child on his return from school, the idea being to inculcate a critical approach to the world. This approach extends up to, and includes, the word of God which is not to be accepted as sealed, perfect, but is to be haggled over, argued. After all, He told us that after Moses smashed the ten commandments, He would never again give His word directly. People would have to peer through a glass darkly to discern His intentions. And even then they would probably argue. Biblical history shows very little in the way of absolute obedience to the Lord; time and again, the average cry of an Old Testament Prophet was “Why me?” or “You must be kidding!” In the Jewish view of the universe, the world is unfair and all you can do is argue your corner. Science fiction—as writers such as Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg have noted—is a very Jewish literature. Elsewhere I have written that while fantasy wants to make the world succumb to moral imperatives (the dispossessed princess is reinstalled, the bad god dies, the hero gets the sword—even the subversive fantasies of authors such as John Crowley, Elizabeth Hand, or Caroline Stevermer operate within these expectations), science fiction wants the world to be just. (2003) It wants it to have rules, so that we know if we press this lever then this cog will turn, this engine will fire, and the rocket will take off. It also wants to know that there are loop holes, rules that can be twisted. And it wants you to know that if you break the rules you will die. If you are a duffer you won’t just drown; there is a good chance you will drown, freeze to death in the vacuum of open space, starve for ignoring the imperatives of the market (or the logics of communitarianism), or be unable to breathe because you forgot to check your oxygen mask before leaving for work this morning. The encyclopedist and critic John Clute has called this “making the universe storyable”. (1997: 899) In this way the narrative arcs of science fiction (sf) simultaneously strive to be both cosy and disorienting. Much of the critical attention to sf focuses on the genre’s disorienting aspects, and I will come to that, but I want to demonstrate the degree to which questions are at the heart of the sf “story” by discussing its cosiness Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations” (1954) is one of the most discussed short stories in the field. It is an example of what is popularly known as “hard sf” (one of many subgenres of the field). It relies on a combination of engineering and physics for its plot, but old-fashioned gallantry for its emotional impact. A man flying a small space craft to an alien planet discovers a stowaway on board. What should he do? Here are the factors in his choice. He is on his way with a vaccine to save the planet from disease. In order to make the greatest speed, the ship is stripped to the bones, its weight calculated to the micro-gramme. In order to cut back on weight, there is only enough fuel for the weight of the ship as recorded on departure. The stowaway is a girl (actually a young woman, but she is portrayed as very young) and wanted to visit her brother. The debate that has raged around this story (see Huntingdon,
James and Cramer) is about the pilot’s decision to eject (or “space”)
the young woman. At this point it’s useful to know that the stowaway was originally a young man. The editor of Astounding Science Fiction, John W. Campbell, persuaded Godwin to change the sex of the protagonist precisely in order to enhance tension between emotional and intellect. The result, as a number of commentators have pointed out, is a rather duplicitous story because the ship is full of things that could have been stripped to release the weight of the young woman. That this was missed by contemporary and by first time readers (myself included) is due to the structure of the story: the question and answer prose falls into the rhythm of catechism. Ironically, it persuades the reader not to interrogate the story, not, in fact, to resist the universe. The reliance on the rules of the cosmos creates a cosiness in which humanity becomes passive. Yet the question-narrative of the sf tale can be enormously
powerful. The basic question of the sf narrative is “What if….?”
It can be about engineering: what if you need to build a railway on a
planet which has miniature volcanoes erupting every couple of hundred
yards? It can be philosophical: what happens if you introduce Christianity
to a culture with no belief in original sin? Or introduce Christianity
to three species who already share a trinitarian symbiosis and in which
the death of one member of the trinity is supposed to lead to the suicide
of the other two? Or wonder how five intelligent species stranded on a
single planet might get on? Or it can question the impact of new physics
on social relations, “What happens if a quantum event opens up a
new universe on your doorstep, and the things coming through are doing
strange things to your society and your body?” In each case, there
is an assumption, not that human beings can fix anything, but that the
relationship between humanity and the universe is that between engineer
and environment. It is a fierce, dialectical relationship and it is conducted
through a four-note strategy that I have (impertinently) called Full Sf.
This strategy can be summed up as: Dissonance is a useful shorthand for what Darko Suvin famously termed “cognitive estrangement” or, “the thing which is different”. (1975) Most modern sf (anything written much after Robert A. Heinlein began writing and John W. Campbell started editing, around 1940) contains more than one “thing which is different”. The aim is to simultaneously disorient the reader, and to bring them further into the world by coaxing them to accept as natural something other than what they know. At its most brutal, this can be Faster Than Light travel (FTL), a convenient device that allows authors to link planets and, like the mobile ‘phone, changes the dynamics of society. This dissonance generates the structuring questions; what can you do when another planet is merely days away? Well, invasion narratives to begin with. And trade. And disease vectors. And the speed of fashion will probably increase. And throw into that a very long lived culture with a moral imperative to have as many children as possible. With a belief that men are property to be traded. Suddenly the what-ifs acquire huge complexity and possibilities. Conventional plot narratives—boy meets girl—take on new complexity when the question is “what does girl need to do in order to secure the dower price for her boy, without alienating the two boys she’s already bought?” And how does she decide which of her boys gets to sire/parent? And does a sire necessarily parent? Best genes aren’t always best father material. Once you’ve set up your Dissonance then you have to Rupture it. These ruptures too generate questions which generate narrative: our Hero is busy working out how to purchase the boy of her dreams, when the family business is undermined by a brand new technology and she has to work out how to apply the new tech in profitable ways; or aliens invade and they decide that all men are oppressed and it’s their duty to liberate them—suddenly her boy goes off to university and half her workforce leave; or virtual uploads mean she can live for ever and the need for an heir disappears. Take your choice. You can have a single Rupture or you can inflict on your Hero one Rupture after another after another. From there we move to Resolution. This is frequently
the least satisfactory part of a sf narrative, because if the narrative
drive in sf is towards change, almost any conventional ending—falling
in love, making lots of money, finding out who was trying to destroy your
country—is rather static. It’s an answer in a genre which is
much more interested in the questions. Which takes us to my last note
in the melody, Consequence. This is controversial because this is simply
my opinion, the idea has not been out there long enough to be either taken
up or dismissed. A successful sf text needs to extend beyond the end of
the book. The best way to see this is to consider the narrative trajectory
of sf’s kissin’ cousin, the futuristic thriller. At the end
of the thriller, the bomb is defused, the plague cured, the asteroid deflected.
Everything goes back to normal until the next Rupture. In good science
there is rarely a guarantee that a “solution” in these terms
is likely to be found. Science fiction solutions are more likely to involve
a radical change in direction, what John Clute has called a “slingshot”
ending (875) which opens up yet more questions: we don’t deflect
the asteroid so we all climb in a space-ship instead; the disease kills
millions: we have to deal with a depleted work force, crop shortages and
the collapse in infrastructure; or the disease kills millions but those
who survive have been transformed into light-wave intelligences. Faster-than-light
travel changes the trade routes so dramatically that empires collapse,
former metropolises turn into ghost towns and there are huge waves of
immigration. So that there is an oddly recursive structure: most modern
sf begins after the last rupture, and ends on the cusp (or just beyond
the apex) of the next rupture. At the end of an sf novel is always the
Big Question: What happens next? Space operas are big, romantic adventures which do not always take place in space. They tend to juxtapose an individual swashbuckler against the huge canvasses of the galaxy. Their prose ranges from the merely lurid to the gorgeously over-wrought—as iron gates can be over-wrought. Until very recently, the idea that space opera might be part of the interrogative dynamic of sf would have caused most critics and fans to laugh. This began to change in the 1990s when the New Space Opera emerged. The author most associated with the New Space Opera is Iain M. Banks (who writes mainstream “weird” fiction without the middle M.) Banks’s Culture novels (listed in the works cited) ask one, very simple question: what would be the sources of conflict in a post-scarcity society? And this is a society in which nothing is scarce. Travel is free: hop on board a ship which is inhabited/driven by an artificial intelligence. Change your sex. Alter your hormones or the chemicals in your body with just a thought. Disappear from the world and spend your life studying the gas-bag intelligences of another planet, never seeing another member of your species again. What is left to cause the conflict which generations of critics have told us is at the heart of literature? Banks’s secondary question, the one that drives the sequence is, “what happens when utopia meets The Other?” a question present in Thomas More’s classic Utopia, and noted by a number of Utopian scholars such as Tom Moylan. Can utopia only exist at the expense of its neighbours? Once convinced that it is right, the Culture has both to defend itself from incursions and, needing to create a buffer-zone around itself, needs to expand. The Culture series opens with Consider Phlebas, a utopian novel told from the point of view of someone who wants to bring the utopia down. The other books in the series interrogate the various ways in which the Culture seeks to embed itself. In Player of Games, the Culture sends a missionary to undermine a society whose rather unpleasant “meritocracy” is based on an annual gaming competition which just happens to reinforce class and gender prejudices, but the question that it asks of the reader is to consider what embedded prejudices structure both the Culture and our own societies. In Use of Weapons, the Culture hires a non-Culture mercenary to intervene in the governments of other societies and challenges the “intervention” protocols of the western world. Look to Windward contemplates the trauma endured by those so used, and by the societies which have been incorporated into the Culture. My personal favourite, Excession, sees a faction within the Culture make use of an intrusion they do not understand to deflect an uprising which they themselves have triggered in order to undermine it early. There is a rather surprising consistency to the question at the heart of these books: how is a society defined, in terms of those with which it deals, and the ways in which it eschews responsibility for its own actions? To deviate for a moment, in the 1960s Marion Zimmer Bradley began a series of novels set on the planet of Darkover. In the planet’s past weapons had been devised that were so frightening that the Compact was signed: only weapon which did not bring the wielder into as much danger as the target was permitted (so swords, but no bows). In his Culture novels, Banks chose to consider a society which wanted to keep its hands clean, but to do so constructed a narrow definition of violence. Bradley chose to construct one in which getting one’s hands bloody was considered the ethically purer approach. Both Bradley and Banks were asking questions not about the nature of violence, but about its context. If you change what it is socially acceptable to do, what happens? The answer (as so often in sf) is that humans are persistent and ingenious primates. Reading Banks’s novels also takes us back to issues I raised early on: who are sf stories about? Within each of his novels are small human concerns. In the midst of utopia people continue to screw up their lives. Banks’s fictions usually use these micro-stories as distractions from the main event, his real “stories” are about a large political entity coming head to head with the cold justice of the universe. Mostly, the political entity wins, but the universe gets its own back on the innocent bystanders. One of the problems with utopias is that, like the catechism of “The Cold Equations” they frequently delegitimise interrogation. As long as the surface remains undisturbed they are convincing, poke below that surface and they collapse. In Triton (1975) Samuel R. Delany challenged the idea that the purpose of utopia is to make individuals happy. In Triton (subtitled An Ambiguous Heterotopia), Bron indulges his desire for, “Life, liberty and the pursuit of misery” while we get to see how other people go about asking questions and making social constructs. Small questions about childcare blossom into co-ops based on sexual affinity groups, or age phalanxes. Safety is protected by the construction of an unlicensed zone. Gender identity is protected by choice—no need for ideological and essentialist constructions when you can walk in as a small white woman and leave as a large Black man. For many sf writers the importance of questions is intimately linked with the ownership of knowledge; it is no coincidence that one of the themes that crops up repeatedly in sf is the persistence of memory. There is a great deal of post-nuclear holocaust fiction, and large numbers of generation ship narratives (people get in a space ship and expect their great grandchildren to make it to the new planet). In almost all of these memory is faded and distorted. The three great classics are Robert A. Heinlein’s 1951 Orphans of the Sky (although the original stories were written in the 1940s), and Walter J. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959) and Sylvia Engdahl’s Heritage of the Star (1972). What these texts have in common is that within the constructed societies questions have become anathema, catechism is the rule, myth has taken over. In each—and in the many other books written in this vein—It is the ability to question that breaks down cultural stasis. One way to think about this is to reconsider George Santayana’s comment, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. These books are constructed around the ethos that those who cannot question the past, are condemned to drift blindly into the future. The slingshot ending is triggered precisely by the decision to keep asking awkward questions. In the 1950s futurists were confident that they could predict the development of modern technology. It was assumed that technological (and political) development was linear. By the 1990s it was clear to everyone that this couldn’t be true: humans were living through a “singularity”, an event horizon beyond which present models of the future cease to give reliable or accurate answers. As the sf author Stephen Baxter has pointed out in his article in Foundation 98 (2006), this is by no means the first singularity: a farm girl in northern England in 1780 could not have predicted that her daughters would work in an industry that barely existed. In 1950 many of the towns of the 1970s were farmland and fields (and had been for at least two thousand years). The first hint of the next singularity came with cyberpunk. William Gibson’s 1980 novel Neuromancer envisaged a future in which humans could link directly to computers, could move about inside a virtual world. And this was before the unexpected appearance of personal computers on people’s desks. Once small mainframes, and then personal computers spread out, then the most urgent questions began to revisit the relationship of humans to technology, old Marxist ideas about the enslavement of humans to technological processes combined with more recent cultural theory which presumes the relationship to be more argumentative. Although we have removed many of the pressures that shape species (at least in the west) new circumstances generate new evolutionary holes for our descendants to squeeze through. One of the dominant questions of sf has been, if we are not the pinnacle of evolution what comes next? Many of these new circumstances are ones we have created: the definition of “civilization” may one day include the ability to shape our own genetic future. In Natural History Justina Robson tests the edge of humanity as her genetically altered Forged go out into the world with new bodies and minds whose form dictates function, a radical revisioning of the idea of “adaptable” humanity. But as ever with modern sf, the questions do not stop with departure. The Forged are human so they in turn ask questions, challenge the Bauhaus ideology of their progenitors and wonder whether the universe was made for them, or they for the universe, an old riff on the notion of God made new. Humans, oldstyle humans, are left behind in this future: the singularity they have created is one they cannot predict or follow. Some singularities are more plausible than others: humans have been asking for several centuries whether there is anyone out there, and it’s beginning to look as if the answer is in the negative, or at least, our neighbours are so far away that our wagon trains can’t get there. Writers do still speculate about first contact however, and although there have been huge ideological shifts in first contact novels (which used to focus mostly on empire or invasion) the fundamental question remains the same: are we unique? The writer to take this on most recently is Karen Traviss. Her Wess’har series (City of Pearl, Crossing the Line, The World Before and Matriarch) considers what happens when humans come across a species that doesn’t think humans are so very special—not even as enemies. For Traviss, the crucial issue is not why humans believe they are so special, but the consequences of doing so. The belief itself she posits, is sociobiological: a consequence of being both prey and predator it means that humans need the ability to continually renegotiate what is “legitimate” prey (not just as food, but as a resource generally), so that at times some species become reclassified as “pets” while some of our fellow humans are reclassified as “prey”. Traviss uses the wess’har to expose the lies we tell ourselves: to the wess’har, all living things are people: exploitation of other people is ipso facto wrong. Like Robson, Traviss argues for a relationship between
form and function but it is one that goes much deeper: humans are aggressive
because we are over-crowded primates, both prey and predator. We have
status structures constructed around display and challenge, sexual relations
that are about power. The wess’har are non-prey, non-predator herd
animals, vegetarians who mate one female to a number of males, who must
swap genetic material to ensure good health and who change status according
to scent signals. Traviss succeeds in making story of the politicised
nature of storytelling itself; humans write stories of origin and uniqueness
and of manifest destiny; the wess’har write stories of co-operation
and community. Sf is distinctive as a form of literature for a number of reasons; its protagonists’ focus is frequently on the macro-world. While literature from outside the genre tends to focus on relationships between individuals against a background of…. (take your pick of Hollywood trailers), sf tends to reverse that. Science fiction tells stories of the collapse of empires, first contact, new technologies against a background of the personal, and it does this precisely by asking questions. Driving all of this is an attitude to the world which asks, if I only had a big enough screwdriver could I take the back off the world? If I could speak to God, could I ask the big enough question? Could I take that mythical lever, and move the universe? The question narrative forces the story to extend into the future: however much a tale may be wrapped up, the world as it ends is not the world as it began. Changes have been made and we are all sitting in the sling waiting for the catapult to launch us into Consequence. In the end the question, and not the answer, is the romance of science fiction.
Banks, Iain M. Player of Games. London: Macmillan, 1988. |