farah mendlesohn - what we mean...

The following was written for Chaz Brenchley, who had been asked to edit an issue of the pdf magazine Red Ink. http://www.incwriters.co.uk/magazines.htm I was asked to write about the way sf is seen from the outside.

“What we mean and how we are seen.”
Farah Mendlesohn.

The dismissal of genre fiction is common to most popular literary genres. What may be specific to science fiction is that the critique of the genre most commonly offered by the “non-sf world” bears such little resemblance to the genre as it exists. Or more properly, it resembles only a small sliver of the genre, and frequently the very sliver that the most committed sf readers despise themselves.

Let us first consider who and what the outsiders are and what they think. The outsiders are the critics of the Times Literary Supplement who simply do not regard science fiction as worth reviewing, or The Guardian which accords science fiction novels only thumbnail sketches, or the New York Times which assigns science fiction to reviewers who don’t like science fiction and so are primed either to reject the book or, if they do like it (and this is what annoys science fiction fans most) to claim that the book is not science fiction. Many of these critics, lacking appropriate reading strategies are baffled by the attempt to unbalance and discomfit the reader, bored by the absence of strong inter-personal relationships, and undone by the extended descriptions of a strange world, complicated physics or imaginary engineering. Attempting to deal with this, their eyes are drawn to the flashy, easily identifiable tropes of rocket ship, android, clone. Science fiction becomes pantomime. Its metaphorical structures are lost.

This article has the potential to turn into an extended whine, an “alas, poor me” attitude to science fiction which the author M. John Harrison, and the critic Dan Hartland find particularly repellent. Both argue that if science fiction is disparaged it is deservedly so; that science fiction has accumulated a range of bad habits and values that prevent it from every being considered as literature. If science fiction wants to be taken notice of, it should compete on the terms set by the literary establishment.

There are two ways to consider this. The first is to consider the values of the literary establishment, how they relate to science fiction and the cultural wars that are fought over this. The second is to reconsider whether science fiction is so hegemonic after all.

The Great Divide between science fiction and “literary fiction” as I have argued in The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction (2003) can be summarized as “what is the character”? This may be an odd way to put this, because in science fiction the answer may well be “the universe” or “the idea”. It is not so much that science fiction is idea driven rather than character driven—although it is, the story starts from “what if the world were different”, not from “who is this person”,--but that the direction of gaze is different. If science fiction characters can feel like ciphers it may be because they are intended to function as avatars which the reader can steer through the world. Literary fiction, even when it is written in the first person, prefers to place the reader in front of the proscenium arch watching the reaction of the actor to the drama.

This difference between existing vicariously through the protagonist and watching the protagonist became a literary battleground at the end of the nineteenth century. The critics Roger Luckhurst (for science fiction) and Beverly Lyon Clark (for children’s literature) both point to the struggles between the followers of Henry James and those aligned with adventure literature (they refer to H. G. Wells and Mark Twain respectively) to define the modern novel and at the same time, to define “adultness”. In the process many books written for mixed audience—the works of Frances Hodgson Burnett, the writing of Robert Louis Stevenson—fell out of the category of adult fiction. With them fell the literatures of sensation which, while always eyed with suspicion had in the eighteenth and nineteenth century precisely been regarded as adult fiction, in the sense of “not suitable for children”.

What we see from the late nineteenth century onwards is not just a redefinition of suitable reading for adults, but a redefinition of what adulthood, and consequently childhood means. By the end of the nineteenth century adulthood as depicted in novels was increasingly portrayed as concerned with relationships between people. It says to readers: if you are an adult you will turn away from the world and focus on inward things. Science fiction, which continues to obsess about the macro world, whether in the form of embarrassing space opera from E. E. Doc Smith (a writer of the 1920s) or his more sophisticated descendants such as David Weber and Lois McMaster Bujold , or in the political futures of Ken MacLeod or Gwyneth Jones, are essentially saying “there are more important issues than how you feel about something or someone.”

Adulthood as it is conceived at the end of the nineteenth century changes in another important way. Compare the novels of Dickens or Trollope to those of James. Both Dickens and Trollope essentially argue that the world can be changed. James, and many many modern writers, argue that it cannot. That the route to adulthood therefore is through acceptance not through empowerment.

By the 1940s, relationships to things, to politics, to the world were moving down the age group or becoming sidelined into new genres such as sf and the thriller. There may also be an extent to which they were pathologised (and this may explain the “rise” in Aspergers’—it is not an illness, it is a human trait which no longer fits the cultural environment). As this happened we begin to see a growing gender divide. While men continue to write these emotionally centred novels, their audience became increasingly female. Men, we are told, stopped reading. In the twentieth century we are repeatedly informed, “boys don’t read”.

Which creates a logical conundrum; because if men don’t read, but science fiction doesn’t sell to women (female readership has never gone much over half, if the surveys are to be believed) who is reading it? The answer of course is about social expectation and questionnaire response. If you define reading as reading of a particular kind of text, and the person questioned has been taught that what they are reading “doesn’t count”, or is childish, they are quite likely to describe themselves as a non-reader.

This problem is reinforced by critics in the mainstream continuously through the way they review: book review after book review comments on “character” and “relationships”. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this. Most of the books they review are written with this reading strategy in mind. But what if the book was written for a different reading strategy?

There are some texts which straddle the line between outside and inside the genre. David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Audrey Niffeneger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife are two such. To the literary world they cannot be science fiction. Neither contain the icons of the field: there are no rocket ships, computers or inter-stellar space ships. Crucially, each of these books makes extensive use of the first person, and is vitally interested in individual emotional response. Both novels were recognized by sf readers however: hard not to when the first has some distinctively futuristic scenes and the second involves a genetic disease which triggers time travel. This does not mean, however, that they work entirely well as science fiction: in each case there is an insularity to the characters depicted which means we learn very little about the world. In each case, the characters are pawns of fate. Each accepts what the world is doing to them, they make no choice to engage with the universe. This is not the way science fiction thinks: even at the height of what has been called in sf, “British miserablism” (roughly 1950-1980) there was an assumption that the individual will resist the universe or will try to alter it within the bounds of scientific possibility. The fundamentally technocratic attitudes of science fiction to the universe—it’s kickassness—is defined in this paradigm as childish before any consideration is given to what is being kicked.

What can happen when the values of one genre is imposed on another can be seen in what has happened to science fiction written for children and juveniles. All books written for children have an “intention to socialize”. I’m not sure it’s possible to write a “neutral book” for children. A consideration of sf books written for the 10-15 age group up to say 1960, by writers such as Robert A. Heinlein and Andre Norton, suggests a combination of an “outward bound” spirit with a desire to introduce boys to the world of work, and to return to the point I threw in earlier, an interest in things that might today be classed as Aspergers. These books were very popular. From the 1960s through to the end of the 1970s, the overarching theme was “the elders were wrong”: John Christopher, John Townsend, Sylvia Engdahl, wrote novels in which the world was not as it was presented and the job of children was to fix it. Then in the 1990s science fiction for children began to take on board the idea that adventures outside the home were simply metaphors for emotional growth. That EQ was more important than IQ (see Angela Fuller, The Guardian, March 7, 06.) A meeting with an alien was almost always the prerequisite for learning to deal with parents, friends or the school bully. These novels, by writers such as Alison Goodman and Jeanne Willis, were not bad novels, but they reflected the values of an establishment that demands children read for emotional growth, not intellectual growth. They weren’t science fiction and they didn’t sell to readers of science fiction. They were interested in the inner self, not the outside world. The Geek, previously the hero of the science fiction novel, retreated into the background. In D. J. McHale’s Pendragon series the nerd stays at home, reading the diaries of the jock having the adventure. In children’s literature, the qualities of the sf fan became undesirable in the very fiction written for them.

To return to my earlier point, if sf were to shed its bad habits—and so far I have been unable to identify what it is Hartland and Harrison, bitterly opposed to the idea that sf is distinctive identify as specifically sf bad habits—I’m not convinced it could ever be accepted into the mainstream as long as the direction of its gaze remained different, and the emotional and cultural values of the readership remain different, When some books are accepted into the mainstream, it may well be for quite different criteria than are lauded by the sf audience.

The thing that may make the difference to the above argument however, is the growing sense that many younger authors genuinely straddle two worlds: authors like Toby Litt, Audrey Niffeneger and David Mitchell have grown up in a culture in which the sf discourse has become mainstream in computer games, video and film. Sf itself is far less outside than it once was. Its ideas and tropes are comfortably accepted into discussion so that Niffeneger, while adhering to the literary requirement to focus on the relationship between two individuals was comfortable using a science fictional idea as catalyst.

All of the above implies that there is a single critical discourse in science fiction, but within the sf community itself, the most that could be identified is a sensibility. That outward gaze, that insistence on the individual in response to the world, or a sense that the individual should have an affect on the world manifests very differently in the world of hard-sf (where the engineer and the engineered are king) , in cybperpunk and singularity sf where the presence of the Meat is an annoyance than in the near future alternate worlds where the Americans are only one power among many, or in a world in which genetic engineering disrupts the understanding of gender. Arguments about “character” in these contexts may hinge on ideological understandings as to how humans react in certain situations. Emotional plausibility may be replaced by scientific plausibility—a suggested panel item for a science fiction convention this year was “what would a literary novel look like if written according to what we know of sociobiology” (Jo Walton sought to answer this in her fantasy, Tooth and Claw). And as scientific understandings of the human are both shifting and hotly contested two novels on the subject might look very different, might even be in argument with each other. The internal discourse of science fiction is itself an element of the genre that outsiders frequently miss.

There are heated debates as to the proper subject matter for science fiction. Science fiction is frequently written in heated debate, in violent response both to the world and to other writers’ stories and commentary.* Feminist science fiction has now permeated the field, it began to challenge the “mainstream” discourse in the 1960s with tales by Judith Merrill, Zenna Henderson and Pamela Zoline which turned domestic concerns into science fiction without any of the gee whiz techno-optimism that men had approached the topic. Issues of sexuality have fascinated some writers, repelled others. Not because certain types of sex are taboo, but because sex itself—unless suitably reduced to a scientific study—has frequently been considered irrelevant to the real issues in life (that Aspergers thing again). Furthermore, the boundaries of sf and fantasy are hotly contended. Far from being a genre complacent to itself, sf lies on the faultlines of genre. While there is a frequent defensiveness—Harrison and Hartland are right about that—there is also a sense from many that any victory in the mainstream won on the terms set by the mainstream would be a false victory, The battle—if there is one—is to be accepted as equal and interesting but different, and perhaps to watch writers of literary fictions adopt the techniques of sf.

From the outside science fiction looks like a monolithic tale of spaceships conquering the galaxy or conquering us; of clones taking over our lives and computers our bank accounts, From the inside… well if you want to know what sf is really about, what subject matter captivates sf audiences, open the page of your newspaper. For each story in those pages, I could find you a science fiction author who has written a novel or story on that topic.

*M. John Harrison’s 2002 novel, Light was a response to New Space Opera which emerged in the late 1980s in response to his own 1975 Centauri Device which was itself a response to the space opera being marketed at the time.