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Speculative, Science, Literary…

06/03/09

… and the next word is “Fiction”.

This isn’t actually a discussion I get a great deal out of, but since these thoughts occurred to me in the course of prepping for my slot on Night Waves yesterday to talk about Philip K. Dick, and since there was no way I was going to be able to go into them in detail there, I’ll share.

I was, incidentally, on the show with Graham Sleight, who knows more about this than I do, so I feel doubly spurious spouting off about it. All that aside, here goes.

First thought: that SF and Speculative Fiction are primarily defined by the fact that they revolve around a posit, a “what if”. That’s not to say that good SF doesn’t have character, plot, or good writing. It’s just that if it didn’t have a “what if” aspect to it – whether it’s “what if Germany and Japan had won WWII?” or “what if there were a world where a virus made you quasi-immortal but plugged you into an ecosystem which would make Jaws look like Jemima Puddleduck?” – it would be something else. The Man in the High Castle would be a story about a shopkeeper, a metalworker, a businessman, and a judo instructor. The Skinner would be a novel about fishermen and psychopaths. Or something.

Second thought: that’s what ticks off the literary establishment about Science Fiction. It’s not the fiction part people have a problem with, it’s the science. At the heart of literary writing and the literary/critical industry is the assumption that writing is about language and maybe the creation of a statement of “the ordinary mind on an ordinary day“. Literary writing is about words, beauty, emotion and communication of self.

(That’s not a perfect encapsulation, sure. I’m thinking out loud here. And I’m operating a “you broke it, you bought it” policy too, by the way. If you come in and bust up my nice neat little notion, your job is then to fix it up again so it means something.)

So to continue, it’s the science bit which is a problem. Speculative fiction is in the first instance a speculation. Science Fiction has its genesis in a thought experiment. Literary fiction has its roots elsewhere (which is not to say that Literary Fiction can’t have fireworks in it, either, by the way. And as I may have mentioned, I believe it should.)

This is a Two Cultures issue, with science and humanities butting heads right there on what the humanities consider to be their home ground.

Third thought: this reminds me of something. It reminds me of Sigmund Freud. (Yes, okay, everything reminds everyone of Sigmund Freud, because everything reminds everyone of their mother, and Sigmund Freud is now inextricably bound up with that realisation. Yes, I’m kidding. Go back to what I was saying.)

Sigmund Freud, right. Hard scientists view Freud with suspicion because his methods were essentially narrative. He wanted a literary career, even. And he refered to his case histories as Novellen, which is a very specific German word for a particular literary form in which the story progression is logical, if surprising, and the symbolism or subtext is often explained at the end.

Freud, in other words, is using a literary approach to science, and it makes people crazy.

See where I’m going with this? What Science Fiction and Speculative Fiction are to the humanities, Freud &co. are to hard science.

Which is why everyone gets to hot under the collar about both of these areas, and probably also why both of them are interesting, even compelling areas to play in.

Fourth thought: I still think terms like Science Fiction and Crime Fiction and Literary Fiction are more about shelving conventions and stock management than they are about what books and stories are…

19 Comments to “Speculative, Science, Literary…”

  • Foz Meadows said on March 7th, 2009:

    I think your Fourth Thought can be very neatly encapsulated by wandering into a series of different bookshops and noting under which sections books like The Gone-Away World, Grass For His Pillow and The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters are filed. It swings between straight fiction, fantasy and occasionally young adult, in the case of Lian Hearn’s Otori books, and this I find fascinating. To consider these examples as a group, they are all, more or less, parallel world stories – a parallel Earth, a parallel feudal Japan, a parallel Europe – but with very few traditional ‘fantasy’ elements (read: no magic). In your book, there’s the Gone-Away device, derived from science; in Lian Hearn’s, there’s prophecy derived through dreams, which is the least-magic form of prognostication in the literary canon, and in G. W. Dahlquist’s, there are the glass books, which derive from a naturally occuring blue clay, and which therefore are non-magical.

    However, they are also distinctly Not This Earth – largely, one feels, or suspects bookstores feel, because the What If elements relate to Big Things and alter Known Facts, such as how Feudal Japan worked, adding the existence of Cubritannia and creating a mysterious indigo clay with surprising properties.And yet, straight fiction – literary fiction – still dervice their premises from a series of What Ifs; it’s just that these hypotheses are smaller, more personal: the invention of a family, a car crash, a hitherto unheard-of person with cancer. Thus, while the former stories are clearly not in this world, we tend to trick ourselves into thinking that straight fiction could – potentially – be happening right down the road, that this family or that narrator might, in some sense, actually exist.

    Except they are all still works of fiction. We’ve been able to put off confronting this before, because the ‘traditional’ distictions between fantasy and literary fiction have been so obvious, derived primarily with the narrative world, and not the people who populate it. (Although I’d argue that the characters of someone like George R R Martin are often more ‘real’ than, say, those of Alice Sebold. But that’s just me.)

    Anyway: the point is, books like TGAW and others mentioned above have forced The Establishment to reconsider their divide between What-Ifs, or at least to acknowledge that the division has always been just a little greyer than they thought. If Rudyard Kipling wrote his Jungle Books at this point in history, doubtless they’d undergo the same shelving migration as Lian Hearn: are they fantasy, adult literature, or for young adults? Or, heaven forbid, all three? Could it possibly be that such distinctions are ultimately problematic, pidgeonholing a work to its most distinctive, but not necessarily is most vital, charactertistics? Hmm.

    Eek. Sorry for rambling. Will shut up now and get ready to go and see Watchmen.

  • Nick Harkaway said on March 7th, 2009:

    Yeah, I noticed pretty much while I was posting this that all novels begin with a ‘what if’ to some degree, and people measure the posit against some internal weirdness/comfort zone graph and decide what they are (and whether to buy them)…

    And somehow or other I’ve just lost the more eloquent version of this comment. Hornswoggled by my own website… *sigh*

  • Matt H said on March 7th, 2009:

    As someone fascinated in both literature and psychology, I found Freud an endless mix of incredible ideas and laughably sexual interpretations, and as such, I have read a lot of his work.

    At one point, I learnt German and with a thick translator, went through The Interpretation Of Dreams in the original language just to make sure that I was fully on track as I travelled into a weird obsession.

    Dreams themselves are not interpreted, what is painstakingly analysed is the written form of the dream. Language plays a huge role in Freudian interpretation, it is not uncommon to find that the unconscious mind communicates through puns.

    Which says a lot about the unconscious mind.

    What I would like to point out is that we now use a scientific (pschoanalytic) approach to literature. For example, the classic answer to Hamlet’s inaction is a tad of mother-lust with a dash of repression baked in an oven of unfulfilled patricide.

    So from this, I ask you, following the idea that you can drive the Freudian car both up the street and down the street [Freud can make of that what he will], do you think that SF or Speck Fiction has an impact on literary fiction?

    Because I do.

  • Nick Harkaway said on March 7th, 2009:

    And I absolutely agree. Apart from anything else, authors, in their creative souls, are ruthless magpie-like hoarders of imaginative and textual goodness. They see something they like, and they use it, whether it comes from Dickens of Philip K. Dick (both pulp writers, by the way – Dickens’ stuff was serialised, and like Dick, he wrote it at a huge rate and plotted it somewhat… on the fly…)

    Also, of course, spec and SF put ideas out there, and those ideas enter the popular consciousness, and kinda mulch down. The Matrix is probably a good example – people still occasionally say “the Matrix has you!” when they mean either “you’re in a dead end job” or “the world around you isn’t real”. And while, obviously, The Matrix is a Descartes riff, the fact that it’s there means anyone who wants to write Lit Fic with a Cartesian spin doesn’t have to work so hard to establish the notion, but does have to deal with the popular awareness of Neo.

    And then, too, literary writers play in spec and SF fields. Of course they do – there are things to be done there, there’s stuff to be explored, and as our world gets more SFish, they’ll have to do more of it. When there’s a gene therapy for HIV and an off-switch for cancer, those things will have to be in the reality of a literary fiction, and with them a consciousness of science. Which will be a challenge, because science language and science style doesn’t necessarily fit well with the Lit Fic ethos as it stands. It’s going to be an interesting decade…

    I wanted to call The Gone-Away World “LitPop” (like “BritPop”) but we finally decided it was a kind of self-aware snotty gag which would make people hate me. I get that – if someone else did it, I’d say it was really tacky -but really what I think I was reaching for is a way of saying: hey! Easy definitions and classifications? Your work here is done. Now we do overlap and hybrid, because that’s what the world is.

    ‘scuse me while I go polish my soapbox :)

  • Jessica Ruston said on March 7th, 2009:

    Totally agree re point 4. People (and by people, I mainly mean writing types, because most normal people, quite rightly, don’t give much of a toss) get their knickers in too much of a twist about whichever fiddly subdivision of a genre something should fit in. It’s something that happens after the fact and is decided by marketing bods and bookshelvers, more than writers.

    Also agree re the ‘What If?’ aspect of writing novels in general – it’s one of the most interesting things to me. A bit like, don’t write what you know, write what you want to know…

  • Cheryl said on March 7th, 2009:

    Very briefly (because cleverer people that me have written whole books on thus sort of thing):

    Thought one: not exactly. Spec fic is defined by the fact that it is not mimetic – that is it does not attempt to mimic the real world. Straight Gernsbackian SF certainly clings to the “what if” model, but many fantasy writers would, I think, deny that there is any “what if” about what they do.

    Thought two: no. What ticks off the literary establishment about spec fic is that it is it is not mimetic. They have chronic failure of suspension of disbelief and cannot accept any writing not set “in the real world”. When you think about it, this is really rather ironic, because all fiction is made up and much mainstream fiction is pretty unrealistic even when it is mimetic. Nevertheless, many mainstream critics are stuck in a mode of thinking that anything that is “not real” is for children and adults should have grown out of it.

    Thought three: You know, you might want to leave Freud out of this, because lots of mainstream critics seem to think that a devotion to spec fic is a sign of immaturity.

    Thought four: partially. Yes, they are marketing categories, but also all forms of literature have conventions and tropes that they use, and that to some extent each reader expects. If someone buys a crime novel she will be disappointed if there is no mystery, or if the detective doesn’t solve it in the end. Imaginative writers naturally strain against these restrictions, while marketing people tend to encourage “more like this”.

  • James Smythe said on March 7th, 2009:

    Interesting point about the gene therapy for HIV etc – does this mean that future booksellers will have to lug books from their designated sections in their shops? Speculative fiction surely thrives off those ideas that could, one day, materialise – why speculate at all if you don’t secretly assume that it could (NOT will) happen? – and surely the greatest honour for a writer would be to have their seemingly-insane prediction come true?

    But then, looking at the SciFi I’ve read over the past few years, whilst much of it falls under the Iain M Banks banner of ‘intelligent alien civilisations’, almost every other bit of the rest comes from the general fiction section of the bookshop. Time Traveller’s Wife? Yiddish Policeman’s Union? Both SciFi, but not scary SciFi. They don’t dabble in the numbers of the whys and wherefores, they give you a situation and tell you to go along with it. The Road? It gives you a situation, and doesn’t expect any more of you. There’s no maths, no physics, no extra worry for the reader other than the “What happened?” question. As you say, people will hoard from anywhere, and there’s no distinction in an author’s mind… Until, perhaps, it comes to selling that novel.

    Agents regularly say “Please, No SciFi”, and force you to sit there and work out exactly what it is that you’ve written. Say you have a character who wakes up twenty years in the past. That’s the central conceit, that’s the gimmick. There’s no facts and figures or complicated scientific explanations. They just wake up there, and then some stuff happens to them. Is that SciFi? Should you sell it as SciFi? If that story ends up being about, I don’t know, preventing himself being abused as a child, much of the novel being a meditation on the effects of that abuse, written in a very heavy lit-fiction style, is it still SciFi? Would your publisher want to sell it as SciFi? I would imagine not.

    My mother read the Time Traveller’s Wife, and loved it. Would she have read it if I have described it to her? Probably not. But she liked the cover and got told it was a great love story etc, so the SciFi was almost secondary. And the literary crowd are the same. Look at Self, at Auster: they’ve done very little but write SciFi their entire careers and yet nobody ever takes them to task for it, or sticks them at the back of the bookshop.

  • Nick Harkaway said on March 7th, 2009:

    Cheryl – “many fantasy writers would, I think, deny that there is any “what if” about what they do.”

    Well, they might, but writers don’t always (alas) get to tell people what they do and make it stick. And (even more alas) they’re not always right.

    “What ticks off the literary establishment about spec fic is that it is it is not mimetic. They have chronic failure of suspension of disbelief and cannot accept any writing not set “in the real world”.”

    Well, except that they do all the time – the same people who would be horrified at the suggestion they should read Ken MacLeod would be appalled at the idea they hadn’t read Orwell and Huxley. I think it’s a figleaf…

    “You know, you might want to leave Freud out of this, because lots of mainstream critics seem to think that a devotion to spec fic is a sign of immaturity.”

    That would definitely be a problem for them. I ain’t scared of no Freud…

    James – basically, yes.

  • Cheryl said on March 7th, 2009:

    Hmm, let’s try to be clearer on that. In Gernsbackian SF the “what if” (what Darko Suvin calls a “novum”) is the point of the story. (Gernsback would define SF even more tightly than that, but let’s not go there). A fantasy writer may set a story in a pseudo-mediaeval world in which elves and magic exist, but that’s not the point of the story. Some of those stories could easily be set in the “real” middle ages. The fantasy writer is not asking “what if there were elves in 12th Century France”.

    And yes, you are right, it is a fig leaf. The thing about defining spec fic as “for kids” is that once a book has been accepted into the canon it is, by definition, not for kids. That’s why you see so many silly statements that the likes of Orwell, Huxley, Atwood, Mitchell, etc. are “not science fiction”.

    There’s a sort of weird cycle here whereby anything with spaceships and ray guns must be “science fiction” and therefore “for kids” and therefore “not literature”, except if it is good in which case it must not be “for kids” and therefore can’t be “science fiction”.

    In many cases what mainstream critics mean when they say “science fiction” is “badly written pulp aimed at children”. If it isn’t that then it can’t be “science fiction”.

    We don’t all mean the same thing by the words we use.

  • Nick Harkaway said on March 7th, 2009:

    Ohhhh, yes. And that whole SF=bad pulp thing is the reason why many well-established authors are windy about fessing up when they dip a toe in the waters of SF. They are (rightly) scared of getting dismissed.

    The odd thing about that is that the pulp tradition itself – in the sense of ‘authors writing at speed for money and making it up as they go along’ includes Dickens, Conan Doyle, and Chandler (although Chandler notoriously couldn’t bring himself to write pulp properly and spent too much time on his pulp stories, with the result that we get some great fiction and he didn’t make any money from it.)

    And another odd thing: the pulps were often a place where you could reference things which the mainstream wasn’t able to cope with – issues of sexuality and political thought which were forbidden topics in the everyday.

    The pulp tradition produced a whole lot of nasty, ill-conceived, heteropatriarchal rubbish (but as we know, 90% of everything is rubbish, and even some of the rubbish is fun) but it also gave a voice to a lot of underdogs and so on, and should be celebrated on that basis alone.

    Off to do some Saturday things – everyone: keep it coming!

  • Foz Meadows said on March 7th, 2009:

    Cheryl – I totally agree that when it comes to sci fi/fantasy that the Establishment finally agrees is good, they have difficult acknowledging that it is also, simultaneously, fantasy. J.K. Rowling poses a very interesting example: note how the Harry Potter books, since their success, have been increasingly touted as Classics (which, yes, they are) but often at the expense of having their genre identified.

    Let’s go a step further: I find it curious that Classics, while not actually a genre, is nonetheless a section unto itself in most bookshops, implying…what? That once a book acheives a certain popularity, grandeur, familiarity, longevity, it relinquishes the right to a creative origin? I realise I was arguing earlier against the prescriptiveness of calling a book this thing or that, but the Classics moniker is almost as bad. Especially at school, calling anything a Classic makes it seem stuffy, old: it puts otherwise vibrant titles into the dustjacket equivalent of tweed, ushering the startled narrative into a dark room full of similarly attired works, all drinking brandy and smoking cigars in their ageing leathern armchairs.

    Too often, now, books are called Classics in lieu of being described: it’s like joining a club where, once membership has been bestowed, the requirement to continue proving either one’s worth or relevance is dropped. Times change, tastes change, and while I think we should always try to encourage the reading of older works, to preserve them and read them in context, and to acknowledge that even when certain writing modes go out of fashion, their stories remain pertinent, this whole ludicrous distinction between Modern or New Classics and Classic Classics makes the notion seem, well…silly.

  • Annie Chapman said on March 7th, 2009:

    This has certainly turned into an interesing discussion!

    Cheryl- “Nevertheless, many mainstream critics are stuck in a mode of thinking that anything that is “not real” is for children and adults should have grown out of it.”

    “There’s a sort of weird cycle here whereby anything with spaceships and ray guns must be “science fiction” and therefore “for kids” and therefore “not literature”, except if it is good in which case it must not be “for kids” and therefore can’t be “science fiction”.”

    Thought you might find this interesting:

    It may be worth considering an AQA A level literature exam paper from January 2007. You don’t get much more establishment than an exam board after all. http://store.aqa.org.uk/qual/gceasa/qp-ms/AQA-LTB6-W-PM-JAN07.PDF
    This pre release material includes Bradbury’s The murder and critics’ views on his work. A number of the critics’ views they include talk of Bradbury’s work as science fiction. This paper clearly acknowledges Bradbury’s work should be considered as science fiction although it does encourage them to consider a wide range of approaches. Seeing as this paper is aimed at 18 year olds I think the exam board can therefore be seen as considering science fiction to be as worthy of study by adults as, say Dickens and Wordsworth (who have also appeared in this exam in other years). Perhaps the establishment are not as narrow minded as you think. It’s quite refreshing for an exam board to rise above our expectations of the establishment I think!

  • Annie Chapman said on March 7th, 2009:

    or even The Murderer- I should check what I write (like I tell the kids)!

  • Cheryl said on March 7th, 2009:

    Foz:

    If something has a special section in a bookstore it is either because the store things some people might be offended to find it in the “general” section, or that the store things people might want to be able to find it easily without having to wade through piles of other stuff. Everything that bookstores do has a commercial reason.

  • Jeanne said on March 7th, 2009:

    Have you read Michael Chabon’s essays Maps and Legends? You seem to be thinking along some of the same lines. What I like about some of those essays is that they argue for less division between types of fiction. More novels that can’t be easily categorized. You’ve been so obliging there.

  • Cheryl said on March 7th, 2009:

    Annie:

    Exam boards are strange animals. Some of them seem to have agendas. Some of them think they should concentrate on things that will appear to young people. Others are deeply conservative. When I was in school we had to study Wells, Wyndham and Bradbury, as well as Dickens, Austen and Hardy. But it was a state school. It was also a very long time ago.

  • Foz Meadows said on March 8th, 2009:

    Cheryl: Yes. But I still find this problematic.

  • Journey into Links « Torque Control said on March 9th, 2009:

    [...] Speaking of Graham, he was on the radio last week, discussing Philip K Dick on Night Waves with Nick Harkaway. You can listen to the relevant edition of the programme here (starts at 34 minutes; not sure if that’ll be accessible outside the UK), and Harkaway made a follow-up post about “Speculative, Science, Literary … and the next word is ‘Fiction’” here. [...]

  • Nick Harkaway said on March 12th, 2009:

    I haven’t read Maps & Legends, but I’m a big Chabon fan. Will seek it out…

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