Even though you won't admit it. You too, hold out for a better world for your children tomorrow. In some tomorrow, on some planet, at some time. Soon...
Why? Because we are all dreamers at heart.
This is what 'Speculative Fiction' is about.
Raymond M. Coulombe of Quantum Muse
What is Speculative Fiction? The classic answer is that it's the fiction of 'what if?' What if we had a time machine? What if we had faster than light travel? What if there was a codified reliable system of magick? What if we had honest government?
For me, that is a nice place to start, and whole careers have been made writing nothing but 'what if?' stories. Writers could do worse. Sadly, many do.
As an editor at Quantum Muse, I also like to print speculative fiction that fits the 'what the f**k!' category. Think of those stories that are more edgy, perhaps weird, and maybe more than a little disturbing. There may be overtones of science fiction, fantasy, or horror, but the story does not fit comfortable into any one of those categories. At Quantum Muse, about a third of each issue is in our 'alternative' category. Sure, about half of those could be shoehorned into an established category, but for the rest, there is no place but alternative.
We see a lot of them. We've printed stories that other publications would not touch, not because they were bad stories, but because they just didn't fit established norms.
Which brings me to a sad point. Science fiction and fantasy are old. The ruts are deep and it takes an act of will to jump the tracks and really do something speculative. The conventions are so well established that it's speculative to make time travel impossible, space travel relegated to slower than light, and to have wizards whose magick doesn't really work all that well or at all. Wouldn't that be weird. Edgy. Alternative even. Tough to do though, but's that's what separates the truly gifted from the hacks.
For me, speculative fiction sees the world with new eyes. It can hit like a boot to the head. It can slowly invade your mind, like an infestation of termites that slowly chew away at your supports. Or it can surprise with unexpected delight, like striking a monster and discovering it's just a big Pinata. Speculative fiction is the fiction of unlimited possibilities.
To misquote the U. S. Supreme Court, 'I can't quite define it, but I know it when I see it.’
Consciousness, Literature, and Science Fiction, by Kathleen Ann Goonan
This article explores the connections between language, literature, and consciousness. The first section discusses the possible origins of literature. Section two focuses on the literature of the twentieth century and how it reflects a change in the way reality was perceived by a great portion of the scientifically and culturally informed public. It includes a discussion of C.P. Snow’s “The Two Cultures” lecture given at Cambridge in 1959, which explicated a split between the ways in which science and literature perceived reality after Einstein’s revolutionary early papers, and relates this to Stephen Pinker’s contention, in The Blank Slate, that the trends of Modernism and Postmodernism have impeded the scientific sophistication of both the general reading public and academe. The conclusion points to science fiction as an important literature, which links these, two cultures.
“(Stanislaw) Lem suggests that it is within such realms of storiness that we live out individual and collective lives, using words to create reality as we go along . . . . there seems to be no escape from storiness. Telling/writing and hearing/reading tales seem to give us ourselves and guarantee that we exist.” 1
i Language, Consciousness, and Literature
Language and its more permanent sister, literature, attest to the existence of that which we call consciousness in ourselves and in others. Literature springs from that ability which most defines us as humans: language. Language could be said to be the truest indication and reflection of consciousness, since consciousness is shot through with and almost indivisible from language. Our innermost thoughts reverberate with unsaid words, fleeting fragments of supposition, memories, plans. Literature is consciousness rendered portable and transferable, a potent key to the nature of consciousness, its fellow traveller since the dawn of recorded thought. The origins of language, the use of symbols, and the flourishing of literature are intertwined in a single braid.
We are a communicative species. The very basis of our form of consciousness, our awareness of our own existence in time, is posited on feedback. For virtually all of us, much feedback is in the form of language, and we have developed ways to use even touch to decipher it.
We are also storytellers. Our feedback is not limited to information about our immediate environment, like the biological feedback of microbes, bees, or even other mammals. Instead, our stories can be as precise and limited as records of crops harvested and taxed, or as emotionally complicated as a Shakespeare play. We all shape reality through narrative. The schoolchild tells her father what happened in kindergarten, fashioning a story, remembering it, re-animating it, casting what may have been pure motion and pure thought into words, and at the same time finding out that her report becomes, in some measure, what actually happened--because what really happened is gone. Many stories are necessary to survival, as we are communal animals: it is important that we coordinate our efforts, and try to avoid coming to blows and sapping the resources of the community with physical recovery or with permanent loss of vital skills. Human history, and presentday politics, is a grievous record of what happens when speech fails, or when our stories are not rendered in a persuasive fashion. By externalizing our stories and recording them, we have been able to accumulate vast stores of information crucial to our survival as a species, and have virtually taken over the earth and its resources for our own use.
Through sharing a system of meaning-packed symbols, humans have created cultures, civilizations, and sciences far too complex for any single one of us to remember or use in its entirety.
Once we acquired a certain facility with language, and particularly in creating a record of language, our rootedness and isolation in time was banished, or at least tremendously modified. Chunks of time--subjective time, at least, which Einstein showed is really the only kind of time--can be moved from mind to mind. We transform what is fleeting— verbalized thought—into a concrete object to which we can return again and again without loss or degradation of the original information, thereby making it possible to record edifices of complex reasoning. Moreover, we are able to combine these elements in an infinitely variable manner. It is this ability to signify, to modify the signals, to delight in their plasticity and rhythmic beauty, and to record them that sets us apart from the rest of the living world.
Literature, though, is more self-aware than mere storytelling. It is a deliberate placing of word against word until there is an edifice of thought, an exercise almost impossible unless one has not only a symbolic system, but also the means to re-create and preserve symbols. Literature--from the Latin for “letter”--is external, communal consciousness, loosed from dependence on one frail biological entity and from that person’s limited lifespan. It is representative of time lived--real or fictional--and has the power to free both the writer and the reader, if not from time itself, then from a limited sense of time. Memory--accessed by an object, a vision, a flavor--is explored, recast as empowering myth, a warning fable, a rich expansion of our own time to include a fictional other’s sense of life; another’s consciousness. We can invent as many new conjunctions of event and emotion as there are moments of awareness. This exploration of temporality—and our conquering of it, at least in some measure—is one of the most important aspects of literature. Utterly dependent upon time, we are biological orchestrations that fall apart when any one of billions of exquisitely timed biochemical interactions is disrupted. Our seeming freedom from this dependency when we use language to go forward, backwards, and sideways in the strange medium of time, space, and biology from which we spring, is the heart of literature’s power. Literature is the conscious manipulation of metanarratives, and is arguably the art fo
rm closest to consciousness itself, as authors concern themselves with trying to represent the thoughts of their characters.
The sense of self is a sense of movement, a constant calculus, as Buckminster Fuller proclaimed when he stated, “I am a verb.” Even when we do not move, as in sleep, we dream motion. Literature is like a dream in that the motion therein is also purely cerebral, and invites us into, and infuses us with, the temporal dreams of others. Some dreams we find so real, so compelling, so truthful, that we revere the dream and the dreamer, the book and the author, the tribal tale and the bard. In dreams, we live outside of time; the stuff of our lives is compressed, rearranged, by a facility which we do not seem to control. Literature gives us control of the image-and-thought-stream of life and our representations of life, our stories.
ii The Two Cultures
But language is slippery, non-objective; not easily revealing repeatedly verifiable information, as does science. It is not even composed of irreducible symbols, and is, in fact, completely composed of metaphor. Words stand for something else; the Oxford English Dictionary is simply a compilation of exhaustive lists of examples of word usage, and the astonishing mutability thereof, through time. In the timestream of words, meaning ebbs, flows, changes. Perhaps this has something to do with the present splintered state of affairs between what C.P. Snow called, in his 1959 Rede lecture at Cambridge, “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.”2 His subject was the difference between those who study words--which are exclusively the product of the human mind, and the shifting ways in which they can be assembled--and those who study the rest of nature. To describe what they have observed, scientists have invented new languages and borrowed the language of mathematics. But until recently, the study of consciousness was not seriously attempted by science. With the advent of the attempt to quantify consciousness, an intersection of these two cultures is not only useful, but inevitable.
Snow, a research scientist who worked with Lord Rutherford at the Cavendish Laboratory in the 1930’s as well as a successful novelist, states in his talk, “Literary intellectuals (are) at one pole--at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two, a gulf of mutual incomprehension – sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding. They have a curious distorted image of each other. Their attitudes are so different that, even on the level of emotion, they can’t find much common ground.”3
Peter Watson, in The Modern Mind,4 points out that although the arts incorporated the sciences during the first half of the twentieth century, art did not feed into the sciences in any meaningful way. Though it now seems obvious that this should be the case, this split is actually a new thing in history. Information and connections in the sciences gained phenomenal velocity beginning in the late nineteenth century. It was not until decades later that anyone in the sciences even tried to communicate the depth and importance of what they were about, although the fruits of what they were learning, in the form of technological change, were everywhere.
In his book The Blank Slate,5 Stephen Pinker blames the Modernists and Postmodernists for the insularity of the humanities in academe, for the fact that the “two cultures” of science and the humanities have grown so far apart. He also states that, in the main, those in the humanities would have the hardest time accepting that there is a genetic basis for much of who we are and what we do. He takes particular note of Virginia Woolf’s 1924 essay, “Character in Fiction,” (though he references “Mr. Bennett and Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” an essay which, in its originally published form in 1923, did not contain this phrase) in which she states . . . “on or about December 10 1910 human nature changed.”6 Pinker says, “She was referring to the new philosophy of Modernism that would dominate the elite arts and criticism for much of the twentieth century, and whose denial of human nature was carried over with a vengeance to Postmodernism, which seized control in its later decades… Woolf was wrong. Human nature did not change in 1910, or in any year thereafter.”7 Pinker assumes that “the philosophy of Modernism” was a largely artificial movement made up out of whole cloth by Woolf and other arbiters of taste--essayists, critics, and artists.
The situation is actually a bit more complex. Although Pinker insists that, because of their evolved biological traits, humans prefer art that includes understandable landscapes, recognizable human faces, and novels that tell stories in the traditional fashion, it seems obvious that whatever Modernism and Postmodernism are, appreciation of them springs from biological roots as much as does appreciation of simpler modes of communication.
He downplays another interpretation of the changes in the human psyche which Modernism concretely manifested – the fact that, due to changes in knowledge about ourselves and the world, and the use of new technologies which emerged from this knowledge, our reflection of these changes in art, literature, and architecture became radically new. Art emerges from humans, from some mysterious stratum intermingled with consciousness in ways which sometimes elude direct awareness. Art that is purely intellectual and calculated rarely finds as large an audience as did Modernism in all of its manifestations.
Pinker’s blame of literature for the intellectual impasse at which we find ourselves, and in particular the contention that Modernism and Postmodernism “caused” this impasse, are in some respects straw men. Science and the humanities differ in fundamental ways, particularly in the fashion in which they approach fact and knowing. Yet, it is in journals such as the one in which this paper appears that differences between “The Two Cultures” can be discussed so that there can begin to be a melding of the richnesses and insights of these two cultures, to everyone’s benefit. Just as scientific progress in many fields, including that of consciousness studies, is crippled by lack of communication between specialized, but extremely knowledgeable people, so the idea that human progress in all academic fields can be given a boost by a cross-culturization of information seems plausible. It might, therefore, be useful to have more information about the change Woolf noticed, and how the change--if not in human character, then perhaps a change in what people thought of as human character, came about.
Literature reflects zeitgeist; the spirit of the age is embedded in every literature that has ever been produced. Literary forms change as societal views change. Our modes of thought and representations of such are directly related to the culture in which they arise, whether that be medieval Germany or Postmodern America.
In 1913, seven years before Woolf published her observations, the Italian futurist F.T. Marinetti wrote about
“…The complete renewal of human sensibility brought about by the great discoveries of science. Those people who today make use of the telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, the train, the bicycle, the motorcycle, the automobile, the ocean liner, the dirigible, the aeroplane, the cinema, the great newspaper (synthesis of a day in the world’s life) do not realize that the various means of communication, transportation and information have a decisive influence on the psyche.”8
Even Henry James suggested that it is impossible for us to know how anyone in an age previous to the age when technology changed the human experience of time and space actually saw the world. And he further stated, in 1904, that “The notion that even the truest formula may be a human device and not a literal transcript has dawned on us.”9
To Virginia Woolf, the Post-Impressionist Exhibit of 1910 as well as the changes she observed in fiction were a testament to the changes that new scientific discoveries had brought about not in consciousness itself, which of course did not change, but in the contents of consciousness. A new lens through which to view the world and human nature had come into existence, and this new way of seeing time, space, matter, and human nature, as well as the new technologies thereby spawned, necessarily changed humanity, as Marinetti observed.
The Moderns (who for the use of this paper are mainly James, Woolf, Proust, Joyce, Stein, and Eliot, though there were
many more, both major and minor) realized that great changes were afoot; they lived through them and had the need to express their observations.
Artists are like the canary in the coal mine, but instead of being harbingers of doom, they are, instead, often exquisitely attuned to the new. They have a need to eclipse previous boundaries. Of course, nothing can be completely new or else it would be unintelligible, a claim some make for Finnegan’s Wake, various forms of poetry, or extreme visual art. One’s ability to understand that which is on the edge in the arts depends, as does understanding of science, on previous training. For instance, the Modernism and Postmodernism that Pinker criticizes could be seen as utterly etiolated, and therefore unavailable to the uninitiated. Most people are not trained in appreciation of art and literature; there must be exposure, excitement, and, particularly in the appreciation of literature, adequate reading skills. This does not negate the fact that many people deeply enjoy literature, and, in particular, Modernist and Postmodernist work. If the vast majority of humanity prefers landscapes unlayered with meaning, or simple stories of vengeance that include a lot of explosions, or love stories with the usual complications, this does not mean that those who prefer more complexity are poseurs, as Pinker seems to insinuate. It only means that there are not many of them, just as there are relatively few astrophysicists, cutting edge biologists, and accomplished mathematicians. Those who are at the top of their field and inclined (or able) to communicate what they know in language understandable to laypeople are very few indeed. So it is, perhaps, with the biological predilection for the study of extreme literature. The pleasures are there to be experienced, but it is difficult to communicate the reasons for this pleasure to the uninitiated.
That which we know, or believe, about reality and about nature deeply informs society and, in its turn, literature and art. In the late nineteenth century, issues of class began to dissolve before the bare fact that evolution is the product of pure chance, and has no peak, no pinnacle. This theory is so counterintuitive that it is still not widely understood, and is rejected outright by more people than accept it. But Darwin’s radical work, which was a completely new way of looking at nature, seemed to remove theological and God from “Creation,” and had a huge influence on how people regarded themselves in relation to the rest of the natural world.
Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume One Page 2