Thus: myths are stories that are central to their cultures and that are taken seriously enough that people organize their ritual and emotional lives around them, and can even start wars over them. Such stories go underground, as it were, when the core statements about truth and reality repeated in the stories cease to be entirely, factually believed. But they then emerge in other guises, such as Art, or political ideologies.
Or films like Avatar. Or books like The Left Hand of Darkness. For every question that myths address, SF has addressed also. Indeed, it’s arguable that this form and its subforms have subsumed the mythic areas abandoned by literature after the meta-theological poetics of Paradise Lost and the meta-theological fabulations of The Pilgrim’s Progress and the extended theology-based other-world-building of William Blake’s long “prophecies.”
Before going into specifics, I’ll say a little about the history of the term science fiction. This label brings together two terms you’d think would be mutually exclusive, since science—from scientia, meaning knowledge—is supposed to concern itself with demonstrable facts, and fiction—which derives from the Latin root verb fingere, meaning to mould, devise, or feign—denotes a thing that is invented. With science fiction, one term is often thought to cancel out the other. Thus such books may be judged as factual predictions, with the fiction part—the story, the characters, the invention component—rendering them useless for anyone who really wants to get a grip on, say, space travel or nanotechnology. On the other hand, they may be treated the way W. C. Fields treated golf when he spoke of it as a good walk spoiled—that is, the books are seen as fictional narratives cluttered up with too much esoteric geek material, when they should have stuck to describing the social and sexual interactions among Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, only in futuristic clothing.
Jules Verne, a granddaddy of science fiction—in its broadest sense—on the paternal side, and the author of such works as Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, was horrified by the liberties taken by H. G. Wells, who, unlike Verne, did not confine himself to machines that were within the realm of possibility—such as the submarine—but created other machines—such as the time machine—that were quite obviously not. “Il invente!” Jules Verne is said to have said, with vast disapproval. He himself invented too, it must be said. But not quite so wildly.
Before the term science fiction became generally used, in America, in the 1930s, during the golden age of bug-eyed monsters and girls in brass brassieres, stories such as H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds were labelled scientific romances. In both terms—scientific romance and science fiction—the science element is a qualifier. The nouns are romance and fiction, and the word fiction covers a lot of ground.
In the mid-twentieth century we got into the habit of calling all examples of long prose fiction “novels,” and of measuring them by standards used to evaluate one particular kind of long prose fiction, namely the kind that treats of individuals embedded in a realistically described social milieu. This convention emerged with the work of Daniel Defoe—who tried to pass his inventions off as true-story journalism—and that of Samuel Richardson and Fanny Burney and Jane Austen during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and which was then developed by George Eliot and Charles Dickens and Flaubert and Tolstoy, and many more, in the mid- and late-nineteenth century.
This kind of work is found superior if it has so-called “round” characters—characters with psychological complications and moods and introspections—rather than “flat” ones who run around having narrow escapes and shooting people, round ones being thought to have more of what we call “depth.” Anything that doesn’t fit this mode has been shoved into an area of lesser solemnity called “genre fiction,” and it is here that the spy thriller and the crime story and the adventure story and the supernatural tale and the science fiction, however excellently written, must reside, sent to their rooms—as it were—for the misdemeanour of being enjoyable in what is considered a meretricious way. They invent, and we all know they invent, at least up to a point, and they are therefore not about Real Life, which ought to lack coincidences and weirdness and action/adventure—unless the adventure story is about war, of course, where anything goes—and they are therefore not solid.
The novel proper has always laid claim to a certain kind of truth—the truth about human nature, or how people really behave with all their clothes on except in the bedroom—that is, under observable social conditions. The “genres,” it is thought, have other designs on us. They want to entertain, as opposed to rubbing our noses in the daily grit produced by the daily grind. Unhappily for realistic novelists, the larger reading public likes being entertained. There’s a poverty-stricken writer in George Gissing’s masterpiece, New Grub Street, who commits suicide after the failure of his slice-of-life realistic novel entitled Mr. Bailey, Grocer. New Grub Street came out at the height of the craze for such adventure romance novelties as H. Rider Haggard’s She and the scientific romances of H. G. Wells, and Mr. Bailey, Grocer—if it had been a real novel—would have had a thin time of it with reviewers and readers alike. If you think this can’t happen now, take a look at the sales figures of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi—pure adventure-romance—and Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, ditto, and the long-running vampiramas of Anne Rice and the Twilight series, and Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife. All of them are romances rather than realistic novels proper.
The setting of the realistic novel is Middle Earth, and the middle of Middle Earth is, roughly, the middle class, and the hero and heroine are usually within the desirable norms. As publishers’ readers so often say, “We like these people.” Grotesque variations on the desirable norms appear, of course, but they take the form not of evil talking clams or werewolves or space aliens but of folks with sad character defects or strange disabilities or no incomes. Ideas about—for instance—untried forms of social organization are introduced, if at all, through conversations among the characters, or in the form of diary or reverie, rather than being dramatized, as they are in the utopia and the dystopia.
In novels proper the central characters are placed for us in social space by being given parents and relatives, however unsatisfactory or dead these may be at the outset of the story. These central characters don’t just appear out of thin air as fully grown adults, the way adventure heroes are likely to do (Sherlock Holmes has no parents); rather they are provided with a past, a history. The past accounts in part for the character’s inner problems, or conflicts, thus making him or her round enough to pass muster. This sort of fiction concerns itself with the conscious waking state, and if a man changes into an arthropod in such a book, he’ll do so only in a nightmare.
It is up to fantasists such as Franz Kafka and Gogol to give us masterpieces in which—for instance—a man’s nose becomes separated from his face and takes up independent life as a government bureaucrat, as in Gogol’s “The Nose,” or Gregor wakes up one morning to find he has become a beetle, as in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. (There is some academic literature devoted to what sort of beetle; I myself am inclined to think it was not a beetle as such but a house centipede.)
Thus, not all prose fictions are novels in the stick-to-realism sense of the word. A book can be a prose fiction without being a novel. The Pilgrim’s Progress, although a prose narrative and a fiction, was not intended as a “novel”; when it was written, such things did not exactly exist. It’s a romance—a story about the adventures of a hero—coupled with an allegory—the stages of the Christian life. (It’s also one of the precursors of science fiction, although not often recognized as such.) Here are some other prose-fiction forms that are not novels proper: The confession. The symposium. The Menippean satire, or anatomy. The extended fable. And what, exactly, is Don Quixote? And what is Moby-Dick? They’re stories, or they contain stories, but are they novels? In fact, the further back we stand from prose fictions—taking them all in, as it were—the fewer of them are “novels” in the nineteenth-century-r
ealist sense of that word.
Nathaniel Hawthorne deliberately called some of his fictions “romances,” to distinguish them from novels. What he might have been thinking of was the tendency of the romance form to use a somewhat more obvious degree of patterning than the novel was thought to do—the blond heroine versus her dark alter ego, for instance, as in Ivanhoe and the romances of Fenimore Cooper. The French have two words for the short story—conte and nouvelle—“the tale” and “the news”—and this is a useful distinction. The tale can be set anywhere, and can move into realms that are off-limits for the realistic novel—into the cellars and attics of the mind, where figures that can appear in novels only as dreams and fantasies take actual shape and walk the earth. “The news,” however, is news of us; it’s the daily news, as in “daily life.” There can be car crashes and shipwrecks in the news, but there are not likely to be any Frankenstein monsters; not, that is, until someone in “daily life” actually manages to create one.
Fiction can of course bring us other kinds of news; it can speak, as does Yeats’s golden nightingale, of “what is past, or passing, or to come.” When you’re writing about what is to come, you could be engaged in journalism of the dire-warning sort—elect that bastard, build that dam, drop that bomb, burn that carbon, and all hell will break loose. Such journalism is expected to confine its range to observable factors. In the nineteenth century, Tennyson wrote a poem called “Locksley Hall,” which appeared to predict—among other things—the age of airplanes, and which contains the line “For I dip’t into the future, far as human eye can see”; but no one can really do that. The future can never be truly predicted because there are too many variables. You can, however, dip into the present, which contains the seeds of what might become the future. As William Gibson of Neuromancer and cyber-punk fame said, “The future is already with us, it’s just unevenly distributed.” So, in forecast journalism, you can look at a lamb and make an educated guess, such as, “If nothing unexpected happens to this lamb along the way, it will most likely become (a) a sheep or (b) your dinner.” But you will probably exclude (c) a giant wool-covered monster that will crush New York.
However, if your writing about the future isn’t forecast journalism, it will most likely be something people will call either science fiction or speculative fiction. The terms are fluid, as we’ve seen. Some use speculative fiction as an umbrella covering science fiction and all its hyphenated forms—science-fiction fantasy and so forth—and others choose the reverse. SF novels of course can set themselves in parallel imagined realities, or long ago, and/or on planets far away. But all these locations have something in common: they don’t exist, and their non-existence is of a different order than the non-existence of the realistic novel’s Bobs and Carols and Teds and Alices.
Here are some of the things SF narratives can do that “novels” as usually defined cannot do.
They can explore the consequences of new and proposed technologies in graphic ways by showing them as fully operational. We’ve always been good at letting cats out of bags and genies out of bottles and plagues out of Pandora’s Box: we just haven’t been very good at putting them back in again. These stories in their darker modes are all versions of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” in which the apprentice starts up some of the sorcerer’s magic but doesn’t know how to turn it off. They may help us to decide whether such apprentices could maybe use a little supervision.
They can explore the nature and limits of what it means to be human in very explicit ways, by pushing the human envelope as far as it will go in the direction of the not-quite-human. Are the robots in Čapek’s R.U.R. human? They make a good case for their rights. Are the Stepford Wives human? How about the replicants in Blade Runner, or the beast folk in The Island of Doctor Moreau?
These are scary or creepy examples. But on the other hand, such quasi-humans can take more positive forms that help us to understand and navigate differences. In such fictions, the characters may diverge from the standard human model—Data in Star Trek, the gifted mutants in John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids and the one in Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, the Martians in The Martian Chronicles, Octavia Butler’s Oankali—but they are viewed sympathetically.
SF narratives can also interrogate social organization by showing what things might be like if we rearranged them. Sometimes they are used primarily as a way of reconsidering gender structures. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, John Wyndham’s Consider Her Ways, W. H. Hudson’s A Crystal Age, the works of Joanna Russ, Sheri Tepper’s The Gate to Women’s Country, and many of Ursula K. Le Guin’s stories have this end in view.
But SF has also abounded in a subgenre we might call “economic SF”—Bellamy’s industrial romance, Looking Backward, which anticipated the credit card, is one of these, but so is William Morris’s socialistic News from Nowhere. Such stories, whatever else they may be doing in the way of redesigning women’s clothing (sexier, less sexy) or putting food on the table (more, less; tastier, horrible), have as their central focus the production and distribution of goods and the allocation of economic benefits among various social classes.
In this respect they may use SF conventions as a semi-disguise or decorative front whereby they may criticize the present-day governments and institutions of the writer’s own society when overt criticism might prove dangerous or fatal. Yevgeny Zamyatin, an early Bolshevik who saw Big Brother coming, used SF for this purpose in We, and Judith Merril and her generation of writer friends took to SF during the McCarthy era in the United States because they felt that bald statements of dissent would invite retribution.
Finally, SF stories can explore the outer reaches of the imagination by taking us boldly where no man has gone before, or indeed ever. Thus the spaceship, thus the inner realms of Fantastic Voyage, thus the cyberspace trips of William Gibson, and thus the trips between two realities in the film The Matrix—this last, by the way, an adventure romance with strong overtones of Christian allegory, and thus more closely related to The Pilgrim’s Progress than to Pride and Prejudice.
In the process of such explorations, SF may create patterns that purport to depict the relationship of man to the universe, a depiction that takes us in the direction of religion and ultimately into the preoccupations of metaphysics and mythologies—the dispositions of gods, spirits, and demons, the origins of the universe and of the people or entities that comprise its societies, the longed-for or feared spiritual landscapes or territories, and the nature of psychic enemies. Again, this is something that can happen within the conventions of fictional realism only through conversations, reveries, stories told within stories, hallucinations, or dreams.
I’m far from the first commentator to note that science fiction is where theologically linked phenomena and reasonable facsimiles of them went after Paradise Lost. The form has often been used as a way of acting out a theological doctrine, as—for instance—Dante’s Divine Comedy was once used. I’m thinking especially of C. S. Lewis’s “space trilogy,” Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength, which rings the changes on the Fall of Man, Original Sin, and the possibilities of redemption, but there are by now many other examples. The religious resonances in such films as Star Wars are more than obvious.
Why this migration of the West’s more recent founding mythologies—our once-essential core stories of the Judeo-Christian era—from Earth to Planet X? Possibly because—as a society—we no longer believe in the old religious furniture, or not enough to make it part of our waking “realistic” life. If you have a conversation with the Devil and admit to it, you’re liable to end up in a psychiatric ward, not sizzling at the stake. Supernatural creatures with wings and burning bushes that speak are unlikely to be encountered in a novel about stockbrokers unless the stockbrokers have been taking mind-altering substances. But such creatures are thoroughly at home on Planet X.
So that’s why Heaven and Hell—or at least some of the shapes their inhabitants have traditionally taken—have gone
to Planet X. A lot of the other gods and heroes have gone there as well. They’ve moved shop because they’re acceptable to us there, whereas they wouldn’t be here. On Planet X they can take part in a plausible story—plausible, that is, within its own otherworldly parameters. And many of us are more than willing to engage with them there because—say some theorists—our own deep inner selves still contain the archetypal patterns that produced them.
NOTES
1. Stanislaw Lem, Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, originally published in Cracow, 1971; Avon translation by Michael Kandel and Christine Rose. Quotation, page 10.
2. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, (Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 49.
3. M. R. James: see, for instance, Tales of an Antiquary.
4. Donovan’s Brain is by Curt Siodmak. The Kraken Wakes is by John Wyndham.
5. Jane Austen: Thus the frisson produced by such titles as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
6. Denis Dutton, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution (Oxford University Press, 2009).
7. Season-linked story cycle: For a good late-Victorian example, see William Morris, The Earthly Paradise.
8. Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, from the film of that name.
9. Yeats’s nightingale: in “Sailing to Byzantium.”
10. Judith Merril: Told to this author.
Dire Cartographies:
The Roads to Ustopia
What we call places are stable locations with unstable converging forces.
REBECCA SOLNIT, Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas
… after WWII utopia was no longer just a synonym for naiveté. It was dangerous. Now, decades further on, in a new century and a new millennium, earnest utopian thought and earnest utopians are a glowing ember at best, and utopia’s legion failures seem to suggest that the best course of action would be to crush it—snuff it for good.
In Other Worlds Page 6