11
Emma Russell
ENGL 317
Science Fiction
There are many ways to approach the genre of science fiction, and many opinions on where to draw its parameters. Some argue sf existed for hundreds of years as novels of fantasy and travel narratives; others maintain the necessary importance of the 18th century Industrial Revolution in the genre’s origins. In general the genre includes those stories that tell unlikely but plausible advances in the scientific fields; novels that explore the potential of current technological or genetic knowledge in future or alternate worlds. Generally not included are elements of fantasy or utopia; though several sub-genres have emerged that combine or transform these aspects, including science fantasy, steampunk, and cyberpunk. It can be studied it relates to other genre of the novel, how it has evolved since its birth, how it relates to the history of science and technology, how it has been transformed by the introduction of comic books, television shows, movies, internet, and other media, the national specificity or political implications of the genre, and the present and future potential of Science Fiction.
It is hard, certainly impossible, to name who or what represents that start of a genre like SF, just as it is difficult to say who wrote the first novel. Gary Wolfe’s Roundtable Discussion on the origins of science fiction, though staggering in the variety of responses, nonetheless represents only a handful of opinions on the parameters of the genre. The discussion series does provide a good jumping point into the field of Science Fiction studies and its many potential theoretical approaches. Some turn to authors and specific works, like Barbara Johnson does in her argument for Aphra Behn’s Oronooko as an important original novel. Members of the sf community point to Mary Shelley, H. G. Wells, Jonathan Swift, and even Descartes as foundational writers of the genre. Jane Donawerth argues that women writers had a large part to play, turning to utopian novels as a means of “reimaging[ing] their lives rather than recording their oppressions” (197). Her position reflects critics such as Armstrong and Gallagher who explored the gendered origins of the novel itself as means of creating “alternative worlds,” and the socio-political implications of the novel as a tool of both women and the dominant societal ideologies (197).
Brooks Landon brings up the “Noname” author of the dime novels popular at the turn of the 20th century, a pseudonym which brings to mind Gallagher’s discussion of the “nobodies” that make up a novel’s subjects (Landon, 198). If “nobodies” are the subjects of the novel, then perhaps “nonames” are the writers of science fiction - which means, by the same translation, that every reader can become the author of science fiction and the author of potential future change in their society. However the power of societal and techonological control can lead to disaster as well as success, as Landon clearly outlines with the potential dangers of racism and political agendas of the dime novels. Just as the novel itself held and was wielded as a socio-political tool, so did the sf novel play a role in society’s cultural and political agendas of the modern age.
Brian Aldiss, Adam Roberts, and George Slusser also explore the socio-historical contexts of the birth of science fiction, not unlike grand theorists such as Lukacs or Watt. They make connections between cultural notions of religion and science, generally agreeing on the place of science fiction in a society moving away from the authority of religion. It is an “antithesis to the thesis of the religiously-determined,” not unlike Lukacs’ claim about the novel’s place as the literature of a “society abandoned by god” (Roberts, 200, Lukacs, 203). The privileging of rationality, experimentation and scientific method over previous “moral” and “religious authority” represents a huge shift in the conception of humanity’s role in the world. It both “dethrones” the human race from the center of the universe, but also grants humanity, through science and innovation, ways of changing how “humans relate to the world” (Roberts, 199; Slusser 201).
Furthermore, this shifting notion of morality and human power with relation to scientific progress has incredible political, social, and theoretical implications. David Seed traces how the attitudes towards science fiction can reflect national attitudes towards political and social strategies, such as American “ambivalence and unease about the new imperil status of the USA” (200). Similarly, John Clute and H. Bruce Franklin explore the ways in which Science Fiction marks a conceptual change in society; the study of science fiction is “an exploration of the history of consciousness of our epoch” and the relationship of that change in consciousness to its material manifestations (Franklin, 197). Like viewing architectural ruins, sf makes us “contemplate our future”; the genre is centrally about an expansion in our awareness of time (Clute, 196). Thus Science Fiction not only makes possible scientific developments, but also opens up the field of possibilities to include the new territory of the future.
The expansive change in society and consciousness related to the birth of science fiction mirrors a similar change that occurred with the birth of the novel genre itself. In many ways, sf as a sub-genre reflects and intensifies the very monumental changes of the novel; or perhaps, as the novel has become a canonized form, the newness of sf brings those qualities back to our attention. The novel was, by nature and by name, something “new,” a literary expression of socio-historical movements and desires. Through an analysis of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Emily Anderson offers broader claims about the origin of the novel and its qualities of “newness.” Anderson argues that Aphra Behn stands as a forerunner in the creation of the “novel” form owing to her deliberate experimentation with form and content. The challenge was (and still is) how to do something new without losing the reader; that is, how an author creates newness that is also grounded and approachable.
The original challenge of the novel is, in essence, the challenge of science fiction: to create something the reader has never seen before but to which they can immediately relate. Behn accomplishes this by setting her story in the realm of the exotic and the unknown while supplying description rooted in the experience of the characters, through which the reader sees the world of the story. Oroonoko is a “tale of spectacle,” where the characters’ (and thus, the readers’) belief rests in repeated instances of physical, visual proof (5). Anderson suggests that “the new and strange remain unbelievable until they are witnessed, and verbal descriptions must be supported by physical evidence” (5). The novel’s strength resides in description validated through the eye; yet, Oroonoko constantly undermines the credibility of sight.
Ultimately Anderson suggests that the true challenge and skill of the novel is “both to represent and to preserve novelty” through the “vocabulary of excess” (13). The novel creates a world that is new to the reader through description, and then both demands that the reader believe in the world (by “seeing” it) while always remaining one step away from being fixed in the reader’s mind, demanding constant imagination. What Behn, and novel authors demand, is for the reader to see their worlds in our ‘mind’s eye’, as it were, where they can serve as the guiding but not limiting force of our interpretation and creativity (12). Science fiction hinges on this constant preservation and creation of newness, where the authors quite literally create entire worlds of their own. In order for the newness of each world to “work,” the reader has to accept the ongoing challenge of seeing and then imagining, taking in the given description and using that as a jumping point for further creation. Sf engages the reader in the process of creation to a point of extremes. Worlds of sf novels remain simultaneously exotic and unending, stages for the reader to participate in literally every aspect of life. And sf stories have adapted to every new development in technology, creating and preserving newness through video games, toys, costumes, movies, youtube videos, and especially websites and forums.
What Johnson defines as the reader’s “accepting the challenge of the novel’s newness”, Catherine Gallagher might instead call the reader’s “willing suspension of disbelief” (Gallagher, 347). Fictionality - that is, the self-conscious state of credible untruth - is what the novel created or perfected. Gallagher describes the novel’s historical roots in journalism, scandal and allegory, all of which exhibited fictional aspects but still maintained “referential truth claims about specific individuals” (340). The novel, in turn, diverged from any claims of the referential and instead turned to the plausible and the credible, maintaining at once “claims to both truth and fiction” (342). Theorist Ian Watt similarly suggests that the novel produces realistic truth in the originality and particularity of individual experience, which can be simultaneously true and fictional. It is the combination of specificity and non-referentiality that makes the novel so widely applicable. Since the novel is about “nobody” in particular, Gallagher argues, the reader can identify and sympathize with the characters as reflections of themselves.
Science Fiction emerged out of this new form of fictionality, in combination with the spirit of technological and scientific innovation that stimulated the Industrial Revolution. Both fictionality and scientific progress are born from the same seed: the desire to explore, as she quotes Aristotle, “not what has happened but the kind of things that can happen,” the fruit of imagination and probability (342). Science fiction exaggerates the novel’s use of fictionality, not only imagining the possibilities for truthful fiction in its characters, but also in its time, setting, and of course technology and science. As John Clute brings up in his Roundtable Discussion entry, sf opens up the realm of the temporal future as a setting for fictionality, allowing us to contemplate plausible alternatives to the future as well as the present (196). The invention of the internet has arguably added another dimension to the novel’s fictionality: many sf novels, such as Tad William’s Otherland, focus extensively on the online worlds and how they complicate our notions of fiction and reality.
Gallagher makes the argument that the novel served as a tool of social control and development in the modern consciousness, when it was necessary to have faith in the new fictions of new forms of economics, money, government, military, and national consciousness (347). Sf is a tool of the continuing modern age that requires our trust in the realm of cyber-space, the unknown developments of military and scientific technology, and smart phones where we can access all knowledge at once. David Seed suggests, in his Roundtable entry, that sf can reflect national or political attitudes such as American “ambivalence and unease about the new imperial status of the USA” - but even further, it can reflect contemporary unease about ideology, technology, limitations and boundaries, selfhood, reality, and knowledge. A genre such as sf is a self-reflexive look at the fictionalities of the novel, and transitively of our real lives, and the many ways in which we inhabit or believe in simulations and plausible fictions of reality.
Gallagher argues that readers “attach themselves to characters because of, if not despite, their fictionality” (351). Readers identify and sympathize with the recognizable “nobodies” of the novel, but they also do the same with the robots, teleportation, and far away planets of the sf realms. The “world-making” of novelistic description, which re-creates believable fictions of people and places, manifests to an extreme in the literal world-making of sf novels whose entire ecosystems and governments, let alone humans, are created from scratch. According to theorist Ian Watt, the novel differs from other forms of literature due to its focus on the individual, the daily, the detailed, and temporality, manifesting in a “full and authentic report full and authentic report of human experience […] under an obligation to satisfy its reader with such details of the story as the individuality of the actors concerned” (378). The rejection of universals both in character and in setting leads to extensive description, one of the aspects that brings the world of the story to life.
In his article on description D. S. Bland examines literary descriptive styles and how they participate in the “world-making” of the novel. On the one hand, he admits that background description is too often ignored, perhaps because of its obvious centrality to the novel, but he also notes that too much “irrelevant” description is often frowned upon. He establishes, through examples, four capabilities of background description: the “utilitarian description” to simply localize the narrative, the description that “place[s] the character in his social setting as well as within a geographical one,” description that “manipulat[es] the landscape” to “suit the emotions and situations of the characters,” and finally the “rigging of the description to suit a mood or to fashion a symbol” (133-134). Description, he concludes, is able to function on a scale from purely utilitarian setting to more intricate manipulation that affects or reflects the emotions, intentions, actions, and mood of the characters or narrative.
The traditional novel’s description references places and ideas that the reader is familiar with, has perhaps experienced and seen every day. The worlds of sf are unknown, imagined, truly fictional - and as such, the description is not merely drawing reference to reality, but also creating a new fictional reality for its characters. By this contrast, it becomes clear that description and the figurative “painting” of landscape are essential to the success of the sf novel. This does not mean that a sf novel should be a list of buildings, trees, and customs, like its predecessor the Travel Journal. Ian Watt cautions that “the accurate transcription of actuality does not necessarily produce a work of any real truth or enduring literary value,” suggesting that in a novel it is how, not simply how much, description is used (378). However building a solid world for the characters, and transitively the reader, to stand upon is essential. Without it, the readers will not only strain their neck but will rather find themselves utterly lost and confused in a half-painted picture.