Fantastic Metropolis

Second, it is crucial to understand that stories are smarter than us. They will do what they want to our sensibilities. The problem isn’t bad, putrid fiction anymore—even the most hard-boiled cases of crotch-rocketry disguised as SF make at least perfunctory nods to characterization—as much as the merely competent stories that are good enough to be published, but do not have feck, vision, and grace. The McStories, in other words, teem. Although the content of Golden-age storytelling has been largely debunked (starched-collar analysis; inexorable, stifling logic; gee-whiz methodology flaunting “progress,” an unquestioning belief in science), this has still been the process used by many writing science fiction.

In this context, for a long period of time—despite the contrary examples of such brilliant stylists as Cordwainer Smith, Alfred Bester, Theodore Sturgeon, and James Tiptree—it has been assumed as orthodoxy that the best style is no style at all. Follow logical conclusions (just like the John Doe scientists of yesteryear) and don’t stray off the path. Hem the fabulist possibilities in the language itself. Make sure your characters develop, but only in certain ways. Make sure your plot has pivot points, has a happy ending. Make sure your character makes a life-altering choice about 500-700 words before the conclusion. Don’t rock the boat too much.

But the boat will always rock. Fiction is an artificial construct, not a rock-riven schematic. The formulas we use to tell the same stories over and over again are like the “serums of wonder” science fiction described with boundless optimism in the past; these formulas cannot save us. They are delusions; at best, useful only as a starting point. The reason that the community of science fiction is fading is that it’s a haven for junkies of these continually injected fictions, similar to the cybernetic dolphin in “Johnny Mnemonic,” roiling inside a sad little tank, hoping for a fix. And that most people have found better things to do with their time.

It’s the exact same will to churn out a product that is the whole problem in the first place. A science fiction aesthetics (if that word can even be used) that is only interested in product instead of process has nothing new to say, nothing revelatory to give us, because we live in an era inundated with products jammed down our eyes and throats. A science fiction based solely on escapism has outlived its usefulness. The commercial spaces, continually encroaching, love people to feed on product, after all. Science fiction’s promise as a subversive literature, only intermittently fulfilled throughout the years, is needed more than ever.

This isn’t fucking around with “literary” tropes for its own sake, a trifling dalliance that will assert a “cocktail party”-lit above everything else. We need different types and modicums of stories for where we’re at now. What matters in writing isn’t what we need to shove into the story (gadgetry, sense of wonder, whatever), but rather what the stories are slipping inside of us; not what we need to say through the stories, but what the stories are saying through us. It is often through grappling with difficult—and even messy—subject matter and narrative techniques that the revelatory can be brought to light in a story. There is also the common fallacy that style is somehow quantifiable, that “too much style” will ruin the broth, so to speak. This becomes code-speak, then, for interesting writing as mere ornamentation, gilding a lily. After all (the argument would go), if a science fiction story is chock full of interesting extrapolations and strong pacing, “being stylistic” would only draw attention away from what a science fiction story is really “about.” But all that we can rely on, as evidence of any great “findings” in science fiction, are the words themselves.