The Dream of the Unified Field
For example, if we are dealing with an unknown person or “alien”, or a strange matrix of societal relations, then the language itself could bend towards the unknown and strange. The common linguistic stylings of classic SF —ensuring that there is no evident style at all—is the ultimate contrived artifice. The seeming absence of a form is the most binding form of all. If one decides to write this way, one must be aware of its artifice. Else, it is used as an ideology. If this happens, elliptical images and syntaxes are somehow seen as being qualitatively “wrong.” Then the McStories enter.
Frankly, science fiction writers who have written ten novels and have “cashed it in,” failing to even try to innovate, bother me less than neophyte, beginning writers who come prepackaged and bland right out of the box. I think that being relatively new myself gives me more, not less, insight into this process, and makes me angrier. And the very fact that I’m angry, by the way, doesn’t mean I’m vindictive, but have hopes that positive signs of change can coalesce into something truly grand.
The problem is one of historicism as well, of moving against the grain from traditional narrative expectations. Hugo Gernsback’s ideas still loom large as the dominant memes of the field. The very first issue of Amazing Stories has emblazoned on the masthead: “Extravagant Fiction Today… Cold Fact Tomorrow.” What has never been fully explained to me, in an almost alchemical sense, is what those dots signify. What process is envisioned as more noble and (most importantly) inevitable than this transformation from fiction to fact? Even those writers who would profess nothing of the sort have to come to a reckoning with this. The “extravagance” that Gernsback notated—the linguistic flights of fancy—are considered raw materials, to be later processed from the metaphysical to the physical. The “coldness” implied by Gernsback has been traditionally its greatest liability for some—and greatest appeal for others. As Ray Davis notes:
That desire for a comfortable familiarity to the game, for the manipulation of worlds and millenia to be as painless as possible, so often climaxing in awe that it skirts spiritual masturbation, can lead to a dismissal of sf as simple power fantasy. Although no branch of fiction can plead innocent to a charge of power-hunger, sf tends to feed the same spurious sense of omniscience as its cousin genre, popular science.
The future’s a discourse. It’s made up, by definition. It isn’t the world…My argument with hard sf nuts has nothing to do with hard vs soft sciences and the way metaphors made from them can “handle” the world: it has to do with sf versus experience. Hard sf isn’t even an act of science: it’s an act of make believe. “Soft” sf just about redeems itself by (a) taking real experience into account and (b) by being a self-admitted commentary on the constructed nature of culture. That’s what writing is about. I can see writing about the cultural phenomenon of futurology. I can see the point of that: although I’d rather write about the constant gallantry of individual human beings facing the problem of their own immediate future. Hard sf is just another fantasy of evasion, trying to borrow authority from genuine acts of science.
For those of us more than content to noodle around in the realm of the metaphysical, then, that other paradigm appears as a daunting, and rather pointless, undertaking if it occurs without critical inquiry of any sort. The “softer” and “warmer” fiction becomes an extrapolation of self, and the self’s interaction with the larger world, in the here-and-now. And again, it’s the lack of most hard SF’s awareness as a discourse—filled to the brim with cultural assumptions—that is problematic. With that awareness comes greater opportunity for texture, nuance, and insight.
