I've
spent the last month or so wondering what useful thing I could possibly say
to an audience composed largely of people who study science fiction.
After all, most of what I have to say is contained in my fiction, and
I've often learned more about my work from critics and academics than I
understood when I was writing it. This
is as it should be. I doubt
that I can offer more insight into my work than could be brought to it by
any number of people in this room today.
What
I can bring, I suppose, is a glimpse of what science fiction writing looks
like from the inside. Or, to
put it another way, I'll try to address a question my readers frequently
ask: What were you thinking?
Well,
what I've been thinking about lately -- brace yourselves -- is the
definition of science fiction
This
of course is one of the most tedious convention panel topics of all time,
second only to "Sex in Science Fiction: Why There Is or Isn't Enough or
Too Much of It." But I
recently celebrated my fifty-first birthday, and one doesn't want to enter
into one's second half-century without a credo, a manifesto, a working
definition of one's art, or some other form of literary Viagra. So here we go.
Plenty
of definitions of SF have been offered up over the years, but none of them
have been entirely satisfactory. Any
successful definition, it seems to me, should be able to shed some light on
three questions about the literature that have puzzled me for some time.
These questions are:
1.
Why do alternate history stories "feel like" science
fiction, even though they're obviously a-scientific (and must so remain, at
least until quantum physicists discover the universe in which the
Confederacy won the Civil War)?
2.
Why is science fiction so particularly beloved by adolescents and
high-functioning autistics? Laugh
if you like, but no less an authority than the neurologist Oliver Sacks has
described SF as "the national literature of Asperger's Syndrome."
This ought to tell us something, if only we can figure out what it
is.
And,
3., Why does science fiction always seem to be on the brink of a fist fight
with conventional religion?
I
recently contributed to a collection of essays published in honor of H.G.
Wells' novel The War of the Worlds, or at least in honor of the fact
that that Steven Spielberg had touched that venerable text with his gilded
wand. In it I described science
fiction as a literature of human contingency.
What I mean by this is suggested by three quotes I pulled from the
Wells novel, and I'll read them here:
First
from the early chapters of the book:
"[As]
men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and
studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might
scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of
water. With infinite
complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs,
serene in their assurance of their empire over matter.
It is possible that the infusioria under the microscope do the
same."
And
again, from early in the book:
"[L]ooking
across space with instruments, and with intelligences such as we have
scarcely dreamed of they see, at its nearest distance only 35,000,000 of
miles sunward of them, a morning star of hope -- our own warmer planet,
green with vegetation and grey with water, with a cloudy atmosphere eloquent
of fertility, with glimpses through drifting cloud-wisps of broad stretches
of populous country and narrow navy-crowded seas."
And
this, more explicitly, from later in the novel:
"Perhaps
I am a man of exceptional moods. I
do not know how far my experience is common.
At times I suffer from the strangest sense of detachment from myself
and the world about me. I seem
to watch it all from the outside, from somewhere inconceivably remote, out
of time, out of space, out of the stress and tragedy of it all."
Well.
What exactly is going on here? These
are primal SF statements -- they resonate as science-fictional in tone and
intent as clearly or more clearly now than they could have when they were
first published, well before the term "science fiction" had been
coined. What, then, do they have in common?
In
each there is a kind of pulled focus -- that is, a radical shift of
perspective from the immediate to the very large or small scale: from Mars
to the infusoria under the microscope, across interplanetary space, or to
take another example from The Time Machine, from the primordial past
to the far future, across time on the evolutionary and geological scale.
We know, of course, that Wells was a student of T.H. Huxley and a
passionate advocate of the idea of evolution, but his advocacy isn't
strictly scientific: for Wells, evolution isn't a way of interpreting the
fossil record so much as it is a way of contextualizing human life.
It becomes, in other words, an aesthetic idea, a subject of or
inspiration for his fiction, and it implies this radically displaced
perspective -- a detachment, as he says, from the world around him, to
somewhere inconceivably remote.
This
is the same displacement of perspective forced by the biology Wells had
studied under Huxley and the geology he had studied with less success under
a Professor Judd, who, as Wells says in his Autobiography, in a warning to
scholars then and now, "bored me cruelly."
It's the displacement of perspective forced by science in general
since Galileo and particularly, in Wells's day, since Buckland and Lyell and
Darwin. What has been displaced
is the centrality of the human species in our own narrative of ourselves.
Once we were the sum and function of the universe, the focal point of
God's attention even when he was displeased with us.
But here we are now, not at the center but at the periphery of our
known universe, not present at the beginning of time nor likely to be
present at its end, not the crown of biological creation but only one facet
of it, not apart from the animals but cousin to them, not even centrally
located between heaven and hell, and if we are uniquely beloved by God he
has become in this new dispensation a refugee God, driven from the visible
world into the crevices of our own ignorance: his existence remains
possible, the faithful are forced to argue, only because "we don't know
everything." This was the
intellectual context in which Wells wrote his early classics.
It
was a shocking paradigm shift for many -- as one early reader of Lyell's Principals
of Geology predicted before that book was published in 1830, "[T]he
saints will be in an uproar." The
saints were. Literature, however, was more cautious. Literature had largely retreated from the realm of the sacred
but had yet to establish a firm footing in Darwin's universe.
Not because it rejected these ideas but because they were difficult
to embrace in a conventional literary way.
In fact, there were two possible approaches to this material as
fiction. The first and most
obvious was simply to write about it, as Matthew Arnold did in his
1867 poem "Dover Beach," in which he superimposes the geology of
Lyell on the decline of faith: "The
sea of faith / Was once, too, at the full.... / But now I only hear / Its
melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, / retreating to the breath / Of the
night-wind down the vast edges drear / And naked shingles of the world.
.... The world, which seems / to lie before us like a land of dreams,
/ So various, so beautiful, so new, / Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor
light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain".
Bleak,
but to the point.
The
second and, I think, less obvious approach is the one Wells took in his
early novels -- that is, to write from within that post-Darwinian
vision of the world, not to comment on it but to inhabit it.
Matthew Arnold looks at Darwin's universe and issues, in effect, a
melancholy sigh; Wells dives into it and plays like a kid in a sandbox.
Which
brings us a little closer to a useful definition of science fiction.
Wells is exploring the human implications of the natural philosophy
of his day by imaginatively inhabiting these abstractions in his fiction.
In The Time Machine, for example, the ultimate fate of the
Earth is not asserted but directly experienced: a man stands on a stagnant
beach under a red, bloated sun, as the last crab-like specimens of
terrestrial life stir feebly. This
is Dover Beach with a vengeance: literally, the naked shingles of the
world, not abstracted as in Matthew Arnold but concretized, made tangible at
least to the imagination, rendered as a human experience.
There
is a line somewhere in an early John Updike story -- I've forgotten the
story but I remember the sentence, which perhaps tells us something about
John Updike -- anyway, there's a line where the protagonist admits he used
to read SF but gave it up because the vast impersonality of time and space
implicit in those books made him feel small and futile.
Which is maybe a plausible reaction.
But I don't think Wells was insisting on any such nihilism.
There is nothing in his early or later writing to suggest that he
considered human life trivial or pointless.
Rather, he seems to be saying, we need to live in both worlds at once
-- the daily human world and the Darwinian/Huxleyan cosmos -- because they
are, in fact, one and the same. It's
this simultaneous perspective Wells insists on: the ultimate end of the
Earth is not an obliteration of the Time Traveller's contemporary London but
coexists with and comments on it. There
is no discontinuity, except from our necessarily limited point of view,
between the terrestrial and the cosmic, the daily and the near-eternal.
Thus
the perspective must constantly shift, the narrative point of view expand
and contract. To the infusoria
under the microscope we are as powerful and distant as Martians; to the
Martians, we are as insignificant as bacteria; and in the ultimate Wellsian
irony, that's how the War of the Worlds is ultimately fought and won -- on
human turf, but between, in the end, the Martians and the bacteria.
So
what we're talking about is the scale of the universe, and mankind's removal
from a privileged position within it. We're
talking about vast spans of time, and no especially privileged place for us
there, either. We're talking about our position as a branch of the tree of
life, not its root or its final flower.
We are a seamless part of the natural world, not a creation but a
phenomenon, and like every other natural phenomenon we are contingent:
in other words, we're the result of what came before us -- only one of a
vast number of possible outcomes of the formation of stars and planets, the
advent of life, and the twists and turns of evolution.
We are contingent beings, living in a contingent and continuously
evolving universe.
I
did a public reading recently, after which someone in the audience stood up
and accused me of using what she called "big words."
I have a feeling "contingency" is one of those words, and I
apologize for it. But it seems
apt, and it really parses down to three assertions any grade-school student
-- well, almost any -- could understand:
1) The world --
including us -- was once a very different place.
2) The world as it
is -- including us -- might have been a very different place than it turned
out to be.
3) The world --
including us -- will one day be a very different place than it is now.
And
in these three statements you have much of the substance and content of
modern science fiction, a hint of a definition, and the glimmering of an
answer to those questions I started out with.
As
my Grade 10 English teacher used to say, "Let's review."
Why
do "alternate history" stories "feel like" science
fiction, even though they're obviously a-scientific?
Because,
although it has no real scientific grounding, the parallel-world thought
experiment, the fundamental what-if, leads straight into an assertion of
human and historical contingency -- a direct literalization of the statement
that things as they are might have been very different.
In fact the alternate-world story is one of the few examples of a
science-fictional contingency not already explored by Wells.
(Another example might be the contingency of human consciousness and
perception, territory staked out by Philip K. Dick and other 20th century SF
writers but never really approached by Wells -- though you could make an
argument for his story "The Remarkable Case of Davidson's Eyes".)
Second,
why is science fiction so particularly beloved by adolescents and
high-functioning autistics? I
suspect it's because these Wellsian shifts of perspective come more
naturally to people who haven't wedded themselves to the primacy of the
social universe in which they find themselves living.
The adolescent's point of view is unfixed, and the high-functioning
autistic hasn't learned to infer his opinions from the behavior of other
people without benefit of conscious thought.
Adolescents and Asperger's people are the Candides and Valentine
Michael Smiths of the world, their perspective necessarily distanced, and
it's not surprising that they resonate to the narrative displacements of
science fiction.
Adolescents,
of course, make the best atheists, and I speak from experience here.
Many of us learn to nuance and temper these opinions as we grow
older, but our initial skepticism and incredulity -- can you really
repopulate the world from a wooden ark full of animals? -- are only
modified, never erased. Wherein, I think, lies the answer to our third question: Why
does science fiction always seem to be on the brink of a fist fight with
conventional religion? It's
because only the weakest kind of SF can sustain any kind of orthodoxy.
Human contingency is written into our literary DNA, and orthodoxy
despises contingency -- orthodoxy wants the eternal and the unchanging,
wants to populate the past and the future with its verities and articles of
faith. The message that nothing
is eternal, and that the past and future are foreign countries with
different rules and habits, doesn't play well at the Vatican, among the
crowds at Mecca, or in the palaces of postmodern evangelism at Colorado
Springs.
No
definition of science fiction is useful, however, unless it's intelligible,
so I recently decided to take my version out for a test run.
I dropped by my local Chapters store, approached the nearest clerk,
and said: "I'm looking for literature that imaginatively inhabits the
idea of human contingency as it relates to time, space, history,
consciousness, and perception. Where
exactly do you keep that?"
The
clerk, to her credit, didn't blink -- only smiled and pointed and said,
"Dr. Seuss is in the children's section."
So
maybe it's not a perfect definition. Maybe it still needs some work.
But I think it's serviceable enough to get me through the next novel
or two.
