Bryan Appleyard has some interesting things to say about science fiction (hat-tip, Glenn). As a commenter said in the Times’ letters section though, Bryan focuses a little too much on the dystopian side of SF, on science-out-of-control. There are some nice touches though: he is right to examine how SF has affected the course of science, as well as the other way round.
The problem with a newspaper article like this, unfortunately, is that you can only really skim the surface of the subject. SF is pretty vast – hey, like the universe itself! There are bound to be vast tracts of land that get overlooked. Appleyard does not mention the more positive, life-affirming side of hard science fiction in the works of people like John Varley or Vernor Vinge, for instance (two of the best writers of the lot, in my opinion). And he barely mentions Arthur C. Clarke, Neal Stephenson, Ken MacLeod and R.A. Heinlein. Mention of the latter, of course, brings us onto the fact that SF has often been quite daringly political; it has used imagined futures to play around with cultural, social and ideal political scenarios (regular readers of this blog will know what I mean, such as The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, or Stephenson’s Snow Crash, etc).
But, to be fair to Appleyard, he takes SF seriously. As he points out, there seems to be more interest in fantasy instead: the enormous popularity of Lord of the Rings, Terry Pratchett, being just two examples. Maybe I am missing something, but I have never been interested in that side of the genre. My wife keeps badgering me to read Pratchett. Another sub-genre is what one might call “techno-military” SF; Heinlein wrote some of this in things like Starship Troopers; a good current example are the writings of John Scalzi.
Here’s a pretty good dictionary of science fiction.
I have been reading science fiction since at a guess the mid-1950s which includes reading work published all the way back to the 1890s and am amazed at the continuing imagination and freshness of the genre. I don’t read fantasy bye and large, but Pratchett is a notable exception. He is witty, well read and I think stands comparison with Wodehouse for burying lots of allusions and references in his jokes. However, unless someone gives me a very good reason to the contrary, I don’t even open anything described as the next ‘Tolkien’
The other aspect of current science fiction I don’t currently like is the tendency to inflate everything – Heinlein being a good example in his later years. Again there are exceptions – Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy coming immediately to mind.
Glad to see u mention Neal Stephenson – for me, the future of SF is cyberpunk. The Net is insufficiently explored in this genre yet it is the Net that will shape our near-future.
I urge any readers to look at books by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Stephenson and Charles Stross if you don’t know what I’m on about.
“Quick! To the library!”
Pratchett also wrote a couple of science fiction books: “Strata” and “The Dark Side of the Sun”. “Strata” is partly a parody of Larry iven’s Ringworld; it also involves a discworld (but not the Discworld of his more recent books.)
Pratchett and Neil Gaiman also co-wrote “Good Omens”, which is like “The Omen” crossed with “Just William”…
Amen to that! One of the worst mistakes of my life was reading The Eye of the World on recommendations from several “friends.” I had to make three separate attempts to get all the way through, and this over the span of several years. God, what I wouldn’t give for all those hours back…
Well, it is a bit dated, but for a discussion of SF (NOT Sci-Fi, only dilettantes call it that) try ‘New Maps of Hell’ by Kingsley Amis. Worth a read, or it was, when I first read it – 35 years ago. While reading it I amused myself by underlining every reference to stories I had read.
I read Pratchett, but I otherwise loath fantasy; just can’t see the point of yet another magically assisted dogooder. And I HATE, with a passion, the way bookshops lump these two completely unrelated genres into the same shelf space. I have no desire to sort through yet another load of elf laden, dragon ridden, orc infested dross in the hope of finding something written by someone who has at least some understanding of science and social interaction. In fact, now I no longer have access to Forbidden Planet in London I hardly even bother.
JexB: There’s also something called Postcyberpunk which is apparently what a lot of stuff I’ve been reading lately could be called. I’m currently looking for as much sci-fi as I can that aknowledges the singularity. Don’t miss Charles Stross and Alastair Reynolds.
I’m currently reading Rainbows End by Vinge, which is more cyberpunky than his usual stuff.
Quite a lot of sci-fi writers are either Libertarian or have Libertarian ideas in their books (especially Vinge). I suppose being optimistic about technology fits with Libertarianism rather well.
Oops, sorry CC, didn’t know I was supposed to call it SF. Must read even more and stop being a mere dilettante.
Rob,
I suspect I am simply showing my age here. There was a time when the SF/Sci-Fi distinction was real, back when teachers, journalists and parents tried to show how cool and accepting they were by calling it sci fi instead of the derisive “that Buck Rogers stuff”. However, real SF readers knew that anyone who called it by that term were phonies.
These days? With the reemergence of precampbellian crap, like Star Wars and Star Trek, the term sci fi has become so common that the distinction has been lost.
The best sci fi book I’ve read in years …
course of empire
This series is also good …
farseer, fossil hunter, foreigner
I was wondering about that, actually. I grew up with “scifi” being the default term – and it’s the one I still use. But it seems that recently there’s a push again to call it SF instead, to show your creds. So if your age is showing it’s also possible that we’ve come full circle and it’s caught up with you.
Fantasy such as Pratchett’s (less so Tolkien) lets us reflect on our past (and occasionally our present), whilst SF is essential to guiding us into our future.
I think the dismal, and totally undeserved, reception SF gets in from the mainstream, is down to the fact that to read the really good SF, you have to have some basic understanding of the science behind it. As we all know, science is one area in which our current education system is found to be severely lacking.
My favorite of the current authors writing “techno-military” are John Ringo and David Webb along with John Scalzi. I tend to avoid anything with flying dragons on the cover.
Pratchett’s Discworld novels have an important sfnal theme running through them: The transformation of the Discworld by new technologies. Some of these are magically based (such as the dwarven mechanical power source in Thud), but some are not: the clacks, the continent-wide semaphore system, is purely mechanical. Pratchett has been using these to explore the historical process of modernization. The newest Discworld novel, Making Money, projects a massive reconstruction of the literal infrastructure of Ankh-Morpork by dwarven industrial technology.
That same novel carries forward the golem rights theme, with sentient artificial beings created as a labor force, and as property, being turned into self-owners.
As to other fantasy, I’m fairly conservative about reading new fantasy; too many writers are producing imitations of Tolkien, often in utterly interminable series (of course, the Discworld could also be described as utterly interminable, but in that case it’s mostly a good thing). On the other hand, I’ve read some worthwhile original fantasy. I think my top choice in recent years would be Garth Nix’s Sabriel and its sequels—portrayals of an anti-necromancer whose task is not to summon up the dead but to make them go back where they belong: The conception of magic is original and interesting, the characters are memorable, and Nix’s prose style is consistently delightful (see Ursula Le Guin’s “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie” for a discussion of why this is important in fantasy).
However my fav Samizdata article ever was this one discussing a fantasy topic.
I think Tolkein, however, intended the ring to be an analogy for industrial technology. Which isn’t to say it doesn’t work better as an analogy for the modern state, mind you.
Well, lets tackle an issue here. Gibson is not a peddler of dystopia. The World of Case and Molly might be dystopian but the world of John Q Average in the sprawl trilogy is late twentieth century dull wealth except more so. Boston to Atlanta in under an hour on the Maglev and all that. Case and Molly subsist in the otherland of street samurai and cyber-jockeys. She’s a thug (an artful one) and he’s a hacker and Gibson is smart enough to appreciate that these are only ever going to be minority occupations.
Sci-Fi (SF) vs. Fantasy. Well, countingcats has a point. I hate the fact that books by Greg Bear (which I might buy) are stuck in with schlock by Anne MacCaffery. Having said that, I’m a huge Tolkien fan but , lets face it, there was one JRRT and the rest of the genre is shite.
I am a recovering astrophysicist. I for my sins know Sod’s Problem (yes, it exists and it’s a fundamental of fluid mechanics) and I get bored because most of life is not making sweet, sweet love with Uma Thurman. Most of it is filling out tax forms or going to TESCO or feeding the cat his kibbles or other sundry dullnesses. Now I would love to spend my working life at Mach 1+ in a Republic Thunderceptor and my leisure time screwing film-stars. That would be peachy but alas it ain’t going to happen because I fix PCs for a living and am married to a (admittedly very attractive) translator from Derbyshire. It ain’t the high life but it’s life.
So, where am I going with this? I love Sci Fi (or SF -a pointless debate) for the same reasons I love games and I built my seriously cool Thalia. The first is that I really, really want to holiday off-world. My Grandpa wanted to get out of the country and I feel I can do more. And y’all invited to have a drink with me at my holiday gaff on Titan.
The second reason is the mere imagination of it. And I don’t just mean raising the bar on what we can aspire to (though that’s useful too as anyone who contributes to my Titanic bar tab can attest). No, it’s about this. I was an astrophysicist and I got bored and I read 2001 in 2002 and Arthur Clarke made a comment about inertia in that book that made me get my pencil out. He was right by the way.
And that’s it. I wanna buy y’all a drink on Titan
One thing about the “SF” vs. Sci-Fi debate is that some of the True Believers in using “SF” elide to saying that it stands for “speculative fiction,” a more intellectual-sounding phrase that includes fantasy as well, and apparently allows everyone to be happy including Margaret Atwood or even Rushdie, at the original article pointed out.
Many of the more libertarian SF authors (and others) have opposed the Frankenstein complex– Asimov quite self-consciously wrote against it, and spoke against it. So it’s a strange view of SF to proclaim that it’s a theme in all SF. Just a part; a respected part with many good works, to be sure, but any definition of SF that excludes Asimov is one not worth having.
Glad you liked my comment that the Times posted, Mr. Pearce.
I don’t think Tolkein intended it to be an analogy for anything at all. The article Albion linked to was just how I saw it.
I am quite happy with the term Sci-Fi because when I say Sci-Fi, I mean Science Fiction, not anything else. However if someone else says SF, I have always assumed they mean Science Fiction as well. It is not a semantic issue likely to keep me awake at night.
Coming too late to this thread as usual, but since I’ve been reading SF for a long time I thought I’d have my say.
I started out reading Dan Dare – Pilot of the Future – in the Eagle comic as a kid, then as an adolescent drifted towards the more complex social side of things. (I even waded through a large part of The Book of the New Sun , before I gave up). When I discovered Baen Books on the web recently I found that my tastes have reverted in my old age and that the authors I enjoy most, Weber, Ringo, write good old fashion space opera with lots of battles against dastardly aliens. (Though to be fair to Weber and Ringo, they do address the social, political and ethical issues – but with lots of battles. Oh, and to be fair to myself, I’ve recently read and enjoyed Harrison’s Commonwealth saga and Vinge’s Rainbows End.)
As a great Pratchett fan, I found that his latest, Making Money, didn’t really do a lot for me. It didn’t seem to say much that he hasn’t said before and what it did say didn’t have the embedded wit and wisdom that I’ve come to love in his work.
Perhaps he should get out of Ankh Morpork for a while. Say some country where everyone’s name ends in -ov or -ova and where they are trying to transfom their country into a modern tyranny like AM but the ruling tyrant keeps trying to slip back into the old, chaotic, democratic ways. Perhaps as a sub-plot there could be a cult preaching that unless everyone started burning a bucket of coal everyday, the Ice Giants would return.
But who am I to suggest anything to a Master.
Appleyard makes a mistake which is common when discussing science fiction, and that is to concentrate on SF’s dystopian message, from the Frankenstein Complex onwards.
I got to say, this is the exception, not the rule. Science Fiction, from the thirties through to the eighties, was overwhelmingly a fiction of optimism. It was about achievement and success, the triumph of the human spirit, not dark failure.
As an FYI – my comments about SF/Sci Fi were meant to be a little tongue in cheek, who would seriously give a toss? Although Appleyard does use SF, and one of his commenters makes the same point, which I thought was amusing.
Sorry, folks, but the sf-vs-fantasy thing (for the records, I type it sf and say it sci-fi) is a complete red herring. They are two totally different pre-occupations. Fantasy done correctly is a continuation of epic poetry, and is partially about imagined worlds, but primarily a playground for the exploration of character.
SF can be that, too. But to suggest that the trite pap is merely on fantasy’s side of the fence is to ignore utter tripe such as Ill Wind:(Link)
Quite so. From the foreword:
“As for any inner meaning or ‘message’, it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical. […] I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.”
SF and fantasy can sometimes combine. A prime example is probably ‘The Incomplete Enchanter’ series from L Sprague de Camp – a series which I think handles the idea of multiple universes infinitely better than Heinlein’s ‘Number of the Beast’. I suppose ‘Glory Road’ (RAH) is such a crossover too.
Novus –
Thanks for the reference. I stand corrected.
Having said that, I wonder if he is being a tad bit disingenuous. I had a read through the Wikipedia article on Lord of the Rings after posting that and it notes that he told a priest that the work was “a fundamentally religious and Catholic work, unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision.” Although, I suppose it doesn’t necessarily need to be a religious allegory to have religious themes.
A good satire on the technical problems of many fantasy and scifi bestsellers.
I wrote on Science Fiction some time ago. My impression was, and is, that S.F. with government for defence only had declined.
These days S.F. was either “Progressive” (and I do not mean technologically progressive) or, a small group of writers, anarchocapitalist.
As for “fantasy”.
I like Tolkien’s work a lot – but no one since him as worked out a world and a history quite as well. Later works are sometimes good to read – but there is the impression of “this is not quite up to Tolkien’s standard”.
As for allegory – Tolkien, as has been said, disliked it. This was part of his problem with a lot of the work of his friend C.S. Lewis.
For Tolkien the world and the people in it (the story) was the main thing. It was of value in-its-self.
Of course his belief in God and his belief in universal principles of good and evil (the two things are not the same) influenced his work – but the Lord of the Rings (and the other works) were not written to convert people to the Roman Catholic church, or even to make them Christian.
That was not Tolkien’s way.