Something something torment nexus
January 2, 2024 7:11 PM Subscribe
An Anti-Defense of Science Fiction. If we’re going to give science fiction credit for solar power and electric cars, then it’s only fair, unfortunately, to give science fiction credit for child slavery in the cobalt mines. If we want to claim that science fiction inspired reusable spacecraft or even the lowly Roomba, we must also reckon with the fact that it inspired the gun-wielding drones sniping hospital patients and staff in Gaza.
tfa:
The issue is that science fiction—and I’m talking fairly narrowly here about the harder, more technologically-oriented kind of science fiction—is intertwined with the entire cultural project of the anthropocene, with our philosophies of dominion and exploitation and their consequences. Call it capitalism, or neoliberalism—though those are probably too specific.
No true science fiction is not capitalist and exploitative, and that's a problem with all science fiction.
posted by pompomtom at 7:34 PM on January 2 [3 favorites]
The issue is that science fiction—and I’m talking fairly narrowly here about the harder, more technologically-oriented kind of science fiction—is intertwined with the entire cultural project of the anthropocene, with our philosophies of dominion and exploitation and their consequences. Call it capitalism, or neoliberalism—though those are probably too specific.
No true science fiction is not capitalist and exploitative, and that's a problem with all science fiction.
posted by pompomtom at 7:34 PM on January 2 [3 favorites]
If you reacted as negatively as I did to that first pull quote, I think it's worth reading the whole thing, because it's a more nuanced argument than I thought at first.
I do think that this point, at least, is worth thinking about:
It seems to me that for almost as long as there have been colonialist and militaristic tendencies in science fiction, there have been other SF writers pushing back against those tendencies, and as long as there has been glib techno-optimism in SF there have been other SF writers pushing back against it. And if the glibly techno-optimistic, neoliberal SF is the public face of science fiction, I think that's mostly because the stuff that makes money and gets popular (in any genre) is the stuff that reaffirms the goodness of the status quo.
But I feel like I'm being unfair to Brookins here, and want to keep thinking about this more.
posted by Jeanne at 7:39 PM on January 2 [13 favorites]
I do think that this point, at least, is worth thinking about:
The issue is that science fiction—and I’m talking fairly narrowly here about the harder, more technologically-oriented kind of science fiction—is intertwined with the entire cultural project of the anthropocene, with our philosophies of dominion and exploitation and their consequences. Call it capitalism, or neoliberalism—though those are probably too specific. Science fiction has been one mode, a prominent one, by which popular artistic consciousness makes known humanity’s relationship to the world, to technology, to each other.I am disinclined to accept this too readily - but I at least want to think about it for longer. I've generally been in agreement with Ursula Le Guin when she said that science fiction isn't about the future, it's about the present. Science fiction isn't very interesting when considered as a prediction or inspiration of new technologies; I tend to think that technological progress plus unregulated capitalism plus colonialism equals child slavery in the cobalt mines with or without science fiction.
It seems to me that for almost as long as there have been colonialist and militaristic tendencies in science fiction, there have been other SF writers pushing back against those tendencies, and as long as there has been glib techno-optimism in SF there have been other SF writers pushing back against it. And if the glibly techno-optimistic, neoliberal SF is the public face of science fiction, I think that's mostly because the stuff that makes money and gets popular (in any genre) is the stuff that reaffirms the goodness of the status quo.
But I feel like I'm being unfair to Brookins here, and want to keep thinking about this more.
posted by Jeanne at 7:39 PM on January 2 [13 favorites]
as an addendum, I don't mean to try to refute any possible criticism of Douglas Adams or anything, but Elon's actual vision of the future seems so demonstrably at odds with everything in the actual books that I can only conclude that Elon either wilfully misread them, only dimly remembers them, never really read them, or doesn't care. As far as I can tell Elon's understanding of the book begins and ends with "whee, spaceships!" With readers like Musk, the actual content of science fiction would hardly seem to matter- they're going to cite it to justify whatever.
posted by BungaDunga at 7:43 PM on January 2 [11 favorites]
posted by BungaDunga at 7:43 PM on January 2 [11 favorites]
I'm not sure there is a sufficiently politically left scifi that shitheads won't claim is their inspiration.
Certainly not since Musk started labelling his escape-the-plebs ships after Culture vessels.
posted by pompomtom at 7:50 PM on January 2 [17 favorites]
Certainly not since Musk started labelling his escape-the-plebs ships after Culture vessels.
posted by pompomtom at 7:50 PM on January 2 [17 favorites]
I don't mean to try to refute any possible criticism of Douglas Adams or anything, but Elon's actual vision of the future seems so demonstrably at odds with everything in the actual books that I can only conclude that Elon either wilfully misread them, only dimly remembers them, never really read them, or doesn't care.
He's probably one of those casuals who has only read the books like thirty or forty times.
posted by lefty lucky cat at 7:55 PM on January 2 [1 favorite]
He's probably one of those casuals who has only read the books like thirty or forty times.
posted by lefty lucky cat at 7:55 PM on January 2 [1 favorite]
Stick to Ray Bradbury and there should be no problems...
posted by jim in austin at 8:02 PM on January 2 [3 favorites]
posted by jim in austin at 8:02 PM on January 2 [3 favorites]
No true science fiction is not capitalist and exploitative
Hell of a Scotsman you've beamed up here!
posted by SaltySalticid at 8:07 PM on January 2 [42 favorites]
Hell of a Scotsman you've beamed up here!
posted by SaltySalticid at 8:07 PM on January 2 [42 favorites]
I remain an “Elon musk has never read a book” truther.
posted by Artw at 8:12 PM on January 2 [28 favorites]
posted by Artw at 8:12 PM on January 2 [28 favorites]
I refute him thus:
(Kicks 20th anniversary hardcover edition of Neuromancer)
posted by tspae at 8:21 PM on January 2 [13 favorites]
(Kicks 20th anniversary hardcover edition of Neuromancer)
posted by tspae at 8:21 PM on January 2 [13 favorites]
Rocketships, robots and rayguns have been core elements of scifi since the beginning. Of course such concepts and more will serve as inspiration for a whole slew of things eventually realized, for better or worse. It's not hard, however, to find scifi exploring the implications of exploiting rockeships, robots and rayguns for whatever ends, to the detriment of humanity and beyond. And of course, nobody is being stopped from creating their own scifi adventures. You can literally make anything up however you please, for dogssakes.
The idea that scifi should take credit for the bad along with the good seems to describe a simple minded appeal/description of science fiction. More like seeking divination. High minded fortune telling for the folks who can't hack interpreting entrails or throwing bones. Certainly your privilege, if that's what you're looking for. But that hasn't been my experience with scifi. Like, at all.
posted by 2N2222 at 8:42 PM on January 2 [5 favorites]
The idea that scifi should take credit for the bad along with the good seems to describe a simple minded appeal/description of science fiction. More like seeking divination. High minded fortune telling for the folks who can't hack interpreting entrails or throwing bones. Certainly your privilege, if that's what you're looking for. But that hasn't been my experience with scifi. Like, at all.
posted by 2N2222 at 8:42 PM on January 2 [5 favorites]
I think science fiction played a significant part in the sucessful effort to pull the world back from the brink of nuclear annihilation.
What greater justification for its existence is really needed?
posted by jamjam at 8:51 PM on January 2 [3 favorites]
What greater justification for its existence is really needed?
posted by jamjam at 8:51 PM on January 2 [3 favorites]
Quick reminder that Looking Backward: 2000–1887 by Edward Bellamy is a sci-fi novel that's published over 130 years ago, is explicitly socialist, and sold over a million copies.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 9:18 PM on January 2 [10 favorites]
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 9:18 PM on January 2 [10 favorites]
Musk's science fiction references—Hitchhiker's Guide, the Culture series, Grok, Asimov 's Foundation, the letter X—are basically the ones I'd expect from some teenage boys naming their school computers in 1996.
My guess is he read a lot of science fiction as a kid and identifies culturally as a fan but hasn't really sat down and read many novels in a while. I might be extrapolating too much, but I get the sense he'd tell you vaguely that today's science fiction just isn't the same, with some kind of vague idea that it's all too "woke."
posted by smelendez at 10:14 PM on January 2 [7 favorites]
My guess is he read a lot of science fiction as a kid and identifies culturally as a fan but hasn't really sat down and read many novels in a while. I might be extrapolating too much, but I get the sense he'd tell you vaguely that today's science fiction just isn't the same, with some kind of vague idea that it's all too "woke."
posted by smelendez at 10:14 PM on January 2 [7 favorites]
Science fiction is how modern societies look at themselves. To blame sf for the state of the world is like saying Franz Kafka invented bureaucracy.
But that John W. Campbell guy does have a lot to answer for. E.g. that "fans are slans" nonsense is a play on Van Vogt, who was one of Campbell's acolytes.
posted by zompist at 10:17 PM on January 2 [5 favorites]
But that John W. Campbell guy does have a lot to answer for. E.g. that "fans are slans" nonsense is a play on Van Vogt, who was one of Campbell's acolytes.
posted by zompist at 10:17 PM on January 2 [5 favorites]
Every criticism that this piece makes against science fiction applies, with only very minor tweaks, not only to every other genre but to literature as a whole.
90% of everything is crap. The problem is not science fiction. The problem is, and always has been, people.
posted by flabdablet at 10:47 PM on January 2 [20 favorites]
90% of everything is crap. The problem is not science fiction. The problem is, and always has been, people.
posted by flabdablet at 10:47 PM on January 2 [20 favorites]
To blame sf for the state of the world is like saying Franz Kafka invented bureaucracy.
I blame Thomas Edison for the invention of bureaucracy.
posted by clavdivs at 11:31 PM on January 2 [5 favorites]
I blame Thomas Edison for the invention of bureaucracy.
posted by clavdivs at 11:31 PM on January 2 [5 favorites]
Which is, as he famously put it, 1% perspiration and 99% aggravation.
posted by flabdablet at 12:16 AM on January 3 [4 favorites]
posted by flabdablet at 12:16 AM on January 3 [4 favorites]
Every criticism that this piece makes against science fiction applies, with only very minor tweaks, not only to every other genre but to literature as a whole.
Exactly this. It's an interesting thought exercise but at the core is a wordier and more media literate version of the wrong-headed "representation = endorsement" argument that I've seen doing the rounds recently.
posted by slimepuppy at 2:43 AM on January 3 [3 favorites]
Exactly this. It's an interesting thought exercise but at the core is a wordier and more media literate version of the wrong-headed "representation = endorsement" argument that I've seen doing the rounds recently.
posted by slimepuppy at 2:43 AM on January 3 [3 favorites]
> "If we’re going to give science fiction credit for solar power and electric cars..."
I don't.
But, to be fair, neither does the article.
So... OK, then.
posted by kyrademon at 2:58 AM on January 3 [7 favorites]
I don't.
But, to be fair, neither does the article.
So... OK, then.
posted by kyrademon at 2:58 AM on January 3 [7 favorites]
Wait until they hear that historical fiction isn’t about history.
posted by cupcakeninja at 3:13 AM on January 3 [3 favorites]
posted by cupcakeninja at 3:13 AM on January 3 [3 favorites]
For those of us who appreciate spoilers, is there a good reason they use “anti-defense” in the title instead of a word that directly means what they seem to be saying?
posted by eviemath at 4:42 AM on January 3 [2 favorites]
posted by eviemath at 4:42 AM on January 3 [2 favorites]
Blaming Iain Banks for Musk is like blaming The Beatles for Charles Manson.
posted by signal at 4:57 AM on January 3 [12 favorites]
posted by signal at 4:57 AM on January 3 [12 favorites]
Fiction rarely tries to seriously propose a solution for broad social problems and tends to be concerned with the lives and problems of specific fictional characters. Science fiction can seem to be proposing such solutions (when social problems in its setting are solved or worse than ours), but generally it's not the focus of the fiction but rather just set dressing and world building.
It's not easy to write good, compelling fiction that counters individualism and capitalism with healthy communal models, because structurally the forms of fiction we have are based in an interior individual point of view.
posted by rikschell at 4:58 AM on January 3
It's not easy to write good, compelling fiction that counters individualism and capitalism with healthy communal models, because structurally the forms of fiction we have are based in an interior individual point of view.
posted by rikschell at 4:58 AM on January 3
If you narrowly define science fiction to be the science fiction that's about our relationship with exploitative technology, then yes, science fiction is about our relationship with exploitative technology.
posted by MrVisible at 5:50 AM on January 3 [5 favorites]
posted by MrVisible at 5:50 AM on January 3 [5 favorites]
This is very good actually and in fact made me feel excited about science fiction when I'd been feeling a little mopey about it since the pandemic. On a first read it feels a little unfocused and definitely rehashes many an internet beef in a way that may not appeal to all readers but it raises some big questions.
1. Literal, material tie-up between arms manufacturers and the military and institutional SF - if SF has no problem impact, why does Raytheon want to sponsor Worldcon, huh, huh? Even if that's only "SF fans are likely to be engineers and we want them to think well of Raytheon so they will work for us", why is that the case? Raytheon does not sponsor the ALA. That stuff about Solarpunk and NFTs really shook me, gotta say.
2. Recent science fiction boom - that's what he's really talking about in one half of the comfort paragraph. Science fiction was an outsider nerd interest when I was growing up, which caused more problems than benefits, but the hegemonic take right now is that just liking science fiction is virtuous or even boldly progressive. Everyone likes this idea, whether it's science fiction fans or corporations seeing the new respectability of SF as a new way to make money. It's all tied up with poptimism and the sort of cheaply pluralistic "don't yuck people's yum" treatment of genres and life choices that is mainstream morality at the moment - mainstream morality which is very good for sales. I mean, we shouldn't yuck people's yum unnecessarily, that's perfectly true, but just as science-fiction-is-for-nerds was a standpoint with benefits and drawbacks, so is the contemporary position.
2.5. Strong claims about science fiction as a counter-literature that shows good futures and makes critiques of the present in ways that other literature doesn't is part of the comfort situation. But is it also partly true? Maybe?
3. The unprovable part is whether there's something about science fiction as it really exists which has a bad power. Obviously Capital-L lliterature grows out of colonialism (to pick one) and justifies it and props it up, even if that's not all that it does. Is science fiction different enough from Capital-L literature that this is uniquely true of SF in some way?
3.5. I think that science fiction isn't any worse than other literatures but it has some unique features. Even if you start SF with Frankenstein, an awful lot of the core of SF is "going to another planet to settle - good, bad or merely difficult?" Or else it's "the encounter of Earth people, usually figured as white and middle class, with the Other". Even when it's critical, science fiction is organized around all these ideas of domination and expansion, knowledge as power, etc.
4. Does science fiction have a unique good power which is at least a counterweight? I think so! I think so! I think so, and I think that you have to ignore queer people and women in particular and more recently readers/writers of color to think that it does not. For why? The Women's Press, that's why. Feminist science fiction in particular was an organizing force among feminists and dispersed and strengthened both abstractly feminist ideas and literal "let's go to Grenham Common and oppose the military" ideas. Subsequently, science fiction presses, magazines, conventions, etc have been organizing sites for queer and/or people of color in a similar way.
5. Okay but that's no Palantir, you say. To that my real answer is "the left isn't going to win by making a left Palantir" and my half answer is "what about the USSR", which really only bolsters my first answer.
5a. The left isn't going to win by making a left Palantir. Palantir doesn't exist because Peter Thiel is a science fiction fan; it exists because it makes money and supports domination. Something else analogously bad would exist if science fiction never got past Frankenstein. We aren't going to make a left Palantir because we don't think getting rich off dominating others is a worthwhile goal. Even if we wanted a "left" which was just a mirror for the right, we don't have the money! We don't have the connections! Palantir comes from capitalism!
5b. And what about the USSR? Like, look, science fiction was incredibly important in organizing and mobilizing people for communism - from the SFnal part of the novel What Is To Be Done to Red Star to about fifty billion other things. Is one USSR worth one Palantir? Or is it just an illustration that you can't have a left Palantir? But in any case, the role of SF in the creation of the USSR is if anything much stronger than the role of SF in creating, eg, Peter Thiel.
6. Science fiction is didactic literature. I'd say that contemporary middlebrow non-SF literature is also extremely didactic and runs in parallel to SF, which is why there is so much "literary SF" about. What material effect does didactic literature have? It's got to be something; advertising works, after all. But difficult to pinpoint without a lot of careful research.
Anyway, to make a weak conclusion, I think this essay says a lot which warrants further consideration! The Ancillary Review looks cool and exciting and I'm sure I will read many more things there!
posted by Frowner at 5:54 AM on January 3 [10 favorites]
1. Literal, material tie-up between arms manufacturers and the military and institutional SF - if SF has no problem impact, why does Raytheon want to sponsor Worldcon, huh, huh? Even if that's only "SF fans are likely to be engineers and we want them to think well of Raytheon so they will work for us", why is that the case? Raytheon does not sponsor the ALA. That stuff about Solarpunk and NFTs really shook me, gotta say.
2. Recent science fiction boom - that's what he's really talking about in one half of the comfort paragraph. Science fiction was an outsider nerd interest when I was growing up, which caused more problems than benefits, but the hegemonic take right now is that just liking science fiction is virtuous or even boldly progressive. Everyone likes this idea, whether it's science fiction fans or corporations seeing the new respectability of SF as a new way to make money. It's all tied up with poptimism and the sort of cheaply pluralistic "don't yuck people's yum" treatment of genres and life choices that is mainstream morality at the moment - mainstream morality which is very good for sales. I mean, we shouldn't yuck people's yum unnecessarily, that's perfectly true, but just as science-fiction-is-for-nerds was a standpoint with benefits and drawbacks, so is the contemporary position.
2.5. Strong claims about science fiction as a counter-literature that shows good futures and makes critiques of the present in ways that other literature doesn't is part of the comfort situation. But is it also partly true? Maybe?
3. The unprovable part is whether there's something about science fiction as it really exists which has a bad power. Obviously Capital-L lliterature grows out of colonialism (to pick one) and justifies it and props it up, even if that's not all that it does. Is science fiction different enough from Capital-L literature that this is uniquely true of SF in some way?
3.5. I think that science fiction isn't any worse than other literatures but it has some unique features. Even if you start SF with Frankenstein, an awful lot of the core of SF is "going to another planet to settle - good, bad or merely difficult?" Or else it's "the encounter of Earth people, usually figured as white and middle class, with the Other". Even when it's critical, science fiction is organized around all these ideas of domination and expansion, knowledge as power, etc.
4. Does science fiction have a unique good power which is at least a counterweight? I think so! I think so! I think so, and I think that you have to ignore queer people and women in particular and more recently readers/writers of color to think that it does not. For why? The Women's Press, that's why. Feminist science fiction in particular was an organizing force among feminists and dispersed and strengthened both abstractly feminist ideas and literal "let's go to Grenham Common and oppose the military" ideas. Subsequently, science fiction presses, magazines, conventions, etc have been organizing sites for queer and/or people of color in a similar way.
5. Okay but that's no Palantir, you say. To that my real answer is "the left isn't going to win by making a left Palantir" and my half answer is "what about the USSR", which really only bolsters my first answer.
5a. The left isn't going to win by making a left Palantir. Palantir doesn't exist because Peter Thiel is a science fiction fan; it exists because it makes money and supports domination. Something else analogously bad would exist if science fiction never got past Frankenstein. We aren't going to make a left Palantir because we don't think getting rich off dominating others is a worthwhile goal. Even if we wanted a "left" which was just a mirror for the right, we don't have the money! We don't have the connections! Palantir comes from capitalism!
5b. And what about the USSR? Like, look, science fiction was incredibly important in organizing and mobilizing people for communism - from the SFnal part of the novel What Is To Be Done to Red Star to about fifty billion other things. Is one USSR worth one Palantir? Or is it just an illustration that you can't have a left Palantir? But in any case, the role of SF in the creation of the USSR is if anything much stronger than the role of SF in creating, eg, Peter Thiel.
6. Science fiction is didactic literature. I'd say that contemporary middlebrow non-SF literature is also extremely didactic and runs in parallel to SF, which is why there is so much "literary SF" about. What material effect does didactic literature have? It's got to be something; advertising works, after all. But difficult to pinpoint without a lot of careful research.
Anyway, to make a weak conclusion, I think this essay says a lot which warrants further consideration! The Ancillary Review looks cool and exciting and I'm sure I will read many more things there!
posted by Frowner at 5:54 AM on January 3 [10 favorites]
The essay is much better than the title or this post's title. I guess good that's it's a yappy title as a proper academic title would not have been noticed.
Wouldn't it be cool if SF could really influence society and tech, or even more accurately predict (Tricorders did not have visual or a social media element)
I don't see a science fiction correlation for the well disregarded Tesla, although for all the hate, finally electric cars are actually replacing some gas guzzlers and pushing an entire industry.
posted by sammyo at 6:33 AM on January 3
Wouldn't it be cool if SF could really influence society and tech, or even more accurately predict (Tricorders did not have visual or a social media element)
I don't see a science fiction correlation for the well disregarded Tesla, although for all the hate, finally electric cars are actually replacing some gas guzzlers and pushing an entire industry.
posted by sammyo at 6:33 AM on January 3
As far as I can tell Elon's understanding of the book begins and ends with "whee, spaceships!" With readers like Musk, the actual content of science fiction would hardly seem to matter- they're going to cite it to justify whatever.
BungaDunga
Reminder that Musk appears to believes that Blade Runner is about someone named Bladerunner.
posted by star gentle uterus at 6:47 AM on January 3 [8 favorites]
BungaDunga
Reminder that Musk appears to believes that Blade Runner is about someone named Bladerunner.
posted by star gentle uterus at 6:47 AM on January 3 [8 favorites]
No true science fiction is not capitalist and exploitative, and that's a problem with all science fiction.
Didn't see anyone mention cyberpunk or postcyberpunk here, so here I am doing it!
Cory Doctorow specifically is a postcyberpunk author who has developed into one of the most strident anticapitalist polemicists active today. Although I am not sure he is as much anticapitalist as antibusiness - William Gibson might be more of a radical there, precisely because he is not as interested in the classic project of sci fi.
posted by billjings at 8:04 AM on January 3 [2 favorites]
Didn't see anyone mention cyberpunk or postcyberpunk here, so here I am doing it!
Cory Doctorow specifically is a postcyberpunk author who has developed into one of the most strident anticapitalist polemicists active today. Although I am not sure he is as much anticapitalist as antibusiness - William Gibson might be more of a radical there, precisely because he is not as interested in the classic project of sci fi.
posted by billjings at 8:04 AM on January 3 [2 favorites]
Reminder that Musk appears to believes that Blade Runner is about someone named Bladerunner.
Lófaszt, nehogy már!
posted by tigrrrlily at 8:09 AM on January 3
Lófaszt, nehogy már!
posted by tigrrrlily at 8:09 AM on January 3
I'm really glad I missed this thread, because as both a literature professor and longtime fan of SF that isn't Becky Chambers, I would have had Things to Say, and I had a lot of actual work to do that would have got shunted away.
No true science fiction is not capitalist and exploitative, and that's a problem with all science fiction.
I could literally write you a six-page bibliography of works that clearly refute this statement, but again, Things to Do. Looks like others are on it, though, which is cool.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 8:18 AM on January 3 [5 favorites]
No true science fiction is not capitalist and exploitative, and that's a problem with all science fiction.
I could literally write you a six-page bibliography of works that clearly refute this statement, but again, Things to Do. Looks like others are on it, though, which is cool.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 8:18 AM on January 3 [5 favorites]
The vaunted prophylactic prophecy of science fiction—the ability to prevent an undesirable future by loudly predicting it—has consistently proven false: most humans live in surveillance states that would make Orwell blush, and they followed up Squid Game with…non-fictional Squid Game.
Both of these statements are wrong; the "non-fictional Squid Game" isn't really that--AFAIK, it doesn't kill people--and if he really thinks that "most humans live in surveillance states that would make Orwell blush", he should re-read Nineteen Eighty-Four.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:20 AM on January 3
Both of these statements are wrong; the "non-fictional Squid Game" isn't really that--AFAIK, it doesn't kill people--and if he really thinks that "most humans live in surveillance states that would make Orwell blush", he should re-read Nineteen Eighty-Four.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:20 AM on January 3
The unanswerable question seems to me to be not "would people have built the Torment Nexus if science fiction didn't write about it" so much as "does science fiction do substantial, identifiable cultural or material work to forward domination that would not be done by other means and therefore without science fiction, would the world be less bad". Subsidiary question: "does 'good' science fiction do enough cultural or material work to outweigh this".
I think you could probably make a solid, careful case about this if you had several very large, long-running grants and an army of grad students - you would need to look at material connections between science fiction fandom and engineering/weapons development first and foremost and then at how ideas from science fiction appear in non-SF places. It wouldn't be enough to do a case study, because you wouldn't just be aiming to show that some science fiction was Bad, you'd be aiming to show that it was pervasively Bad and significantly more Bad than Good. "Science fiction contains Bad ideas which have some impact on people's actions, but also Good ideas which have similar impact, here are case studies" would be an interesting book to read, but not an argument winner.
It's difficult not to take a determinist line, here, because science fiction grows out of various scientific and imperialist concerns that come up as colonialism happens and science develops. It's not weird that science fiction treats of colonialism; science fiction came into being to respond to colonialism. Is there a world that has colonialism but no science fiction? (I mean, you can imagine such a world, maybe one where the church kept a tight lock on literature, but it would be a very different world indeed.)
I guess I come out of this thinking that science fiction doesn't need attacking or defending in the grand sense, or at least doesn't need a separate critique from the usual one of capitalism and hierarchical domination; it needs concrete things like refusing to support the arms industry ideologically or materially and it needs self-awareness so that we don't write cozy stories and pat ourselves on the back without realizing that those stories have genocidal and violent presuppositions.
posted by Frowner at 9:18 AM on January 3 [3 favorites]
I think you could probably make a solid, careful case about this if you had several very large, long-running grants and an army of grad students - you would need to look at material connections between science fiction fandom and engineering/weapons development first and foremost and then at how ideas from science fiction appear in non-SF places. It wouldn't be enough to do a case study, because you wouldn't just be aiming to show that some science fiction was Bad, you'd be aiming to show that it was pervasively Bad and significantly more Bad than Good. "Science fiction contains Bad ideas which have some impact on people's actions, but also Good ideas which have similar impact, here are case studies" would be an interesting book to read, but not an argument winner.
It's difficult not to take a determinist line, here, because science fiction grows out of various scientific and imperialist concerns that come up as colonialism happens and science develops. It's not weird that science fiction treats of colonialism; science fiction came into being to respond to colonialism. Is there a world that has colonialism but no science fiction? (I mean, you can imagine such a world, maybe one where the church kept a tight lock on literature, but it would be a very different world indeed.)
I guess I come out of this thinking that science fiction doesn't need attacking or defending in the grand sense, or at least doesn't need a separate critique from the usual one of capitalism and hierarchical domination; it needs concrete things like refusing to support the arms industry ideologically or materially and it needs self-awareness so that we don't write cozy stories and pat ourselves on the back without realizing that those stories have genocidal and violent presuppositions.
posted by Frowner at 9:18 AM on January 3 [3 favorites]
Like, it doesn't matter if no one would have thought of the Torment Nexus if they would instead have created the effective, cheap and low tech Taylorized Torment Process.
posted by Frowner at 9:31 AM on January 3 [6 favorites]
posted by Frowner at 9:31 AM on January 3 [6 favorites]
Also, how about looking at the ARB notable books of 2023 list? This is a very good list, IMO. The books on it that I have read are outstanding.
If you read The Saint of Bright Doors, though, you should also read The Translator, At Low Tide and Applied Cenotaphics In the Long, Long Longitudes. I know this makes me sound like a picky-pants, but he is just outstanding as a short story writer and extremely underestimated. I like The Saint of Bright Doors and all, but it is much more like other SF novels than his short stories are like other SF stories. Exciting to see that he has a second novel already coming out - people have totally been sleeping on his work for a long time!
Note that I called it first - I had my SF class read Applied Cenotaphics when it came out because it just completely blew me away.
posted by Frowner at 10:28 AM on January 3 [2 favorites]
If you read The Saint of Bright Doors, though, you should also read The Translator, At Low Tide and Applied Cenotaphics In the Long, Long Longitudes. I know this makes me sound like a picky-pants, but he is just outstanding as a short story writer and extremely underestimated. I like The Saint of Bright Doors and all, but it is much more like other SF novels than his short stories are like other SF stories. Exciting to see that he has a second novel already coming out - people have totally been sleeping on his work for a long time!
Note that I called it first - I had my SF class read Applied Cenotaphics when it came out because it just completely blew me away.
posted by Frowner at 10:28 AM on January 3 [2 favorites]
I'd like to take issue with the use of Science Fiction to mean only the subset of the genre which arose in the US and UK in the 20th century.
Even though the term "Science Fiction" was invented in a specific, capitalist, colonialist society, Fantastic literature is a few millenia older than the US or the UK—SFF has existed in many time periods and many different kinds of societies.
It's fairly insular to arbitrarily confine the concept of science fiction only to the last century's anglosphere.
posted by signal at 2:16 PM on January 3
Even though the term "Science Fiction" was invented in a specific, capitalist, colonialist society, Fantastic literature is a few millenia older than the US or the UK—SFF has existed in many time periods and many different kinds of societies.
It's fairly insular to arbitrarily confine the concept of science fiction only to the last century's anglosphere.
posted by signal at 2:16 PM on January 3
"What is science fiction" is pretty hotly debated. For me, I think it makes the most sense to trace a lineage that flows to and through the genre that calls itself science fiction and that is considered as a publishing category. That doesn't mean that Persian wonder tales or A True Story aren't important as their own thing; it's that there's this whole sort of "what is modernity and technological progress, what do they mean, who owns them, are they good or bad, I know let's explore them through imagining inventions and travel to strange places using what we understand as modern science" thing, where the world is amenable to reason, discovery and human control (or else we are shattered because we discover that it isn't, or reason itself turns out to be different than we had assumed). Science fiction isn't science fiction because it has space ships. It has space ships because it's science fiction, so to speak. When we say "science fiction", to me it's a useful shorthand for "the fiction that deals with modernity, the idea of "progress", the idea of "reason" and the practice of colonization from the standpoint that modern "science" is powerfully determinative of society".
So I wouldn't call wuxia in general science fiction; I wouldn't call The Lord of the Rings science fiction, or a fantasy novel like A Stranger In Olondria that deals with questions about language, colonialism and religion.
Obviously there's some fuzzy stuff here - what about stories where "science" is more an aesthetic motif, like the City of Stairs books that are mostly fantasy, what about China Mieville's Bas-Lag books or other books where magic is treated as a science?
But I tend to feel that "science fiction" is a modern phenomenon that flows from colonialism, modern theories of race, modern theories of progress, anxieties about science and rationality, etc. The reason to understand it this way is not to gatekeep something important and sacred but to identify why is is so often so fascist and flawed. It's not wuxia's fault that golden age science fiction is kind of fascist, in short.
posted by Frowner at 2:37 PM on January 3 [3 favorites]
So I wouldn't call wuxia in general science fiction; I wouldn't call The Lord of the Rings science fiction, or a fantasy novel like A Stranger In Olondria that deals with questions about language, colonialism and religion.
Obviously there's some fuzzy stuff here - what about stories where "science" is more an aesthetic motif, like the City of Stairs books that are mostly fantasy, what about China Mieville's Bas-Lag books or other books where magic is treated as a science?
But I tend to feel that "science fiction" is a modern phenomenon that flows from colonialism, modern theories of race, modern theories of progress, anxieties about science and rationality, etc. The reason to understand it this way is not to gatekeep something important and sacred but to identify why is is so often so fascist and flawed. It's not wuxia's fault that golden age science fiction is kind of fascist, in short.
posted by Frowner at 2:37 PM on January 3 [3 favorites]
You can make a case that fantasy has been "science fictionized" really - that going from, eg, Lud In the Mist and The Lord of the Rings to the Bas-Lag books is the process of SF's concerns being integrated into a fantasy genre that flows from other origins.
posted by Frowner at 2:48 PM on January 3 [1 favorite]
posted by Frowner at 2:48 PM on January 3 [1 favorite]
You could also make a case that science fiction has been "fantasized" -- see, for example, the endless (rather boring) debate about whether Star Wars is actually fantasy since, in spite of the rocket ships, it's about space wizards having swordfights with hardly any exploration of science or technology beyond surface-level set dressing.
I suspect that the real answer is that in many ways, the two have been closely intertwined all along.
posted by kyrademon at 5:25 PM on January 3 [1 favorite]
I suspect that the real answer is that in many ways, the two have been closely intertwined all along.
posted by kyrademon at 5:25 PM on January 3 [1 favorite]
Hve you actually read any Science Fiction?
posted by signal at 5:20 AM on January 4 [1 favorite]
posted by signal at 5:20 AM on January 4 [1 favorite]
I've read TFA, the adjacent Noahpinion and (mefi's own) cstross' piece (previously).
TFA was spot on with "Plato's concern that poetry can be persuasive."
I'm going to raise "what do you mean, 'is it art?' you monster!" after the thread is dead.
I disagree with a good friend often about what I want vs what he wants from all the books, TV, movies, games and video games we consume that's marked as being in the Scuence Fiction and/or Fantasy genres. His goal is to consume things that reassure him of his place in the cosmos; while mine, to help me reorient myself or reshape the cosmos -- he doesn't want to change, while I think that great art inspires us to develop and become better people.
I'm strongly focused on outcomes and judge whether the art I consume drives me there -- even pulp books orsoap space opera give a framework for thinking about everyday struggle without me having the scars.
It seems weird that other people don't.
posted by k3ninho at 5:31 AM on January 4
TFA was spot on with "Plato's concern that poetry can be persuasive."
I'm going to raise "what do you mean, 'is it art?' you monster!" after the thread is dead.
I disagree with a good friend often about what I want vs what he wants from all the books, TV, movies, games and video games we consume that's marked as being in the Scuence Fiction and/or Fantasy genres. His goal is to consume things that reassure him of his place in the cosmos; while mine, to help me reorient myself or reshape the cosmos -- he doesn't want to change, while I think that great art inspires us to develop and become better people.
I'm strongly focused on outcomes and judge whether the art I consume drives me there -- even pulp books or
It seems weird that other people don't.
posted by k3ninho at 5:31 AM on January 4
I mean, in the sense that fantasy and science fiction are both about things that can't happen in the world as we know it, they're entwined; in the sense that all writing comes from culture so it's all got the same pool of starting concerns, they're entwined. But I think it's clarifying to look at them as separate genres with separate lineages.
Science fiction predates westerns. Pulp genres are all interconnected but I think the western is mostly about the closed frontier, history, self-justification, nostalgia, national identity, etc.
But what's interesting about fantasy and science fiction is that the genres have such different histories! There's a genre which self-understands as science fiction (more or less) in the nineteenth century and which is recognizable to us as science fiction. With the pulps this quickly turns into a serious publishing category, there are fanzines and conventions, etc in the twenties and thirties.
There is no parallel structure for fantasy at that point. There are gothic stories and ghost stories and there are monster stories that mostly share SFnal concerns, there are regional "magic" stories like Manly Wade Wellman's Silver John stories, there are stand-alone faux-medieval romances, etc, but there is very little like "fantasy" the genre we have today, where in general there is another magical world, an alternative magical part of this world, a magical people, etc; where the emphasis is on worldbuilding and a sense of a liveable fantastic world. There isn't a shared understanding of "fantasy" as a genre; something like Lud-In-The-Mist is a stand-alone.
To me it feels like "fantasy" really gets going as a self-understood genre only in the sixties/seventies and the conventions of the genre don't really crystallize until the seventies/eighties.
Tolkien isn't the first writer of "fantasy" novels but The Hobbit and LOTR are what kick off the genre, and it takes real work to get it going as a publishing category. On the cynical side, you have The Sword of Shannara as a Tolkien knock-off and that's what really gets things going. On the purer in heart side, there's Lin Carter's Adult Fantasy (not that kind) series which pulls together Tolkien, Dunsany, Machen, Cabell, etc.
To talk out of my hat, I feel like fantasy at least starts off as a more conservative and less "social novel"/socially critical genre than science fiction. Tolkien is didactic, of course, and Peake is a social critic, but when you compare them to the social criticism and didacticism in, eg, Asimov, you can see the difference.
Obviously there's some fuzzy stuff here - what's Lovecraft? Conservative, didactic, there are aliens and the occult and the occult is treated as a science, etc. I don't think it's either possible or useful to really try to say "there is a bright line and everything on THIS side is fantasy and everything on THAT side is science fiction".
It's just that we do have these two genres with genre conventions that are related but different and that come into being on different schedules and with different relations to the publishing industry. Similarly YA is a genre that really crystallized out of "books for young people" during my lifetime and began where there was already a formula (from the pulps and fantasy!) for crystallizing and marketing a genre, and that has shaped the conventions and distribution of YA.
Genre comes out of a tussle between readers, writers, big publishes and small publishers. Genres develop conventions which are lodestars - people might adhere to them or hate them or detourne them, etc, but the genre is legible in relation to its conventions. Horrible Harry Potter "is a wizard" because we've got language for what a wizard is that starts with The Hobbit and then a series of riffs on wizardry that gets us from Old White Guy Who Is Mostly Wise Rather Than Purely Sparkly to the present world and the idea of magic "systems".
I think when we talk about fantasy and science fiction we get into loops where the point of the conversation is to decide which genre is Good and to argue about whether, eg, Lovecraft is really fantasy or science fiction or some secret third thing, etc and that is either entertaining if you do it as a joke or incredibly boring and annoying. But to me the point is to try to understand how the genres come into being and what this means for how ideas move around in them. It's worth sorting out how ideas are articulated in these genres precisely because they are currently extremely influential and a major source of how morality and social criticism are popularly understood.
posted by Frowner at 5:35 AM on January 4 [4 favorites]
Science fiction predates westerns. Pulp genres are all interconnected but I think the western is mostly about the closed frontier, history, self-justification, nostalgia, national identity, etc.
But what's interesting about fantasy and science fiction is that the genres have such different histories! There's a genre which self-understands as science fiction (more or less) in the nineteenth century and which is recognizable to us as science fiction. With the pulps this quickly turns into a serious publishing category, there are fanzines and conventions, etc in the twenties and thirties.
There is no parallel structure for fantasy at that point. There are gothic stories and ghost stories and there are monster stories that mostly share SFnal concerns, there are regional "magic" stories like Manly Wade Wellman's Silver John stories, there are stand-alone faux-medieval romances, etc, but there is very little like "fantasy" the genre we have today, where in general there is another magical world, an alternative magical part of this world, a magical people, etc; where the emphasis is on worldbuilding and a sense of a liveable fantastic world. There isn't a shared understanding of "fantasy" as a genre; something like Lud-In-The-Mist is a stand-alone.
To me it feels like "fantasy" really gets going as a self-understood genre only in the sixties/seventies and the conventions of the genre don't really crystallize until the seventies/eighties.
Tolkien isn't the first writer of "fantasy" novels but The Hobbit and LOTR are what kick off the genre, and it takes real work to get it going as a publishing category. On the cynical side, you have The Sword of Shannara as a Tolkien knock-off and that's what really gets things going. On the purer in heart side, there's Lin Carter's Adult Fantasy (not that kind) series which pulls together Tolkien, Dunsany, Machen, Cabell, etc.
To talk out of my hat, I feel like fantasy at least starts off as a more conservative and less "social novel"/socially critical genre than science fiction. Tolkien is didactic, of course, and Peake is a social critic, but when you compare them to the social criticism and didacticism in, eg, Asimov, you can see the difference.
Obviously there's some fuzzy stuff here - what's Lovecraft? Conservative, didactic, there are aliens and the occult and the occult is treated as a science, etc. I don't think it's either possible or useful to really try to say "there is a bright line and everything on THIS side is fantasy and everything on THAT side is science fiction".
It's just that we do have these two genres with genre conventions that are related but different and that come into being on different schedules and with different relations to the publishing industry. Similarly YA is a genre that really crystallized out of "books for young people" during my lifetime and began where there was already a formula (from the pulps and fantasy!) for crystallizing and marketing a genre, and that has shaped the conventions and distribution of YA.
Genre comes out of a tussle between readers, writers, big publishes and small publishers. Genres develop conventions which are lodestars - people might adhere to them or hate them or detourne them, etc, but the genre is legible in relation to its conventions. Horrible Harry Potter "is a wizard" because we've got language for what a wizard is that starts with The Hobbit and then a series of riffs on wizardry that gets us from Old White Guy Who Is Mostly Wise Rather Than Purely Sparkly to the present world and the idea of magic "systems".
I think when we talk about fantasy and science fiction we get into loops where the point of the conversation is to decide which genre is Good and to argue about whether, eg, Lovecraft is really fantasy or science fiction or some secret third thing, etc and that is either entertaining if you do it as a joke or incredibly boring and annoying. But to me the point is to try to understand how the genres come into being and what this means for how ideas move around in them. It's worth sorting out how ideas are articulated in these genres precisely because they are currently extremely influential and a major source of how morality and social criticism are popularly understood.
posted by Frowner at 5:35 AM on January 4 [4 favorites]
Hm. I'm not entirely in disagreement with you about the origins of SF versus fantasy, but I'm not sure I agree with you about how late fantasy became a self-understood genre. It was always more diffuse the SF, having more origin points woven into it, as you point out (literary fairy tales, gothic romanticism, heroic sword and sorcery, mythology, medieval sagas, etc.), but I think that, say, C. L. Moore would have considered herself to be writing fantasy when the Jirel of Joiry stories were published in the 30's.
And while LOTR informs much of our modern conception of the idea of "wizard", when a sorcerer shows up in The Canterbury Tales ("Doun of his hors Aurelius lighte anon / And with this magicien forth is he gon" etc.) Chaucer clearly didn't expect his readers to be bewildered by the concept.
Fantasy's origins are pretty old, even if the genre as we conceive it today -- which is still a very broad category, encompassing lots of very disparate works -- feels younger because of how it was popularized and eventually marketed.
posted by kyrademon at 8:04 AM on January 4
And while LOTR informs much of our modern conception of the idea of "wizard", when a sorcerer shows up in The Canterbury Tales ("Doun of his hors Aurelius lighte anon / And with this magicien forth is he gon" etc.) Chaucer clearly didn't expect his readers to be bewildered by the concept.
Fantasy's origins are pretty old, even if the genre as we conceive it today -- which is still a very broad category, encompassing lots of very disparate works -- feels younger because of how it was popularized and eventually marketed.
posted by kyrademon at 8:04 AM on January 4
I don’t think it counts as “fantasy” when the prevailing culture still actually believes that magic is real?
posted by eviemath at 8:05 AM on January 4 [1 favorite]
posted by eviemath at 8:05 AM on January 4 [1 favorite]
Fair enough. That probably means that "fantasy", as we conceive of it today, couldn't really have existed as a genre before about the late 17th century, at least in the European-descended tradition. So Perrault and D'Aulnoy would count, and certainly the gothics, but not, say, Mallory or Chaucer.
posted by kyrademon at 9:51 AM on January 4
posted by kyrademon at 9:51 AM on January 4
I find it more useful to talk about genre when there's an element of self-recognition and crystallization, or to talk about a genealogy. I feel like genre isn't about whether there is magic or life on the moon in a given story, it's whether there is a discourse/public that recognizes magic or life on the moon as a kind of story. It's like, not all self-published small publications are zines - if you start saying that all small self-published things are zines then you don't need the word "zine", because it's just a synonym for "small self-published thing".
On a personal level, I think it raises questions when you refer to something as part of a genre when neither the author nor the audience have that genre (or something analogous) as a frame of reference. Obviously Mary Shelley and her audience didn't talk about Frankenstein being "science fiction" in the way that we say it today - who shaves the barber, who genres the foundational work, etc. And if HG Wells describes his early work as "scientific romance" it would be pretty stupid to say "we can't call this science fiction because it's science romance".
But then there's all these other situations where you're looking at a story from another time or another culture where it's part of a whole different understanding of genre and story, and it seems weird to lean heavily on "this is really science fiction even though its authors and audience would have viewed it as a magical wonder tale in a genre of court tale-telling" or whatever, or to try to fit such a story into an origin narrative about science fiction when it was not available in a European language until 1975, etc.
To return to wizards, because we all love wizards, Tolkien didn't invent them, but the Hobbit and LOTR crystallize and popularize an image of what a wizard is and solidifies how a wizard appears in a story. In the eighties I read all the seventies and eighties fantasy I could get my hands on and the wizards were virtually always recognizably Tolkien wizards. That starts to change after "fantasy" stabilizes as a publishing category and people start to think "what is a wizard, what if the wizard were a girl, what if wizardry was something different, what if your questing party didn't have a wizard", etc.
But of course "how do we define [science fiction/fantasy]" is a question with a lot of answers. Some people like to say that science fiction begins with Frankenstein because that's where certain ideas about science and modernity first get crystallized, some people say that it begins with A True Story because ATS deals with aliens, travel to the moon, etc. Samuel Delany wrote somewhere that it doesn't truly start until the pulps, because that's when it really develops as a publishing/readerly category. I'm definitely more in the "some people" class of science fiction opiners than the "Samuel Delany" class but I tend to feel like something we can call SF becomes self-recognizing in the 19th century, and that's when SF begins for me.
I guess what I'm interested in with genre is why certain ideas/images/themes appear, how they reflect cultural concerns, how they are didactic and the sort of dialogic nature of genre. I think there's a narrative about something we can call science fiction (although we could call it SFsub1 or something if people felt strongly about the 'science fiction is all fiction ever with aliens, space travel, fantastic machines,etc' bit) that illuminates, like, cultural stuff about science, modernity, race, colonialism, etc in particular ways and that there's a coherent way to understand this fiction.
posted by Frowner at 12:25 PM on January 4 [2 favorites]
On a personal level, I think it raises questions when you refer to something as part of a genre when neither the author nor the audience have that genre (or something analogous) as a frame of reference. Obviously Mary Shelley and her audience didn't talk about Frankenstein being "science fiction" in the way that we say it today - who shaves the barber, who genres the foundational work, etc. And if HG Wells describes his early work as "scientific romance" it would be pretty stupid to say "we can't call this science fiction because it's science romance".
But then there's all these other situations where you're looking at a story from another time or another culture where it's part of a whole different understanding of genre and story, and it seems weird to lean heavily on "this is really science fiction even though its authors and audience would have viewed it as a magical wonder tale in a genre of court tale-telling" or whatever, or to try to fit such a story into an origin narrative about science fiction when it was not available in a European language until 1975, etc.
To return to wizards, because we all love wizards, Tolkien didn't invent them, but the Hobbit and LOTR crystallize and popularize an image of what a wizard is and solidifies how a wizard appears in a story. In the eighties I read all the seventies and eighties fantasy I could get my hands on and the wizards were virtually always recognizably Tolkien wizards. That starts to change after "fantasy" stabilizes as a publishing category and people start to think "what is a wizard, what if the wizard were a girl, what if wizardry was something different, what if your questing party didn't have a wizard", etc.
But of course "how do we define [science fiction/fantasy]" is a question with a lot of answers. Some people like to say that science fiction begins with Frankenstein because that's where certain ideas about science and modernity first get crystallized, some people say that it begins with A True Story because ATS deals with aliens, travel to the moon, etc. Samuel Delany wrote somewhere that it doesn't truly start until the pulps, because that's when it really develops as a publishing/readerly category. I'm definitely more in the "some people" class of science fiction opiners than the "Samuel Delany" class but I tend to feel like something we can call SF becomes self-recognizing in the 19th century, and that's when SF begins for me.
I guess what I'm interested in with genre is why certain ideas/images/themes appear, how they reflect cultural concerns, how they are didactic and the sort of dialogic nature of genre. I think there's a narrative about something we can call science fiction (although we could call it SFsub1 or something if people felt strongly about the 'science fiction is all fiction ever with aliens, space travel, fantastic machines,etc' bit) that illuminates, like, cultural stuff about science, modernity, race, colonialism, etc in particular ways and that there's a coherent way to understand this fiction.
posted by Frowner at 12:25 PM on January 4 [2 favorites]
Frowner, I'm sure you recall "Pierre Menard, author of Quixote", by Jorge Luis Borges, whose point is that the exact same text would mean very different things in different centuries/contexts. If Lucian's book was written today, we'd probably call it fantasy. At the time, it was something else, more akin to a tall tale, with the ancient trope that the farther you get from home, the stranger things get. Still, Lucian in general has at least one very modern idea, the use of mythology as a playground, shorn of even a pretense of belief. A more modern and non-Western example might be Li Ruzhen's Flowers in the Mirror.
I agree that science fiction is a commentary on science and modernism, and thus can't really exist till these things appear. This might have been a gradual process, though. Parts of the Divine Comedy refer to what was then understood of the physical universe; C.S. Lewis pointed to the movement of Dante and Vergil through the center of the earth, experiencing the reversal of gravity, as the first science fiction effect in literature. Swift's Gulliver's Travels is mostly satirical tall tales, but the section on Laputa might be one of the first depictions of scientists as opposed to scholars.
Jules Verne helped get things going, and though he has all the gung-ho technophilia, I think it's worth pointing out that his Captain Nemo is a critique, not a celebration, of colonialism.
I think you have a good point about the importance of publishers, and readers' expectations, on what is a genre. When I was a kid, I ran to the sf section in every bookstore to see if Tolkien had published the Silmarillion yet. Usually he hadn't, but Ballantine had scoured the archives for things that were not at all Tolkien but could appeal to his fans: Mervyn Peake, E.R. Eddison, David Lindsay. And yeah, despite that, fantasy for awhile was all based on either Tolkien or the sword & sorcery pulps.
I think fantasy also needs modernism to exist, because it requires an understanding the past differed in quality, not just in events. There's a flavor of this in Malory: surely Malory and his readers were well aware that wars were already being fought with arquebuses and cannons, not swords and lances. But it only became a commonplace in the 1800s, I think.
There's always been a fantasy/science fiction overlap, and it's gotten fuzzier over time. As just one example that comes to mind, there's J. Scalzi's Redshirts, whose plot revolves around the notion that people could become aware that they live in a fictional world and try to do something about it. The methods and the references are all science fictional, but it certainly isn't anything to do with science... it's an idea that could have occurred to Lucian or Borges.
posted by zompist at 3:18 PM on January 4 [1 favorite]
I agree that science fiction is a commentary on science and modernism, and thus can't really exist till these things appear. This might have been a gradual process, though. Parts of the Divine Comedy refer to what was then understood of the physical universe; C.S. Lewis pointed to the movement of Dante and Vergil through the center of the earth, experiencing the reversal of gravity, as the first science fiction effect in literature. Swift's Gulliver's Travels is mostly satirical tall tales, but the section on Laputa might be one of the first depictions of scientists as opposed to scholars.
Jules Verne helped get things going, and though he has all the gung-ho technophilia, I think it's worth pointing out that his Captain Nemo is a critique, not a celebration, of colonialism.
I think you have a good point about the importance of publishers, and readers' expectations, on what is a genre. When I was a kid, I ran to the sf section in every bookstore to see if Tolkien had published the Silmarillion yet. Usually he hadn't, but Ballantine had scoured the archives for things that were not at all Tolkien but could appeal to his fans: Mervyn Peake, E.R. Eddison, David Lindsay. And yeah, despite that, fantasy for awhile was all based on either Tolkien or the sword & sorcery pulps.
I think fantasy also needs modernism to exist, because it requires an understanding the past differed in quality, not just in events. There's a flavor of this in Malory: surely Malory and his readers were well aware that wars were already being fought with arquebuses and cannons, not swords and lances. But it only became a commonplace in the 1800s, I think.
There's always been a fantasy/science fiction overlap, and it's gotten fuzzier over time. As just one example that comes to mind, there's J. Scalzi's Redshirts, whose plot revolves around the notion that people could become aware that they live in a fictional world and try to do something about it. The methods and the references are all science fictional, but it certainly isn't anything to do with science... it's an idea that could have occurred to Lucian or Borges.
posted by zompist at 3:18 PM on January 4 [1 favorite]
Have Gun-Will Travel is an apt scify- western analogy though I don't like because no Chewbacca. It-id be like that slim bounty hunter from clone wars with that Lee Van Cleef trebeled voice.
Satyricon liber /House Harkonnen and Giedi Prime. Both are Hedonist, power mad socities but the former is not science fiction. Gulliver's travels seems fantastical but is it really in the tradition of Menippean satire.
but. Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumīs ego ipse oculīs meīs vīdī in ampullā pendere, et cum illī puerī dīcerent: "Σίβυλλα τί θέλεις;" respondēbat illa: "ἀποθανεῖν θέλω."
might recognize it as the epigram to The Wasteland..."In Isaac Asimov's short story "All the Troubles of the World", Asimov's recurring character Multivac, a supercomputer entrusted with analyzing and finding solutions to the world's problems, is asked "Multivac, what do you yourself want more than anything else?" and, like the Satyricon's Sibyl when faced with the same question, responds "I want to die.""
posted by clavdivs at 6:05 PM on January 4 [1 favorite]
Satyricon liber /House Harkonnen and Giedi Prime. Both are Hedonist, power mad socities but the former is not science fiction. Gulliver's travels seems fantastical but is it really in the tradition of Menippean satire.
but. Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumīs ego ipse oculīs meīs vīdī in ampullā pendere, et cum illī puerī dīcerent: "Σίβυλλα τί θέλεις;" respondēbat illa: "ἀποθανεῖν θέλω."
might recognize it as the epigram to The Wasteland..."In Isaac Asimov's short story "All the Troubles of the World", Asimov's recurring character Multivac, a supercomputer entrusted with analyzing and finding solutions to the world's problems, is asked "Multivac, what do you yourself want more than anything else?" and, like the Satyricon's Sibyl when faced with the same question, responds "I want to die.""
posted by clavdivs at 6:05 PM on January 4 [1 favorite]
I guess I just think that this:
"...it feels like "fantasy" really gets going as a self-understood genre only in the sixties/seventies and the conventions of the genre don't really crystallize until the seventies/eighties"
is overly reductive. That period is when fantasy as a genre was popularized and when (certain) conventions became staples of the genre, but that doesn't mean it didn't exist as a self-understood genre before then.
There's a pretty direct line from, say, Robert E. Howard to C. L. Moore to Fritz Leiber to P. C. Hodgell. Hope Mirlees is interesting as someone who could have been a Tolkien but wasn't, but she didn't create the path she was on, nor did it dead-end with her; George MacDonald influenced her and she influenced later authors from Neil Gaiman to (I suspect) Susanna Clarke. Literary fairy tales were hugely popular for a while, then became passe, then came back in the current, massive retelling boom.
The immense popularity of LOTR had a huge impact on the genre that is still being felt, but fantasy as a genre existed before it, and not all modern fantasy is descended from it.
posted by kyrademon at 2:50 AM on January 5 [2 favorites]
"...it feels like "fantasy" really gets going as a self-understood genre only in the sixties/seventies and the conventions of the genre don't really crystallize until the seventies/eighties"
is overly reductive. That period is when fantasy as a genre was popularized and when (certain) conventions became staples of the genre, but that doesn't mean it didn't exist as a self-understood genre before then.
There's a pretty direct line from, say, Robert E. Howard to C. L. Moore to Fritz Leiber to P. C. Hodgell. Hope Mirlees is interesting as someone who could have been a Tolkien but wasn't, but she didn't create the path she was on, nor did it dead-end with her; George MacDonald influenced her and she influenced later authors from Neil Gaiman to (I suspect) Susanna Clarke. Literary fairy tales were hugely popular for a while, then became passe, then came back in the current, massive retelling boom.
The immense popularity of LOTR had a huge impact on the genre that is still being felt, but fantasy as a genre existed before it, and not all modern fantasy is descended from it.
posted by kyrademon at 2:50 AM on January 5 [2 favorites]
The world built in the Titus Groan books, published roughly contemporaneously with Hobbit/LOTR, is a long way from Middle-earth. I rate plot, prose and character development as far ahead of Tolkien's, though Peake didn't go as far as inventing entire languages in detail.
posted by flabdablet at 4:08 AM on January 5
posted by flabdablet at 4:08 AM on January 5
(As an interesting side note, outside the world of the fantasy genre, the biggest immediate influence Hope Mirlees had was on T. S. Eliot. If you read her poem Paris, you'll see the connection immediately. The influence undoubtedly went both ways; it's not hard to find the link between the themes of The Wasteland and those of Lud-in-the-Mist.)
posted by kyrademon at 6:06 AM on January 5
posted by kyrademon at 6:06 AM on January 5
To return to wizards, because we all love wizards, Tolkien didn't invent them, but the Hobbit and LOTR crystallize and popularize an image of what a wizard is and solidifies how a wizard appears in a story. In the eighties I read all the seventies and eighties fantasy I could get my hands on and the wizards were virtually always recognizably Tolkien wizards.
But just to play devil's advocate here, isn't Tolkien's concept of a wizard (and everything that follows) basically Merlin, who would have been pervasive in his upbringing?
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 6:08 AM on January 5 [1 favorite]
But just to play devil's advocate here, isn't Tolkien's concept of a wizard (and everything that follows) basically Merlin, who would have been pervasive in his upbringing?
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 6:08 AM on January 5 [1 favorite]
To me this is why "genre" as opposed to "fantastic stories" is about culture and dispersion of the stories more than content per se.
Merlin is an origin point for Gandalf and the other wizards up to a point, but the differences are what make the story - Gandalf explicitly isn't a power behind the throne, he's explicitly an angel sent by God to assist humans/elves/dwarves, he rambles and motivates people rather than stays behind the scenes advising, etc. He's the template for the questing wizards that are so standard in seventies/eighties fantasy. Because what makes a genre is its readership and distribution, Tolkien is important because suddenly everybody knows what a wizard is like, and a wizard is like Gandalf. It's not the Merlin is an obscure figure at all, but LOTR was a massive pop culture phenomenon in the sixties/seventies that reached people who were not otherwise especially interested in fantasy.
Once LOTR happens, there's a shared cultural awareness of all these tropes that generate contemporary fantasy, and contemporary fantasy gets read in relation to them - even if it's "this is not your anodyne reactionary sappy Tolkienism" or "we're going to tell the story from the standpoint of the Orcs" or "this story, unlike Tolkien, draws its influence from X" etc. Also, there's suddenly an awareness among publishers that you can make huge amounts of money off this stuff - not just a little income stream from some oddball novels that sometimes get shelved with SF and sometimes get shelved with literature but big, bestseller money.
The point isn't "oh Tolkien created all these ideas" (when he himself was at great pains to show how connected his stories were to literary/cultural tradition) but that because of audience and distribution, his ideas created a format which put contemporary fantasy on its current path.
In a way, genre is about Things Getting Worse, or at least Things Getting Standardized. You take Lud In The Mist for instance, and you can't imagine a Lud In The Mist Expanded Universe. Or consider the immense, immense market for Lovecrafiana - how almost all of it involves standardizing and scrubbing what Lovecraft actually wrote so that it generates a coherent world that is not utterly driven by racist anxiety. Lovecraft did not write about adorable plush Cthulhu, but how adorable plush Cthulhu is!
Whereas once you're into genre fiction, there's a tremendous push (from fans, from culture, from publishers; if you read enough wizard school books, sometimes you want to write your own to do it the right way, etc) to standardize, to make universes that "make sense" and can be worked by fans, universes where it is clear that many, many stories can be told. I think that the way publishing has changed since the consolidations really started to happen in the nineties has only intensified this - I'm definitely seeing writers who used to emphasize more stand-alone and less systematized stories moving toward trilogies, magic schools, etc.
Genres have rules/practices that make them legible. Funnily, my dad and I (who is very not interested in fantasy or science fiction but very fond of Tolkien) recently read an M John Harrison novel that is extremely post-Tolkien and New Wave. I thought it would be a relatively big hit since Harrison is very into Woolf and other early modernists and it's an interesting book, but my dad found it hard to follow the plot. (He reads a lot of serious fiction - this isn't a reading or aging thing). The book is just much, much more legible if you're familiar with fantasy genre conventions because it's all about detourning them. (In Viriconium, if you're interested.)
posted by Frowner at 9:42 AM on January 5 [2 favorites]
Merlin is an origin point for Gandalf and the other wizards up to a point, but the differences are what make the story - Gandalf explicitly isn't a power behind the throne, he's explicitly an angel sent by God to assist humans/elves/dwarves, he rambles and motivates people rather than stays behind the scenes advising, etc. He's the template for the questing wizards that are so standard in seventies/eighties fantasy. Because what makes a genre is its readership and distribution, Tolkien is important because suddenly everybody knows what a wizard is like, and a wizard is like Gandalf. It's not the Merlin is an obscure figure at all, but LOTR was a massive pop culture phenomenon in the sixties/seventies that reached people who were not otherwise especially interested in fantasy.
Once LOTR happens, there's a shared cultural awareness of all these tropes that generate contemporary fantasy, and contemporary fantasy gets read in relation to them - even if it's "this is not your anodyne reactionary sappy Tolkienism" or "we're going to tell the story from the standpoint of the Orcs" or "this story, unlike Tolkien, draws its influence from X" etc. Also, there's suddenly an awareness among publishers that you can make huge amounts of money off this stuff - not just a little income stream from some oddball novels that sometimes get shelved with SF and sometimes get shelved with literature but big, bestseller money.
The point isn't "oh Tolkien created all these ideas" (when he himself was at great pains to show how connected his stories were to literary/cultural tradition) but that because of audience and distribution, his ideas created a format which put contemporary fantasy on its current path.
In a way, genre is about Things Getting Worse, or at least Things Getting Standardized. You take Lud In The Mist for instance, and you can't imagine a Lud In The Mist Expanded Universe. Or consider the immense, immense market for Lovecrafiana - how almost all of it involves standardizing and scrubbing what Lovecraft actually wrote so that it generates a coherent world that is not utterly driven by racist anxiety. Lovecraft did not write about adorable plush Cthulhu, but how adorable plush Cthulhu is!
Whereas once you're into genre fiction, there's a tremendous push (from fans, from culture, from publishers; if you read enough wizard school books, sometimes you want to write your own to do it the right way, etc) to standardize, to make universes that "make sense" and can be worked by fans, universes where it is clear that many, many stories can be told. I think that the way publishing has changed since the consolidations really started to happen in the nineties has only intensified this - I'm definitely seeing writers who used to emphasize more stand-alone and less systematized stories moving toward trilogies, magic schools, etc.
Genres have rules/practices that make them legible. Funnily, my dad and I (who is very not interested in fantasy or science fiction but very fond of Tolkien) recently read an M John Harrison novel that is extremely post-Tolkien and New Wave. I thought it would be a relatively big hit since Harrison is very into Woolf and other early modernists and it's an interesting book, but my dad found it hard to follow the plot. (He reads a lot of serious fiction - this isn't a reading or aging thing). The book is just much, much more legible if you're familiar with fantasy genre conventions because it's all about detourning them. (In Viriconium, if you're interested.)
posted by Frowner at 9:42 AM on January 5 [2 favorites]
I read recently (don't remember where, probably on MeFi) that a genre is a conversation, and as such doesn't have fixed boundaries, but rather topics and things that have already been discussed.
I like this definition, especially since it makes sense of why I'm so irked when some 'literary' author decides to slum it by taking a beaten-to-a-pulp trope from the early days of science fiction, adding a horny professor/author or two, and then gets lauded for how foward thinking and daring he is. To me this is equivalent to somebody joining an ongoing conversation where people have been talking about their experiences tasting different kinds of cheeses all over the world for the past hour and declaring loudly "Did you know cheese is just spoiled milk????" and expecting everybody to applaud his wit.
posted by signal at 2:38 PM on January 5 [2 favorites]
I like this definition, especially since it makes sense of why I'm so irked when some 'literary' author decides to slum it by taking a beaten-to-a-pulp trope from the early days of science fiction, adding a horny professor/author or two, and then gets lauded for how foward thinking and daring he is. To me this is equivalent to somebody joining an ongoing conversation where people have been talking about their experiences tasting different kinds of cheeses all over the world for the past hour and declaring loudly "Did you know cheese is just spoiled milk????" and expecting everybody to applaud his wit.
posted by signal at 2:38 PM on January 5 [2 favorites]
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one of my personal hobbyhorses is that musk keeps claiming inspiration from douglas adams, whose hitchhiker's guide begins with 1) making fun of humans who like the latest shiny tech and 2) blaming capitalism for their unhappiness, within the first four sentences. I'm not sure there is a sufficiently politically left scifi that shitheads won't claim is their inspiration.
posted by BungaDunga at 7:32 PM on January 2 [42 favorites]