It is widely agreed, I think, that the most prominent technological trend generally unanticipated by science fiction is the enormous growth in computer technology.  This results in older science fiction often having technology that seems like a mismatched jumble of the astonishing and primitive: interstellar civilizations with faster-than-light travel where microfilm is the state-of-the-art in data storage is a common example.  I’m not bothered by it, but it certainly jumps out.  (And there are exceptions, including what is arguably the most prescient SF story ever- Murray Leinster’s astonishing “A Logic Named Joe,” which predicted home personal computers, the internet, search engines, and internet telephones.  Not bad for a story published in 1946, when a cutting-edge computer cost more than five million inflation-adjusted dollars and weighed 30 tons.)

What brought this to mind was an amusing example I was recently reminded of.   A friend of mine caught the movie Short Circuit 2 on television few days ago.  Not exactly rigorously hard science fiction, but it was, in its time, one of the more prominent popular depictions of the idea of artificial intelligence.  (And perhaps the high-water mark of the  obsession with wacky comic relief robots that loomed like a vast black shadow over much of the 1980s. )  Protagonist Johnny 5, a self-aware robot with at least human-level intellect, boasts at one point that he possesses “5oo hundred megabytes of memory.”

I’m typing this on the computer I use for work and most other things writing-related.  It’s a few years olds, and was not a top-end model even when it was made.  It has 160 gigabytes of memory.   I have a 1 gigabyte USB flash drive shorter than my pinky finger.  I paid about $20-30 for it a few years ago; compared to what you can get now for the same price, 1 gigabyte is nothing impressive.

A figure intended to make audiences think “amazing computer technology from a secret government lab” when I was a child is now dwarfed by cheap consumer electronics you can buy in a Wal-Mart clearance aisle and carry in your shirt pocket.  It makes me wonder what technological trends (and soical trends, for that matter) present-day science fiction is missing, and what glaring omissions will strike readers 40 years from now as the equivalent of “Wow, 500 megabytes!” or interstellar starships that calculate their trajectories with microfilm records and a slide rule.  If anyone has any guesses, I’d love to hear them.

Via Grasping for the Wind, I came upon this interesting post by James Enge, in which Enge talks about the role played in each person by the “naïve reader” and the “sophisticated reader.”  As Enge describes it:

The naive reader wants the hero to kill the bad guy and marry the space-princess (or space-prince, or what have you). The sophisticated reader is muttering, “Yes, this is much like the plot Burroughs used, with overtones of Hamlet and the occasional oblique reference to postmodernism which is de rigueur for self-consciously retrogenerical pastiche, n’est-ce pas?” The naive reader just wants to sit back and enjoy the movie. The sophisticated reader is the guy sitting in the row behind who won’t STFU.

Each person contains both.  The naïve reader experiences the story directly- as Enge says, it is “the one for whom the reading experience is emotionally fulfilling.” The sophisticated reader, through deeper analysis and understanding of things beyond what’s up in the foreground, can augment the enjoyment of the naïve reader-or disrupt it, either by identifying issues the naïve reader would miss or running wild and nitpicking everything.

This made me think of a related question: What aspects of fiction are the primary sources of enjoyment, and what aspects are secondary or in the realm of peripheral details or nitpicking?  These categories don’t correspond precisely to Enge’s casual and sophisticated reader, but they are somewhat related.

I think one of the biggest and most common barriers to understanding when considering fiction is the assumption that all fiction is ultimately about, or at least ought to be about, the same things, and that likewise all readers enjoy or ought to enjoy the same things.  One of the distinguishing characteristics of science fiction, especially (but by no means exclusively) hard science fiction, is that it often moves issues of scientific and technical realism, along with things like creativity and logical consistency of background, from the peripheral/nitpicking realm to the foreground.

For me, and I think for many people who like science fiction (especially written), getting science and technology right isn’t just something that appeases my desire to nitpick or allows me to appreciate a story on an additional, supplementary level, it’s a source of pleasure in the same way that the plot and characters are.  Background and setting are similar. I enjoy it when a setting is put together well, when the extrapolated social and technological effects of the science presented makes sense-and again, this is front and center in my mind in the same way that character and plot is.  It’s primary, not supplementary.  Fantasy often does something like this too, with J.R.R. Tolkien being the most obvious and striking example.  This is quite different from most other forms of fiction, where the setting may have thematic relevance but is usually not an object of interest in itself.  (Historical fiction is an exception, since the historical veracity of the setting is often a significant part of the reader’s enjoyment.  It would be interesting to know how much overlap there is between historical fiction readers and SF readers)

Indeed, some science fiction works more or less invert the normal hierarchy entirely, not only putting science, extrapolation of technology, and logical construction of setting up in front as sources of enjoyment, but pushing things that are conventionally considered the core of what good fiction should be about, such as characterization and prose style, into the background, or almost into oblivion altogether.  If I’m reading a science fiction book with imaginative and well thought-out ideas, the quality of characterization often becomes a nitpicky background concern to me.  A science fiction story is certainly not harmed by good characters, but often it isn’t much harmed by their absence either.  A lot of the complaints about characterization in science fiction often strikes me as sort of like hearing someone complain that magical realist author Gabriel Garcia Marquez failed to explore the physical mechanism or social effects of the technology of the giant magnet that the gypsies had in One Hundred Years of Solitude, or about the improbable and melodramatic plots of many operas.

This is not an absolute rule, and it’s certainly possible to write science fiction that is primarily based on character or stylistic flair.  There are plenty of character-based stories I like.  I think my description captures the genre’s general thrust, however.  This has serious implications for other issues, such as the desire of some people for science fiction and fantasy to gain greater respectability, but this post is long enough for now.  I’d be interested in hearing how other readers experience science fiction, and if your take on the nature of the genre is similar to mine.

Lou Anders has an interesting post (found via SF Signal) on people’s enjoyment of books being affected by the religious or political views expressed in the book.  I can’t think of a book that I otherwise would have liked that I disliked because of its political, ideological, or religious content, though maybe that has more to do with my reading choices than any innate tolerance; I really couldn’t say.

There are two ways I can think of for a book or author’s ideological stance to diminish a reader’s enjoyment, and I think people almost always talk about only the first, which is when a person finds the author’s viewpoint morally or intellectually objectionable in itself.  This is the kind Anders is talking about, I think, and is the kind usually discussed when the issue comes up.  Orson Scott Card is probably the most prominent example of an author some people won’t read for this reason.

There is another way in which I can see a book’s stance or viewpoint marring someone’s enjoyment of the book, however, particularly in regards to politics.  Every adult who is not oblivious to the society around him has an ideology, consciously embraced and held or otherwise.  Political ideologies do, of course, have a purely moral component, beliefs about how things should be.  However, in large part, an ideology is a set of beliefs about how the world works, a sort of physics of society. Can government central planners do a better job of creating prosperity than the market economy?  Can despotic foreign countries be turned into successful democracies through invasion?  Will increased welfare spending have undesirable cultural effects on the recipients?  Is human nature as we know it fixed, or would it change significantly under different socioeconomic conditions?  These are questions full of moral significance, but they are not themselves moral questions.

If a character in a story is forced to watch as his beloved family is slaughtered and never feels any distress about it, most readers would think, “Hold on, people don’t work that way.”  If you’re reading a science fiction story where normal people routinely survive 500-foot drops in Earth’s gravity without being harmed, the implausibility of it will make it harder to believe in the world of the story, and thus harder to enjoy it.  My father, an attorney, can’t watch TV legal dramas for more than five minutes without yelling at the television.

Politics can be similar.  When someone’s ideology clashes with yours, he doesn’t just disagree about moral values, he disagrees about how the world works, and how people work.  Thus, when reading a work of fiction, a violation of one’s ideological expectations can be jarring in the same way that poorly done characterization, bad science, or technical mistakes can be.  If you believe that unregulated markets inevitably result in monopolies and plutocracy, a story with a world based on libertarian assumptions about society and economics will be that much harder to buy into.  If you think that the state is by nature an exploitative institution, a setting where the government works the way good-government liberals say it does (or can) is not going to be believable.  You won’t believe in a setting based on a free-love paradise if you believe promiscuity causes unhappiness and social breakdown.  And so on.

There are ways around this.  (Perhaps everyone in the free-love paradise has been genetically engineered so that they don’t feel jealousy or form strong pair-bond ties.)  And you can still enjoy a story even if you think it’s based on bad assumptions about society and human nature, if it’s other virtues are enough to compensate.  Nevertheless, I don’t think it’s at all unreasonable for enjoyment of a story to be affected by these factors, any more than it’s unreasonable for it to be affected by the realism of characterization or science.

This goes deeper than bad physics, for me and I think for most people.  It’s relatively easy for me to imagine that the laws of physics are other than what they really are, so that FTL travel or whatever is possible.  But ideology is in large part about the causal laws of human beings, and it’s much harder to bracket what I know about human beings than it is to temporarily put aside what I know about physical science.  I can read about and contemplate special relativity, or not, as I choose; I can’t stop living in a human society and thinking and feeling with a human mind.  Almost everyone has strongly held beliefs about how people work that are fundamental to their worldview; most people don’t have such beliefs about science, even if they like the subject and are knowledgeable about it.

Of course, people who care about the subject mostly agree about the laws of physics, except on the cutting edges, and there’s fairly broad agreement about at least the basics of how most people behave, at least on the individual level.  Ideology is far more contentious.  Most people would be intolerant of a story, if allegedly set in the real universe we know, where people enjoy being tortured or rivers flow uphill, but such intolerance never shows itself because everyone agrees on those points, and so there are no stories like that to be intolerant of.  There’s plenty of opportunity to be intolerant where ideology is concerned, on the other hand, because no comparable consensus exists.  Whatever you believe about politics and society, the world has plenty of people who believe things that will strike you as the equivalent of “rivers flow uphill,” and who would say the same thing about your beliefs.

So, yes, my enjoyment of stories can be, and has been, affected by the ideological stance or assumptions in a book, and I don’t think there’s anything unreasonable about that.  (Though I do my best to bracket that aspect when writing a review, since “Are the book’s setting and events in accord with John Markley’s social and political views?” is probably not a question SF fans are dying to know the answer to.)  Now, I don’t give this consideration a huge amount of weight.  There are far too many different authors with different views for me to limit myself to people who agree with me, and my reading would be greatly diminished if I decided that, say, Iain M. Banks was too doctrinally impure to read.

What about you?  Has this issue affected the way you read or experience fiction?  If so, how?

io9 has an article entitled “Charles Stross Explains Why UK Scif Is More Hopeful Than US Scifi.” The title left me baffled, as if I had seen an article entitled “Stephen Hawking Explains Why Siberia Is Hotter Than the Photosphere of the Sun.”

My impression has long been that British science fiction is darker and more depressing than what’s produced in America. Stephen Baxter is generally quite downbeat, as (to a lesser extent) is Alastair Reynolds. If I had to describe the mood of either author’s works in a single word, it would probably be “bleak.” Peter F. Hamilton is more upbeat, but I still don’t think I’d call him optimistic.

Even more positively portrayed futures usually seem to be used as setting for dark stories. Neal Asher’s Polity universe is very optimistic in most respects-life is very good for the great majority of humanity- but the plots and events are usually pretty dark. Iain M. Bank’s Culture is perhaps the most utopian society in science fiction, but it’s largely there as a backdrop for some of the most depressing stories in science fiction.

I haven’t read Ken MacLeod, but my understanding is that a number of his books portray an anarchosocialist future society in a pretty positive way, so there’s that. Still, darkness seems to be the general trend.

I’m not saying this as a criticism of these authors; I like dark. But I’m wondering: Is my assessment correct, or is there some big strain of optimistic British SF that I’ve missed?

Jake Seliger has an interesting post about remarks made about fantasy by Patrick Kurp, in which Kurp says:

Fantasy feels like a cheat, an evasion, a con game for stunted children. I read to know the world, in particular the human world, even to celebrate it, not to slum in another. Ours feels sufficiently mysterious and wonder-filled, so ghosts, witches, aliens and magic spells come off as kitschy, redundant gimmicks.

I strongly recommend Seliger’s post. He gives an interesting defense of fantasy that is worth reading.

I’m interested not so much in Kurp specifically as in what his remark suggests, because I think it shows an important part of the reason why fantasy and science fiction is so looked down upon, a question that’s been on my mind lately. Calling something childish or the like is, of course, a common attack leveled against fiction that does not take place in the real world as we know it (or its past), as well as a common criticism of people who read such fiction. Why?

I think it largely boils down to this. Children often have vivid imaginations, and so imagination is strongly associated with children in our culture. Children tend to have all sorts of traits that are not appropriate for adults. People often have a need to prove themselves grown up, to others and perhaps to themselves. Thus, use of imagination beyond imagining fairly mundane real-world events is disreputable. As a result, it’s often not enough to simply say, “SF doesn’t interest me,” or even to say that SF is all aesthetically bad; some psychological or moral fault must be ascribed to SF and/or its readers.

It’s worth noting that the small number of speculative works that have gained respectability are usually social/political commentaries, satires, or allegories, e.g. 1984 and Brave New World. (Or the new Battlestar Galactica, for that matter.) Imagination is more excusable when the imaginative elements of a work are only a stand-in for something about the present-day world, merely sugar to help the medicine go down. Some SF fans themselves seem to implicitly accept this, arguing that SF should be respected because of its potential for metaphor or allegory.

Things are likely aggravated by the fact that most modern fantasy, like science fiction, is heavily based on system-building and logical extrapolation: if X were the case (X being “magic is real” or “time-travel is possible” or whatever), what would happen? Logic and systematizing, as I’ve said before, are disfavored personality traits; having a strong interest in them is considered to be mostly the preserve of nerds, weirdoes, and losers. Fantasy is (obviously) not connected to science in the way science fiction is, but it often shares science fiction’s rational approach to a great extent.

That might explain why magical realism is usually considered legit literature: it has imaginative elements, which is iffy, but it doesn’t compound the sin by thinking about the imaginative elements rationally. Weird stuff just happens, and people and the world in general don’t respond realistically. (I’m not saying this as a criticism; different forms of literature engage different aspects of the human mind to different degrees, and that’s perfectly legitimate.)

Similarly, while mystery is often highly rational in orientation, it does not usually imagine things that could not happen today (or in the real past, for historicals.) Mystery is Genre rather than Real Literature, but it is still far more respectable than science fiction or fantasy.

Respectability for fantasy or science fiction is most likely a hopeless cause, at least in the current cultural climate. It has the stigma of childishness and Nerd Cooties at the same time. A genre might be able to get away with one; you won’t get away with both.

At last week’s Mind Meld at SF Signal, the question asked was:

What are the best examples of SF/F worldbuilding?

This is a question I like to think about, since I think worldbuilding- and especially the process of extrapolating how this or that technology or social change would affect the world- is one of the core virtues of science fiction that distinguishes it from more conventional fiction. People always say- or chant- “All fiction is about people,” and in a trivial sense that’s true, but it’s often less true in science fiction than in other genres. A science fiction story certainly can be about people (that is, the psychology of specific individuals, or some alleged truth about the “human condition”), but it doesn’t have to be, and that’s one of its strengths.

(This, I think, lies at the core of why science fiction is held to be inferior to “literature:” it rejects mainstream culture’s privileging of emotion and socialization over other human faculties, such as reason. Most people- and, what’s more important, most opinion-shapers in this area – are primarily socially/emotionally/people oriented, and people often consider subjects outside their own field of interest and/or competence is to be inferior or unworthy. It’s also a common human tendency to find people who aren’t like you to be some mixture of baffling, pitiful, and repulsive, and so disdain for the stereotypical nerd spills over onto the interests and pastimes of the stereotypical nerd. There are other factors, but I think this is the heart of it.)

But I digress. So, what are some of my favorites?

The Oikumene and worlds beyond of Jack Vance’s Demon Princes series (The Star King, The Killing Machine, The Palace of Love, The Face, The Book of Dreams, currently available in two omnibus collections) is the first thing that comes to mind. There are so many interesting locations, and there are few who can make places come alive like Vance: Dar Sai and it’s bizarre mating customs and strange sports (someone ought to get a real hadual league going), the cruel and morbid people of Sarkovy, the diverse worlds of the vast Rigel Concourse, and many more. Vance is also the unsurpassed master of the fictional epigraph as world-building device.

The old BattleTech universe was tremendously detailed and interesting, especially if you have some of the old House sourcebooks that came out in 80s. It’s actually pretty remarkable how much background material they created for a tabletop war game, and I love that sort of thing. Granted, there’s no real reason anyone needs to know what the legal status of Lutheranism is in the Rasalhague District of the Draconis Combine in order to adjudicate battles between giant robots, but it’s fun to have information like that if you like to immerse yourself.

Poul Anderson’s Orion Shall Rise is a good one, and my favorite post-apocalyptic setting. There’s lots of interesting stuff – Skyholm, a pre-war aerostat whose inhabitants rule parts of Western Europe, the well-intentioned but oppressive Maurai nation that rules the Pacific, the near-anarchic and rapidly industrializing Northwest Union, held together by its Lodges. There are lots of little things that made it feel more real to me- for instance, the fact that the nuclear war that shattered civilization centuries ago is called different things (the Doom, the Judgment, etc.) in different cultures, or how pre-Doom religions have evolved in subtly different ways in different parts of the world.

I love the setting for John C. Wright’s Golden Age trilogy, the Golden Oecumene. I can’t really do justice to it, because it’s it probably more densely packed with ideas than just about anything I’ve ever read; I sometimes felt as if every page had enough imagination to support whole novels. It also manages the feat- a difficult one, I’ve argued- of being an exciting story within a utopian society, without even the expedient of venturing into some hostile realm outside the utopia being portrayed. I love Iain M. Banks’ Culture books, for instance, but the Culture itself is really the least interesting thing about the books it appears in. Not so the Oecumene.

I’ve become increasingly fond of Neal Asher’s Polity universe. My favorite location in it is probably the world of Spatterjay from his book The Skinner, with its relentlessly nasty ecosystem. Spatterjay has some interesting social speculation, too: The bite of the Spatterjay leech transmits a virus that gradually changes the human body, making the host stronger, tougher, and faster-healing until he is almost unkillable. The human settlers thus have a rather casual attitude towards violence- they have prize-fights where disemboweling someone is merely the equivalent of a boxing TKO. He’ll be fine, just stuff his intestines back in and let him walk it off…

Finally, Larry Niven’s Known Space deserves a mention. I love the juxtaposition of hard science fiction elements with the more implausible or even outrageous concepts Niven comes up with. On the one hand, you’ve got carefully thought out use of reaction drives, slower-than-light travel and civilizations, and other hard SF staples. Even the more fanciful elements are dealt with rigorously- momentum is conserved when you’re sent through a teleporter, for instance. On the other hand… A billion years ago, telepathic aliens crushed a slave revolt with a massive telepathic transmission that killed all sapient life in the galaxy! Human adults are actually just the adolescent form of a race of hyperintelligent genocidal aliens from the galactic core! Luck is genetic, and you can selectively breed for it to create nigh-invulnerable people! It’s sort of like going to a really interesting physics lecture and then taking LSD halfway through, but without those pesky dissociative fugue states and giant spider attacks.

Any thoughts? Any favorites of your own to nominate?

I first got into Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen series because I had heard it described as dark military fantasy in the vein of Glen Cook’s Black Company books. They do fit that description somewhat well.

Odd as it sounds, I find the Malazan Book of the Fallen series to be fairly upbeat, in a certain sense. The books present a fairly unpleasant world, full of horrors- an entire race that turned itself into a horde of undead hulks in order to wage a millennia-long campaign of genocide, a theocratic regime that intentionally drive hundreds of thousands of its own innocent people mad with hunger in order to use them as fanatical man-eating shock troops, plague and religious war depopulating large swathes of a whole continent, whole armies roasted alive, and who knows what else- and that’s just the first six books! Meanwhile, even what seems to be the most reasonable government on the planet is still in the habit of doing things like having entire families publicly impaled on walls pour encourager les autres. Not a fun place to live.

And yet, to me it has a certain positivity and hope that a lot of other “gritty” fantasy, like George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series and (to a less extreme degree) the Black Company (to name my other two favorite modern fantasy series), generally doesn’t have. In the Malazan Book of the Fallen there are inspiring characters like the indomitable Coltaine in Deadhouse Gates, or the heroic Gruntle and the compassionate Itkovian in Memories of Ice. As awful as the world and events portrayed are, virtue and heroism are real, and at least sometimes powerful. The sheer larger-than-life badassery of many of the characters, which turns people some people off, gives the feeling of a world where individuals can matter and make a difference.

There is a sense of hope, about humanity if not the universe in general, that is much weaker in Glen Cook and even weaker still in George R.R. Martin. Characters in Cook’s work are usually sympathetic and sometimes even admirable or heroic, but they tend to be inefficacious. The men of the Black Company are dragged from war to war, and are lucky just to stay alive; major characters die and the world carries on as if they were never there. Garrett has greater control of his own destiny, and the power to do some good, but the world won’t change, and he knows it. (Some of the Garrett books have a very strong feeling of melancholy about them, despite their humor.) As for Martin…Well, it would be oversimplified but nevertheless fairly accurate to summarize much of A Song of Ice and Fire as “Loathsome Bastards being loathsome and bastardly to people, many of whom are also Loathsome Bastards.” There are admirable (or at least decent) people, but they usually do much less to influence events.

Lest I give the wrong impression, I am not criticizing Cook or Martin for this. This is meant as observation, not value judgment; I love Martin and Cook, and when it’s done well I love books with the sort of grim world and outlook they often portray.

Any thoughts?

There’s a good post by Mike Brotherton at Science Fiction and Fantasy Novelists arguing against the idea of a dichotomy between fantasy and science fiction, in which fantasy supposedly is (or should) be about things that are not amenable to rational analysis. I’ve never agreed with the idea, which I hear from time to time, that fantasy and magic become less fantastical or magical if they follow rationally explicable rules. Aside from the fact that a truly unscientific world would probably be incomprehensible to minds built for a causal, rule-governed universe, it’s bad for the narrative- you can’t have drama without constraints on what the characters can do, and the characters can’t have constraints if just anything can happen. (This is known in literary theory as the “Superman Just Invents New Powers Out of Nowhere Every Five Minutes” problem.)

A rather large caveat: just because phenomena follow rules doesn’t mean they need to be explained, necessarily. H.P. Lovecraft was a materialist who expressed that worldview in his fiction- his monsters and “gods” were generally beings with unimaginable technology or subject to alternate physical laws, but not “supernatural” in the sense of being apart from the material universe. Nevertheless, Lovecraft did not go into much detail- we don’t learn just what the Colour Out of Space was, or how Cthulu’s biology allowed him to survive being rammed by a boat, or why the Great Old Ones can only awake when the stars are right, and we’d probably sink into gibbering lunacy if we tried to fit that knowledge into our brains. There’s nothing wrong with leaving things unexplained, or even saying that some things in the story are beyond the capability of humans to ever understand. But they should be in principle understandable, even if not from a human perspective. This approach also calls for some caution, since “this fictional world is a place where some things are beyond our comprehension” can degenerate into “stuff happens for no reason aside from the author writing himself into a corner” if care is not taken.

Even a supernatural, animistic universe is potentially amenable to scientific analysis, though perhaps without the rigor of physics. If earthquakes are what happens when the land spirits quarrel with each other, a knowledge of plate tectonics won’t help you predict earthquakes- but studying how the land spirits think and interact might. That would be quite an interesting setting, actually- a world where humans understand and control nature not through the hard physical sciences, but through psychology and sociology. If someone wants to go to the trouble of writing an entire book about it and then give me half the money for the thirty seconds of work I contributed, knock yourself out. And, more conventionally, fantasy magic is rule-based- say certain words or perform a certain ritual or whatever and get a certain effect, even if the actual mechanism is not understood.

More subjectively and personally, with a very few exceptions (such as some horror stories, where the unknown nature of the horror makes it scarier) I’ve never understood the idea that explaining something makes it less interesting or less impressive. The little glowy thingamabobs in the night sky are pretty, but knowing that they’re colossal nuclear reactors putting out enough energy to be seen trillions of miles away makes them much cooler, and in general the night sky is more sublime when you have a sense of the true scale of it. I’ve spent over a year childishly infatuated with a woman working at my neighborhood bar, which is pretty damn stupid, but my excitement when she stops to talk with me and my inane attempts to amuse her with my horrible jokes and patented Guinness Mustache embarrass me slightly less when I think of how the flood of phenylethylamine in my brain that turns me into a mumbling idiot around her is an adaptation forged over millennia of evolution that promotes the survival of the human species. (I acknowledge that this is not a terribly romantic sentiment.)

Brotherton also hits one of my pet peeves- stories where the skeptical “scientist” character keeps insisting that blatantly supernatural events must have a mundane explanation, no matter how untenable the notion becomes in the face of mounting evidence. To be fair, a certain amount of this is probably realistic- people don’t give up a strongly held view of the world easily. It often gets taken to ridiculous lengths, though.

It’s especially annoying if the character lives in a fantastical world and has been frequently exposed to supernatural events in the past, yet once again becomes a dogmatic materialist every time another clearly supernatural phenomenon comes along. “Look, I know we’ve previously encountered vampires, werewolves, nymphs, Goetic demons, leprechauns, the Wandering Jew, valkyries, the prophet Elijah, tengu, nephilim, the Spear of Longinus, Satan, our own time-traveling past life incarnations, and the entire Aztec pantheon. But the idea that ghosts might be real is just absurd!”

Update: Edited to fix a typo.

I’d like to start by apologizing for the title of this post. I just had to somehow cram the Nozick reference in, no matter the cost.

A while back, Alex Zalben, writing at SciFi Scanner, posted the following:

Find me a sci-fi movie where there is a Utopia, and I will point out the worm in the apple. Every single time we are presented with a Utopian society on film, there is also a corrupt diplomat that’s running the show, or it’s a dream world, or it’s built on a city of good-hearted underground dwellers… You know what I’m saying because you’ve all seen such movies before.

So I’m going to make a broad statement and say: There is no such thing as Utopia in science fiction.

Zalben goes on to cite some examples from both film and books. He suggests that the lack of conflict inherent to a utopia makes drama effectively impossible.

You can include an actual utopia and still have conflict, either by having it threatened by outside forces, or by having characters from the utopian society venturing outside of it for some reason. In television, Star Trek: The Next Generation would be an example of both approaches, for instance. The portrayal of the Federation got “dirtied up” a bit by Deep Space Nine, and perhaps even a few of the later Next Generation episodes, but it was pretty explicitly utopian early on- all the talk about how humanity has evolved beyond this or that. Venturing into written science fiction, John C. Wright’s “Golden Age” trilogy is an example of the “outside threat” method, while several of Iain M. Banks’ Culture books use the latter method.

Zalben started out by talking about movies, though, and it’s possible that this method is poorly suited to feature films. It requires a lot of world-building, and that takes time: you need time to establish the utopia, and you need time to set up the non-utopian outside, and then you need time for the actual conflict, and if you want to actually explore the idea of the utopia in detail and still have a good conflict you end up with a movie that’s six hours long. The lack of actual utopias in cinema may be more a limitation of the medium than anything else.

It also depends on how strict your definition of “Utopia” is. If it requires absolute perfection and goodness, than conflict within the utopia is impossible. If it merely means a society that is vastly better than ours, you can still have internal conflict. There can still be bad people with bad intentions, they’re just not the ones running the show.

You can also have a utopian society where the conflict is not in the form of some sinister evil, but between good guys. For instance, much of the conflict in John C. Wright’s “Golden Age” Trilogy is not between heroes and villains, but between humane and well-intentioned people who disagree about cultural values and the future direction of their social evolution. An interesting wrinkle is that Wright’s utopia is libertarian, and both the protagonist and most of the antagonists firmly accept libertarian principles of justice, resulting in a conflict for the fate of their society where most of the combatants would never dream of using force, violence, or state coercion against each other. (Though some of the players don’t play quite so nicely…)

One problem is that if you actually portray the utopia in any detail, axe-grinding is all but impossible to avoid, which risks alienating potential readers. This can be overcome- I love Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels, even though the Culture itself has a great deal of leftist wish fulfillment built into it- but it does have risks. If a society is portrayed as ideal or nearly so, everything makes a potential statement. Does religion still exist? What kind of government do they have, if any? How do they deal with criminals? (If they don’t have any, that too betrays certain assumptions.) What things are illegal, taboo, or disapproved of? How does the utopia remain in existence? Do they have a market economy and private ownership? What are their attitudes and practices regarding sex? Do they have marriage?

People differ on both what kind of society is desirable in theory (Most of the societies conceived by 19^th century utopians would be horrifying to me even if they worked as advertised) and on how societies work, and which ones are possible, in practice. Most portrayals of the future express ideological assumptions, whether or not they are explicit or even intentional, but utopia pushes the issue front and center by proclaiming what it portrays to be ideal. If you don’t think it’s ideal, or think it’s outright bad, than 1. you may enjoy the story less, and 2. you may like the author less, as a person. Different people have different limits in this regard. If John C. Wright had a radical political change of heart and decided to write about noble Communists colonizing the moon, building a perfect society there through the power of scientific socialism and mass terror, and then going to war against the plutocrats of Earth and heroically killing the entire reactionary population through man-made famine, my love of Wright’s previous work probably wouldn’t be enough to make me buy it.

One possible final problem is that so much science fiction is about change. Often the fictional changes took place between now and whenever the story happens, but quite often science fiction portrays societies in flux and transition. Most visions of utopia, on the other hand, are static- if you’ve attained the best possible society, change is degeneration. That can work fine for a story- a tale of a collapsing utopia could be very interesting- but that’s not really utopian fiction in the usual sense of the term. It’s ironic- science fiction is in one sense the only form of fiction that works for portraying a utopia, since no perfect societies exist circa 2008, and yet the idea of utopia clashes with one of science fiction’s principal themes and strong points.

I’d be curious to hear about you thoughts, or your favorite and least favorite utopian stories.

Baen Books has done some fine work bringing older science fiction back into print, often for the first time in decades. This, however, is by the far coolest thing they’ve done- no, the coolest thing any human being who isn’t Poul Anderson has ever done. Baen Books will be releasing a collection of Poul Anderson’s Technic History stories this September. It’s apparently called The Van Rijn Method: The Technic Civilization Saga #1. Amazon.com also has a listing for David Falkayn: Star Trader: The Technic Civilization Saga #2, slated for release in January 2009. Both books are listed as around 600 pages, which is nice. Hopefully we’ll eventually get the complete Technic History stories.

Note that this post has some spoilers, if the widely known general themes of stories written decades ago count.

The dearth of Poul Anderson books in stores, and his relative obscurity compared to many other writers, is one of the greatest injustices of the science fiction genre. I was thrilled when Baen released their previous Anderson collections, Time Patrol and To Outlive Eternity, and I’m even more thrilled to see that they apparently sold well enough to bring this about. I compiled my collection of his books from my local used bookstores and various online sellers, but most people aren’t blessed with my obsessive nature and abundant spare time, and a young kid who’s curious about science fiction isn’t going to stumble on an old copy of Agent of the Terran Empire at the local Barnes and Noble. If there’s a young science fiction fan or potential science fiction fan in your life, you could do a lot worse than getting him this.

Anderson is an interesting choice for Baen, whose editors have explicitly said they want to bring adventurous, upbeat stories to the forefront of science fiction. Anderson’s Technic History stories certainly have plenty of adventure and excitement; no one can say they’re boring. On the other hand, while Anderson doesn’t wallow in despair or nihilism, there’s a deep sense of melancholy that pervades much of his work, and the Technic History is a prime example of that- most obviously in the Dominic Flandry and Long Night-era stories, but in some of the van Rijn-era stories too, though the latter are usually cheerier since most of them take place in Technic Civilization’s vigorous youth, before the rot takes hold. There’s action and adventure and excitement, but there’s also the deep sorrow of a universe where human civilizations rise, fall, and shatter to pieces in a cruel cycle that Anderson’s heroes, for all their courage and ingenuity, cannot stop. You can fight as hard as you can- indeed, you should fight as hard as you can- but human civilization will continue to fall towards Ragnarok, and whatever hope you can have is not for yourself but for whatever manages to grow from the ashes.

Now, this is one of the many things I like about Anderson. If you had to describe my personality, “gloomy Germanic fatalism” is a pretty good start. It is by no means necessary to have that sort of temperament to enjoy Poul Anderson, but it doesn’t hurt. However, I am a bit surprised by Baen’s choice of material here, in light of Baen’s stated goal of bringing more optimism back to science fiction. Then again, they publish David Drake, not the jolliest of authors, so perhaps it’s not so odd. It should be said that while life in Anderson’s universe is often sad and tragic, it is not pointless.

I should stress that if I’ve made Anderson sound relentlessly dreary, that wasn’t my intent. He’s not- he’ a huge amount of fun as well. If you like science fiction and you haven’t read Anderson, do yourself a favor and check him out. You’ll probably want to use Amazon.com or the like, because he’s terribly underrepresented in stores. And if there’s a budding young geek you know who would benefit from exposure to the classics, get him one of the collections when it comes out. He’ll thank you for it. Or possibly just laugh at you behind your back for being an out-of-it old weirdo. Either way, the kid will be entertained.