The recent monomania of my nemesis adversary friend RPG brings to mind the close association between science and science fiction. Let’s face it, we’re all space cadets at heart. But what, precisely, is the relationship between science and SF? How well does SF interpret science? Can it predict the future? Does science draw from SF? Such are the themes to be discussed in a panel discussion on SF film to be held in a couple of weeks, in which I am involved, and which you are invited to attend (for a small fee). Matinee Wednesdays. Restrictions may apply.
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I, Editor by Henry Gee
This is the Nature Network and therefore Terribly Extremely Very Serious foothold for Nature Senior Editor Henry Gee. If you want fun and games, visit http://cromercrox.blogspot.com/
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Your Mind Tricks Won't Work On Me, Jedi
- Date:
- Tuesday, 27 Oct ober 2009 - 22:48 UTC
Those idiot Earth-Humans still haven’t worked out who we are, Captain FtttspleenMy position is clear, or should be, but the closer I look at it the vaguer it seems(1), so that were you to come up and ask me what my position might be, I’d say ‘missionary’. Notwithstanding inasmuch as which, the position whence I shall start might be expressed thuslywise:
Science Fiction has no necessary connection with Science
The support for this stance is manifold. Some of it is stylistic, some historical. The historical part is easily stated. The term ‘science fiction’ stems from ‘scientifiction’, a neologism coined in 1926 by Hugo Gernsback, publisher of pulp magazines, around the launch of his title Amazing Stories, which republished
a load of old tripeclassic stories by the likes of H. G. Wells – stories highly disparate in origin, tone and literary roots. SF was a mongrel creature, right from the start.This, of course, makes any definition based on style harder to defend, for SF is rather like jazz – it’s hard to define, but you know it when you hear it. For this reason my own definition of SF, if you can call it that, is more about its general themes rather than the scenery it contains. You could say the same, for all literature, I suppose – and SF as a branch of literature has more akin with pure fiction than a laboratory manual.
So, here goes.
SF is a branch of fiction in which ordinary people are confronted by fantastic situations, seek to transcend them, and are thereby changed
For the purposes of what follows, I am ignoring the base level of SF, which is really sword-and-sorcery quest fantasy (Star Wars ); shoot’em up Westerns (Independence Day ); or haunted-house horror (Alien) in borrowed clothes.
Moving on up to the elevated world of everyday tabloid cliche , the fantastic situations of SF are offered by a technological future, possibly in an exotic, extraterrestrial setting. The setting is dystopian, either explicitly (Blade Runner ) or implicitly (GATTACA , The Stepford Wives , 2001: A Space Odyssey ; Jurassic Park , The Day After Tomorrow ) and the moralizing is simple. Scientists shouldn’t attempt to play God, there are things with which mankind should not meddle, blah blah blah. That arch-guru of schlock horror, H. P. Lovecraft, would have recognized it instantly.
If things were that simple, we’d see that SF is emphatically anti-science – by offering a series of rather pat warnings, it turns science against itself.
Good SF, like good literature of any other kind, should offer something chewier, and, I daresay, more adult. In Trillion Year Spree, Brian Aldiss wondered why SF cinema recycles teenage pulp retreads when so much great SF remains unfilmed. It’s perhaps no accident that great SF cannot be easily be boiled down to popcorn, but if that’s the way the world at large views SF, then things won’t change.
It’s true that several of the stories of Philip K. Dick have made it on to screen, whether as Blade Runner , or in slightly more disguised form as Total Recall . But where – he asked rhetorically of the uncaring void, that’s the problem with this blog, nobody actually reads it, nobody loves me on Nature Network, nobody – is the film of (say) Ursula Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness ? By setting her story on an alien planet in which people are hermaphrodites, she addresses issues of sexuality head on, and impossible in any other way. And what about Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, a story that asks questions about the purpose and future of humanity on the largest scale? Childhood’s End starts in exactly the same way as Independence Day, but quickly goes on to be much more interesting. And guess which one was filmed.
I discussed much of the same themes when Independence Day came out, including the comparison with Childhood’s End ( Nature 382 , 681, 22 August 1996). By way of a response, Clarke faxed me a single sheet of paper. It was a list of all his novels, when they were published, and when each one had been optioned by Paramount Pictures. None of them had ever been made into a film. None. All except 2001 – which started life as a screenplay, anyway. QED. Which stands for Quantum Electrodynamics, as any fule kno.
(1) Or, in other words, to pass on sage words learned as a graduate student:
Q: Why is doing a Ph.D. like an erection?
A: Because the more you think about it, the harder it gets.Last updated: Tuesday, 27 Oct 2009 - 22:48 UTC
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Comments
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Interesting stuff, Henry. Thanks for your ramblings.
We do love you, it’s just that you’re too smart for us to understand you.
I too want to see Le Guin’s book filmed. Hell, I’d settle for Anne McCaffrey. So many good SF books that need to be made that would now look derivative (Canticle for Leibowiz?).
Someone should do a proper version of an Azimov book, say Caves of Steel.
I love you, Henry. Or rather, I do read your posts.
I think that, in part, what it boils down to, is that the sort of high-end (sic) science fiction is often used to explore broad themes of politics and society, which is perfectly possible on film, but not necessarily what people want to watch in the cinema. There’s also the basic thing that films are visual, books wordy and descriptive. I remember thinking that Blindness would be unfilmable – well, they did a film of it, but what was lost was all the empathising with the main character, the atmosphere and… well, the important stuff.
So some of it gets diluted down a bit, or, more frequently, you get the cop out at the end. I’d say that Gattaca is one of those – a brilliant exploration of the ethics of genetic selection that goes Hollywood at the end. Same with Sunshine or Black Hole (morbid meditation on the nature of humans, until they got the laser guns out) or, well, most other films I could think of.
Also, just on the definition, I like the phrase Transreal, coined by Rudy Rucker, to encompass sci-fi and speculative fiction – and I think it encompasses fantasy too.
Science Fiction has no necessary connection with Science
Do you think though that there is a connection between scientists and science fiction writers? There would seem to be a definite overlap – though I have no evidence for this, and it could be my own selection bias. But the number of writers who are also or were also scientists or mathematicians seems higher than it should otherwise be.
SF is a branch of fiction in which ordinary people are confronted by fantastic situations, seek to transcend them, and are thereby changed
Talking in relation of this blog (SF), otherwise very well, Henry. From any point of view “The World Below” of Sydney Fowler Wright is one of the greatest novels of SF.
I remember when I was young and the world is old, I was surprised by the overwhelming imagination of this writer, could not believe what I was reading was really fascinating. As the reader was connecting to the narrative very fast.It is my humble opinion.
“Those idiot Earth-Humans still haven’t worked out who we are, Captain Ftttspleen”
“But we have! =P”
And I read your blog, I just don’t know enough about SF to comment. I still haven’t even watched GATTACA, and we had it in the office at my previous job (for educational purposes) so I could have even watched it at work. And I haven’t watched Blade Runner even though I know that it’s a film that’s shown ridiculously often in introductory film classes (one former film student I know said he had to watch it THREE times in his first semester), and therefore probably worthwhile.
I’m even worse with SF books. It’s probably my least favourite genre. I wrote a whole explanation why, but I’ll just make everyone mad at me =)
Eva, I believe your cat is saying:
look at that pizzaface!
steffi’s definition of SF:
- a genre that allows geeks to be even more geeky
- a way of reflecting on real-world problems by
making up crazy shitoutrageously exaggerating them.And you know we love you, Henry, so stop going on about it.
I don’t thing good SF writing exaggerates problems, rather they put them in a different setting which makes them easier to recognize and address. I actually prefer the (good) SF approach to real-world problems – it’s somewhat less depressing but not in any way less serious.
And Henry, I always read your blog! I’m just to intimidated by your brilliant writing to dare comment :)
This sort of SF wouldn’t make good blockbuster material, so it would be difficult to get the money for the effects that are needed (he writes, having read LHoD almost 20 years ago).
As for what is SF, it’s all about talking squids in outer space, isn’t it? (also see here, and regularly since then).
@John W – Canticle was among the roster of the great unfilmed mentioned by Aldiss. Asimov remains remarkably unfilmed, too. The Caves of Steel is an interesting case in point, because it’s really a whodunit done up as SF, with the Holmes character a human, Elijah Bailey – and the Watson character a robot, the great R. Daneel Olivaw. You’d think it would work terrifically as a film. Of course, the recent film I, Robot had very little to do with Asimov’s Robot stories. (I haven’t seen The Bicentennial Man, though). Two of Asimov’s better (and lesser-known) novels that would work as movies were The End Of Eternity and The Gods Themselves. Your spelling of ‘Asimov’ as ‘Azimov’ is wrong, but you’re in good company – that’s how Tolkien spelled it, in a letter saying how much he, the great hobbitbringer, liked the works of the prolific Noo Yawk SF writer.
@Scott – there is some overlap between SF and scientists, probably because people who read SF as kids are geeks, and therefore become scientists. But there are also other biases at work. One is the general (and I’d say stochastic) association between the genre and technological futures, reinforced by all sorts of things, particularly in SF cinema, from ‘50s B-features onwards. In fact I’d go as far as saying that most modern SF movies have more to do with 50s cinema than contemporary SF (it’s interesting, is it not, that Forbidden Planet is so good because it’s a rip-off of The Tempest ?). The second bias is the general disapproval in which SF is held by the literati, partly because they still think of SF in terms of 1950s cinema, failing to note the enormous amount of really good SF written by authors today… or even in the 1940s and 1950s, when the likes of Asimov were getting into their stride, Robert Heinlein was good , and in which Alfred Bester wrote The Stars My Destination – a work of genius, I think, which also remains unfilmed. (Just a thought – John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos made it to the screen quite successfully as Village Of The Damned ).
However, some SF writers come from outside science. Many people who write for Futures are scientists (a selection bias, I guess, as the column appears in Nature ) but I’ve published stories from senior citizens, children, historians, lawyers, linguists…
@Eva – perhaps you’ve just been exposed to too much bad SF.
@Richard @Scott @Steffi @Anna – you’re just saying that. You don’t really love me.
@Bob – your comment crossed with mind. I agree completely, of course.
For those that would like to come to the event that Henry and others are speakng at on Monday 9 November in London…
A special offer is available that discounts tickets to £7.50. The offer is available over the phone, in person by quoting Nature Staff Offer, and via the internet by inputting the promotional code 95 in the promo code field when logging in or registering. Customers must log on/register and input the code before selecting seats otherwise the discount will not be activated.
There is no limit on the number of tickets people can book.
Er …. what Paul said.
The Caves of Steel is an interesting case in point, because it’s really a whodunit done up as SF
The Caves of Steel is one of my “If I had become a film director” books I would have filmed. And I would do it a hell of a lot better than The Bicentennial Man (don’t, just don’t, I think even Crox Minima may find it too full of sugar and schmaltz).
I’m just running through my head some of the sci-fi films I’ve seen, and the majority seem to be those in “borrowed clothes” – a tale that would work just as well in a non-sci-fi setting. Forbidden Planet as The Tempest with robots, Sunshine, Event Horizon et al as a supernatural space station horror, Star Wars as a western, etc, as you already point out. I don’t think that makes them any less fun, or any less able to comment on the future.
Where do things that aren’t so technologically futuristic fit? I’m thinking of things like Oryx and Crake (which was filmed, I haven’t seen it, haven’t heard good things about it), which are set in alternative societies with not a techgizmo in sight? Is that even sci-fi, or just futurism or alternative reality?
I think even Crox Minima may find it too full of sugar and schmaltz – I dunno, is Miley Cyrus in it?
But srsly, I reckon most things are in borrowed clothes, given that there seems to be only a small number of basic plots (seven, I hear, can’t remember where). Plenty of non-futuristic stories work in SF. The point I am making is that the perception of SF as wholly techno-futuristic-squids-in-space is wrong, dictated by what gets filmed, and the narrow-minded views of the self-appointed literati. I haven’t read Oryx and Crake but the author is a bete-noire for me as she constantly rants that her stuff isn’t SF (i.e. she thinks it’s too good for SF) when it plainly is.
Here is a more positive example. Alternate-History fiction is clearly SF, as it puts ordinary people in extraordinary situations and watches them cope. My favourite is The Alteration, set in England in 1976, in a Universe in which the Reformation never happened. It’s by Kingsley Amis – a literary figure who was a champion of SF.
Nice post Henry. Tempted by your event (and by CHildhood’s End) even though I imagine I’m much less of a sci-fi nut that most of the likely attendees.
If the third most active blog on NN (as things stand this morning) is read by nobody, what chance do the rest of us have? Or is your mind playing tricks on you?
It’s not the reading, Stephen, it’s the love .
Nice thoughts – I myself get all tangled up in what is SF and what isn’t. So many books that are in the SF section are also, like you said, fantasy, western, romance, etc. One of my favorite SF books (at least, I think it’s SF) is Lucifer’s Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. I suppose movies like Deep Impact or Armageddon could be based on it, but I think it’s story was much more interesting (more about what happens after the comet hits, not the time leading up to it).
SF is emphatically anti-science – by offering a series of rather pat warnings, it turns science against itself.
Henry> isn’t this partly because people were scared what could happen if “computers took over and we people relied too much on them instead of our feelings?” Isn’t the anti-science rather a take on "we shouldn’t try and become machines since we as humans have compassion and are able to understand complex issues where it is not only black and white?
(no coffee this morning, which can be an explanation if it sounds too hippie like? Obviously I read your blog, although I can find myslef too intimidated to comment most of the times since I wake up and read the posts after a day of commenting…. from the European side of things.)
That said, I love love love Le Guin. And don’t you think that the SF was made to distinguish from the “swords and dragons let’s play heros fantasy without electricity?”. I don’t think I have read one fantasy book with electricity and machines in it, since then it is per default a SF novel?!
Perfect timing for this post, as NaNoWriMo looms large, and various discussions of what constitutes SF abound (as well as what constitutes just about every other genre). My plan is to do a middle-grade SF novel with a female protagonist, although prospects for my actually completing anything look bleak at this point. BTW, Childhood’s End is still one of my favorite novels.
for SF is rather like jazz – it’s hard to define, but you know it when you hear it.
I think you’ve got it right there.
Of course we love you Henry, and your gobsmacking erudition and wit!
Though, as my cartoonist bro’ would have it, be careful what you wish for…
Sniff. Gonna cry. Well, my eyes are watering, at any rate. As well they might.
Excuse me, can someone tell me which means “Geek”, is a specie of lizard?.
Oh! sorry, it’s lunchtime in my country, I hope that the menu consist in Chicken with sauce of Geek!
Be right back, I’m anxious for the answer to my query by a good person of NN.
Alejandro – I am happy to oblige. As you see from this definition , a geek is a person who is seen by society as rather odd, unfashionable and obsessed with science and technology.
Thank you Henry, you’re a very good friend. expected nothing less from you.
I hope that we not fall within that classification.
Nonetheless the “Chicken with sauce of Geek” is very bad.
Finally my lunch consisted in spagetti with tomato sauce and cheese.
Sounds like a tasty lunch, Alejandro. I was wondering what kind of lizard you might mean by ‘geek’ until Mrs Gee said
which is either a gecko, or a Yukkon from the planet Thhphhht.
Ha, Ha, very nice the gecko.
I wonder that she thinks of this Gee minima and Gee minor.
Sorry I wonder that
shethinks of this Gee minima and Gee minor.Wot rpg said, in the first comment.
Steampunk is, by definition, restricted to Victorian-era technologies at the latest, and it is usually considered to be a sub-genre of fantasy or science fiction. Steampunk and pessimistic post-apocalyptic tales are my favorite sub-genres of speculative fiction; can’t wait to see the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, starring
AragornViggo Mortenson.Film adaptations of what we oldies used to call “SF”: How about Tarkovsky’s “Solaris” and “Stalker” from books by (respectively)S. Lem and the Strugatskis? Admittedly the former departs a long way from Lem’s book, while the latter is barely recognisable as “Roadside Picnic”, but that’s not much worse than “Total Recall” from “We can remember it for you wholesale”.
As for LeGuin: in 1980 (yes, kiddies, I really am that old) I was in a San Francisco hotel zapping channels when I saw the image of a jellyfish in the sea taken from below, followed by an ill-looking bloke on some concrete steps gradually sitting up and seeing a dandelion, and ecco! there we were in “The Lathe of Heaven”. OK, it was a ‘worthy’ tiny-budget movie, but still … the trouble is if you had a big budget for the special effects etc. you would be required by your commercial sponsors the put in lots of ‘action’, i.e. violence. Which is why I hope none of them will get their hands on (for example) “The Left Hand of Darkness” – and after LeGuin’s experience with Earthsea I don’t think they are likely to within my lifetime (don’t know about you youngsters, though).
@ Kristi: Apparently, you’re not alone—steampunk seems to be enjoying a surge in popularity.
Did I say Oryx and Crake was filmed? I meant The Handmaid’s Tale. Which is a lovely book – well, lovely in terms of Atwood’s clear love of language, though the tale is bleak. I wasn’t aware of her anti-SF musings – I see that she’s tried to say that her work is speculative fiction – and a search revealed Le Guin’s thoughts on SF and Atwood’s own thoughts.
Kristi – interesting commentary of the sub-genre of SF Steampunk, I had no idea was influenced by J. Verne, H. Wells etc. I get the impression that should be widely used for quality comics. I asked this question because I discontinued reading of SF and not knowed of the new sub-genres of SF that have evolved to the present day very fast. I will have to update, difficult in these times.
I’m with Anna Vilborg,
I’ve always thought that—aside from re-inventing old story-lines in new form and speculating on future technology and society—sci-fi makes it easier to explore issues, because it can take the issue outside of our cultural baggage. If you write about, say, sexuality, in an every-day setting, it’s gets trapped in the reader’s cultural baggage. If you place it well in the future on a remote world with different rules, you get a chance to look at it afresh.
My point exactly! And it’s fun to watch :)
@Henry: we love you. Is this over now??
@rest: strange to have people to discuss SF with; I’ve gone without for some 40 years…except for my son of course, but he’s only been sentient for 10-odd.
I always wondered why ANYONE would make something like the original Battlestar Galactica series, when there was ready-made space opera, with rockets, blasters, hyperdrive and swashbuckling heroes in the form of Poul Anderson’s stories and novels featuring Nicholas van Rijn and Flandry. With much more believable physics. And girls.
There have been a couple of really good SF television series – like one produced in the UK in the late 1960s whose name escapes me, featuring hour-long independent episodes, written by SF authors – but these are so rare.
Movies: aside from 2001: ASO, I can’t think of one I haven’t found serious fault with in terms of physics / biology background. Except for Star Wars, and that was willing suspension of disbelief because it was so cool…..
Now we have the likes of Neal Asher and William Hamilton producing stunning space operatic epics, which look eminently translatable to film – but probably never will be. Needed: some VERY rich SF buff willing to make some SF movies the way they should be made.