And Speaking of Dragons . . .
. . . here's a link to an article from Clive Thompson about why we should all read science fiction. I usually don't go for this kind of "I only read it for the articles" justification of SF. But this one's rather nice. Thompson's conclusion: "Science fiction is the last great literature of ideas." Or, put rather more cleverly, "big-idea novels are more likely to have an embossed foil dragon on the cover than a Booker Prize badge."
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2 comments:
Interesting article. Fortunately there are a lot of SF novels that present really interesting and thought provoking topics, but of course there are many others that are as much "fluff" as may be found in any other type of fiction. The trick is finding the right ones. Unfortunately it seems the best SF doesn't get the attention it deserves as "serious" fiction, and some of the fluff is sited as one of the reasons.
The comment about authors having "deranged" notions about women was amusing, but over the years there has been some fantastic SF produced by women and/or focusing on female characters that makes that comment seem excessive.
One point that the author might be missing is that the real world has effectively turned into a increasingly "big idea" over the last 100 years or so. We have personal computers, cell phones, hand held devices that tell us how to get from wherever we are to wherever we need to go, etc. Perhaps it's not surprising that we have fiction written to make us think about some "small" ideas that are as important as ever. How many SF stories have been written with clever ideas about futuristic technologies / societies that ultimately point out aspects of what it really means to be a simple human being.
Yeah, I too had to laugh at the "deranged notions about women" line. I think that line reveals the same problem that many "literary" apologists for SF suffer from. They stumble on a good SF book after not reading any SF since they were a kid, and they assume it's the literary equivalent of an immaculate conception. It never seems to occur to them that SF has evolved since they were twelve ... or that even back when they were twelve SF might have been a little more sophisticated than they thought it was.
I also agree with you about real life catching up with SF. William Gibson is a great example of this: life has caught up with his predictions and made yesterday's cyberpunk into today's realism.
We now live in a world where the typical reader of the New York Times Book Review wears running shoes made by little girls in Thailand and reads the paper on a computer made in China (but with a tech hotline to Mumbai in case of problems), all while drinking shade grown organic coffee that can be ordered online directly from the grower in Costa Rica. In such a world, the traditional "character-based" literary novel about the angst-ridden personal lives of middle class white people living isolated lives in surburban America starts to seem a little old-fashioned. The sphere of the "personal" has expanded far beyond our immediate physical environment that the very fabric of our lives is composed of technology-enabled global relationships with people who don't even figure in the world of the traditional "character-based" novel.
On the other hand, perhaps this isn't as new as we think it is. Queen Victoria's subjects may not have had internet, but the fabric of their daily lives was at least as entwined with global trade and new technologies as ours is. Writers like Jules Verne and H. G. Wells and George Orwell always understood this ... which may be why they gravitated towards science fiction.
By the way, it's not really my kind of idea, but someone really needs to write a book about a lonely middle-aged suburbanite whose life is turned upside down when he (or she, for that matter) calls the Dell helpline in India for help with a new computer and ends up getting romantically involved with the person on the other end. I mean there's a plot right there that would have been science fiction twenty years ago and today is something you could imagine happening right in your neighborhood.
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