So… we’re doing the “sci-fi canon” debate thing again, eh?
Cool, cool cool cool. Looking forward to the endless arguments about Heinlein and Atwood and Clarke and LeGuin and oh no, I seem to have thrown my phone down a mine shaft and become an anchorite and taken a vow of silence. Whoopsie!
Yes, I do think it’s a punishingly painful discussion, thank you for asking. But since I’m trying to distract myself from the shit-tornado that is the U.S. post-election day situation, here’s my thoughts:
There can’t ever be a science fiction canon. There is no one book that will ever be “a definitive example of science fiction,” because science fiction does not relate to time and history the way other genres do.
“Science fiction isn’t actually about the future, it’s about the present.”
That’s a paraphrase of a sentiment that’s become a bit of a cliché in recent years. Google some approximation of those words and you’ll come up with Margaret Atwood and William Gibson and Kim Stanley Robinson all playing variations on the theme.
Much is made of the failures of prediction, one reason why SF authors have retreated from any attempt to be labelled as predictors or prophets. No cell phones in Neuromancer? (Or almost any other book of the era, but Neuromancer should have seen it coming, for some reason.) All-female secretarial pools in the Foundation novels? Cigarette machines on space stations, men with crew cuts and midwestern accents colonizing the jungles of Venus, Soviet starships… It’s easy to mock the missed guesses about the future, but that’s not what I’m talking about.
“Science fiction isn’t actually about the future, it’s about the present,” is true, but insufficient.
Science fiction is about the present, and it is about the future. It’s about how the present – right now, this slice of cultural ferment, this delicate soap bubble of a moment – sees the future. Every science fiction novel lives on the knife edge of irrelevance, hoping it can find its readers’ minds still feverish with the same fears and hopes by the time it winds its way through the labyrinth of publication.
And yes, that includes novels set hundreds of years in the future, space operas and sprawling sagas that encompass the heat-death of the universe. Star Trek started out being about the Cold War and the civil rights movement and the United Nations. And if some of the themes still resonate, we recognize that they were not intended for us, citizens of the 21st century. Nor would a viewer from 1967 have necessarily seen the resonance in Star Trek: Picard’s themes of refugees, failed states, and conspiracism.
Sure, you can find enduring human themes in science fiction novels. You can find worthy writing going back decades, especially if you have a soft spot for the febrile intensity of the early pulp writers. There are science fiction novels and stories that could find a place in the broader literary canon entirely on the merit of prose, plot, and character.
But SF’s publishing culture is inward-turning and labouring under a century-old inferiority/superiority complex. We don’t want to be part of that snobby lit fic crowd! We’ve got our own thing! We’re special! We’re the only ones writing about the big issues, the ones that can’t fit between the pages of a mimetic novel about some grubby old English professor having affairs and drinking too much and getting divorced!
Well? So what?
The urgent drive that gives science fiction it’s unique literary force also makes it the most ephemeral genre.
Science fiction is not a collection of books of varying quality and importance. It’s a wave, energy moving through a fluid composed of culture and time. If you went back and destroyed every SF book written before 10 years ago, it would continue. If you exterminated the genre entirely, wiped it from the minds of everyone living, it would reappear, parallel evolution shaping something much like what had gone before, a marsupial sabretooth adapted to the same literary environment, the same problem of storytelling our tomorrows.
If there is a strength to science fiction, it lies in the fact that it is disposable. SF is a set of tools, a way of seeing, a subculture, but it is not and cannot ever be a monument. Every attempt to point to some great book of the past and say “This is science fiction!” robs the genre of its power.
What “canon” should you read, if you’re an aspiring SF writer? You should read the SF that gives you the tools to write your future, your present. Even personal canons have a half-life, though.
The future keeps moving. SF keeps moving, or like a wave, crashes on the shore and is gone.
Welcome to the first… edition? Missive? Hyper-Web-Blast-O-Gram? of Unsettling Futures. This is an experiment as anything, so expect commentary, probably some short-short fiction, and links/self-promotion.
Speaking of which…
Self-Promotion Corner
I will have a story in an upcoming issue of Analog Science Fiction & Fact sometime (???) in 2021. It’s called The Acheulean Gift, and it’s about kids who were “enhanced” with hominin DNA and their eventful summer camp experience.
I had a story in Analog earlier this year, All the Turns of the Earth, which you can read right now on Curious Fictions. I’m quite fond of it. It has pterosaurs!
I’m not going to plan ahead too much, but I can tell you that the next edition of Unsettling Futures will be called What I Learned About Good Writing from Sweet Valley High.