Science fiction should stop trying to save the world
If you're always blowing stuff up, you can only tell so many kinds of stories
If you picked up a novel set during World War II, would you expect it to end with the hero killing Hitler?
Obviously, that’s a silly question. World War II novels, if they’re of the two-fisted variety, might be about commandos doing daring raids or saving POWs. They might be about the horrors of war and the cost killing and death takes on one individual caught up in all the madness. (The Guns of Navarone –> The Thin Red Line continuum.) They might choose to dramatize the people at the very top and their decisions, but it’s not like Churchill and Stalin and Roosevelt commandeered a tank and drove it into Berlin looking to whack Adolf. You don’t expect a World War II story to end with the hero single-handedly winning the war.
Unless you’re Quentin Tarantino, or a science fiction writer. In the first case literally, in the latter case, figuratively.
Consider a few fantasy and SF novels, retitled for accuracy:
Harry Potter: The Kid Who Killed Magic Hitler
The Lord of the Rings, And The Two Dudes Who Threw The Ring Into The Volcano Personally
Ender’s Game, Which Wasn’t A Game, He Was The General Of A Genocidal War
Stranger In A Strange Land, aka Space Jesus And His Pals
Snowcrash’s Main Character Is Literally Called Hiro Protagonist, I Don’t Know How I Can Make This Any Clearer
Science fiction novels, through a combination of genre conventions and tradition, tend to be about world-shaking and potentially world-ending events. First contact with aliens. Catastrophic wars. Plagues. Rogue AIs. Voracious nanotech. Robot uprisings. Zombie swarms.
How do our heroes respond to these threats?
They still save the day, often with two-fisted action. A lot of well-rounded, carefully constructed modern characters remain literary descendants of Dirk Danger, Space Ranger.
And I am getting more than a little tired of the world being saved.
There is a lot of be said for the inheritance of vigour SF gained from its 1920s and 1930s pulp roots, but it does predispose authors to resolve plots with a ray gun or a right cross. We’re a genre whose roots lie in action-adventure tales: plot-first, ideas-second, character-third-or-maybe-not-at-all.
You could argue that the SF genre’s progress has been about reshuffling these three factors – the 1940s pushing ideas to the forefront over plot, while the New Wave and Feminist SF revolutions pushed character into primacy, at least nominally.
And yet… there’s always been the world-saving impulse. So the end of an SFF novel is the destruction of the enemy base, the hack that disables the doomsday weapon, the death of the Dark Wizard of The Tower of Skulls.1 A good book will handle this in a way that makes character an integral part of the resolution, as with the shattered relationship between Essun and her daughter Nassun at the end of N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy.
In fact, to weaken my argument, you can easily make a list of world-saving books that are great – The Fifth Season and its sequels, The Vorkosigan Saga, The Lord of the Rings, A Memory Called Empire2. Just take a look through any given year of Hugo novel nominees – chances are good that at least half will have the main characters struggling against disaster on a global, interstellar, or even cosmic scale.3
I have two problems with this.4
First, despite all the work that is put into character in modern SFF novels, this means that the last few chapters (if not more) of most tales tend to privilege action over character to a significant degree. It’s been more than 45 years since Ursula K. LeGuin asked if there was a place for Mrs. Brown in science fiction, and the answer seems to be “Yes, but…”
Mrs. Brown (the small, often beaten-down, not important to the wider world character whom LeGuin borrowed from Woolf for her essay) doesn’t save the world, isn’t even remotely capable of it. Indeed, the point is that she’s important for herself, for her humanity, not for what she does. Ordinary people just trying to get on with life, people who don’t kill Space Hitler, are also important, yes?
Second, privileging problems that one person (or a plucky gang of misfits and outsiders) can solve narrows the scope of science fiction and fantasy dramatically. “The enemy’s gate is down,” isn’t good advice for solving problems of weakening democracy, global climate crisis, or social inequality.
Insofar as there is a larger point to science fiction beyond “making enough money so writers can eat” and “creating something to while away an hour on the bus” it’s not to predict the future – it’s to remind us that the future will and can be different. My favourite kinds of science fiction is the story that overturns something we take for granted about the way we live, and which refuses to even try to put the pieces back together.
Yet the world-saving novel is often in direct opposition to the novel of a world changed forever. World-saving privileges the existing structures of power, social relations, economic systems. (What if everyone had been transformed into mineral life forms at the end of The Broken Earth? What if the mind-virus had spread worldwide at the end of Snowcrash?)
It is said that fantasy is inherently conservative, but as long as SF maintains its tendency towards “save the world” plots, then SF is also standing athwart the future, yelling stop.5
The essence of science fiction isn’t in stopping anything, it’s in letting things keep changing, even letting them break, and seeing what we can put back together from the pieces. And then, seeing what life is like for the people living on the other side, what technology and disaster and encounters with the strange will do to their ideas of society, family, self.
I am not suggesting that EVERY science fiction and fantasy book become a kind of kitchen sink novel with dragons, about the problems of a family just trying to make it in the mines of Ceres, or going through a domestic tragedy while on vacation amid the mangrove swamps of Drowned Miami. But… why isn’t there more of this? Yes, it does exist, but if we stacked up all the SF books whose characters are living ordinary lives in strange worlds on one side, and all the books where they find themselves at the center of dramatic, world-shaking events, which pile do you think would be bigger?
So consider this a call for SF that by thinking smaller can think bigger, that can encompass futures that are odd and unsettling, not for the threats to the world, but to the changes it will inevitably see. I think the character best suited to explore those ideas is a lot closer to Mrs. Brown than to Dirk Danger, Space Ranger.
Self Promotion Corner
I actually did write a story once in which the protagonist is fighting Nazis. She never kills anyone. She spends most of the story hiding, caring for an old woman, and wishing she was flying.
I’m currently finishing up an MS that cannot be accurately described without the phrase “the climactic swordfight,” so, yeah, let he who is without sin, beam in my eye, mea maxima culpa, etc., etc.
I am particularly fond of A Memory Called Empire because Arkady Martine at least has her hero use diplomacy rather than violence, something that could be a whole other rant.
Weirdly, classic military SF often averts the save-the-universe mentality – neither Starship Troopers nor The Forever War has the protagonists accomplish much of anything, both novels ARE, in fact, about the character’s growth, with Heinlein’s a jingoistic “The military will make a man out of you!” book while Haldeman’s is about disillusionment, trauma, and the futility of war. The best Vorkosigan books are also the ones with the lowest stakes, too, notably Memory and A Civil Campaign.
Whether they are problems for you is very much up to what you like in fiction. Bug or feature?
First and last time I’m ever paraphrasing Buckley, I can tell you that.