Unsettling Futures - Three Fun New Ways to Argue About Science Fiction & Fantasy!
Aesthetics, nerdery levels, and a triumvirate of SFF ingredients!
Hard vs soft, is that kinda Freudian?
There are various traditional ways fans of fantasy and science fiction divide up the field (primarily for the purpose of arguments).
The most venerable of those is the hard sci-fi vs. soft sci-fi debate, an argument that, after all these years, is less beating a dead horse, and more aggressive equine necromancy. It's also so boring that considering it nearly puts me into a deep coma.
Another fan favourite argument is putting stories into different genre and subgenre boxes. Grimdark, hopepunk, Mundane sci-fi, cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk and biopunk and ribofunk, fine shadings of detail between epic, high, and low fantasy, and on and on and on. I will admit to enjoying this game of literary taxonomy, but it's getting a little dull now that we've used up every possible word that could be attached to "punk."
More recently, there's the machine-gun recitation of tropes. I have come to dread this approach, which I think is reductive ("found family" has lost all meaning to me, I have heard it so many times I no longer know what "found" or "family" mean, separately or together) and which is increasingly used for marketing, always a bad sign.
But we want to argue about sci-fi stories, and divvy them up, and have petty fights that go on forever about minor distinctions, because what else is fandom for?
I just think we need some new ways to talk about different types of stories, so here's three.
Sci-fi 101, 201, 301…
Simplest idea first! We rate SFF stories by their complexity, with the 101 level comprehensible by a casual reader who has never sampled any SFF in book form.
I think it was John Scalzi who referred to himself (possibly just his Old Man's War series) as "sci-fi 101" many years ago, and that's a pretty good baseline.
The idea is that some science fiction stories are graspable by a reader who is not, y'know, a huge fucking nerd who has been reading this stuff since they were nine. And some science fiction stories are tangled in assumptions about hyperspace vs Bussard ramscoops, about time paradoxes, about computer jargon and orbital dynamics and references that you get to previous SFF novels and…
These are the books that you give to your non-SFF-reading friends and they make that face, like they smelled something weird, or like someone asked them to do complex calculus in their heads, and you know they aren't going to finish it.
Complexity levels are about density and originality of ideas, and the velocity with which they're delivered.
Hence the 101 label, for folks who've watched Star Wars and a few episodes of Star Trek. The starting points are grounded, the world building and ideas are relatively simple and will be introduced in nice bite-sized chunks.
You get up to someone like Adrian Tchaikovsky, you're moving up a couple of grade levels. This isn't first year stuff. Now you've got to keep your wits about you. You need to understand the grammar of SFF worldbuilding, or you'll get lost.
Gene Wolfe and Ursula K. LeGuin and or N.K. Jemisin often work another level (or two, or three) up. Not only are you getting more complex ideas, there's worldbuilding without a net! (If it's M. John Harrison, there isn't worldbuilding in the traditional sense at all! Off with ye, clomping foot of nerdism!)
And then up in the post-grad levels, you've got John Clute's Appleseed. Jesus Christ, Appleseed. I still wake up in a cold sweat sometimes…
These levels don't pin down the actual quality of a book – there are plenty of authors, like Ray Bradbury, who work mostly around the 101 and 201 level, and write amazing stories. Authors roam up and down the levels throughout their careers. But this scale talks about the complexity of the work as a work of science fiction. How much SFFnal experience and depth do you need to grok it? (For example, do you need to grok grokking?)
The nice thing about Sci-fi 101 is that the base level of knowledge has expanded massively over the last 30 or so years. Since the 1980s, a flood of SFF blockbusters has educated the general public on quests, greys, elves, time machines, cyborgs, zombies, superheroes, chosen ones, and so on. Everyone has absorbed enough background radiation of SFF to get references to the force or the one ring or the dangers of your own mom getting a crush on you when your Delorean jumped back to 1955.
Sterile Sci-Fi vs Grungy Sci-fi
Instead of looking at SFF through a lens of taxonomy, as with subgenres, why not pick a particular aesthetic axis and talk about that?
One of the big dividers in SFF that has nothing (or almost nothing) to do with hard vs soft or fantasy vs sci-fi is one I think about a lot – sterile versus grungy. (Or clean versus gunky or pristine versus fetid, you get the idea.)
I think this is a good lens because people have strong opinions on the aesthetics of their fiction, and while you can often get that sense through reviews of specific works, good luck finding groups of books divvied up this way!
So here's the basic idea – at one end, you have the sterile, something I referred to in my head for years as "grey corridors science fiction." This is SFF that takes place in clean, uncluttered places and features a lot of clean, uncluttered people. Original Star Trek is a pretty classic example.
Signs you are in a sterile SF story:
labs benches dotted with autoclaved equipment
white or grey walls
fluorescent lighting
brushed steel
tile
chromed spaceships
characters who wear lab coats, jumpsuits, or crisp military uniforms
Signature limb: robotic armature.
Signs you are in a grungy SF story:
shantytowns and dumps
flickering neon or grimy sunlight filtered through smog
sweat, slime and mucus
dirt under the fingernails
primer paint and rust on the hoverbikes
cracked linoleum flooring
characters who wear rags, or leather motorcycle jackets, or patched fatigues
Signature limb: tentacle
The sterile aesthetic was dominant in the "Golden Age" when Clarke and Asimov were spinning their yarns. It never fully died, with folks like Greg Bear still carrying the torch. Meanwhile, cyberpunk and the New Weird dove headfirst into the grungy, and Jeff Vandermeer and Kameron Hurley are full-time occupants. But again, authors work in both modes. The intrusion of one aesthetic into the other is a great device: the saliva-dripping, acidic alien into the battered if orderly confines of the Nostromo, the spaceport and wall on the literally anarchic world of Anarres. There's nothing to stop an author from starting a story in one aesthetic only to transition fully to the other by the story's end.
Obviously, some subgenres are more associated with one end of this spectrum than the other, often deliberately. But you can easily write a cyberpunk story set in the confines of a corporate office complex, and you can write a space opera that's all lymph and organ transplants (see above re: Kameron Hurley, The Stars are Legion, which rules and which you should read).
There are doubtless a dozen other aesthetic spectra you could come up with! Clean-line versus baroque? Humourless versus gonzo? Sure, why not, make up your own! Fight about them with your friends!
And then there is an idea that I think requires three points of reference, not two…
The Ideas-Pulp-Literary Tension Pyramid
So, if the other ideas are just for fun, I think this idea actually kinda sorta says something about how science fiction works, and why it works at all. At least, it's one lens I use to understand science fiction.
I believe there's a perpetual, unresolvable tension between these three attractors in sci-fi. There's no perfect stable point between them, it's always a moving target.
In brief, the three legs of this wobbly little footstool:
IDEAS – You often hear "science fiction is the literature of ideas," usually deployed as a pre-emptive defence mechanism. "We're not just geeks! This is serious stuff!"
But yeah, the idea, the Platonic what would happen if? is a real and perpetual driver of science fiction and fantasy. Whether it's technological, psychological, sociological, or purely fantastic, every SFF story worth its salt has to deploy a deviation from the ordinary, a world transformed, in ways large or small.
The re-categorization of a lot of the core SFF toybox of ideas into tropes in recent years is a bit of a mistake – FTL and time travel and undersea colonies, none of those are really literary tropes. They can only really be understood as thought experiments, which can be modified as needed. Mashing multiple ideas together remains a fruitful exercise for generating new stories today, especially if it's mixing the social and technological axes.
PULP – You can argue if you want to about when science fiction was born, whether it was Mary Shelley or H.G. Wells or Jules Verne (it was Shelley, c'mon) but the birth of science fiction as a publishing category was in the 1920s-40s, and it was in the pulps. Sci-fi and fantasy and horror, from Conan the Barbarian to shoggoths to a thousand square-jawed starship captains were merely a few flavours in the Baskin Robins of cheap monthly adventure literature, alongside vigilantes, cowboys, daredevil pilots, nurses in love, and detectives trying to track down that pesky Maltese Falcon.
The weakness of pulp is that it's formulaic and essentially empty –mindless action that, in its historical form, relies on clichés, which in its magazine heyday often meant a whack of sexism and racism and so on.
But the strength of pulp is that it is supposed to be fun, exciting, thrilling! Adventure alone is insufficient to make a story great, but it sure doesn't hurt!
And beyond that, I think what the pulp legacy brings to modern SF is the "go for it, who the hell cares?" spirit that makes a genre lively. Pulp writers pounded out stories for money. If something seemed like it would put more eyeballs on the page, and get the editor to ask for another story, why not try it? That gonzo spirit still lives in SFF. It's one of the most powerful engines of the genre.
LITERATURE – This is all the stuff that pulp doesn't do well or skims over entirely – character development, themes, well-wrought prose.
A lot of early magazine SFF played in the Ideas/Pulp end of the pool and refused to paddle over to the deep end of Literature, but that was not universal. One of Heinlein's strengths (often unacknowledged) was his powerful, yet unobtrusive, authorial voice. (It made the lectures go down… somewhat easier.) More directly literary were Bradbury, and also Theodore Sturgeon and Alfred Bester. Whether they considered what they were doing art or craft or commerce, they were consciously trying to create elevated prose. By the early 1960s, you had Samuel Delany and Ursula K. LeGuin publishing, and then we were off to the races. "Literary science fiction" was its own thing, whether it had that name yet or not.
A ONE LEGGED STOOL CAN'T STAND
I mentioned above that I think there's a perpetual, unresolvable tension between these three points. Any SFF worth its salt has to engage with all of them to some degree or other. A story that's all Ideas will just be the author moving marionettes through a stage, "Oh, look at the pretty hypotheticals!" All Pulp is cliché, you've seen it before, no matter how remixed. All Literature tends towards pure vibes, and man cannot live on vibes alone.
There is still a lot published that is heavy on two of the pillars and light on the third. A lot of adventure/military SF tends towards a Pulp/Ideas duopoly. Writing is utilitarian at best, characters often include the Manly Man Who Knows a Lot About Guns And Will Regretfully (But Not That Regretfully) Use Them, and his Lady Friend, Whose Breasts Will Get More Description Than Her Personality. I've also seen more than a few urban or epic fantasies and cyberpunk stories that are very light on new ideas – they just remix technology, monsters, or magic from other works and then fling people into adventures that sit somewhere on the Pulp/Literary axis. I've definitely read a few books (or stopped reading them a third of the way in) that flew too close to Literary/Ideas. Cool premise, well drawn characters, and then they don't DO anything about it. Ennui, moping tend to be key characteristics.
Returning to our original premise, I feel like this is as useful a tool to tell your friends about a book. "I liked it, but it had a little more Pulp and a little less Idea than I usually like. That other one was super-Literary, but it had just enough Pulp to keep things hopping."
Fodder for silly arguments
Of course, all three of the proposed argument-starters above are entirely subjective. What qualifies as pulpy SF, as sci-fi 101, as "grungy?" Who knows! That only makes the arguments more pointless!
Final note here – it's been a rough week for me (and, actually, my entire home town). Not going to get into it, but I bring it up because arguments about science fiction and fantasy genre stuff are supposed to be silly. There is serious stuff in SFF, in the ideas, in issues around who gets to publish and what stories are told, even who gets power and voice in fandom. But when we talk about the stories, we should acknowledge that we are talking about make-believe tales of rockets and dragons. The fact that people actually take hard vs soft science fiction seriously and try to use it as a kind of value judgment against other fans/writers is unutterably stupid.
Not one single aspect of this post is meant to discourage anyone from reading or enjoying any damn thing. I've certainly changed what I like over the years, opened myself to new things.
Mostly, I hope these give people a couple of tools for talking about SFF, where a particular book lies on some spectrum, maybe, just maybe, helping people find something new they might like. They are not meant for whacking someone else in the head.
Recent reading
I'm halfway through The Unbroken by C.L. Clark right now, and enjoying it quite a bit. It's doing a great job balancing well-drawn characters, plot, and a colonialist low-magic black powder fantasy setting.
Finished up Max Gladstone's Last Exit with mixed feelings. Not going to get into any kind of review, but one thing I will note is that it's the sort of book that conflates "saving the world" with "saving America." It's a very, very American book, and despite its protagonists travelling to countless alternate Earths, countries outside the US might as well not exist. When you're not an American reader, that's always a stumbling block.
A couple of short stories that I very much enjoyed recently were Ian Tregillis's The Owl and the Reptiloid at Sunday Morning Transport and Critical Mass by Peter Watts over at Lightspeed. The latter is set in Metro Vancouver, and it's always nice to see locally-set SFF, even if it's a wee bit dystopian.
Obligatory Self-Promotion Corner
Mentioned this earlier in the week, but a new audio drama, Broken Road, has debuted, based on my short story "Patience Lake." If you missed it, you can read the original story and check out Broken Road via the links right here.
Remember kids, never like or subscribe to ANYTHING on the internets! I once subscribed to a newsletter, and the next thing you know, I was hit by a bus! It really stung, too! Had to get a Band-Aid and everything!