Making predictions is hard.
Particularly about the future. What’s even harder is to influence the world one way or another – be it with your writing, or your teaching, or just your wonderful sunny personality.
When I opened Darkship Thieves with “You always get what you don’t want” I was merely echoing my grandmother’s oft-repeated aphorism.
I don’t know if you went through the same, but I remember being three or a little older, and starting to daydream about my adult life. Of course the early dreams were crazy stuff, but they’d be. I had no clue how adults lived, after all. But then the older ones got sharper and more defined.
Look, I’m a realist. Always was. At age eight, I was going to grow up and live in Denver. (This was so far back I did not know Denver was not by the ocean.) At age fourteen, I knew what the US immigration policy looked like, and I knew a couple who had been on the waiting list for ten years (both Phds though, I’ll grant you, not stem.) At age three I dreamed of growing up and having babies, but at age twelve I knew most boys filled me with an irresistible desire to hit them hard over the head to stop them talking. (I didn’t know about duct tape. Also, most girls gave me the same issue. Middle school was hell.) At age five I dreamed of being pretty and popular, but at age ten, I knew neither was likely to happen.
So I could extrapolate my life quite well. I was going to get a Phd, teach in college and look after my parents in their old age. I can’t tell you, given my trajectory, how LIKELY that future was. like 99.9% likely.
Instead, because of a friend delaying in the bathroom in tenth grade, (after a badminton match. We’d just showered, but she insisted on stopping by the bathroom on the way out of the school.) And my getting bored and looking on the bulleting board, I ended up in the United States for my senior year in highschool. (Well, the poster showed a girl coming out of an egg with a suitcase. It said “get out of your shell” and a number. NOTHING about what it was. If it had said “exchange student program” I’d never have thought about it. But it didn’t. So I called the number to find out what it was, and they said “How about we send you the papers.” And I said “sure” knowing my family couldn’t afford it. Turned out it cost very little and… we… The rest is history.) This in turn led to my becoming… a sparring partner (wash your mind. We just argued A LOT) with my family-liaison’s son. Which, four years later, after a nasty breakup, led to my calling him and… well… We’ve been married twenty seven years. And I’m a professional writer, something that seemed impossible even thirteen years ago.
Okay, if I just disqualified myself from future-prognosis, I assure you I’m not the only one. If you look back at your own life, you’ll find that while each step at the time was perfectly logical according to who you are, the trajectory would have seemed wildly improbable to you at ten. Or twenty.
Maybe you never thought you’d marry. Maybe it’s your profession that surprised you. Or where you life. Few of us live predictable lives, because we don’t live alone. We are factors in a chaotic system, but we are not the only factor.
A-propos de quoi am I telling you this stuff?
To be bluntly honest, I think it’s part of what’s ailing science fiction. It’s impossible to listen to Heinlein juveniles, or anything else from that time, without catching that sense of confidence of “this is how the world will go.” It’s also impossible not to see how different the world is from anything they could have predicted. Rather like being 14 and trying to extrapolate your life at sixty.
And this means that anyone reading it today knows that it’s not “an accurate prediction of the future” – impossible to convince ourselves our predictions are any more accurate. (Unless we’re really, really egotistical and lack self-examination powers, which mind you, a lot of us do. But not enough to maintain the illusion.)
So am I saying that science fiction is passee?
No. Science Fiction was never about predicting the future. The clue to this is that writers were not in carnival fairs, and didn’t say “cross my palm with silver” (Okay, I lie about that last one. Though I prefer gold. Or would.)
The contradiction of science fiction is to make it sound like it’s about the future – like the writer can see into the future and see clearly enough to make it real and believable to the writer. But it should not – and I don’t think it ever did – have pretensions of being accurate. (Again, if we could do that, we’d win the lottery.)
But then, what good is it? you ask. Well, let’s put it this way – your daydreams of being a grown up when you were very little were in no way accurate. BUT they were important. They gave you an idea life wasn’t static, and you wouldn’t always be a kid, dependent on your parents. It got your mind working towards such ideas as “I’ll live independently and need to make a living.” So, as each new stage arrived, in what is, looking backward, years of vertiginous change, you weren’t scared. You’d tried this on, if in slightly different form, in your mind. You could think about it clearly now because it wasn’t new and scary.
Science fiction is like that for our entire species. We can – and do – look to the future through it. Science fiction is the dreams of mankind. (Fantasy, too, but it’s a different thing. It’s like those daydreams you had – what you didn’t? – that you’d find out you were a dragon shape shifter. You knew they’d never come true, but it was fun to think about it on a summer afternoon, and work out exactly how you’d hide it.)
In a time of rapid change – now – we must dream ahead. The future will not be what we expect, but it will rhyme. (I didn’t become a college professor looking after my parents, but it could be argued I think too much, and look after my kids…) If we’ve looked ahead and sort of seen ourselves in a very different society, we’ll be able to think of developments more clearly.
(Take clones – please. While the real cloning didn’t resemble SF, people who read SF were nothing phased by cloning. While their co-workers ran around talking about the end of the world they read the articles, absorbed it, compared it to the scenarios they’d read before, then said, “Oh, look. This is not that different from twins. No, it doesn’t do anything to your soul.” etc.)
So, we need science fiction. And what type of science fiction do we need? Distopic? Hopeful? Human wave? (Now old) New Wave? Space? Earth Bound? Feminist? Politically incorrect? Hard? Or scientific sacred-cow goring?
Yes.
We need all of the above. Only a wide range of dreams can prepare us for an unknown future and allow us to try on new ideas and new ways of facing the world, so that whatever the world throws at us, we have at least some notion what is going on.
This is why having gatekeepers establish “one correct type” of science fiction is so pernicious.
What we need are tales of wonder and the imagination. The crystal ball are broken, but our dreams aren’t. Dream a little dream (or a big one) today.
Edited to add: Welcome Instapundit readers and many thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link!
According To Hoyt 
WOOT! Thank goodness we don’t get everything we want! (Or, as I tell my kids, “If wishes were horses, we’d have a *very* crowded house” :-) ). Agree, totally. There are places for all kinds, and thank God that the gatekeepers, while still there, haven’t noticed their gate is sitting by itself and people are going around them without even looking twice.
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I always said that if wishes were horses we would all have very well fertilized gardens.
So, if youthful dreams of the future are horses of the mind, then…we would all have richly fed imaginations?
(Well, maybe this explains someone like Sarah.)
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I don’t know if Sarah appreciates being called “sh** for brains”
/runs away very fast/
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When I was a kid, I did a lot of gardening. I was very successful because I used enough fertilizer for a large farm, in my 100 sq feet vegetable garden. Being called fertilizer for brains might be the closest one comes to describing my mind. Or if you read Pratchett — Leonardo de Quirm, and ideas falling from the heavens into one’s head.
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I should point out that I was a sickly young child and very lonely (well, it was an era when the best protection against infections disease was to isolate the sufferer — at least twenty years earlier than my real age, because of being in Portugal) so I daydreamed a lot.
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If wishes were horses, we’d eat a LOT of horsemeat.
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Well Lin, there’s also “be careful of what you wish for, you may get it”. [Wink]
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I still have daydreams of being a dragon shapeshifter. Of course, I’d have to pick my kid up from school without getting shot, but I’m sure she’d consider I was the Best Mommy Ever if I managed it.
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When I was young I couldn’t wait to grow up and get lots of mail, like my parents. Of course, when I was young my mail was mostly comprised of birthday and holiday greeting cards, often containing checks or cash.
Science Fiction never pretended to depict the future, merely a future. It is akin to those medieval maps portraying the mapmakers’ guesstimates of what the future might be. (Dystopian SF is the “Here there be dragons” portions.) It is a guide to the imagination, helping us envision a path through the future, granting confidence the route just might be navigable and might be worth the effort.
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Dreams are important. The world would be a dreary place, indeed, if no one ever dreamt strange and beautiful dreams. Once in a while, they do come true! If all of them did, though, yeah…that would be a problem. (^-^)
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I’d be a star-traveling were dragon. :-P
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I fail to see the problem here. :D
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So do I!. Sounds good to me.
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Ha! I’d be something different every day. Possibly every few minutes. Just because I like the idea of having a million or more different “me’s” and I get bored fairly quickly. (^-^)
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I pick up on references to the sources for both William Blacklock and Peter Farewell.
Sarah, yet another great ponder, well put, thank you.
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Wargaming reality is a useful skill. Successful wargamers (writers that got the “what if” right) should be recognized and rewarded ;-) There’s a reason we have a real submarine named Nautilus. I think that humans have an instinctive recognition that “what if” stories could help them stay alive. The story genre of the shipwrecked survivor having to make everything he needs to survive dates back to ancient Egypt.
Of course the “what if” stories have to have internal consistency and not be too multivariant or they aren’t useful any more. No fair having were-dragons AND alien abductions. The probes just won’t fit right, you know?
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Not fair to have Were-Dragons and Alien Abductions? I don’t know. If there are aliens abducting humans, they deserve to meet up with a Were-Dragon. [Very Big Evil Dragon Grin]
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Of course! But that’s Revenge/Justice/Comeuppance, not What If. And when you write this story make sure to have long, detailed descriptions of the alien guts on the walls and the high-pitched screaming ;-) And then the were-dragons take over the ship and go to the alien’s homeworld for *more* revenge…
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Heh. Poul Anderson, _The High Crisade_.,
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I gather that top athletes practice “visualization” — “seeing” the perfect pitch or the putt going into the hole — as a aid to performance. As it works in the moment so does it work looking forward.
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Visualization works in many ways. I used to visualize my preflight inspections, emergency maneuvers, and sometimes the entire plan of my flights, when I was actively flying planes. I’ve done it for art, and for playing guitar, and for acting. It’s a handy technique, especially if you are good at “seeing” things in your head!
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“If wishes were horses we’d all be eating steak”
-Jayne Cobb
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Can you expand on the “Heinlein juviniles” phrase? I’ve only heard that once before and it was in a very derrogatory context.
Regarding sci-fi readers versus the general public, if a glowing blue door appeared inexplicably in front of a group of people, the sci-fi readers would be the ones to take a step forward while everyone else would take a step back. There’s a flip side to that, though. Read too much apocalyptic over too long a time and you just might find yourself turning into intolerable cynic.
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The phrase “Heinlein Juveniles” refers to a series of about a dozen novels written by Robert Heinlein and published by (I think) Scribner. They were written from the late Forties through about 1960, and include such works as Rocket Ship Galileo, Have Spacesuit Will Travel, The Star Beast, Red Planet, Farmer In The Sky (originally serialized in By’s Life, the official magazine of the American Boy Scouts), Space Cadet, Tunnel In the Sky, Citizen of the Galaxy and others. They were written for what is now the YA (Yong Adult) market and helped move SF out of the pulp magazine ghetto into the Hardbound world of respectability, gaining the favour of librarians and parents for whom HB was the hallmark of respectability (remember, in 1950s America paperback books were usually graced by covers for which “lurid” would be a step up and were little better than comic books.)
Heinlein’s contract ended when the publisher refused his novel Starship Troopers, freeing him for the explorations of his later period works: Stranger in a Strange Land, Glory Road, the Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Time Enough for Love, Friday and so on.
This is all from memory and off the top of my head (which those familiar with me will observe is increasingly apparent) and may differ in certain particulars from actual events. I recommend hitting Wiki which on matters of this sort is generally reliable. I also apologise for not italicizing titles but, frankly, there were so many I decided it would be terribly tedious.
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Thanks for the explanation. I’m going to read up on a few of those. I was going to be snarky and ask you if the Yong Adult market was for mature Chinese readers, but I won’t. :)
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start with Citizen of the Galaxy, proceed to Have Spacesuit Will Travel. Cap it with Red planet. :) Then read the rest too.
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Well, on my latest read I started with Have Spacesuit will travel, then started from the beginning (original publication order): Rocket Ship Galileo and now Space Cadet. Red Planet will be next (probably starting tomorrow. They are very fast reads.)
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Yes. I did that about a month ago. :)
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“Can you expand on the “Heinlein juviniles” phrase? ”
Heinlein wrote a fair number of books / stories / serials for which the intended audience were what we would today call the young adult market. Think “Space Cadet”, “Farmer in the Sky”, or “Have Space Suit–Will Travel”.
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I can’t help but chuckle every time I remember the kid in Space Suit would have (legally) stocked it with amphetamines if he’d thought to bother about it. Your father’s YA was a lot less tame in some ways than today’s YA.
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During the JFK era my family would go to Cincinnati once or twice a year and a feature of each of those visits was the trip to the local amusement park, Coney Island (now enlarged and known as King’s Island.) I recall being fascinated by the shiny brass .22 cartridges littering the walk in front of the shooting gallery. I rather suspect they don’t do that any more.
And I remember one film critic noting, after viewing the original Manchurian Candidate, the changes in what constitutes presidential security nowadays.
Times sure do change, don’t they?
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Many consider Heinlein’s “juveniles” to be seminal; ask a NASA engineer what piqued his interest in space, there’s a good chance he’ll name Have Spacesuit Will Travel or one of the others. Growing up an SF fan in the American Midwest, most folks would start their intro with “Started out reading everything by Heinlein, just like everyone else, and then discovered there were other authors.”
The books get scoffed at by many, especially liberals, for being so “Mom and apple pie”, but they ignore the realities of writing for the youth market in America in the 40s and 50s, not to mention that several of them (as noted elsewhere) were serialized in Boy’s life, and the Boy Scouts of America were not about to publish subversive literature.
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“The future will not be what we expect, but it will rhyme.” – also the argument for smaller-scale studies we should all do, all the time … like “what do I do if the car ahead of me suddenly does X?” Great SF writers just do it on a much larger scale. And some – too many – folks never try it at all, once they’ve “grown out of” youthful imaginings.
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SF has historically asked “What if” in two ways: 1) What will the machines be like if we have a submarine that goes 20,000 leagues under the sea? OR 2) What will the people be like if the upstairs/downstairs class divide brings about Morlocks and Eloi? The kids who prefer #1 tend to grow up to be well-paid engineers. The kids who prefer #2 tend to grow up to poverty writing respectable SF.
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William Gibson points out his early novels and story collections portray an awesome internet (“cyberspace”), but an unseen authoritarian government has apparently confiscated all the cell phones.
As I drive through Atlanta every morning and evening, watching people talking, [t|s]exting, while driving, well, you can’t help thinking he could have had a better future in mind.
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As I drive through Atlanta every morning and evening, watching people talking, [t|s]exting, while driving, well, you can’t help thinking he could have had a better future in mind.
Warning: If you text while driving in NC you risk ticketing and arrest.
It was hard enough for an outsider to navigate the traffic on I-85 around Atlanta before you had drivers with the added distractions of cell phones and texting.
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Driving in Charlotte for seven years made my husband blase about driving NYC rush hour. I don’t think cell phones can make that worse. Chaos is chaos. (Me? My position when in a car in NC is with my eyes closed, huddled in the passenger seat, praying.)
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Hate to tell you, but they have re-engineered Independence Blvd. yet again, and well, it does carry a great deal more traffic, but not any more comfortably. Also you no longer get to look in at the window of that, ah-hem, florescent lingerie shop…
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you know, we drove it TWENTY years ago — last — then again two summers ago. I’m not sure it had improved.
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Eh, ask the city planners/politicians. They’ll assure you it is much better. Or better than it would have been if they hadn’t mucked with it. And cheap at twice the cost so pay your taxes and shut your gob.
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Feh – I meant to post this comment earlier.
It has been proposed that when the time arrives for First Contact with an alien intelligence Earth’s representatives ought be SF fans as they have already done it many times.
Myself, I think it depends upon the SF fan … I would agree to Leonard but have grave qualms about Sheldon representing us.
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Alt. description of the plot if Niven & Pournelle’s Footfall: Science Fiction writers save the world.
Alt. description of Niven & Pournelle’s <Fallen Angels: Fen save the world.
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Wow. Didn’t think it had been that long since i refreshed the page. I had no idea I was echoing a post over an hour old…
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No. My fault. I hadn’t looked at it to approve posts. I don’t see what needs approval from remote machine.
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Ah, I see, merely comedic timing. That’s par for the course, for me. I’m a champion of weird timing and coincidentally wrong statements/questions.
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I would think they would want SF writers, like the threat assessment team in Footfall.
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My cousin, the Cornell engineering grad, and I were discussing this at my father’s funeral last month. In our youth we read stories about space travel and thought that surely we’d be on Mars by now. It’s not that we forgot, as a country, how to dream. We seem to have lost the ability to follow through. (Not to mention Jetson cars)
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The official sf establishment (for publishing, not movies) also clamped down pretty hard on the dream. In the eighties, if I heard the phrase “before going to other planets we need to learn to take care of this one, I would have killed someone. I was one stupid tirade by well meaning eco-fan away from a planet killing event.)
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Actually, Heinlein often got the details right, even when he got the big stuff completely wrong. For example, in the opening chapter of _Space Cadet_ (1948) he has a character using a cellphone. Not only does he get the cellphone right, but also the sociological implications of parents keeping up with their kids by calling their cellphone when they’re traveling, and also a kid thwarting this by packing his phone in his bag. The whole conversation would be completely normal today.
That was kind of “wow” to me and a lot of other kids, back when I first read it in the 1960’s, but guess what? Kids who read that book went on to invent those cellphones and cellular networks.
Heinlein seems to have deliberately set out to indoctrinate kids with the desire to become what they read. I feel no doubt that this had a big effect on the future, which is, of course, what Ms. Hoyt is talking about here…
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Yes. Even though his future was a lot more organized and top down, (not that he approved of this) than it turned out. (Yes, as bad as it is.) It was the eye of the times. BUT he still got stuff right, both in that and in the attitude one should take to that type of top down push. And that’s why SF is important, even if we get “big future” wrong.
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I was 11 when I discovered Heinlein. I read everything of his I could get my hands on, then found Asimov, MZB, Andre Norton, and tons of other great writers. My books are more like movies in my head, the stories play thru my imagination in vivid color and brilliant sound. I’m 47 now, and still go back to re-read Heinlein every few years, he’s an old friend that I will never get tired of.
I’m still hoping D.D. Harriman will step up soon, I want my ride to the moon.
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I keep trying to raise him. Unfortunately I only have two shots. (I WANTED eleven kids. It didn’t work.) So I have to try to push other people’s kids that way. Mwah ah ah ah ah
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D. D. Harriman is alive and well and is named Richard Branson … or maybe Burt Rutan.
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Yes, yes, but you know I’m a Heinlein brat. Belt AND suspenders.
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I work for D. D. Harriman, only his name is actually Jeff Greason. Dan DeLong, Aleta Jackson, & I pretty much drafted him to be the CEO of XCOR in 1999, I’ve never regretted it.
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yay for Jeff Greason! (I’m along with you on this.)
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SciFi is about transcending limits, with death the ultimate limit.
Hence the fascination with > 1x time travel.
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I have an alpha reader who gets irritated that one of my characters is so blase about time travel. Well, the main character grew up with it, knows all the limitations and restrictions, has a time-ship with a very cramped and uncomfortable interior, and uses the ability for her import-export business. How about a lovely 15th century tapestry from Flanders? Of course it is a reproduction. No one in their right mind would lift artifacts from burning castles or purchase looted goods from 16th century Spanish armies. *wink*
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LOL. And yes, the human ability to become blase with ANYTHING is a gift.
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Right. People can get blasé about anything at all. In Kipling’s story “The Madonna of the Trenches”, a British soldier asks for a transfer out of a sector where the trenches and dugouts are floored and walled with the frozen corpses of French soldiers. He can’t stand the creaking noise made by walking on them. His CO says (correctly) that this is a transparent excuse: “You’d no more got stiffs on the brain then than you have now.”
Yes, people can get used to anything. I’m not sure that’s a “gift”.
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It is. It allows people to survive in UNBELIEVABLY bad circumstances. As far as survival is a good thing, it’s a gift.
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WELL! There you go again thinking the future should be bright, that individuals matter. Authors that _matter_ show us exactly how our capitalistic, non-Malthusian culture dooms us to failure. And that somehow a select minority might winkle a small promise of hope from it.
This, of course, is why such authors as Niven and Pournelle, Ringo and others have had such dim success writing about the future and the grim reality it has in store for us.
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I was going to say something about both middle fingers in the air, but you know that’s a given. The future had BETTER be bright. Otherwise I’m not letting it be.
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I’m not at my home computer and this one at work has a really shitty irony detector app installed, so I’m not picking up on the intended meaning despite the words in front of me.
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D’oh! That was supposed to be a replay to Quilly. When snark goes bad…
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There are a couple more functions of SF/Fantasy. One of them is simple entertainment. (Let’s hear three cheers for entertainment… Rah! Rah! Rah!) I started reading SF back in the 50’s (Yes, I’m that old.} A lot of what I read was thud and blunder SF, vastly entertaining to my teen-aged mind. But there is also much higher purpose for the genre.
A lot of the better stuff helps us understand ourselves and our world. Look at Orwell’s dystopian novels 1984 and Animal Farm. Is he predicting the future? No, he’s telling parables on the nature of the totalitarian state. He’d seen plenty of this, right in his own time. Or Tolkien’s trilogy, which among other things, examined the nature of evil and the ability of the common man to muddle through against it. He’d seen a bit of that, too.
Of course not all of it was death and destruction. The nature of honor, loyalty, love, courage and all other human virtues are examined over and over again. I doesn’t really matter what time they are set in; in fact, sometimes a different framework helps understanding.
One story from my early reading comes back to me. It is the novella Ararat, by Zenna Henderson. It tells the story of an alien humanoid race, marooned in the American Southwest. The People are a gentle race, who care and nurture one another. I find I am in a similar society in my church, right here is Winchester, Kentucky. People really care for each other, and look out for their needs. There is a lot of love here. Of course, they don’t have psychic powers, and they can’t fly, but the society is similar. But I can fly. I do it frequently. In my dreams.
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Well, what this was not an exhaustive list of the functions sf should serve. There are several. It was rather my response to the last several years where — on the inside — we writers have been pointed in a bleak-and-human-evil ONLY direction. I think the more varieties we can have out there, the greater the chance of hitting something meaningful with our readers. And I’ve seen that type of society. For a while I belonged to a writers’ group like that.
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Predicting the future? How about predicting the past?
No, I’m not kidding. Heinlein (and many others) predicted the moon landings. They’re history. Ancient history, according to my son.
Heinlein famously predicted the waterbed. I had one in the 80’s. Loved it. Wanted to get another one, this year. Can’t find one — nobody makes them any more. Waterbeds are history.
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Absolutely. When my h2o bed died in 2000 I tried to find a replacement in vain. had to get one of those pneumatic sleep comfort things. darned thing isn’t warm when i get into it.
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Building material costs have gone up. So developers, bankers, and builders appealed to the municipalities to change their codes. Builders argued that prior codes called for significant overbuilding. Various local building codes allow for reduced structural support than they used to.
Waterbeds weigh a great deal. Many apartment complexes would not let you have them unless you were on a ground floor slab. Many of the newer houses won’t bear the weight.
Then there is that little problem of what happens if the mattress fails. (For our late not so lamented it occurred in the middle of the night…)
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Heinlein got _everything_ right; Those who say otherwise are nitpickers
fixated on the unimportant (that roads do not roll) and not the essential
(a society transformed by, and utterly dependent on, cheap transport).
Imagine Houston with gas at $10/gal, if you can, and want to.
P.S. Re-read your ‘Future History’ timeline, and recall H’s comment to a
sceptical fan regarding ‘The Crazy Years’. Paging Nehemiah Scudder.
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Sarah doesn’t like Religion or Politics posted here so I’ll deserve her “whack” for the following. “Nehemiah Scudder” exists only in the minds of people who dislike religion. RAH was extremely wrong to think a “Neheniah Scudder” could so easily come to power.
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Drac, you’re being too hidebound. You’re viewing Nehemiah Scudder as TRADITIONAL religion. If you unhook it from that, and understand religions are not NECESSARILY G-d centered and/or believe in the afterlife, the picture shifts. (And he was never exactly traditional religion. Remember the comment in Stranger? Something like “Boy of my tribe. No one remembers him anymore”?
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Sarah, considering that “Nehemiah Scudder” is used to attack any traditional religious Politician (especially Republicans), I stand by my statement.
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Oh, I don’t care how it’s used — I care about “irrational policies with a messianic bend, applied from above.”
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Point and if I mentioned a current day example, I really get into Politics. [Wink]
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Aw, c’mon – the American people would NEVER fall for a political candidate who promised to heal the world while making our nation’s enemies and allies respect us once more. Fantasy has its limits and SF relies upon suspension of disbelief, not utter credulity. Next you guys will be telling me that the nation’s conservative party will someday nominate the wealthy scion of a famously brainwashed politician/business leader. Heck, why not go all out and make him a member of some religious cult that once advocated, oh, I dunno – polygamy?
LOL – talk about your Crazy Years! Pull the other one, you guys, I’m developing a limp.
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We’d never so foolish to elect a fellow who’d say he’d make the seas stop rising. We’re talking politicians, not god-kings.
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Heinlein got PEOPLE right. This is part of what I was saying — again, I really need to have coffee BEFORE I write — the future will never be PRECISELY or often even vaguely accurate, but the pitting of human against events is still a good… trial run. Dry run. Whatever. provided we get PEOPLE right, it’s worth reading. (You can’t pick a fight with me by liking Heinlein more. TRULY.)
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Sometimes he got people right. I’m probably going to have people frothing at the mouth here, but I found the characters in Stranger in a Strange Land very unrealistic. Between the (to me) unbelievable characters and very slow plot I really struggled to get through it. (probably never would have finished it if it was referenced in so many books by authors that I really like; and I wanted to understand the references). Farnham’s Freehold on the other hand is FANTASTIC depiction of people, probably why it is my favorite of any Heinlien I’ve read, I can point to examples of practically every character, simply by running through a list of people I know personally.
Oh, and it has a happy ending, endings don’t have to be happy to be good, but that one is both happy and good, which is a plus.
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For some people — Stranger is fairly accurate. I’m not fond of it, for a value of not being fond of a Heinlein book… BUT to be honest, Mike was supposed to be the factor that made it possible, and he was raised by aliens. :-P
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I’m going to say this one time for the Cheap Seats: THIS IS NOT, NOT, *NOT* “THE CRAZY YEARS” — it is “The Era Of Limited Choices”, from _Fallen Angels_. (Chapter Two — book available in Baen Free Library; go look it up. Ice Age; circular reasoning as de-facto censorship; about the only thing we don’t yet have is the privately-run space station — but Rutan’s working on the orbital gliders….) Sorry, folks — RAH didn’t predict *everything*….
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Looks at Chris. Looks at the others. Guys. We have an heretic. There will have to be an inquisition.
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I’ve been writing humour just about all my life (honestly – since I was about eight years old); for the past six or seven years, I have combined it with science fiction. When people at cons ask me why I write a lot of science fiction, I tell them that the genre gives me a lot of useful metaphors with which I can write about the present.
It is my contention that science fiction is pretty much always about the time in which it was written. This is often a conscious choice by the author (ie: Orwell intended Nineteen Eighty-four to be a satirical comment on totalitarian regimes like that in Communist Russia). Often, though, the author unconsciously channels the zeitgeist of his/her times (the optimist science fiction of the 1960s embodied by Star Trek reflected the optimism of post-War Baby Boomers, while the flood of current dystopian science fiction reflects the uneasiness with which post-Boomer generations look at their lives). When science fiction is truly alien (for example, the film Fantastic Planet), it comes across as surreal and not always comprehensible.
I would also argue that this is as it should be. Art is a reflection of the world around the artist; it should tell us something about the way we live NOW, even if it is set in the future.
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You WOULD be right, except that the dystopia is written, controlled by and bought (in publishing houses) by boomers and it started with the boomers. The PREVIOUS generation — yes, the people who knew WWI and WWII wrote the optimistic stuff. You’ve also apparently NEVER talked to editors. They’re the ones who rejected sf because “it wasn’t plausible” if we weren’t all going to diiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiie. OF course SF — like all writing — reflects the times and prejudices of the people writing it. That has to rank up there with “the sky is blue.” BUT if ALL SF is is “a metaphor” (And EVERYTHING is ultimately a metaphor for the human existence. I have an MA in literature! I can play that game BETTER.) then the genre doesn’t need to exist (which actually the establishment has been saying for years, and favoring fantasy.) SF is supposed to be a conscious waking dream of the future. If not, to misquote someone “To H*ll with it.”
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It might be you are both right, but the constipated worldview is not that of society but of the portion of society occupying the publishing houses. SF (all writing) reflects the times and prejudices of the people writing it, but what makes it into print times and prejudices of a much more limited group.
Another reason to admire John W. Campbell.
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Oh, and writing as “social critique” has to be one of the most self-important and shallowest of the ideas of the last fifty years which is saying a lot. Does that creep in? Oh, sure. But humans have been telling stories for centuries before this handy dandy concept of “Society made me evil” was introduced by Jean Jacques may he burn in h*ll Rosseau.
1984 wasn’t “social critique”, it was the finest “what if this goes on” SF nightmare. Unfortunately a lot of people seem to think it was a manual.
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(And EVERYTHING is ultimately a metaphor for the human existence. I have an MA in literature! I can play that game BETTER.)
and
Oh, and writing as “social critique” has to be one of the most self-important and shallowest of the ideas of the last fifty years which is saying a lot.
I remember feeling an uneasiness in high school and college. Something about the analysis of literature that I was being taught to do seemed so much sophistry. Oh, I could play the game real well. But the teachers always seemed to have a foreordained conclusion that was expected, one that suited their world view.
I know I have mentioned this before, this is part and parcel of why I love the scene in Back To School where Kurt Vonnegut is informed that the paper he was hired to write on Kurt Vonnegut failed because, the professor says, it demonstrates absolutely no knowledge of Kurt Vonnegut.
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Eh. Like the rejections I got when I started writing because I clearly had never been out of the states and hated other countries. (On a story set in Portugal. I am not even joking.)
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LOL.
But, like a lot of humor, if you didn’t laugh at it you would be crying. (Or worse, banging your head against the wall.)
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Stranger in A Strange Land — we laugh because it’s too sad to cry.
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Hmm. I have no problem with you rejecting “writing as social critique” as a method of CRITICISM or ANALYSIS; I agree that critics often look for things in works of art that conform to their critical ideas rather than what actually exists in the work. However, I would suggest, though that you cannot dismiss it when the writer explicitly says that his or her writing is a social critique (as Orwell did and I insist I do.-)
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To say writing is social critique is on a par with saying writing is words. Just because it is social critique is not to say it is informed, informative, enlightened or enlightening.
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Absolutely. I didn’t claim my writing was good (although I and others like it); I simply said that it contained social commentary. Whether or not it has the qualities you enumerate is up to individual readers to decide for themselves. :-)
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True, but only in some situations. Because of the state of publishing for the last umpteen years, some authors call their writing “social critique” only because that is what the editors wanted. Just because you call it that doesn’t make it true. Otherwise, my Saturn would really be a Mercedes.
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The proof is in the reading, isn’t it? If the writer says something exists in a story, and, as a reader, you find it there, then it likely is there. :-)
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Or the writer is good enough to make you believe it’s there or you, as the reader, say it is just because the writer says so. Sorry, I’ve been in too many classes in school and university where that is exactly what’s happened. I’ve been in too many critique groups as well where I’ve seen that happen. All I’m saying is that it may be there but it’s just as likely that it isn’t and folks are only giving lip service to it.
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piffle. Writing is social critique – heck, life is social critique. Which is why saying a thing is “social critique” is tautological. Tell me of anything that cannot be construed as social critique.
Is the Wizard of Oz a parable about woman’s ability ti heal damaged men? Or is it a treatise on the tyranny of the gold standard? Or is it a tale about a lost little girl finding a place in the world? It is all of these and none of them.
Deconstruct deconstructionism and you find nothing there.
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My husband does a wonderful social critique of street signs — when he wants to prove the sheer Wankerishness (I can too make up words. I’m a writer) of the concept. Me? I just tell them deconstructionism is a rotten peg on the rotten seat of post-modernist, which supports the edifice of corpses of Marxism. Bah. They can have it. Give me daydreams and BUILDING. Tearing down is easy. It’s building that takes bone, blood, sinew and intelligence. I’ll side with the builders.
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Sweat, you forgot the sweat. :-)
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Blood sweat and tears… :-P
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“or you, as the reader, say it is just because the writer says so.”
Case in point from art. I have some interest in art. (I wouldn’t say I’m very good at it as my sadly defunct webcomic would demonstrate, but I do have an interest.) It’s interesting to watch someone at an art museum. They’ll read that a particular artist was noted for his use of chiaroscuro, then look back at the painting, make a comment about “lovely chiaroscuro” and move on when it’s utterly clear that they have _no_ idea what “chiaroscuro” is (if they did they’d know “lovely” would hardly be the best adjective) let alone whether that particular painting was a good example of it or not.
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Ira,
Trust me, you do not want me to go down that road. You insist you’re writing social critique? If I begin to critique your blog – or this comment – on that basis, it won’t be pretty.
Me? I write what works for me as a story. The things I believe most strongly find their way in there somehow – but they’re integral to the story. When the story is nothing more than a transparent frame for the author’s dialectic diarrhoea, that author is not writing social commentary. They’re indulging in public onanism.
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I write satire – social and political criticism is built into the genre. I will grant you, that my first goal is to make readers laugh – if they don’t enjot the writing, the critical component in it will be pointless. However, I enjoy writing that leaves me something to think about when I’m done, and that’s the kind of thing I enjoy writing.
I don’t disagree with you: a lot of “message stories” are onanistic. But, of course, most art without any overt messages can also be dismissed as having poor or no entertainment value. I would argue though, that, when incorporated into the story well, an author’s point of view can be part of the overall pleasure of reading a story.
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The author’s POV is ALWAYS integrated into the story. We are human. If that makes stories “critique” then my eating breakfast is critique.
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No, no, Sarah. What happens a few hours AFTER you eat breakfast is critique :)
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Yes, yes — but the method he arrived at the story was not “let us write some rousing social critique” — Yes, I reject it as a method. First of all, you are immersed in the society when you write it. Your “critique” will be flawed at best and follow hackneyed socially-approved lines. As likely did the writer’s to an extent. By definition your critique of their critique is poppycock. I agree some analysis of literature is needed “Why does this piece remain relevant?” “What does it mean to us now, that still speaks across the years?” HOWEVER analysis as done in our colleges is largely Marxist twaddle and you know at its heart Marxism is really good at “deconstructing” and “tearing down” and blaming everything but individual choices for the ills of the individual and the world. It turns blind fury to the binding rules of society, convinced once it collapses there will be something wonderful in its place. Unfortunately, in literature as in society as in economics as in architecture, as in science, Marxism has proven time and time again that in the wake of its destruction (or deconstruction) all that’s left is the misery that has largely been part and parcel of human condition in societies where the individual isn’t free — thereby proving it is a hundred million broken eggs and not a single omelet.
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How to deconstruct almost anything:
http://www.fudco.com/chip/deconstr.html
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On a note of minor disagreement, it usually works out well for the Marxists, at least while it lasts. Looting was one of mankind’s earliest and (if you’re buying the beer I might assert) most useful occupations.
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While ti lasts…
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You’re spot-on with the remark about clones. Though I liked the SF stories like Van Vogt’s Null-A where clones had shared consciousness, I knew from the start that they were just identical twins. Happens all the time in nature, no need to get excited.
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The major question with clones is whether their production is done in a manner which is humane, and whether it is done in a way which suits both animal and human dignity. Where people draw the line will differ, until we come to some kind of moral consensus.
The problem is that you can tinker as much as you like with electronics or machines without doing any wrong to the pieces-parts or the device you come up with. You can tear down and build again as much as you like. But even a microbe has a certain dignity to be respected. Treating bits of a living thing the same way you treat electronics is taking liberties, not being thrifty and creative.
Older sf works examined these questions, whereas a lot of newer ones refuse to admit there’s any moral question. Meanwhile, some of the same sf writers and fans who won’t eat GMO food are championing GMO transhumanism on themselves and their kids. It’s very strange.
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YES on your last paragraph. Oh, yes.
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No one said that humans are always logical.
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“The clue to this is that writers were not in carnival fairs.” Since you have already debunked the second part of this quote I will deal with the first part, with a question. Have you ever attended a Sci-Fi convention?
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Yes. Dear sir, the average carnival fair goer would look down on us Sci Fi convention habitues. THEY are saner. :)
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Sorry to be late for the party — I put this piece aside to read later and only now got back to it. Good discussion; not much to add but just a couple of minor critiques (sorry).
First: “While the real cloning didn’t resemble SF, people who read SF were nothing phased by cloning.”
I HATE grammar police, and of course typos are ever-present for anyone who writes, even those (or perhaps especially those) where one word is substituted for another, particularly when they sound alike. But, as a writer, you just might want to know (if you’re don’t already) that the word is “fazed” not “phased.”
Second, “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” was mentioned above, so I thought I’d mention a pet peeve: it’s horridly mis-titled (though I was too ignorant to recognize it as a youth). A “league” is typically 3 MILES (the distance one can walk in an hour) — at sea 3 nautical miles — though during Roman times (in Gaul) it was 1.4 miles. Either way, “20,000 leagues under the sea” puts one far beyond the center of the Earth and way out into space on the other side.
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Michael, Sarah has mentioned that typos and such will show up here. Since she doesn’t get *paid* for her blog, it really isn’t worth her time to go over it and catch odd typos, etc — and we’d *all* much rather she spent time writing fiction that she can sell and we can buy :-)
Interesting factoid about a title that’s been around for 142 *years* (first published in 1870). Don’t know what you expect anybody to do about it now, so perhaps take it up with the publishers (if any) or rights holders (if any).
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Michael, Sarah has mentioned that typos and such will show up here.
Naturally, which is exactly what I said.
Since she doesn’t get *paid* for her blog, it really isn’t worth her time to go over it and catch odd typos, etc — and we’d *all* much rather she spent time writing fiction that she can sell and we can buy.
Nor do I suggest that she should “catch odd typos, etc.” I merely mentioned it on the off chance that she wasn’t aware of “fazed” versus “phased” (an error that many people make), and would appreciate knowing that, if indeed she doesn’t already. If she does (or did), then never mind….
Interesting factoid about a title that’s been around for 142 *years* (first published in 1870). Don’t know what you expect anybody to do about it now, so perhaps take it up with the publishers (if any) or rights holders (if any).
I don’t expect anybody to do anything about it. It’s just an “interesting factoid” — which many people no doubt have noticed before. Why Verne used the term “league” I can’t imagine, but it is interesting. It’s also fascinating to me to wonder what inspired Verne’s Nautilus — and I think it was the advent of the ironclad warships just a decade or so before (though those were not submarines, of course), such as the U.S.’s Monitor or (for a good diagram) Keokuk.
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If you follow it up, the journey of Nautilus over the time of the book could easily add up to twenty thousand leagues — it doesn’t have to be all in a straight line. I have a pickup truck with over 250,000 miles on it. That does not mean it’s parked next to the NASA Moon buggy.
Submarines weren’t a new concept in Verne’s time; one was used (not too successfully) in the American Revolutionary War. He just imagined an extension of then-new technology that would make them practical.
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“Why Verne used the term “league” I can’t imagine, but it is interesting.”
It seems Verne may NOT have used the term “league” but rather the decision was his translator’s. If only we knew of somebody with experience as a professional translator of French who could provide insight into the selection of that term!
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RES, it’s been a LONG time.
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Re submarines: one was used (by the Confederates) during the American Civil War too. As for the linear mileage (or league-age) I suppose that could be true. Indeed, I have a VW bus (not presently in use) with 570,000 some-odd miles on the odometer, which I’ve often said has been to the Moon and back.
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As there seems so doubt, let us turn to that ever fallible authority, Wikipedia:
Beatiful post–and you are absolutely right. We need all types of SF–“the mo’ colors, the mo’ better” (well, that’s the quote from Spike Lee). I am just as comfortable reading the hard SF of Stephen Baxter’s MOONSEED as I am reading A PRINCESS OF MARS. I loved Komatsu’s JAPAN SINKS as well as AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS (hey, it can qualify as SF!).
Harlan Ellison once said that predicting the future is a “mugg’s game”–which means that it’s impossible to do so. Science fiction is not an accurate read on the future–it about _possible_ futures, but more importantly, it must always be about _people_. All the fancy gadgets and tech will not matter if the main characters are 1-dimensional cardboard cutouts.
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Sigh. Errata: strike
Insert:
Truly, I cannot explain what happened to me.
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ah!
PROVE IT!
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Oh, er, ah … geeze, there was a proof around here somewhere, but all I can find is this pudding, and it has no theme.
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The title refers to the distance traveled while under the sea and not to a depth, as 20,000 leagues is over six times the diameter of Earth. The greatest depth mentioned in the book is four leagues.
Well, that certainly answers it — though 20,000 of the 3-mile leagues is over seven times the diameter of Earth, while via the Roman 1.4-mile Gaulish league it’s only 3.5 times the diameter of the Earth.
Beyond that, the Nautilus being four leagues (at least 5.6 miles) deep would certainly be extraordinary even for modern submarines, much less a one-off creation of the 19th century (and why even design a sub capable of those extreme pressures, unless you’re researching the great depths). That’s the trouble with a lot of SF — it drastically over-simplifies the difficulties that in reality would require many sequential experiments, the genius of hundreds if not thousands of different men and women put together, along with a large variety of prototypes in order to achieve the collective vision.
But thanks folks for answering my long-time pet peeve! I’m so glad to learn that Jules Verne wasn’t so wildly off base as I imagined!
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“That’s the trouble with a lot of SF — it drastically over-simplifies the difficulties that in reality would require many sequential experiments, the genius of hundreds if not thousands of different men and women put together, along with a large variety of prototypes in order to achieve the collective vision.”
I guess that’s why I like space opera, if a book is all numbers and formula’s that translates to me as BORING, I’m wanting to read a good story. While I hate obvious errors and impossibilities, I don’t sit down and do the math to see if the ship traveling from earth to some hypothetical planet 23,000,000,000,000 miles away when traveling at 2.82 times the speed of light will actually take 43 days to get there, I assume that the author knows what he is talking about.
I was shocked to learn that not 1 but many people when reading David Webers early Honor Harrington books actually sat down and figured out the volume of the spaceships, then compared them to the tonnage listed in the book, and the materials they were supposed to be made out of, and contacted him to tell him that the ships couldn’t possibly be as light he said they were. It’s a great example of why an author should do his research thoroughly, because there will be readers that catch any mistake he makes, but the people that ignore the story to try and catch the author making a mistake still boggle my mind.
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I think this is the type of mind who wants to prove they’re better than the writer at SOMETHING. It’s a backhanded compliment, I believe.
I wouldn’t backtrack Dave Weber because… the ships don’t EXIST. If the writer makes them live for you for the moment, why would you pierce the wonderful illusion with blah reality? Have you ever woken up and seen something that looks beautiful in the semi-dark? it looks, maybe, like alien towers, rising. Then you turn on the light (or put your glasses on) and realize it’s just your sweater piled in a weird way on the chair at the foot of the bed. I’m the kind of person who is always a little sorry the towers vanish and leave the sweater there. Many people, though, NEED to make sure it’s just a sweater, after all.
The funniest story I have of someone “checking my work” is with the musketeers mysteries.
Before I wrote them, I re-read all the books, including the wretched Viscount de Bragelone, looking for two things: the characters’ first names AND their hair colors. I didn’t find them. So I gave them the first names and the hair colors I wished (No, the historical people on whom it is — perhaps. Dumas lied a lot — based aren’t close enough ringers to use their data.)
On the THIRD book, I get a fan email, referencing an exchange in Twenty Years After where Porthos says Aramis is well preserved, and his hair is just as black. I had, of course, made Aramis a blond. I went to look… and there it was. The thought that someone had carefully combed the books to find this was both impressive and terrifying. So… what did I do? What could I do? Well, thank G-d for that Masters in Literature, which taught me to catch subtexts in words. I immediately pointed out to the fan that Porthos was, in fact, making a subtle dig at Aramis, who was, CLEARLY coloring his hair to hide the white, and pointing out that Aramis’ hair NEVER been black before, by saying the opposite.
The fan sent back “Well played, madame.” or something to that extent. Since then, I fully expect people to catch the most unlikely mistakes, no matter how much I fix in advance, and my editors and first readers track what I do to the last detail.
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I largely agree with that (and I love space opera as well as hard SF), but I still think that it’s good if authors recognize — particularly in engineering innovatively new craft exploring wholly new engineering regimes (such as a vessel to travel for the first time to the Moon and safely return with its crew) — that it’s pretty darn unlikely that one person however brilliant will be able to anticipate and solve all the problems, especially without doing much experimentation and experiencing a lot of trial and error.
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I recall tales of Heinlein covering the floor with butchers’ paper, calculating orbitals for one of his novels (I think it was Space Cadet, but am not interested in confirming this.)
That is clearly a far better use of a writer’s time than oh, writing more novels for us to nitpick.
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This recent Xkcd entertainingly illustrates the scale of depths of lakes, the sea, and ships and submarines.
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