Science fiction survives on its metaphors, catching an echo from the human context then rifling current science for an image or chain of images to act as a correlative. The rationales behind this project (including the rationale that it’s all rational, the claim that the project has, or should have, more in common with scientific discourse than poetic or political discourse) are less important to the general reader than the excitement of the found image. Science fiction is not read as a form of peer-reviewed publication.
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Yep l guess the old cliché/adage is true, nothing dates faster than science fiction!
No, Matt. The marketers already have that figured out. It just becomes “alternate history of the future.”
In truth, good science fiction rarely if ever dates, for precisely the reason set forth: the excitement of the found image. The readability of a piece of sf in later years depends on the fiction part, not the science part.
Hmmm, not sure I’d be confident to make any general statements about what Science Fiction is or does – it’s too broad a church. For reader-appeal, some SF seems to thrive mainly on “sensawunda” (alterity posing as possibility); whilst some relies more on its strength as a literature of ideas. Sometimes SF engages with science proper, other times it’s only really interested in gadget-porn – a distinction which I think is evident at least as early as Verne and Wells.
Mike, you’ve been talking a lot about SF as metaphor in the last couple of months, but do you really believe that’s the extent of it? A lot of your best work has to do with impenetrability, and that’s really where SF grabs me, when things stop making sense about what they make sense about. Granted, I might be taking you a bit too literally. Also, it’s like five thirty in the morning over here and I’ve had a few.
Hi Brendan. No, that’s not the extent of it. But it’s a function that’s gone missing from generic sf–& from the language of in-genre criticism–for a couple of decades now. So it bears some reconsideration.
I take your point about “not making sense” –unfamiliar environments often don’t, & since sf claims to be a fiction of unfamiliar environments & situations, it has a duty to represent that vertigo, that indecipherability. What’s the point of an alien being you can understand ? As a branch of the fantastic, sf should accept that its currency is the inexplicable, not the explicable. I like discoveries when they’ve just been made & seem confusing, not when they’re fully mature & propping up our neat view of the world.
Empty Space has an epigraph from Marcelo Gleiser: “Our instruments have limits. Since knowledge of physical reality depends on what we can measure, we will never know all there is to know. … Much better to accept that our knowledge of physical reality is necessarily incomplete.”
Sf is interesting when it writes itself into those weird spaces on the map. I want it to do metaphor as well. I have no interest in literalism.
Or, from Sacheverell Sitwell: “In the end it is the mystery that lasts and not the explanation.” The epigraph of Aickman’s “Cold Hand In Mine’, which you turned me on to.
But I get you on metaphors, and I appreciate your challenge to create new ones. Whether I’ll be able to is another matter.
That’s an interesting take – but that cognitive dissonance experience is hardly the exclusive preserve of SF. Supernatural fiction also relies on it, as, perhaps to a lesser extent, does a lot of mystery fiction. Does the difference lie in how the dissonance is presented, or in how it is handled/resolved (if at all)?