August 15, 2012 · 9:18 am

mapping the nightmare

Success at predicting the future has been slight. Until recently, SF could claim a separate function: that it catered the science & technology theme park on behalf of science itself. But increased media presence shows science taking charge of the scientific sublime; while gadgetopia can handle its own marketing–indeed, is its own marketing. What else is there to offer? A great deal. Science fiction opens itself unconsciously to its own fears. Judging by its typical subject matter, it has plenty. It is visibly in fear of death. It has a terror of not being special in the universe. It has a terror of being both vulnerable & out of control. It fears injury. It fears disease. It fears disorientation. It is frame dependent in the perceptual rather than the physics sense & will almost despairingly construct contexts & continuities to appear seamless. It fears the puzzled messiness of being human & is always seeking a fix or a cure or a techno-betterment. It is in denial of its understanding that “organisation” means something different to the universe than it does to human beings. It is afraid of entropy. It is afraid of the irreversibility of action & the rigid nature of objects. Its obsession with unlimited access to vast spaces indicates a deep undermining recognition of its own limits. It fears both that the universe is infinite & that it isn’t infinite enough. But sf’s greatest fear, other than that of generally being alive, is the fear of appearing to be wrong–that is, without argumentative defences: effectively a version of that nightmarish condition in which the individual is self-discovered naked in a public situation. Sf has always worked with these fears & others, offering them to the individual reader neither as a tour of the science theme park nor of the “future” but as a map of the human in its continuous & mostly-unacknowledged present.

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18 Responses to mapping the nightmare

  1. Chris Lites
    August 15, 2012 at 5:37 pm

    I agree. All science fiction is about the now. The predictive aspect is just a tool used to put today under a microscope and poke it with a stick.

  2. whiteonesugar
    August 15, 2012 at 7:12 pm

    This post made me think about how boring and derivative some SF can be.
    SF is a disguised discussion about yesterday’s fears and conflicts and just occasionally someone runs under the radar and publishes art.

    Thinking about SF and meaning makes me ask – why so few women readers? The discussion only seems to engage men.

    There have been some great women writing in SF but my local bookshop has a SF section visited only by men and the occasional reluctant partner.

    Genre and gender – what’s that all about then?

  3. Mia Wolff
    August 16, 2012 at 3:37 am

    whiteonesugar—there are woman readers–myself being one of them—got into it entirely on my own by way of my small town library when I was a kid, starting with magic and fantasy and graduating to the science fiction section on the adult floor–I use to carry home stacks of books until I had exhausted their supply. I’m a painter and very interested in color and visceral story telling, not to mention just plain weird and fierce. Don’t think gender has much to do with it—more temperament. But I may be speaking from the strange end of the pool…

  4. whiteonesugar
    August 16, 2012 at 12:27 pm

    Mia – I wonder why SF is a map for modern life that few women choose to use. I don’t have any stats to back up my gut feeling, but I am sure that there is a whole set of strange semantics around the positioning of SF that prevents many women from picking up the books with spaceships on the front. Clearly not all, but many.

    I am interested in the way that Margaret Atwood’s SF is published in a deliberately non SF presentation. I wonder how many of the men that enjoyed O & C also read Alias Grace.

  5. siobhan
    August 16, 2012 at 2:46 pm

    Science Fiction loves the other. Science Fiction loves to ask why? Science Fiction loves the strange end of the pool. All we ever do is write and read in the moment of that discovery :) s

  6. martm
    August 16, 2012 at 4:16 pm

    I suspect it’s a map that women know all too well: your man disappearing with his mates for a bit of a lark, leaving dishes in the sink and the council tax unpaid. And if you follow him into the void, you come across creatures like Michael Valentine Smith who enjoy talking at you, but haven’t that much time for actual conversation – which means, listening and responding to someone else’s point of view. But in space, no one tells you to shut up. The monologues are endless. Everyone behaves like Jeremy Clarkson.

    So no wonder many women stay clear: each launch vehicle’s a symbol of desertion. Or, as someone once said, all rockets are haunted.

  7. Mia Wolff
    August 17, 2012 at 3:26 am

    you know–I never thought of some guy leaving me on a rocket ship–I always though I’d be the one on the ship. Not leaving—just going for the joy of going. Give me the space opera life–even if its mostly illusion. Its a nice wacko balance to admiring all the books on your shelves. …course it would be nice to have some of those books along with you

    and then you’ve got Mr M J fucking with your expectations (just finished Empty Space)—might be interesting company out there in the place of no road signs

    happy light years!

  8. Cary
    August 18, 2012 at 12:52 am

    Reblogged this on Writings From Within and commented: The inestimable M. John Harrison on sci-fi, prognostication, fears and death.

  9. matthewbrandi
    August 19, 2012 at 11:44 am

    Sugar: You don’t.
    Wolff: We do.
    Sugar: I wonder why you don’t.

    How to suppress women’s reading: do I hear Joanna Russ (peace be upon her) turning in her grave?

    @martm: Are these flaws distinguishing male SF fans, or are they flaws of men in general? Do people read SF because fandom is appealing, or do they join fandom after having become readers?

    How many female SF readers ever become visible to male SF fandom, even those women readers seemingly in plain sight? Why would they want to be seen?

    Of course, I say all this without having consulted any statistics, and as an obligate non-joiner.

  10. Mia Wolff
    August 20, 2012 at 1:32 am

    oh yes–Joanna Russ ( not to mention Tiptree/Sheldon)
    men are wonderful
    SF also
    fuck statistics
    thank you matthewbrandi
    ps–women have always been in plain sight

  11. martm
    August 20, 2012 at 11:09 am

    @matthewbrandt: All men? Who knows? I’m an obligate n-j, too, so fandom never appealed – but to those it attracts, I think the reading has to comes first. Surely no one spends a rainy Easter weekend in a hall full of Asimov nuts waiting for a fancy dress parade of cybermen without some prior knowledge.

    Meanwhile, while that was going on, the rest of us were enjoying a talk with everyone else in plain sight. A bit like this, actually.

  12. Sue Burke
    August 20, 2012 at 9:23 pm

    The stats from the US: one-third of SF writers are women, and half the readers are women. But you Brits may be different.

  13. MichaelO
    August 21, 2012 at 11:11 am

    Siobhan, I don’t think science fiction loves “the other” much at all. Most of it has a public and debilitating stroke even trying to conceive…clinically or poetically….what “the other” might even be like..

  14. Chris Lites
    August 21, 2012 at 6:40 pm

    I think Mike, PKD and William Gibson do a good job of addressing the philosophical concept of “the other.” Sci-fi has the unique ability to manifest the other in guises which defy rational means. As such, as a genre it can paint on a broad existential canvas what it means [or does't mean] to be Other, or for the Other to be unknowable.

  15. MichaelO
    August 22, 2012 at 5:10 am

    Can’t agree, Chris. Mostly I find it’s simplified human hieroglyphs, and not simplified in a one breath/one stroke way either. Dress them up as eels, random vermin, fish-heads and you’re done. I don’t think carnivalizing one another is necessarily a terrible or wasted thing but it has zip to do with the other. Except inasmuch as you can find that quality in even prosaic circumstances.

  16. Chris Lites
    August 22, 2012 at 3:38 pm

    The proliferation of aliens in sci-fi is all about definition of self through Otherness. PKD is loaded with the notions of the crises of confrontation with The Other. His sci-fi is also loaded with the inverse of the Other in which the self confronts more selves which are seen as The Other. It may not read like Milan Kundera, but guys like PKD are constantly addressing the crisis of self definition through negation.

    The Underground Man would be at home in a good many science fiction settings. You’d have to be more specific on what you mean by “carnevalizing one another” for me to speak to that, but if I read the phrase correctly it has everything to do with defining the Other so as to define the self through negation.

  17. MichaelO
    August 23, 2012 at 12:35 pm

    Perhaps we disagree on the definition, if that’s something possible, of the Other. To me the Underground Man is merely the thick, spiteful negation of a set of values. And in perpetual tight orbit around them. By “carnevelization” I meant the isolation, distillation and amplification of certain human qualities via paint and masks, whether poetically or even literally.

  18. Chris Lites
    August 23, 2012 at 3:18 pm

    I’m talking about the Hegelian/Existential notion of The Other ties to the philosophical idea of “The Gaze” among other things. But I have background in philosophy and am thus predisposed to “go there.” The aspects you list under carnevalization certainly have existential analogues, but they aren’t directly addressing this particular “Other.” I can see The Underground Man representing the anti-ethos above, but I see him a paralyzed by choice and by the aforementioned gaze of the Other.