A brief, very civilized discussion on SFCanada this spring, about the dread "definition of science fiction" left me feeling mildly disgruntled. I am therefore grateful for articles such as Claude Lalumière's feature Fear of Fiction: Campbell's World and Other Obsolete Paradigms. I remember feeling excluded by Campbell and company's vision of science fiction as a young adult, when I was reading them like they were gospel. The "Golden Age" paradigm in which nothing changes much but the science toys or planetary setting, is twice as wrong now. In the 1950s, it made sense. Science, as a powerful agent of change, was still pretty new and exciting to the average reader. By the time I was reading about it in the 1970s as a science student with literary aspirations, it was hard to digest. As a science fiction author in the 21st century, I agree with Claude that the "Golden Age" vision of SciFi is something we ought to have the courage to -- respectfully -- reject! My reasons differ from his, in their details, as any two people's might.

To simplify my reasons for rejecting the "Golden Age" vision, and cast them in a context appropriate to the "Reality Skimming Blog", I'll cite my frustration concerning my own fiction. My understanding of the SF mission was that one should tells stories about settings and conditions that are really different from our own, but still close enough to be a meaningful arena in which to set human experience. SF readers, I presumed, were keen to experience something really different and new. I soon found that, to the contrary, just like anyone else, SF folks have a hard time taking in new information. Changing the facial lumps or markings on faces is coool, and inventing a new gun is fine, but proposing changes to social systems? Noboby gets that! And taking a serious look at how to prevent total warfare destroying civilization? Weird. SF is about making faster, better, more destructive weapons or security systems ... right? The first impulse of most SF readers presented with either the Sevolite or Reetion systems of social control, as presented in the Okal Rel Universe series, is to insist someone would "get around them". To treat it like a game where the objective is to find the cheat. Now, I am not denying that there are people who will do exactly that. Any system that proposes a serious restriction on the means and methods of mass destruction has to deal with the question of what to do with sociopaths and rugged individualists of all stripes, good and evil. But the very question of how to avoid mass destruction if you are capable of it seems to offend a lot of typical SF people, as if using the genre as a vehicle to limit technological "progress" in any and all directions, is heresy. Speaking as someone who grew up in the 70s, wondering how world leaders could be so completely nuts to even seriously contemplate destroying all life on Earth for any reason whatsoever ... I'm convinced that problems of social control are way more vital to our existance in the long run than any advance in the hard sciences. And no ( * heaving a great sigh * ) I don't mean social control of the 1984 sort. That's definitely bad-evil-big-government-conspiracy stuff. I mean seriously thinking about, and dramatically exploring, how to strike a workable balance between collective rights and those of the individual, in societies with the potential to inflict mass destruction. Methods, in essense, for how to live in a glass house when we are so damn prone to throwing stones.

posted by Lynda at 15:26   comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments