So You’re New to Science Fiction, eh? Try Reading This First
Geekery, Writing 4 Comments »Science fiction is a literature of ideas, of speculation about how things in the world might be different, if one or two things about our world, or indeed, our universe, were different–and how people, human beings, might or might not respond or adapt to these changes. People who aren’t in the know about science fiction tend to get caught up in the gadgetry and whizziness of the science part of the name, but it’s important to realise that science fiction is *fiction* first and foremost. It’s about exploring human nature in unusual circumstances. It is not about predicting the future, which is the most common misconception people have about science fiction. It sets out to explore different ideas and possibilities, but at no point does it set out to make predictions. For example, in my novel Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait there is the idea that in about twenty years we’ll have time machines, that they’ll be widely available, and everyone will have one. I’m not seriously predicting that this is going to happen, or even likely to happen. In the real world, time travel is technically possible, but it is enormously difficult, and current theory suggests that there would be extremely serious limits on what a time traveller could do, even if she could get the machine to work.
It is widely thought that science fiction is all about spaceships, aliens, remote planets, the distant future, and even, to borrow from Canadian author Margaret Attwood’s thoughts on the subject, "full of talking squids in outer space". She continues to insist that she does not write science fiction. She writes books about genetic engineering, about climate catastrophes, and all manner of extremely speculative ideas, which, to those of us in the science fiction community, mark her work as genuine sf. She doesn’t believe it, and won’t be told otherwise. Cormac McCarthy wrote a novel called The Road, about a father and son walking through a world where some terrible catastrophe has occurred. This book is held up as literature. We in the sf community identify it as science fiction, because the post-apocalyptic theme is right up our street. It’s a what-if scenario: what if the world ended catastrophically? This theme is one of the most prominent in science fiction, probably stemming from many authors living through the Cold War, ecological crisis, political anxiety, and other real-world disasters apparently just waiting to happen. What would happen if one or more of these came true? What would the world be like after a nuclear war? What if all but a few people died? What if there were alien lifeforms out there, and they came here? I could go on and on with these examples. Science fiction is nothing if not a fertile field. Hundreds, even thousands, of new, original science fiction novels are published annually, some of them by authors who insist they are not committing actual science fiction, but who really are. It is the genre which, sometimes, dare not speak its name.
Why would an author be embarrassed about writing science fiction? It was good enough for Nobel laureate Doris Lessing, who wrote several works of science fiction, and reports that she’s very proud of them, and wishes reporters would ask her about them more. But some authors are embarrassed about science fiction. It’s true that the field comes from humble roots. There used to be a wealth of magazines printed on pulp paper, in which all manner of lurid, sensational, and often not very good stories of colourful aliens, amazing spaceships, wars with aliens, and, yes, bug-eyed monsters having sex with scantily-clad ladies. And some of these stories are still great fun to read. The critics of science fiction, and those who continue to insist that their excellent works of science fiction are really just "literature that happens to take place in an imagined future setting" believe that the field today is still like it was in the 50s and 60s. They think science fiction is the sort of thing you often see dished up in TV shows and popular movies. It’s true that these are considered sf, but there is much more to the field, too much to describe in this short space. If you’ve ever wondered what the world would be like if there were no men, or no women; if you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to live on other planets; if you’ve ever wondered what it would be like if you went back in time and met Jesus Christ as he was being crucified; then science fiction is for you. It’s fun, and thought-provoking. It might even make you see yourself, and the world, very differently.
As for combining crime and sf themes in one story: this is an old trick, dating back at least to Isaac Asimov, one of the legends of the sf field, and a giant in the world of books generally, having written literally hundreds of books during his life, including many nonfiction titles, science textbooks (he was also a professor of biochemistry), popular science titles, and much else. But he also wrote a lot of science fiction/crime novels and short stories. It was from this work of his that I got interested in the idea of combining the two genres. It’s fairly easy to do, as well. For a crime or detective story, you need sinister goings-on. A murder, or several murders, is a great start. Who did it? Who are the victims? How do we find the killer? All standard police procedural/detective story notions. Then you add a science fictional idea: what if time travel was not only possible but widespread and incredibly commonplace? How do these two things go together? The detective story gives you the basic framework, in which you need a detective or sleuth, you need witnesses, suspects, and of course you need to know what actually happened. Your detective character can work through a number of ideas, leads, theories about what happened, and you resolve it all at the end. Into this framework you inject your sf idea. Asimov wrote stories set in a world where robots were common, and extremely intelligent, but non-threatening to humans. But a murder occurs, and the robots are suspects. Could they have done it?
More generally, though, science fiction is, in the end, about scientific speculation at some level. And science relies on the "scientific method" in order to turn observations, and ideas, into hypotheses, theories, experiments, and arriving, hopefully at an explanation of what’s really going on in the world, subject to further investigation. And it’s investigation itself that makes science ficiton and crime fiction work so well together: in both types of fiction something has happened and characters are trying to figure out exactly what it was, and what to do about it. Science fiction is often about exploring the unknown, trying to figure out mysteries large and small. And likewise in detective or crime fiction, there are again mysteries to solve. It just makes sense to combine the two. Crime fiction is still published, as well as in novels, in pulp magazines, just like science fiction has always done. In some ways the two genres are like two sides of the same coin, featuring many commonalities, as well as their own unique flavours.
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