Is it Science Fiction?
I am an admirer of Margaret Atwood and her fiction. Sometimes she can be too eager to thrust environmentally-friendly subtext at us, and her narrative in-jokes do not always hit my peculiar funny bone, but her life-stretching characters and literary prowess are a joy.
I was in denial a few years ago when told by my local book group that Atwood does not want her fiction to be regarded as science fiction. Oryx and Crake she described as ‘adventure romance’. Let’s think about this. A dystopian fiction taking genetically modified people beyond current capabilities. I would say that kind of premise is definitely science fiction.
One of the best aspects of science fiction is its defiance of rigid definitions. Early works were hard science fiction where robots, rockets and flying saucers invaded Earth or used to explore space. Time travel, faster-than-light and aliens were all around in H.G. Wells and Jules Verne and considered as science fiction. Where we have giant and miniature humans as in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1725, again in 1735) then we are in fantasy. Not that he thought much about genre. If anything Swift considered his masterpiece to be a parody of the growing middle-class fashion of reading travellers’ tales as well as a satire on people’s foibles. Vampire tales kicked off by Bram Stoker in Dracula (1897) are fantasy because no amount of reasonable projection of current knowledge would create a vampire. It’s easy to classify pixies, dungeons & dragons, and goblins as fantasy – beyond scientific knowledge. Many tales are borderline. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818 / 1831) is well within current knowledge, give or take a transplant and a defibrillator; hence it is science fiction.
As a rough guide science fiction could be said to be fiction, which stretches current knowledge. Fantasy is pure imagination.
I confess to kick against prescriptive definitions. For example Theodore Sturgeon (most famous novel being the excellent More Than Human [1953] based on six extraordinary people who could merge as a superhuman) wrote: “A good science-fiction story is a story about human beings, with a human problem, and a human solution, that would not have happened at all without its science content.” I hope he didn’t mean to sound like an arrogant banner-waving human-centric where no other species matters. Having said that I can’t think of a major science fiction story that doesn’t have human, or hominoids, as main characters. Maybe I should write one.
Before I leave him there is Sturgeon’s Law: "Ninety percent of science fiction is crud, but then, ninety percent of everything is crud." No arguments there.
Robert Blevins publisher of Adventure Books of Seattle favours Rod Serling of Twilight Zone fame, who once said: 'Fantasy is the impossible made probable. Science fiction is the improbable made possible...'
I also like Tom Shippey’s definition of science fiction: “Science fiction is hard to define because it is the literature of change and it changes while you are trying to define it." That bit about change is significant. The huge element of ‘what if’ makes exciting fiction. What if gravity was random in strength and direction? What if time varied with height?
Back to Margaret. This all kicked off again because of her new work, The Year of the Flood (Bloomsbury, 2009). It is a sequel to Oryx and Crake, and like her other works explores human GM possibilities with a mix of satire, humour and is great literature. Sadly, she instructs readers not to count it as science fiction. In her recent essay collection, Moving Targets, she says that everything she writes is possible and so is not science fiction. I’m sorry, Margaret, but your definition remains yours and if I admire your work as science fiction then I will. I can only guess that she has fallen victim of the snobbery in the literati. The point is to ensure our science fiction is literature, not to be in denial.
Geoff Nelder is the British co-editor of Escape Velocity, the ebook and paper science fiction magazine of science fact and fiction.
Geoff’s recent science fiction mystery – Exit, Pursued by a Bee – won a Top Ten Finalist P&E Award
http://geoffnelder.com
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