What's wrong with SF?

"sometimes it seems to me that you are grasping ideas that I have tried to express much more fumblingly, in fiction. But you have gone much further and I can't help envying you”.

This was written by Virginia Woolf to SF writer Olaf Stapledon. But SF has had some public relations problem since then, not least amongst writers. SF went through a growth spurt in the pulp zine era, then another in the UK during the 1960s. Andy Hedgecock in "From New Wave to SciFi Strange: thematic shifts in the SF short story" (from "Short Fiction in Theory and Practice" 1: 1) covers the genre's history from then to now

• "The new wave in British science fiction (SF) was a literary movement championed and guided by the London-based magazine New Worlds in the mid- to late 1960s". He quotes Colin Greenland: "One of the strongest imperatives of Moorcock's editorial policy, ... was to bring sf back into the arena of contemporary fiction, first by incorporating into sf the characteristic themes and techniques of fictional innovators from Joyce and Beckett to Burroughs and Borges, and then by investing the sf writer’s inheritance of images and approaches into a fiction whose primary and most urgent concern was not remote space or the distant future, but the condition of the present"
• According to Kelly and Kessel (in their introduction to "The Secret History of Science Fiction") "'after the mid-1970s, SF went back into the playroom, never to be taken seriously again'. As the same authors point out, however, forms of literary SF ignored by the mainstream media continued to flourish both with and without the ‘science fiction’ label"
• "In recent years writers and critics have endeavoured to define a form of SF that offers accessible storytelling but returns to the literary and human-centred values of the new wave. The term 'slipstream', originally coined by SF author Bruce Sterling, was used to refer to fiction that blended SF, fantasy and literary fiction, and which focused on feelings of strangeness and dislocation; while the 'New Weird' combined urban fantasy, literary experiment, SF and horror. It is suggested the most useful term for recent developments in SF storytelling is 'SciFi Strange'"
• He concludes by writing "There is a rejection of ‘disguised nostalgia’ in SF stories and a hunger for new approaches, often based on the blurring of genre boundaries. Contemporary SF writers tend to believe, like their predecessors in the 1960s, that mainstream fiction ignores significant aspects of human experience such as politics and the abuse of power, ecological disaster and the fragility of identity. ... The development of a new approach to SF storytelling, SciFi Strange, seems to be inspired, in part, by a wish to use the tools, techniques and tropes of the genre to discuss the diverse themes set out above with an audience unfamiliar with traditional SF. There is little compelling evidence of a resurgence of the formal experimentation of the 1960s new wave"

The early Star Wars films didn't help establish SF's high-art credentials - SF got dragged back to what the SF people call Sci-Fi (pronounced 'skiffy', I'm told) where too many loner scientists (i.e. authors) save the world and get the girl.

One problem is that the definition of SF is slippery - if you want to buy "The Handmaid's Tale", "Cosmopolis", "The Time Traveler's Wife", "Never let you go" or "Frankenstein" in a bookshop you wouldn't head for the SF section (which seems the place where SF authors' books - rather than SF books - are kept). China Mieville's books challenge classifications. Borges, Vonnegut, Calvino, etc edge toward Fantasy or Science Fiction too, but the rule seems to be that SF with literary value isn't "Science Fiction" - it's just "Fiction". Whenever an SF overlaps another genre or mode, the odds are that SF will lose its claim in a resulting tug-of-war if the work is good or topical

Some writers/agents encourage the SF/non-SF division - Margaret Atwood didn't want her books on SF shelves; Iain Banks writes as Iain M. Banks when he writes SF. The goalposts have moved over the years though

• When Swift wrote Gulliver's Travels he could use distant lands, but nowadays it would be set on different planets or in the future - like "1984", "Planet of the Apes", "Clockwork Orange", etc. These Allegories/Satires are no more scientific than "Animal Farm" is horticultural.
• SF settings are used to explore alternative lifestyles and sexualities. or used as a source of comedy - e.g. "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". During the cold war there were several post-apocalypse novels - "A Canticle for Leibowitz", "Planet of the Apes", "Riddley Walker", etc - which because they dealt with mainstream pre-occupations were accepted by the mainstream.
• The PostModern mix of high and low cultures offers a route for SF to fraternize with literature. William Burroughs and Vonnegut live happily enough on the edge. Vonnegut said (perhaps tongue-in-cheek) that "the science-fiction passages in SlaughterHouse-Five are just like the clowns in Shakespeare".

Whether or not the author wants it, the science element in these could be considered incidental. In Paul March-Russell's "The Short Story" it's suggested that SF is less a sub-genre than a mode of writing - i.e. a vocabulary of images than can be applied to various genres. Perhaps so. Science might be there only as a source of new metaphors for old problems. E.g., William Gibson (Neuromancer) said that "computers in my books are simply a metaphor for human memory: I'm interested in the hows and whys of memory, the way it defines who and what we are, in how easily memory is subject to revision"

SF can appear escapist in a derogatory sense, but I think the situation's more nuanced than that. SF and Romanticism have been associated for decades - Frankenstein's associated with the English Romantic poets, and Wells described his SF works as "scientific romances". The re-evaluation of (or search for) Self in times of Technological Revolution goes on. Man's place in nature is re-assessed. Loners and explorers venture out across dales and galaxies. Sometimes Humanity wins, sometimes Technology does. More often nowadays some fusion is reached - most explicitly with cyborgs.

Rather than being escapist, SF has been used as a way to avoid censorship. According to "Anatomy of Science Fiction", ed Donald E. Morse, Cambridge scholars press, 2006

• "In Central Europe in the twenty-first century there is now little in the way of home-grown science fiction", p.190

• "After reunification, many GDR authors stopped writing science fiction or ceased writing altogether", p.180

Another barrier to literary acceptance is that SF stories often adopt a traditional 'Realism' attitude to language. There's competition from other genres too - as bloggers have point out, imaginative reconstructions of historical (or even alternative history) scenarios aren't subject to the same linguistic constraints. According to George R.R. Martin in a recent interview SF is even losing ground to the Fantasy genre.

Yet another factor affecting the reputation of SF is that it's sometimes said to suit the currently unfavoured short-story genre - novels like "2001" and "Fahrenheit 451" began life as short stories - but SF isn't well represented in general short story magazines and anthologies.

Is the situation any better now? In a Sept 2009 Guardian blog written by SF writer Prof Adam Roberts, his professorial colleague (and Booker prize judge) John Mullan said that SF is "bought by a special kind of person who has special weird things they go to and meet each other" although according to Roberts, "British SF really is going through a golden age". The New Scientist Sept 2009 issue had some Flash SF pieces, and the UK's £5000 Edge Hill short story collection prize was won by Chris Beckett in 2009 for his SF collection "The Turing Test", ahead of some well-known mainstreamers. Maybe that will help change the attitude of people who say of an SF text that "It's not real SF. It's just exploiting SF to write about Satire/Politics/Love/Life". It's SF Jim, but not as we know it.

So don't be too put off by the SF label - yes, it may be just "cowboys and indians in spacesuits" but it may also be the speculative literature of our age. More SF is slipstreaming into the mainstream - David Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas" is partly SF, as is "A Visit from the Goon Squad" by Jennifer Egan. If it's good enough for Virginia ...

Gestalt effects and poetry

I'm interested in Part vs Whole effects and emergent phenomena: how poetry can be made from mundane parts; how a sad story can be created from comic episodes. There often isn't a simple one-way journey from the parts to the whole - understanding the whole makes you re-process the parts in context. The issue is mentioned in Metaphor and Figure-Ground Relationship: Comparisons from Poetry, Music, and the Visual Arts by Reuven Tsur - " Figure-ground relationship is a very important notion of gestalt theory. Theorists of the psychology of music and the visual arts made most significant use of it. The significance of this notion in literary theory is rather limited. ... I will consider three literary texts that exploit this readiness of human perceivers to switch back and forth between figure and ground. All three texts achieve their effect by inducing readers to reverse figure-ground relationships relative to their habitual modes of thought or perception"

The effects are clearer visually. Here are 2 examples

The rabbit and the duck

(Source: Jastrow, J. (1899). The mind's eye. Popular Science Monthly, 54, 299-312.).

I suspect when people see this untitled they'll notice a detail that will lead them to identifying either the duck or the rabbit. The 2 interpretations are supposed to have equal status - it's not "really a rabbit". People told that the picture's a rabbit may not think to see it as anything else. The context and expectations can suppress interpretations even if (as in this case) one interpretation is as natural as another.

Writing analogous texts isn't easy. Getting the balance and contextual cues right is harder still. The nearest I've got to it is writing pieces that are long puns, displaying the 2 versions. Here's the end of "Doubled up in pain"

... a lover gone. No mistake.

... all over, gone. No missed ache.

The Margaret Thatcher Effect

Face rotation isn't a commonly required facility, and we're not very good at it. The individual features are interpreted using one process (perhaps quite a primitive one). A different process recognises that there is a face, and tries to identify which face it is.

Reading poetry you may have an emotional reaction to individual features, reactions that are shown to be "wrong" when you analyse more carefully. However, once you interpret anger (for example) through the ironic voice of the poem, sometimes the anger still shows through - you react viscerally to it - even though you know it's meant humorously