This is how I categorize all of my genre writing. Crappy science fiction, crappy horror, whatever I’m working on that fits into a genre. For someone who makes a minor religion out of the rejection of categorization, this is a pretty indefensible position, but it’s an elitist pitfall I generally dive right into when discussing my own genre work. It’s like living in a neighborhood you’re ashamed of.
Genre fans will put up with a lot of shit, I think partly as an extension of the “he may be an asshole, but he’s our asshole” phenomenon. Lost plot points, two dimensional characters, broken similes and mixed metaphors. Even in generally lauded works like Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, there’s a lot of forced exposition. The first couple of pages are full of descriptions of the mechanics of space travel—launching and docking—which are a familiar shorthand in works of science fiction, emblematic devices intended to set the tone. “BEHOLD! I am describing a docking sequence complete with an oddly metallic automatic voice! Holy shit, it’s science fiction!”
The problem with familiar shorthand is that it’s familiar shorthand: unchallenging, completely without innovation, and lazy. The opening paragraphs of Solaris are especially egregious considering the choice of detail. Lem’s protagonist describes climbing into a claustrophobic little capsule in preparation for launch, then a laborious docking process, but the whole point A to point B thing is relegated to “a rustling outside, like a shower of fine sand.” Lots of detail on what the writer can imagine or easily explain, and a little vague muttering about all the shit (like interstellar travel) that’s more difficult to pin down. It’s just bad writing, but not remarkable because it’s science fiction. Science fiction readers expect the “rustling outside” shit now, hollow narrative devices, hackneyed launch sequences both figurative and literal. They’re like the cheap rush you get from eating a candy bar. BEHOLD! You taste sugar! Holy shit, you must be eating!
It’s just bad writing. You see these “beginner errors” all over established science fiction, the launch sequence being a particularly good example. A lot of Composition 101 work starts with descriptions of minutiae—people getting out of bed, brushing their teeth, eating breakfast—that has nothing to do with forwarding the plot and no substantive value to the overall story. Beginning writers have to be cautioned against this, and introduced to the concept of backstory and offstage action, which seem like common sense but are counter-intuitive in execution. Start the story with an action relating to the plot, or set the scene through the use of evocative and appropriate language, or, hopefully, both. Plot and poetry.
Brash statement: most science fiction could be improved by aggressive (even hostile) editing. Solaris for instance. The first three pages would be improved if they were reduced to the sentence that appears at the top of the third page: “I had missed the precious moment when the planet first came into view. Now it was spread out before my eyes; flat, and already immense.” It establishes travel, destination, setting and place, and it gives a hint that something’s not quite right. The poetry is a nice touch, but the brevity is the real treasure, the scarcity of the words making them more valuable. It’s an opening I’d be proud of—plot and poetry pushing against each other, creating an engine that drives a compelling beginning.
A lot of “literary” (non-genre) writing has too much poetry and not enough plot (and even then the poetry can be pretty suspect). Lots of supposedly pretty language with not a lot otherwise going on. If you’ve ever read a book that seemed to wander all over the fucking place, introducing characters and problems and complications without doing too much else, you’ve encountered what I think is the major problem of “turn of the 21st century” literary fiction, namely the devaluation of plot. It’s also a major problem in independent film (a movie like The Station Agent is a great example of this—intriguing personalities, the introduction of a lot of “compelling conflict,” then roll credits).
But genre writing has the other problem. Too much shorthand—plot devices, hackneyed language, reliance on the superficial and trivial for setting and atmosphere—is like the strings holding up make-believe rockets made of coffee cans and sparklers in early science fiction movies: horribly distracting to the non-fan. Not to beat this horse too far into the afterlife, but the “launch sequence style,” again, is a perfect example. Imagine opening any non-sci fi story that way:
James carefully got dressed, first his white cotton socks, which kept his feet warm but still dry through the capillary action of the fibers comprising their material, then his work boots, constructed mostly of animal hide, bound together with stitching and lacing made of man-made fiber, a synthetic that had been largely developed during the last global conflict known to his kind. The rest of his garments were a blend of these natural and synthetic fibers, with fixers and fastenings made out of metal and engineered plastics. He then walked down the narrow hallway, faintly illuminated by the mid-sized yellow sun of his planet, and began to make breakfast: a beverage consisting of hydrogen and oxygen passed through the pulverized seed of a native shrub, and the eggs of an avian species that had probably evolved from ancient creatures many times their size, creatures so huge and powerful that the scientists of James’s planet, in a specialized language common to their kind, called them “Thunder Lizards.”
Even just writing that example leaves me twitchy, irritated and bemused, because it really isn’t that much of an exaggeration of the style. Never mind that this story would have nothing to do with what James wears or eats first thing in the morning. If it were science fiction, describing these things in self-important, almost obsessive language would be if not expected, then certainly not remarkable. It’s shit writing, cluttering up the experience of the reader by throwing a lot of pointless, cheap words in his face. Going back to the candy bar metaphor, it’s the equivalent of a lot of empty calories, providing short-term pay off but ultimately a nasty downside that leaves its consumer hungry, flabby, and with a vague sense of being ripped off. Worse, it gradually destroys in them the ability to appreciate anything not preloaded with these clichéd, useless, lazy passages.
Like a lot of sugar junkies, science fiction fans will offset the crash by consuming more of the same, in as much quantity as they can get. Hardcore sci fi fans even tend to reject science fiction that doesn’t rely on those cheap gimmicks—”where the fuck is our sugar coating?”—and there are some otherwise fine examples of science fiction literature out there cluttered up with the trappings of the genre, perhaps because without those trappings, it would fail to attract the serious (non-genre) audience (after all, it’s just sci fi), and lose the audience of sci fi fans it could otherwise rely on. Solaris, again, serves as a good example. It’s mostly a great read, with a lot of interesting things to say about reality, perception and intelligence, even an understanding of a sort of divinity, but there’s just a little of that cheapness to it that I find unpleasantly distracting, if I’m reading with discernment. In places, notably that opening, it’s a lot like a chocolate-covered steak, and that chocolate covering is almost genre-defining. I wonder how it would have been received minus the shitty launch sequence semaphore—BEHOLD! Science fiction!—and I wonder if Lem included that stuff specifically to reach an audience more inclined to consider the themes he reaches for in Solaris. That he perhaps loses or alienates more “serious” readers is a sad side effect, a symptom of the genre.
I’m a more “serious” reader most of the time, but when I read without the full burden of “critical discernment,” I can throw myself into it and enjoy the junkfood aspect of science fiction for what it is. It’s in that same way that I love a lot of Philip K. Dick’s writing. The themes of his later works are “literary” in nature, even existential and intellectual—the definition of self and identity, the basis of reality, the juxtaposition of observation, interpretation, and self-awareness, a fundamental struggle of true vs. false when definitions of either are shifting—but they’re often clothed in some of the worst pretensions of the genre.
It probably doesn’t help that Dick’s signature pieces were written after his immersion in late ’60s drug culture and his language and thinking informed by that time period in a way that can now sometimes seem as quaint and a silly as the rainbow bell bottoms and crochet vests of the era. The thematic drive behind the stories survives and endures, as testified to by the continuing adaptation of his works by Hollywood studios, most recently A Scanner Darkly, in production at the time of this writing and due out in 2006 (and I should mention Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report (and I know I’m forgetting one or two others) if only because so many people don’t realize these are adaptions of Dick’s novels and short stories), but the original texts are flawed and cluttered by shit that wouldn’t be tolerable outside the genre. These are generally sound works with a lot of depth and complexity, but are degraded by various pieces of “familiar shorthand,” sci fi conventions intended to set the stage with as little effort and thought as possible. In my mind’s eye, I see the cardboard Daleks of early Dr. Who cavorting across a stage with canes and straw hats, wearing the red-and-white striped blazer of the vaudevillian.
If I’m typical of slightly more demanding readers of science fiction, I’m a large part of the “… but he’s our asshole!” problem. As a consumer, I willingly overlook sugary crap I would never forgive in my own work because I expect it—it’s just sci fi, after all. Stupid launch sequences, bad aliens with heads and faces and two arms and two legs and two eyes, laser guns that pew pew pew through the soundless vacuum of space are all to be expected, if not celebrated, because it’s science fiction. And those things are charming in their way. ¡Viva la junk food! Right?
I don’t know. Maybe sometimes? But this is what makes this neighborhood a ghetto, this is why writing in this genre vaguely embarrasses me, this is why I prefix “crappy” before anything that isn’t literary. To be fair, horror, mystery, spy novels, police procedurals all have their stupid little sugar coatings, their junk food mechanisms, preloaded for the cheap and early payoff, alternately overlooked or embraced by their followers and fans. And you could certainly preface most of my “literary” writing with the descriptor “crappy” and not be wholly inaccurate.
But I’m writing specifically about why I’m embarrassed about writing science fiction, or why I feel like the time I spend working on this stuff is less valuable than the time I spend writing outside of genre. Because junk is expected, because the bar is generally so low, because I could (and I’m sure still do, despite my best efforts) forgive and overlook a lot of shit and sugar in my own genre writing. It’s crappy science fiction because it’s a degraded genre, and it’s a degraded genre because more isn’t expected of it. I feel the same sense of sheepishness when I’m “caught” reading science fiction. There are some books I dearly love that I wouldn’t read in public, and when I see someone hunched over a tattered science fiction paperback in a Starbucks, I think less of them for daring to read it in public (but part of that is the “Look What I’m Reading In Starbucks!” effect, which is a subject for another overlong and rambling blog entry). Science fiction, as long as it’s permitted or expected to be full of sugary little shortcuts, will never transcend the limitations of the genre and will forever be confined to that narrow little section in the local Bookoplex.
If more were expected of it, it could be great literature. Homer’s Iliad is science fiction of a sort, as is Shakespeare’s The Tempest. If its fans were less forgiving of clunky structure and sugary shorthand, it could transcend the junk food role and become the main course, in a way more readily than non-genre literary fiction because of the vibrant and volatile metaphoric language available to both its writers and its readers. Taking the example of extant Ancient Greek literature, the gods and demi-gods act on a landscape they tower over as forces of the divine, but they are forces of the divine with human faces and human fallibility.
The Iliad’s Achilles is human flesh as the vessel of divine wrath, ultimately (and knowingly, willingly) destroyed by the mortal weakness inherent in that flesh (though it takes divine intervention, which is all over the Iliad, to do it). The entirety of The Tempest relies on sorcery and illusion for setting (and its opening may be the great-grandfather of the launch sequence). Through Prospero’s abilities to twist perception and bend forces of nature (and its lesser embodiments in the fairy Ariel and the deformed Caliban, light and dark echoes of each other), he manipulates reality and in effect history, forcing confession and repentance, which in turn is transformed into redemption and a purified, bloodless vindication.
What’s my fucking point, right? It’s the “science fiction” of these stories that allow the themes to flower. It’s Achilles’s divine parentage that serves as the catalyst of wrath, and his mortal siring that spells his downfall. What a hell of a cautionary tale; though the Ancient Greeks no doubt saw Achilles’s death as more of a redemption and less a warning (considering the concepts of glory and self-worth inherent in their society, but again—topic for another time, since this single post is already creaking under its own weight), the story survives the passage of time and allows us, in an age less blood-spattered and fiery, to carefully consider the costs of revenge and the weight of appeasing our own fury. Without the “science fiction” in The Tempest, we’re reduced to a story about a wronged old man, shipwrecked on an island with a young daughter and a couple of creepy servants. Allowing for sorcery and illusion, we have a magically wrought storm at the center of that story that itself serves as a metaphor for the great and violent changes we sometimes need to make to reform our wrongs and fulfill the potential of those we have wronged—even if those great and violent changes don’t actually exist anywhere but in our imaginations.
Yeah, alright, maybe I’m pushing it a little with The Tempest bit, but the basis of my assertion remains true. Allow for divine intervention and magic—science fiction—and you have more thematic tools available to enrich the literature you’re reading (or writing). Instead of cheap gimmicks intended to quickly and easily create a setting which is ultimately unimportant to the narrative thread of theory, the “launch sequence” (and all the other clichés of science fiction) should be harnessed like a herd of Pegasi and used to allow story (and reader) to go places it otherwise couldn’t reach.
It’s what I’m trying to do with my own “crappy science fiction.” The handful of story ideas I’m working on rely on central themes that wouldn’t be possible in any other setting. A mostly empty colony ship, depopulated by some sort of plague or accident, is a metaphor for isolation and alienation. The protagonist, trained as a historian and librarian and brought out of a deep freeze as one of a tiny group of survivors, struggles to find relevance and usefulness in a society bereft of history. He struggles to remember everything he’s ever read so he can try to recreate a history to replace that lost when all the “books” of his society-in-transit were destroyed by fire or sabotage. He wanders around this mostly empty city-ship intended to house a hundred thousand people, now one of a dozen left alive, mourning all his friends, his family, and the history of his civilization (which is sort of how I feel every time I go to Wal Mart). I wouldn’t be able to work with these themes in as facile a way if I couldn’t use the setting of “a colony ship in transit between stars.” The setting informs and acts on the theme in important ways. Or at least (as I realize I’m sounding like an arrogant asshole in talking about my own work this way), that’s what I’m trying for.
It’s “science fiction” itself that allows the best of science fiction to do things no other kind of writing can do. Even in Solaris, which I’ve probably unfairly singled out, the central question of the novel can be interpreted as “does God love us, or is he just fucking with us?” and it is a question that would be impossible to handle as deftly and in as nonvolatile a fashion outside the framework of science fiction. But that launch sequence …
As long as science fiction—or any genre fiction, or independent film or studio system movies—rely on the various tricks and allowances expectations of their audiences, it will fail to achieve the greatness they could otherwise attain. That’s why I love science fiction, and hate it, and watch my favorite Twilight Zone episodes with bittersweet grin, and why I’ll continue to call my own genre writing “crappy,” even if it isn’t entirely true.
