Before I begin, let me explain to you, dear reader, exactly why I am eminently qualified to talk about this, and why, based on my impeccable credentials, you should immediately agree with me and accept, uncritically, every word in this essay:
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Glad we cleared that up. Let’s get started.
Science Fiction, Fantasy – whatever. Let’s call it Speculative Fiction, since that seems to be the grownup language that’s being used these days. I’m cool with that. I’m not interested in the taxonomy of the genre (not today at least). I’m interested in why SF is the best type of fiction to write. Period.
Yes, I know, there will be protests—or there would be, if anyone who passionately cared about another piece of the world of fiction were to stumble across this. Especially, I suppose, from critics of “serious” and “adult” areas like “Literary Fiction,” and “Historical Fiction,” and…
… sorry, I fell asleep for a second. My point is that I understand there are people who are passionate about things that aren’t SF. And I have no particular quarrel with them—even the ones who find my genre-love embarrassing, childish, and lacking in refinement. And I’m not even trying to say other genres are bad, because that’s simply not true. I love mysteries, suspense novels, westerns (yes, westerns.)
But there are two points I want to make here:
- SF is better than any other genre imaginable, ever, and
- I don’t care if you disagree.
Point one will be the bulk of this post. As to point 2… well… look at the title of this blog. I’m a self-publishing supervillain. By and large supervillains aren’t out there lobbying for your support—we’re making ultimatums. But this isn’t an ultimatum, this is more a position paper.
And so, without further ado, my proof.
I remember being young, and playing games with the other kids on my block. The games weren’t particularly structured—they were us in a group imagining things and acting them out. Sure, there was a certain amount of repetitiveness to our games—they usually involved all of us gathering together all our toy guns, distributing them, and doing battle with a) each other, b) imaginary aliens, c) imaginary monsters, or d) some other imaginary foe. There were very few deviations from this script, to be honest, so under a certain definition of “imagination” we could be accused of having none. But that’s not the point: the point is, we were able to play anything we wanted and out of those choices, we played the game we wanted to play.
And that, my friends, enemies, and neutral parties, is awesome.
I don’t mean “awesome” in the modern vernacular, that means “hey, that’s all right,” or “hey, that’s pretty cool,” or “hey, that doesn’t look like it would suck.” I mean awesome in the “when you consider the ramifications of what just happened here, the sheer immensity of it will overwhelm you and maybe scare you a little.” However limited our choices may have been on a practical level, averaged over time, at the beginning of each day we were faced with something we all recognized as infinite: we had the possibility of doing whatever the fuck we wanted. And what we decided to do, every single time, was the thing we thought would be the most fun.
That was our choice. It was influenced by our materials at hand—we had a lot of toy guns, so we decided to use toy guns. We had a neighborhood that didn’t much care if we played in everyone’s yards, so we incorporated everyone’s yards. But we did what we wanted, because we wanted to do it, and we liked it—and the personal opinions of others, mostly parents, intruded only when it was bedtime, or supper time, or when a parent decided we were being too loud, or too rough.
In other words, only when we were forced to. But to us, we just… decided what to play, and did it. And felt no shame.
Then we started to grow up. As soon as late elementary school kids started to gravitate into cliques. By middle school those cliques were set, by high school there was no escaping them. And suddenly your life was defined by choices that were almost wholly dependent on the preferences of other people—what clothes you could wear, what music you could listen to, what ideas (or ideals) you could hold. And not just your peers, but adults as well.
Not all of these things were bad. Adults were trying to prepare you for adulthood, and that requires a certain level of compromise, and discipline. Growing up means adapting to unpleasant truths, and an unpleasant truth is that you can’t have that sheer joy of facing the freedom of possibility all the time, every day.
But, as in all things, it is too easy to go too far and kill it off entirely. And coming out the other end of the transformation to adult, you have people who believe you can never have that possibility, never feel the exhilaration of that choice, ever again. It’s a belief that only children are allowed to be that free, and they’re that free only because they’re too unsophisticated to understand the harsh realities of the world—realities that we try to shield them from as long as possible, so they can continue to enjoy that freedom.
Art, by varying degrees, is an exception to this. It is an exploration and communication of possibility. You can look at a painting of a plate of grapes—a terribly mundane thing to paint—but somewhere an artist saw those grapes and said “yeah, I’ll take some oils and use them so that a flat piece of canvas suddenly turns into a 3-d representation of grapes on a table. See if I don’t.”
It doesn’t matter that the end product was something people might consider “mundane.” Out of an entire stack of choices, an artist chose that. Deliberately. And then made it happen.
But even Art (all art, from music, to writing, to picture-art, to everything else) seems to work hard to limit itself. Taxonomy can be an idol in its own right, as much as mammon, or lust, or sloth, or any other sin of obsession. We divide art into its countries and principalities, and we guard its borders, so that one thing is “realism,” and one is “gothic,” and one is “surrealism,” and one is “mystery,” and one is “suspense,” and one is “comedy…” and when someone crosses from one border to another, we demand to see papers and credentials to make sure the visitor has the proper authorization, and we follow them to make sure they don’t stay too long. Even with art, it seems, we have little collective tolerance for that child who could choose anything, and ultimately chose what he wanted to play.
SF—Science fiction and fantasy, speculative fiction, whatever you want to call it—is the closest thing we have to that limitless possibility. You want to play with rockets? Play with rockets. You want to play with ogres and goblins? Go to town! You can literally write anything you can imagine, and someone, somewhere in SF will be interested—at least in concept, if not in execution.
The greatest thing about SF is it can be SF and any other category in literature, because SF knows that categories are artificial. A noir detective story with elves. George Washington crossing the Delware with the help of a time-travelling alien. Two star-crossed sorcerers falling in love despite the disapproval of their families. A disgraced dragon who unlocks the secret to a virus that is killing his brood, but can’t convince his peers, so he turns to the only source he has left: a young human priestess, just starting her career…
Spies, history, manners, comedy. Hell, you can even take Science Fiction and Fantasy and put them together. Sorcerers in space suits, wizards and warp drives, proton guns and prophecies. The borders of SF are borderless.
The borderlessness of the genre may not be realized, or even exploited. Like my child-self, it may be that every day a writer is faced with the infinite, and every day out of the infinite realm of choices, he or she decides “well, I’m going to go with dragons again.” It could very well be. But, like those children in the mid-to-late 70s that I remember so well, as long as the writer is makes a choice on whatever is the most fun then I couldn’t care less if it’s yet another Tolkien re-hash or Conan the Barbarian clone.
None of that means I will necessarily want to read it, because none of that guarantees that what the writer actually creates will be any good. Writing still requires discipline, and practice, and is still best served by magnificent editor. And those are “adult qualities.” But the beauty of SF is that those adult qualities are additive to the “childlike qualities” – they make it better, rather than diluting it.
So you can have an SF story that is dark, and rich, and menacing, because out of the infinite range of possibility that’s what you chose. And you can have an SF story that is light, and idealistic, and full of joy and wonder, because out of the infinite range of possibility that’s what you chose.
The only thing that prevents SF from doing this is the courage of the people writing it.
When I read Elizabeth Bear’s article in Clarkesworld Magazine, I felt myself cheering. Not because I necessarily agreed with her assessment of the current state of SF—I actually am not familiar enough with popular trends in the most visible parts of the industry to say—but because I am familiar with the fears and insecurities of people who create SF, and the people who consume SF, and the secret wonderings of people from both groups about what it would take to finally, finally be accepted by the “serious critics” and “serious institutions” in the artistic community as a whole. I have been just as guilty of that in my life, with the things I’ve done. But changing to fit in is a deeply unsatisfying experience. It’s better to show them, to SHOW THEM ALL, and to keep playing the most fun game ever, whatever that game may be.
This takes courage, and it’s hard to have that courage. Especially when you’re starting out. Maintaining that courage can be tough when nobody cares about what you do, or why your game is so damned fun. Mustering that courage over and over and over again until finally someone else notices can be exhausting, in some cases damaging. If you want to know why there are so many artists who appear to be self-involved egotists, well, it’s at least in part because for long periods of time the only constant believer an artist has is him or herself. It’s easy to warp when all the pressure to keep going comes from one direction.
But it is worth the struggle: SF is can be so many things, at so many times, so effortlessly, that it re-introduces us to that possibility every day. The chance to play, without restraint, over and over again. And somewhere there’s a kid who desperately needs to know that adults play too, and it’s still awesome. And, to be frank, there are adults who are longing to be re-introduced to that idea, and they don’t even realize it.
SF does that. It is the “genre” that can be anything, at any time, for any reason—the purest expression of that yearning to play. Which makes it better than every other genre available, ever.
Have courage, writers, because you need to be bold to keep it that way. Have courage, don’t apologize, and never stop playing your awesome, awesome games.
