Writing about reading has given me motive to finish something. Just finished reading Rudy Rucker’s new novel Postsingular, and it’s a well-written novel, full of wonderful and strange ideas, well-presented, and like nearly all sci-fi I read, kind of empty.
I like science-fiction. I don’t like most science-fiction novels. As I’m reading, I follow the characters and skim their ideas and see the reality this author has created and is trying to sell me, I almost always think, “This is your future reality? This is all you’ve got?”
So today in the shower, I was trying to figure out why that is. Here’s what I’ve got so far.
- Sci-fi writers are more invested in their ideas than their humans, or at least equally invested, which means they’re still only half-invested in people, because they also must spend a LOT of time artfully explaining theoretical physics/chemistry/agronomy so the story remains science fiction rather than science fantasy. Which leads to less fleshed out people.
- Here’s where I walk into a minefield: They leave God out. Some sci-fi novelists flirt with Buddhism, or take vague (often deprecatory) swipes at other established religions. But otherwise God has no existence. Ignoring God imperils your fiction to irrelevancy.
The humanity, the sense of realness in most sci-fi stories is not jeopardized by the introduction of fantastical ideas, but by the refusal to properly address the rest of reality that you're proposing reacts to them. I want my sci-fi writers to be better engaged with the world, the people in it, and themselves so they can sell those parts too, along with the changes that come from a worldwide nanobot swarm and unfolding the 8th dimension within our understanding.
I don't think that's too much to ask. I just think it's hard.
Read for yourself! Mr. Rucker is giving away the book in pdf form under Creative Commons license. It is worth the time you'll spend on it, despite my misgivings about the whole field.
3 comments:
What do you think about the differences between Fantasy and Sci-Fi? The are pretty much lumped together these days, but are such different critters. Would you say that fantasy novels put more emphasis on the characters and world building or does the problem cross genres and you simply substitute talking horses and the like for the nanobots?
Yeah, I originally put a chunk about fantasy in there, but removed it to keep things short-ish.
As I call it, sci-fi contains actual science. It's the same wonk distinction that puts Star Wars unequivocally in the "fantasy" camp.
In fantasy, you can throw in a talking horse and don't explain the horse's differently-evolved vocal chords and neural pathways, and blah blah. Or whatever.
Fantasy has to worry about internal consistency, but not with plausibility (if that makes sense).
So in my thesis, the quality writer, spending the extra brains on internal consistency rather than horse genes, will spread it around to make the setting realer, including interpersonal relationships.
Come to think of it, the sci-fi writer usually doesn't need to "explain" reality so much, because s/he can generally assume that it's what you see now, only more futurer.
That could be part of the problem too. There's going to be a disconnect between the sci-fi writer's reality and mine as contemporaries, as "equal experts." But the fantasy writer has to sell you on the whole freaking world. So that means 1) s/he will work harder at it and 2) I'm a more sympathetic reader because going in, I must implicitly admit I'm not as expert as Tolkien on Middle Earth matters. I'm ready to believe him, since he literally wrote the book on it.
Man, I coulda made a whole post out of this. Dang.
Thanks for answering. I find I enjoy reading more fantasy than sci-fi and was wondering if that was why. Mostly I think I'm more interested in the people than the science. Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars makes a nice blend between the two, and there was a set of marine in space novels where the emphasis was on the marines and not the space, but on the whole I'm more of a fantasy gal.
I also lack much knowledge of Tolkein or Middle Earth, so you're in good company. ;)
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