Are you writing Science Fiction but to embarrassed to admit it?
I attended the Writer's Workshop course for beginners writing a novel. It was brilliant. It was also the first time I realised that: a. I was one of three chaps and fifteen women on the course – no complaints; b. the only writer to be working in the SF genre on the course.
So what?
Indeed. But it seems to me that there's always been a certain stigma attached to SF. The problem? Geekness: socially dysfunctional nerds who dream of robot men from Mars rescuing the galactic princess from the evil sex-mad beast lord from ...whatever. Is that what you're thinking?
Maybe.
Well who else is writing SF? An amazing array of men and women. The breadth and depth of the genre is equally broad. From Mary Shelley's ‘Frankenstein’ to Ian M Banks 'Matter'. Covering, evolution, sex, the mind, the end of the world, a new world, the end of a universe, a new form of life, machines alive, computers taking over the world, and all the grass dying. Some amazing things.
It seems to me that the genre is often miss-treated, and miss-understood. For example, War of the Worlds by H.G. Well's has been made into films and television series depicting metal Martians taking over Earth and dropping dead at the last minute because of bacteria. That's it right? No quite. Herbert George Wells was a visionary writer, a scientist and a humanist not a MCcArthyist. His aim was not to provide a thin veil to disguise a dislike for another culture or social order (As with the 1953 film version). It was to illustrate what could happen to mankind in the far future - would we be like the Martians. His other goal, to explore how late Victorian society at the time would, in his view, fall apart rapidly, loosing the social morals at the time.
Science fact or fiction, the distortion of ideas, timelines and histories, what if’s and new ideas are all very useful tools to handle difficult social issues, taboos and explore ‘blue sky’ thinking.
Challenge everything.
So what's everyone's view on Science Fiction then...?
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23 Comments
the only SF i have read (and I hope this is SF ) is Ice People by Rene Barjavel and I must say I loved that. I would happily read more of that sort but i find it hard to choose a SF book.
Aiyla
You see I don't really like fantasy stories and the covers are often very fantasy looking, you know with em....wierd creature and unrealistic things and that puts me off. Whereas the Ice People was actually romantic and.....sorry I can't really say. I guess I should read more. What would you recommend ?
SF is out of fashion at the moment. Films like the Matrix made Cyber Punk fashionable. The problem is films like Watchmen, whatever you think about it have just made the studios think that anything that can be considered controversial is not worth doing because of the box office returns. It's self defeating though. You pump out crap and that's what your audience will grow up to expect. We have to break the cycle somehow.
I do worry that the genre inspires images of geeks dressed as Klingons at conventions and it does seem to attract some strange people. But then again so does normal fiction - the just don't dress up as klingon's, they have murder mystery weekends or some similar, perfectly acceptable event that does not degrade them to geek status.
Worse for me - I also read and write fantasy - now between both genres (which seem to be treated as one these days - I can't wrap my head around that) I am considered by the average man in the street as positively weird and sould go "get a life" as afst as I can. Yet joe blogs will turn out in droves to watch "Alien" or "Terminator" or "The Lord of the Rings" or "Harry Potter does Hermoine over a Squealing Cactus".
I don't understand others opinions of these genre's but then again, that doesn't really matter to me. What matters is that good sci-fi is as rare as good fantasy - finding a new Ian M. Banks or David Gemmell is almost impossible - there are huge amounts of dross in both genres.
Hmm - that may have been a small rant - my apologies ;c)
AW
So it looks like the general opinion is that the genre is lacklustre. There does not seem to be anything out there different. Is that in itself a reflection of society? 'Blade Runner (put aside Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep for a moment) and Neuromancer were very much a reflection on the idea of post modernism. The 90's were post modernist ironic. What do we have now? Nothing? Anything goes? There is, I believe, a lack of cultural, political stimulus. Even the credit crunch and the Banking crisis are poor sources for reflection.
What are the great challenges that face mankind? The same ones we've always had: environment, food shortages, prices, oil, wars, sex. They are always there for reference. What about thought? Is there anything in the way we as people use our minds? I don't mean telepathy - I'm thinking about how we perceive reality. What would happen if we woke up one day and realised that they way we do things - going to work and having kids and going to work and going to the movies and going shopping oh and going to works. What if we realised that that has absolutely nothing to do with living life?
Discuss...
We MUST get off this planet - in the same way that a child must be born lest the babe die and kill the mother too.
You ever heard of multiple redundancy? We have none - natural disaster, man-made disaster, plague, pestilence, cosmic radiation - sheesh there are so many ways to kill an entire race of people, we need to get out there, then even a disaster on a planetary scale cannot wipe out the species.
Space is VAST beyond comprehension, so what if we are a MILLIONS to one chance. There are 300 billion stars in our galaxy and 100 billion galaxy's out there at last count. Millions to one is DAMN GOOD ODDS!!
Enough capitulation!
;c)
AW
You guys do sound a little defeatist. Mr. Flibble, you sound as if all possible stories have been written and all technologies explored with nothing left to write a book about. I think we just have to find out where they are lurking and drag them out into the light where we can examine them.
Aonghus, you seem to think that SF has been dying since the sixties, I would disagree but it does not have the verve that it used to have in the days of Heinlen, Asimov and Clarke et al.
SF has been down in the dumps recently and I think it has a lot to do with the perceived lack of investment into space technology. I don't know why we are not spending massive amounts of money between this and cold fusion. Together they would solve half the planets problems.
I've finally managed to find my first draft of a book I wrote about ten years ago called Legacy of the Stars. I'll clean it up and post a chapter or 2 and see what happens.
etc...
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