I believe the critic Paul Kincaid had an article somewhere titled 'What do we do when we read science fiction?' While I have never gotten around to getting hold of that particular essay, I was surprised to find that someone had bothered to ask a question I'd been asking myself for quite some time now. It might strike some to be an obvious question, and not very different from asking 'what is it that we do when we read?', but its really not all that simple: we involve a whole new set of mental faculties when we engage with a science fiction novel. While it is not absolutely necessary that a science fiction novel should defamiliarize a reader, often the best SF is that which makes the reader work hard to piece together the imagined setting of the story.
I believe this is exactly what the New Wave was up to. Thus we have a J G Ballard, and a Stepan Chapman, and a M John Harrison, not to mention China Mieville.
What personally strikes me rather interesting is that none of the writers I mentioned, excepting perhaps Harrison, are my absolute favourites. I certainly admire their writing, and am in awe of some of their work, but they always manage to not quite make it when it comes to writing a novel. With Ballard, the invented milieus hijack characterization, while with Mieville, dialogue is extremely artificial. Chapman I have only read one novel of, Troika. While Troika certainly made me uncomfortable in a way that only the most original speculative fiction can, again, it didn't hold together as a novel.
But the imaginative capabilities of Ballard, Harrison and Mieville are of a decidedly different variety altogether. All of them are curiously obsessed with entropy, with disease and diseased landscapes, lending these ugly milieus a kind of breathtaking beauty that a reader, in hindsight, would be a little shocked by. How did this author manage to sell me onto a locale that I wouldn't want to live in myself?
Perhaps, at the end of the day, that, above everything, even so called 'perfection', is the sign of true genius.
"What it is we do when we read science fiction" is actually about how we interpret the language we encounter within science fictions, specifically the neologisms. But that is actually a movement towards exactly the sort of question you are asking. And it is, broadly, something I am interested in and will probably return to again.
ReplyDeleteThank you for your reply, Mr Kincaid. I'll take the opportunity here to say that I admire your criticism enormously, and was pleasantly surprised to find a list of books you'd posted on a website, under the heading 'Literary Pillars' (if I'm not mistaken), for most of the books in there are some of my absolute favourites too.
ReplyDeleteMy article was, strangely, inspired by Sterling's Schismatrix, a book I'd heard good things about, but for some reason, am finding excruciatingly difficult to make sense of. I found 'Light' by Harrison, and 'Neuromancer' almost as difficult when I'd started them. But this very difficulty contributed exponentially to my overall enjoyment of both novels, as I'm sure the case will be with Sterling too.
I think SF does the reader a huge favour in being difficult, in making him look up words and meanings and visualize a world he cannot, for once, take for granted. In the process, it might also help reduce some of the complacency plaguing the interpretation of our very own world as well.
Ah yes, Literary Pillars, an interesting exercise but not one I'd care to do too often.
ReplyDeleteSchismatrix, of course, has to be seen in the context of Sterling's other Shaper/Mechanist stories. It's a complex view of the future and we can only ever grasp part of it. Which I think is the point. That's what makes us work at it, and I think that is one of the things science fiction should do. It is one of those literatures where the satisfactions should be as much intellectual as emotional, and I get very discontented with stories that don't make me think.