On the Use of Tropes in Science Fiction
One of the best tidbits of advice I’ve ever received came from Writers of the Future winner Brad Torgersen. He said, more or less, “There’s nothing new under the sun. It’s all about how you use the various stock elements that makes the story.”
The further I plunge into the literature of the SF genre, and the more I try and leave my mark on it with the fabled First Pro Sale, the more I realize just how true Brad’s take on the whole thing is. Writers like Orson Scott Card have even gone so far as to reduce the genre, in a way, by saying that it’s merely “a subset of fantasy.” True, but when I heard those words (on the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, I believe), I couldn’t help but feel a sense of betrayal.
Wasn’t science fiction the genre that had made Card’s career, after all? Without having written Ender’s Game, would I even know who he was?
But for the sake of argument, let’s take Card’s elaboration into account. He argues that science fiction is a sort of literary dead end because there just aren’t enough new scientific discoveries — or moreover, any new ideas — out there to justify writing sf anymore. From a storyteller’s perspective, he says, it makes more sense to just resort to a magical fantasy setting. Why bother with the facade of making things like FTL travel, etc., seem plausible in a universe where we know such key tropes to be utterly impossible?
I call bullshit. But I’m not just picking on Card, mind you; I love the guy, for both his take on craft (especially for speculative fiction) and his novels. Ender’s Game is one of the most important works of the past century, and I don’t want to diminish it. So why would he?
Well, science fiction gets ghettoized a lot. It happens so much, I think even we as writers unconsciously perpetuate the ghettoization process ourselves.
For example: books like Rant by Chuck Palahniuk, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton, and The Road by Cormac McCarthy are considered among the finest works of contemporary fiction. Fiction. That’s it. What they are, though, is science fiction.
So where are sf writers complicit in their own ghettoization?
Well, we condemn a book like The Road for its various flaws, and do not ever bother to actually refer to it as science fiction. Jurassic Park? That’s more like…er, a thriller. Hunger Games? That’s just young adult fiction, not really sf. Dystopian fiction, yeah, that’s it.
People, people, people…
Science fiction does not now, nor has it ever, meant that AI, spaceships, aliens, and Big Dumb Objects must be present for a piece of fiction to qualify.
I think perhaps a small part of the problem, especially among non-writers, is that pesky word “science.” It spooks people. Makes them think that the story will automatically take place in space, or else will involve an obligatory alien invasion. We have the predominance of really bad science fiction films to blame, of course; the general public (a vast percentage of whom don’t read more than maybe a book a year) is far more likely to test the waters of sf by watching a two-hour film than they are to pick up a book by some dead British guy they’ve never heard of. It’s the sad goddamn truth.
And there’s a place for stock elements, for tropes, in sf. They’re indisposable, really, and most them have been around forever because they work. Like wizardry or (shudder) vampires, they have utility for writers of imaginative fiction. The Niven habitat, the android, the hyperspace engine: these things crop up again and again because they make sense from a storytelling perspective. Hell, the sf story of mine of which I’m most proud, I recently realized, could easily serve as a prequel to another sf story that I read and admired months earlier, which was far from my mind when I wrote my own story — because the “rules” of space travel, realistically, can only be extrapolated so many ways before we’ve seen everything.
But there’s also a reason a guy like Paolo Bacigalupi gets picked up by Gordon Van Gelder at F&SF, and eventually goes on to win the Nebula for Best Novel. There’s a reason writers and readers alike still idolize a sf writer like William Gibson, even for his first novel, Neuromancer (1984). These guys didn’t limit themselves. They observed — and still observe — the world they’re living in today, right now, and wrote (write) it down through the filtered lens of sf.
Like infrared photography, or night vision goggles, science fiction is the instrument we use to measure, document, and scrutinize the world we live in with a fresh, almost alien perspective. The freedom the genre affords us is almost unlimited — save for, generally, a broad adherence to the known scientific laws of the universe as they’re understood today. That’s it.
Just a different flavor of fantasy, sure. I’ll give you that.
Only it utilizes the grit, realism, and at times haunting plausibility of a world where magic doesn’t exist, and where the basic framework of contemporary science still holds true. A world that could — however unlikely it may seem — one day exist. Only, we know it will never exist, because the future is always changing. You never really get to where you intended, especially in a world like the one we’re living in now. It was easy to be optimistic about the future back in the 1950s. Today, well, things are different; and if science fiction is to survive, we’ve got to accept that dystopian fiction takes place in the future, and like it or not, that makes it today’s dominant form of science fiction. To quote George Carlin: “The future ain’t what it used to be.”
It always comes down to writing lively characters and putting them in an interesting situation though, doesn’t it? The genre (or perceived genre) shouldn’t have much bearing after that outside of marketability.
“The Road” worked for me because I connected with the characters and their struggle. It didn’t hurt that McCarthy is a master of using landscape for the foundation of his stories. It is this detail that allows for a suspension of disbelief, and in turn bolsters the liveliness of the people upon it. They are living, breathing extensions of the landscape.
There isn’t much plotting in “The Road”. It’s two people walking across an ashen landscape and running into conflicts. These are the kinds of stories writing classes tell us not to write, and you’ll even find warnings on certain magazine submission guidelines that they won’t accept “character goes from point A to point B” stories. Of course, that’s foolish. It’s interesting characters doing interesting things that make a good story, as “The Road” proves (and a good writer bringing it all to life, of course). McCarthy also has a wonderful style in which he doesn’t spend seven pages out of ten in a character’s head. He lets much of the action and dialogue paint the picture. It’s a breath of fresh air.
These kinds of stories tend to draw me in more than space opera science fiction, but I wouldn’t be adverse to such fiction as long as the characters were strong and they were in interesting situations, tropes or no tropes.
I’d definitely consider Jurassic Park science fiction. If you take the science out of that story, it falls apart.
I’m working on revisions with my agent right now for my sf/thriller novel, and I’ve considered many of the points you’ve raised here in that process.
Bravo, well said!
Card clearly demonstrates a failure of imagination when he says their aren’t enough new scientific discoveries. Man, the (scientific) literature is just full of them. Here’s one from just today: physicists have created a “hole in time”, the temporal equivalent of an invisibility cloak. Only 110 nanoseconds so far … but man, the possibilities!
Yes, fictionally this may already have been done as stasis boxes or bobbles or some kinds of time travel — but often it’s the limitations imposed that make for the more interesting story. I discovered this in my own fiction when exploring the volumetric limits imposed by Broek’s refinement of Alcubierre’s work (which, BTW, suggests that FTL travel may indeed be possible, just really difficult.)
Card (and others) also miss the point when they call science fiction a subset of fantasy. True enough, much of what gets passed off as SF (or perhaps rather, sci-fi) is just fantasy with spaceships, computers and aliens instead of horses, magic and trolls — Card’s own Ender’s Game stories could be considered in that light (although perhaps not the original short story which started it all). But the hard core of SF — and I heard Connie Willis making just this point a couple of weeks ago — is as a literature of ideas. Yes, we as readers (and, we hope, as writers) these days we expect more than just the idea; the Hugo Gernsback days when cardboard characters and cliche settings were fine so long as the idea was new are long gone, we expect rounded characters and well thought out settings as well as ideas. Indeed, the ideas don’t even have to be new if you do everything else well enough, but if you do come up with one, or put a new twist on one, you’ve got a potential award-winner if everything else holds up. (Larry Niven in his short-story heyday had this finely honed; several of his award-winning stories were near category-killers. Just try writing a crosstime-travel story these days without considering the implications he raises in “All the Myriad Ways” — which have real echoes in quantum theory.)
Not that there’s anything wrong with a good rollicking space, time travel, or zombie apocalypse (to pick three not-quite-random examples from this year’s Hugo nominees) story either.
Michael,
It absolutely comes down to the treatment of the plot, and great characters are the vehicle for doing that successfully. Some of my favorite books are entirely obvious plots, and yet the way they’re handled makes them brilliant.
Crichton gets sort of shunned by a lot of folks in the sf community because he supposedly handles science in a way that makes it seem evil, which I also think is a false assumption. His stories are about what human beings do with science, not what science itself does. Like that old bit about guns don’t kill people, people kill people.
I’m sure it’ll be a couple years, but I’m looking forward to reading INVASIVE, my friend.
Yeah, mind-blowing scientific discoveries happen every year — every day! I was just shocked when I heard Card say those things. And yes, Ender’s Game really does border on space opera, save for the somewhat unneeded Battle Room concept (couldn’t the games themselves be considered ample training for what they’re doing?). There’s also the use of Le Guin’s ansible, which is the sf equivalent of magic, as well as the plot device of Mazur Rakam (sp?) being sent outward at relativistic speeds to keep him from aging… It all feels a bit flimsy, the way Card throws such technology in so suddenly once the plot calls for it. Still a great book, though. Love it, but I still think it’s flawed in a lot of ways.
As for the Alcubierre drive: I’ve used it in a couple stories, but I don’t think I really understand it well enough to use it again without some in-depth research. Anything that complex makes me nervous (I’m just an English major, after all), but with enough reading I’m sure I could get comfortable with it…especially in a sf novel, where speedy spaceflight is good to have a lot of the time. For some reason I prefer my hard sf in short-story length, and my space opera in novel-form. Call me crazy.
My rule for cleaving the F/SF divide is thus: “If it could be magic, it is fantasy.” Or, rather, “If it is not definitely science, it is fantasy.”
For example, I started reading Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis a little while ago. In it, there are aliens that trade in genetic code and command living spaceships. Although these concepts are well-couched in scientific language, from an actual conceptual point of view, I have just as much reason to believe in this system as any given magic system – because I can’t disprove either. The non-certainty of existences is imperative in this definition: fantasy is the what-if genre of non-certainties.
This makes most SF fantasy; but, really, I’m still going to call anything futural “science fiction,” and a whole lot of other stuff, too, because,. honestly, science fiction is most definitely not fantasy. Readers know this; or, at least, I do.
But that’s the literary view. Speaking very functionally, most SF is pure fantasy, because both genres ask world-building “what-ifs.”
Oh, there it is: true SF isn’t world-built. It can be necessarily. But fantasy is a built-world: it can only possibly certainly exist within the parameters the author sets it.
That’s what I come to your blog for, Alex! To work out my definitions in in-comment rants.
Always a pleasure to provide a sound, semi-tangible forum for sorting out your thoughts.
You bring up a lot of interesting points about the functionality of speculative elements (however rigorous the author chooses to make them): when you get right down to it, sf and fantasy are effectively the same type of story. They are written more or less in the same way, and for more or less the same purpose. Hence that wimpy umbrella term, “speculative fiction,” I suppose.
I read an interesting blog post a while back by Matthew Woodring Stover, who argued that basically ALL FICTION, regardless of publishing-category genre, is ultimately fantasy. Since the dawn of civilization, he says, any story that’s not pure nonfiction is rightly considered fantasy, if you apply the broadest (and most literal, I suppose) definition. Interesting, and hard to argue with.