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Subtle Science Fiction
October 8th, 2008
There’s a seldom-used form of science fiction that I don’t see a lot of, but I think I would like to. I’m going to call it “subtle” here for the sake of discussion, but that’s the wrong word. It’s more profound than subtle. I’d love to get to some pointers about examples. Anyway, let me explain what it is.
It’s a form of alternate history, of deep world building, in which the only difference from our world is that the nature of humanity is changed.
Fiction to me is about showing the truth about ourselves, who we are, what it means to be human. Science fiction lets us see more clearly in some cases because the contrast is turned up by holding up the mirror of aliens, or giving us new powers and seeing how real people would use them.
But in art, there are a lot of ways of showing the truth.
Conventional science fiction uses aliens a lot for the sort of purpose I’m talking about. Aliens who can’t lie, or who are ultra rational, or who have a more limited spectrum, or more extreme spectrum, of emotions.
But what about keeping it a little more human?
What would the world look like if humans didn’t lie? Or didn’t create art? Or didn’t have a sense of humor? Or didn’t have the ability to suspend disbelief? Or easily set aside beliefs? Or didn’t have religion or a concept of god? Or had sexual activity like bonobos? Or in which females were physical larger than males? Or mated for life from childhood? Or didn’t seek revenge? Or were all more optimistic? Or all more pessimistic? Or there was a different distribution of intelligence, with everyone being smart, or everyone being average with a tiny dispersion.
The negative space can draw a true picture, too. There are so many things we take for granted about the world, sometimes the only way to see how things work is to take something away and see what stands and what falls.
I first had an idea for a story like this years ago, but never could figure out how to pull it off effectively. The conceit that interested me was what if people could only identify with an actor once. That is, once you saw someone in that role, they were typecast, totally, to all viewers. There are a lot of obvious changes this would make in the world, like how theater and movies would change. But there would also be a lot of implications for how first impressions would stick, and how consistent human behavior would have to be to get people to evolve this way. My first thought was to write a story about someone like Dustin Hoffman or another actor who could take on a wide arrange of roles, convincingly, and how they might know their ability and hold out for the role of a lifetime. Seemed mildly interesting, but not quite compelling enough for a great story.
Do these kind of stories exist? Have I missed them? Or failed to notice and remember them? Maybe they’re out there, and just too subtle for the likes of me. I’m a smart guy, but sometimes I read a story and feel like I’ve missed the point.
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I’m disappointed. You started all these “what if” situations and then I thought you were going to mention some examples. I’ve always wondered what people would be like if we didn’t have fiction, but in a way, I see that all the time because on television stories or in novels, people seldom read or watch television. Fiction is usually about action or relationships, so it would be hard to write about a world where there was no fiction. Or art.
Also, you mentioned, what if people didn’t lie. Well, except for unreliable narrators, people in fiction mostly speak the truth, unless the story is built about telling a lie. We expect the narrator to speak the truth. So it would be very hard to write a science fiction novel about a world were people don’t lie. I suppose you could have a comic story about an alien coming to Earth and the people eventually learn that he/she/it is constantly lying, while the humans never do, but I bet that would be hard to pull off.
It’s much easier to create a stereotyped alien like Mr. Spock, which is the point of your essay.
I think if you want subtle science fiction, try Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro.
It is hard to come up with examples! The closest I can think of are stories with aliens. The Argonaut species in don’t use fiction generally, and have a very specific form of story telling. Nancy Kress’s Probability novels have an alien race with a collective consciousness and as a subtle consequence kidnapping is not a serious crime.
I remember reading a story back in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union that had as it’s “what if” premise the idea that centralism was more effective than distributed work and competition. The USA fell, computers remained as giant mainframes, etc. I can’t recall the title or author or even where I read it though (could have been someplace like SF Age or Tomorrow).
I’ll investigate Ishiguro. Thanks for the suggestion.
To add to the possible sources of “what if” scenarios, I suggest the books of the famous psychiatrist & neurologist Oliver Sacks. When people have bits of their brain missing, the results are interesting. His works show how the physical nature of the brain alters what people perceive.
I like dealing with the notion that our thoughts are constrained by our preconceptions and, in turn, influence what we can see.
I, too, would have liked some examples of subtle SF, because while I was reading the post all I could think of was the Magic Realism genre.
Thanks to Jim Harris for mentioning Ishiguro. Meanwhile, what about Haruki Muragami? Now there’s a writer who makes me feel like I’ve missed the point, but until that point there’s a wonderful mingling of mythologies and, possibly, science.
Cheers
Morva Shepley
I don’t read much magic realism. When I hear that phrase, I usually think, “Oh, fantasy relabeled for literary snobs who don’t want to read fantasy.” But that’s a snobby response, too, and I’m willing to get some recommendations.
“Oh, fantasy relabeled for literary snobs who don’t want to read fantasy.†Well, as far as I can tell, that’s exactly what it is. Most people had known about “fantasy”, or sometimes it was called “absurdist” for years before certain sections of the literati learned of it and re-labeled it so that they could claim to have discovered it. In a way that’s good, because there is a lot of absurdist (as opposed to absurd) stuff that I don’t like.
However, to move away from my usual rant on this subject, the likes of Isabelle Allende and Gabriel Garcia Marquez are not people you should miss out on just because the literati want to claim them all for themselves. You should only miss out on them because you wish to.
Cheers
Morva Shepley
[…] couple of months ago, I wrote about subtle science fiction, in which human nature was explored by changing some aspect of human nature and seeing the results, […]