A Word About Genre: Social Sci-Fi

Social science fiction may sound at first as if it is a part of soft sci-fi since it's main concern, anthropology, is one of the soft sciences. However, the focus is on the group rather than individuals. This is usually developed through the exploration of hypothetical, alien societies. This is perhaps one of the earliest sub-genres in science fiction because it was possible prior to modern or even accurate science. Think of Gulliver's Travels. Obviously, this genre is closely related to the alternate reality/parallel universe genre since the development of a separate world facilitates the creation of a new society. However, one does not imply the other.

These invented societies are frequently critiques of existing social norms and their possible futures as well as suggest possible solutions. Morality and ethics often are central to these critiques. Taken to extremes, social science fiction crosses into the utopia/dystopia genre.

Consider The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Heinlein. The society on the moon has different mores concerning sex and marriage. The female to male ratio is very low. As a result, the society has introduced polyandry, the practice of a woman having multiple husbands, and group marriage, the practice of having shared spouses, both male and female, that often develops into line marriages which successively introduces new spouses so that the marriage does not end due to any one death. The family votes before a new husband or wife may join and the marriage is to the whole family. It also maintains economic stability by working from improvements made in the past and through multiple income earners. The continued line marriage also insures continual parental influence. This part of the novel is social critique. The romance and friendship of Manny and Wyoming is within the domain of soft science fiction.

Classic Examples:
Brave New World - Alduous Huxley
Nineteen Eighty-Four - Orsen Wells
Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula Le Guinn

Stephen Fry Quote

The American prison system is the reinvention of slavery.

A Word About Genre: Alternative Reality/Parallel Universe

The alternate reality, parallel universe is one of my favorite elements in science fiction. It turns our silly world on its head. Generally, the alternate reality has a stronger relationship to our reality than the parallel universe, it is much like ours but with small variations.* A parallel universe often has different laws in the hard sciences. For example, gravity may not be stable or travel at the speed of light may be possible.

The other world has a beautiful history as ancient as man. Many of our great myths are stories of events in another world, such as on Mount Olympus. Other worlds are found in favorite children's stories as in the Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis. In such a world, there are talking animals and trees. Another key difference is that time passes at a different rate. The Pevensie children live full, adult lives before returning to childhood, having missed little time during the reality that contains WW II. Similarly, when they return, they have not aged greatly but the world of Narnia has aged and changed greatly.

Authors and film makers tend to have great fun when surprising their readers and audience by the surprise twist that the plot takes place in another reality.

The magic of this genre is that anything in our world can be changed, for better or worse. We can live for a few hundred years, travel great distances, be able to move through time as we move through space. The Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde offer a complex alternate reality in which time travel is possible, literary integrity is a crucial part of law and government, vampires and werewolves exist, dodo birds have been resurrected through cloning and so much more it makes my head spin. And all it takes is the gentle letting go of some law of reality and suspending it.

Of course, like all science fiction genres, alternate reality is not all fun and games. Parallel universes frequently threaten the universe of the main character's universe. And quite often his/her universe is quite like our own. An excellent and curious example is Isaac Assimov's The God's Themselves, which includes characters from both sides of an Electron Pump.

Do not be fooled by our "common sense" ideas about parallel universes. Quantum mechanics has widened our minds to the possibility. I must admit that quantum physics is exactly where I lost my firm on physics and resigned myself to Newtonian laws.

*One such variation is the alternate history sub-genre. I plan to get to this one later.

A Word About Genre: Soft Sci-Fi

If you have watched a few episodes of Bones, you know that Dr. Temperance Brennan dislikes, abhors and has little appreciation for the soft sciences, to put it mildly. These sciences are psychology, sociology, politics, are the focus of soft science fiction. The plots of soft sci-fi focus on character development or societal problems than on scientific elements. The first Star Trek is one of my favorite examples. The setting, modes of transport, presence of aliens, etc squarely place Star Trek in the sci-fi genre. But the plots revolve around the captain and the crew of the starship Enterprise, their loves, their losses, their conflicts.

Don't get distracted by the term "soft" as these books can be harsh and cruel indeed. For example, The Road by Cormac McCarthy could easily fit into this genre because the story focuses on the thoughts and feelings of the father with practically no detail explaining why the earth was destroyed and its food stocks decimated. However, the story is horrifying and down-right disturbing (so much so that I cannot force myself to finish it).

Included within this genre are the space opera (think Star Wars, especially episodes I-III) and science fantasy (Startling Stories, Weird Tales and other collections of pulp shorts). I might return to these later but suffice to say that soft science fiction and her sub-genres are the reason why science fiction and fantasy sit side by side in book stores.

Finally, soft science fiction is not necessarily bad science or vice versa, although some would have you believe that. Think of the hard-soft binary as a line. On the left side you have hard science based on modern, real hard sciences. On the left side you have soft sciences focusing on human relationships and problems. All science fiction exists between these two poles. If you go all one way you either end up with a scientific treatise lacking in plot or in a romance novel.*

*Please note, the romance I am describing is a literary form which engages the fantastic and the supernatural. Shakespeare's The Tempest is a romantic play which certainly lacks any modern notions of romance between the supposed lovers.

District 9

It would be difficult to evaluate this film without referring to apartheid in South Africa. The parallels between the alien "prawns" and the black South Africans are blatant. The location of District 9 where the prawns were kept was very recently a neighborhood from which its inhabitants were evicted. Humans become increasingly inhumane, revealing our darkest traits. Wilkus, the human protagonist, cares little about the rights of the prawns, not even their right to life. When he serves eviction notices, he does not care if the aliens can understand or comply if they do understand.

The aliens lack of hostility but are treated brutally. The are imprisoned, denied the right to work, to move. They are even denied the right to procreation with their egg/pods aborted when discovered. The humans claim that the prawns do not care about their offspring, despite evidence of the opposite in Christopher's care for his son.

The humans are drawn by their weapons technology, which only the alien species can use. Only those who wish to exploit the aliens will interact with them. Their only desire is to use the technology for destruction. There is little to no concern about the prawn's welfare.

Wilkus is poisoned when he tampers with vial of liquid which two aliens had been filling. This poison begins to mutate his DNA. As he transforms into a prawn, he discovers the humanity in both the aliens and himself. The prawns instinctivly flock to rescue him when he is in danger. At the end, he is identifiable only by his one blue eye.

A Word About Genre: Hard Sci-Fi

While science-fiction has much in common with pornography (just look for a book by Kilgore Trout and see where you find yourself), the hard vs soft distinction in science fiction is about the gratuitous display of scientific accuracy. Hard science-fiction sticks to the hard sciences: physics, biology, astronomy. While the fictional world of hard science fiction does not necessarily correlate to our world, the author portrays these elements in scientific and technical detail.

Isaac Assimov and Arthur C. Clarke, who were part of the Big 3 in sci-fi, are two of the earliest authors in the hard sci-fi genre. They also exemplify some of the difficulties with extrapolation and hypothesizing future inventions, which can make their works feel quite dated.

If you know the how and the why of phenomena, you've probably got yourself some hard sci-fi. If things are a little magical and unexplained, focusing mostly on the mental and social aspects, then it leans toward the soft side of the scale. There is some gray area in the middle. Sometimes, what is dressed as hard, scientific fact is just plain our silly magic. If someone explains in great detail how a ship moves at or faster than the speed of light, you've got a strange ambiguity on your hands. Modern science states than any object with mass travelling at such a speed would do so at infinite energy expenditure and enlarging to infinite mass. Or the object would go back in time. Which would really upset everything. So while someone may use or even explain "warp speed", it just isn't real. But somethings have to be different or unreal if the book is science fiction, right? Or else you just end up with fiction.

The genre has suffered since the 50's and, with it, Disneyland's Home of Tomorrow. The expectations of hover cars and robotic nannies featured in Jetsons are a long way off if anyone ever gets around to them. Computer hacking, genetic splicing and cloning, and biological warfare are the subjects of modern hard sci-fi.

I am not passing judgment on whether one end of the spectrum is better than the other. Hard science fiction can be fascinating because the hypothetical has a chance of becoming the real. I also find that hard science fiction writers take their readers a little more seriously, anticipating our rigorous and analytical questions and probing in ways that the early Star Trek and Star Wars actors and writers could never imagine. But hard science fiction can also be tedious and overly pedagogical. The trick is to find a balance between the science and the fiction, not forsaking one for the other.

Classic Examples:
Ringworld
Inconstant Moon
The Mars Trilogy
Rainbows End

Avatar

Avatar was terrible. How can anyone have spent so much time and money on a movie without even trying to write a script for it. It was just Disney's Pocahontas with blue cat furries, artwork stolen from Roger Dean (art designer for Yes), and the Dunbar from Dances with Wolves. I didn't even get to enjoy the 3-D since, despite buying tickets days in advance online and waiting a very long time in a very long line, we still ended up sitting way off to one side of the screen. The angle was so nauseous that my mother left about a quarter through the movie.

If you were to read the "artists'" description of the themes and influences, you might think this movie was pretty deep. But I don't go for five and dime morality. But don't let their make-believe integrity fool you. According to Cameron, the whole love story wouldn't work out unless the blue chick was sexy as all get out.

This isn't even sci-fi. It's just a cheap knock off without the Disney song. Oh, and with a lot of magic since Marine Moron was explaining everything. James Cameron, you fail.

I know that none of my observations will sound original because almost everyone has noticed the similarities between the hijacked works of others and this travesty. But in my defense, these are my observations. I noticed the similarity to Roger Dean immediately in the dragon things and the mountains. I have a whole collection of what might be considered Roger Dean trading cards, a complete deck of them plus some spares. Other people have pointed out that the story is a lot like Fern Gully but I can't remember that movie from my childhood.

I really hope I do not have to endure any more of this Avatar stuff but I fear that Cameron will see his financial success as artistic success and make a sequel.

A Word About Genre

Science-fiction is a genre in itself but it consists of several sub-genres, many of which can be furthered divided. To save myself the difficulty of frequently writing out "sub-genre" and "sub-sub-genre", I am going to shift science-fiction into its own category in which further divisions can be drawn.

I intend these posts to be a basic primer to terms I might throw around carelessly. Each genre will have it's own label. Any entry on a work of science-fiction that falls into a particular genre will also bear that label. This way, you can search "genre" for all of my entries on the various genres and subs as well as the name of each genre for both the description and posts that fit within the genre. Most science fiction has multiple themes and a single work may fall into more than one genre. I will, however, attempt to classify works by their most salient genre.

As I add genres, I will try to label all the appropriate works. I will also, eventually, include a list of works under each genre description. I will probably only add titles of the works most appropriate to that genre as a heuristic of the genre rather than attempting to create an exhaustive list.

Genres:
Hard
Soft
Alternative Reality/Parallel Universe
Social
Cyberpunk
Utopia/Dystopia
Post-Apocalyptic
Mundane

*This post has been back-dated to place it at the head of the "Word about Genre" posts. I have also edited some of these posts in recognition that I might some day have an audience who does not suffer from my chronic condition in which I hear every thing that I think.*

The Borrower

My undergraduate degree was in pre and early modern literature. So it should be no surprise that I worship the almighty written word. Language, especially a phonetic written language, is the most important and vital invention of mankind (in my less than humble opinion). I don't want to get into whether it is "superior" to ideographic, logographic, syllabic, etc types of languages. It is the type of language I learned first and it is what I am most familiar with. The ideographic system of Chinese languages is useful in an enormous country where dialects can be so distinct that they sound like different language. A unified written system, regardless of pronunciation, is marvellous for communication.

A full spoken language, complete with standardized vocabulary and grammar, took humanity a very long time to develop. And how much more so for a written language? Literacy was, for thousands of years, the privilege of the aristocracy. It required not only the invention and maintenance of a language but also the time and resources to learn it. While the invention of moveable type printers made book production easier, books did not become economically viable for most people until the industrial revolution.

Books are no longer rare and precious heirloom tomes. They are mass produced pulp with glued bindings. Newspapers are going out of fashion as we shift our preferences to the internet. Even this blog is brought to you with ease, free of charge for me to publish and for you to read.

But I am crazy about books. I don't just mean the worlds they hold. I love the tactile sensation, the musky library smell of them, the sound of turning a page, the way book covers look like inviting secrets. I own several hundred books. At one point, they began to take over my room. What looked like a dishevled mess was in fact genre-specific stacks and piles of books that could not find homes on my bookcases. Eventually, my mother bought us four more bookcases and we turned a portion of our spare room into a library. While I have been in graduate school, I have added significantly to my collection despite my aversion to buying books for classes.

Libraries rank high on my list of civic altruism. Fire trucks and police and public water works are all great for survival, but a library is a gift to the souls of people. I love to wander through shelves of books. I peruse fiction stacks like book stores. It has been a disappointment to me how thin the U of Chicago library fiction sections are. So many of the books are ancient, falling apart, out-dated. The academic books outweigh these significantly. Don't point out that it is a university library. If they don't value fiction then they are missing something great. In fact, I think it says a lot about what is wrong with the University of Chicago that it's libraries contain more works about Kurt Vonnegut than by him - and there are not that many about him either. Secondary source favoritism.

Oh, but public libraries, how I love those! Any book has been held my myriads of others. Where did they read it and how did it affect them? I especially love the little notes scrawled on the sides of pages, underlining and question marks for words of unknown meaning. I miss those little cards that contained the names of previous borrowers. Although I always found it disappointing when a great book sat on shelves for months or even years before I rescued it again.

Inside the world of the Thursday Next novels, there are vast libraries, one for each language. You can open any book and enter into the story itself, you can watch and feel as a reader travels through the narrative - if you are not careful, you might even be read. While the characters keep their book identities, to a point, they can lead wildly different lives in the pages where they are absent or when the book is not being read. They agonize when they are not read and worry what the outside world thinks of them.

For them, time looks like it does to a Tralfalmadorian. All of it is always there, to be experienced over and over. While some parts may be painful and unpleasant, they can look forward to the other parts, the lovely parts. Unless the story is truly depressing and awful. But even then they would rather have the high emotions than the dullness of being unread.

Science Fiction and Sex: Incest

Since I began this primer on sex in science fiction, I keep going back to a conversation I had with a friend of mine. It happened unexpectedly when I was walking home from work late at night. The conversation lasted less than 5 minutes and it was among the most bizarre conversations I have had. Life always seems to happen when we are preoccupied, doesn't it? I find it a little irritating that so many important conversations take place outside, in the cold, underneath a street light. We talked about the taboo of incest, why we feel so immediately disturbed by it, if it is just a culturally built thing. You may have noticed in one of my other posts that, to me, the taboo of incest is just an evolutionary trait that keeps the gene pool sufficiently mixed and viable. Here was his premise:

Suppose a brother and sister, both adults, have a very close relationship. They decide they would like to have sex to deepen their relationship. They use contraceptives so that she will not become pregnant. No one else knows about it. No one is hurt by it. And there is no offspring. Is it wrong?

If you are like me, your mind screams that of course it is wrong. But why? I have stated my claim of evolution and yet I know it is wrong. Incest happens all the time, in many species. Definitions of incest vary from culture to culture, with some societies considering taboo what other societies accept as normative. Levi-Strauss suggested that the discouragement of incest was a social force. Marriage and offspring form strong bonds and social networks. Forming such alliances strengthens communities by linking up several members of families. A marriage is not just between two people but also their families, the in-laws they join.

Think of times when incest was common. European and Egyptian royalty come to my mind. Marriage between close relatives, even half-siblings was common. Such close marriages keep material wealth and power concentrated. A pharaoh and his half sister need not worry about an interloper or concubine staking her claim since the half sister is the first wife, through whom inheritance is determined. In a situation where one person has multiple spouses, the sibling-spouse may be merely a figure of power and not a source of reproduction.

For reasons beyond my comprehension, many sci-fi books set in the future involve the political intrigue of feudal lords and ruling classes. With such concern over power and wealth, marriage is often a dangerous game. It threatens the stability of the family as well as the government. In other cases, alien species may reproduce in a manner different from our which renders concepts such as siblings, family and incest null. While the narrator or a character may seek to justify this, do not be misled - the author includes this element to make you uncomfortable, to make you distrust and dislike certain characters, and to make you put a wall between yourself and the incestuous persons.