conjunctis viribus [translation]

[Note: I originally started this entry over a year ago, if I remember correctly, but only now got around to finishing it up. It still doesn't quite measure up to the thoughts bumping around in my head. But it still interests me as a topic.]

Looking for Kim Stanley Robinson content on the internet the other day, I found this great interview with him; I'm especially intrigued by this bit, of which I probably quote too much:

The Years Of Rice And Salt is published as a HarperCollins book rather than a Voyager book; the marketing literature doesn't seem to be pushing it to a science fiction audience. Do you feel that it's not a science fiction book?

No - it's a science fiction book. The alternative history has a long and honourable part in science fiction and that's the way I conceptualised it when the idea first occurred to me 20 or 25 years ago. On the other hand I can see the logic of their thinking. The science fiction audience is fully aware of me and if they're interested, knowing me as they know me at this point, they'll buy the book - and if not, not - but there's no further work to be done there. The notion, I think, is that people who may not think of themselves as science fiction readers could read this book with pleasure and perhaps haven't tried me before. You can't help but like the strategy involved and that a publisher has a strategy.

It's a common discussion; people thrashing around as to whether they are science fiction authors or not; people who talk like they're 'escaping the ghetto' or they're climbing over the boundaries and don't seem to want to look back.

I'm not one of those. I'm a science fiction writer and always will be. It's my genre and my community and intellectual home. This escape, some of it probably has to do with outdated sociology of the reputation of science fiction. Some of it has to do with a hidden inferiority or ghetto mentality - that it would be better off in the big bad world. At my point in life, I don't see the advantages of the big world. Science fiction is one of the most powerful tools of human thought we have and one of the most powerful ways we have to generate beautiful novels. I don't seem to have suffered in terms of an audience. I have a relatively big and extremely supportive and intelligent audience so what's so bad about that? What would be the gain in going out into a gigantic, anonymous market place where you are one forgettable figure amongst others, which doesn't even have a sense of it's own history like the science fiction field does? I'm a science fiction patriot but that doesn't mean the books have to be published under a Voyager imprint as opposed to a HarperCollins imprint - that's just a marketing decision. What I would like to do is somewhat like what Asimov did, which is always to be resolutely and obviously a science fiction writer but just to expand out to be one of those science fiction writers who everyone understands they can read with pleasure. That's the plan.

In 2004 Matt Ruff showed up at the Science Fiction/Fantasy book club meeting since we were discussing his book Fool on the Hill. Ruff has since ventured into non-SFF realms, and we'd recently been reading some other books that I didn't think necessarily fit under the SFF umbrella, so we ended up discussing the ins and outs of being genre-specific in one's work.

Several authors have made this transition, especially in the past twenty years. Neal Stephenson often ends up mentioned in such discussions since his earlier books are all so popular among SFF fandom, and fit well in the SFF section (including Zodiac, Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, and, I could argue at length, The Big U), but at some point Stephenson decided to branch off into what I like to call "engineer" or "applied science" fiction—fiction that still includes a lot of science, but lacks the extrapolative elements featured so predominantly in most science fiction. Some examples that fit into this mold:

• In the Beginning...was the Command Line
• Cryptonomicon
• Quicksilver

Granted, since SFF is often tossed under the general heading "speculative fiction", it's easy to step back and shovel in the rest of fiction, since the very basis of fiction is some sort of "what if" question: "What if we can fly faster-than-light?" "What if dwarves and dragons and elves and magic existed before, but somehow faded from popular notice?" "What if there were a whaler captain obsessed with a certain white sperm whale?" (I've never really noticed before, but the phrase "what if" doesn't seem to be grammatically correct—it seems to be a shortening of "what would happen if". Weird that I never noticed that before.)

Jonathan Lethem is another author who fits into this discussion; his first book, Gun, With Occasional Music, totally fit into the science fiction mold, yet at the same time planted a foot in hard-boiled detective fiction as well. Lethem followed this up with several more "sciffy" titles, including Amnesia Moon, As She Climbed Across the Table, and Girl in Landscape, all of which had a similar blend of genre fiction, perhaps most noticeable in the final title's borrowing from Western tropes.

Then Lethem started expanding his genre range outside of SFF; in This Shape We're In, Lethem earns our forgiveness for ending a clause with a preposition by taking us on a fascinating journey through a wondrous world that doesn't feel at all science fictiony, yet doesn't really fit into fantasy, either. It instead seems to stray afield into allegory without a clear genre identification—I've generally seen it included in the general fiction sections at bookstores, so it's apparently not genre enough to make it to the SFF's dark corners. The genre mixing continues in Motherless Brooklyn, as well as (to some extent) in The Fortress of Solitude, but by now Lethem's left SF behind, and very little of his genre introitus is visible.

But I still dig his stuff.

I could go further into other examples (I think Jasper Fforde is likely headed down the same path), but Kim Stanley Robinson puts it into the best perspective:

...you've got the kind of acceleration of history and the heavy dominance of technology in our lives, the fact that technology shifts all our habits every five years or so. At this point, I think of us as all living in an enormous science fiction novel, which we're co-authoring together. You couldn't be better placed as a writer than in science fiction. I feel like the stage people in the Elizabethan era - simply that we are in the right form for the historical moment we're in. The things you can bring to bear to your storytelling from a science fiction perspective are the ones that can best describe our current reality. If you are going to be a realist to 2002 you'd better start writing science fiction.

— "This Is the Year One: Kim Stanley Robinson Interview"

The truth is that between writing, research, parenting and life in general, I have no time anymore to read other sf writers, and seldom do. I'm even beginning to feel that it's part of my job to remain ignorant of current sf, and to become increasingly idiosyncratic. That's what novelists are supposed to do.

— "Wilderness, Utopia, History: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson"

Last updated by eric Sun Mar 12 07:31 2006 | thought | link