On Books: Retro Versus Visionary

[psikeyhackr]

“Rite of Passage” packs a large philosophical punch that lingers long after the plot details fade from memory

The colonists resent the arrangement because they feel that the Ship holds back on knowledge that could make them self-sustaining; the Ship agrees; if the colonists had the Ship’s technology they would not need to work for the Ship. A quandary.

I consider “Rite of Passage” liberal arts science fiction. It doesn’t necessarily care about establishing exotic environments, and it doesn’t go out of its way to make the science believable, like hard sci-fi. Panshin is more concerned with people and sociology than anything else; using the platform of science fiction is a convenient way for him to talk about societal issues while divesting his work from the contemporary.

http://thebright.com/rite-of-passage-by-alexei-panshin/

It is not hard SF but it is serious SF whose ideas most reviews do not even discuss. I would include it as STEM Fiction anyway because is shows the importance of scientific knowledge in terms of who has it and who does not.

And of course we don't have FTL to escape from and overpopulated planet but Panshin did not include global warming as part of the apocalypse.

psik

 

[J-Sun]

Hm - thread seems to have started resting (like a parrot) over the weekend.

I also have some points of contention, but his basic premise is that science fiction has lost its sense of itself and lost faith that the future is comprehensible, leading to a lot more genre-bending across the borders with fantasy and weird fiction and a lot more cynical story-telling. That seems fairly similar, though he's not drawing connections to things at a cultural or societal level.

Yeah - in broad outlines, I think that's reasonable and think they're more or less in accord. IIRC, Kincaid was stressing more "exhaustion" while I think Spinrad may think it's more socially and economically driven than an intrinsic exhaustion. Which is sort of a different way of saying the same socio-cultural distinction you mention. And I think Kincaid is more motivated by the "Singularity" cop-out than Spinrad is. (I love Vinge and I think the Singularity stuff is fine as an idea but it does seem to have become almost the idea and then it's ruinous to SF - kind of like Nirvana wouldn't have been so bad if they'd just been them and not had the effect of wrecking 90s music. )

He's using it to mean "literary" or "high-level" science fiction, which to me is an odd use of the term, and out of step with its general usage. But this is a footnote to the broader discussion.

Agreed that it's a footnote so maybe I should just drop it. I'll just say that while Spinrad has some other essays where that sort of distinction isn't entirely absent. it's more an unconscious assumption on his part (or a qualitative improvement that he sees as just sort of happening by default) than an argument he's making or a point of emphasis with the term in this article. Here, to quote him, he's just emphasizing "Does the speculative element have to be scientific or technological? Not really.... We generally count... Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, whose speculative element is cultural." I'm sure Spinrad would coincidentally argue that Bradbury is superior to, say, Clement but he's just emphasizing that it doesn't have to be physics to be "spec fic".

I mean it in the Popperian/Durkheimian philosophy of science way: that truth is knowable and emerges from observation, deduction, experimentation and verification.

Oh, so you did mean it how I initially took it. But I thought it sounded like "a thing" so I searched the web and turned up a bunch of stuff including a Damien G. Walter piece so I figured that (non-philosophical) "positivist platform" stuff must have been what you were talking about.

As far as Spinrad advocating Popper or any specific philosophical viewpoint in depth, I couldn't say. I do think he's viewing it through a (philosophically) positivist or positivist-like lens, though. This brings up the last major point I jotted down (not counting the reviews of the books themselves - Spinrad's piece is actually "just" a book review column ).

"As tinkerdan notes, one of the oddities of the essay is complaining about the past vs. the future and science vs. non-science and yet he cites a time travel novel approvingly. I get how nuances of the thing may set it apart but, still, in large scale, it's contradictory. But this underscores a deeper issue: as SF/F is blurred, much modern "science" (which I put in quotes as he does SF) is increasingly mystical and unverifiable or falsifiable "publish or perish" stuff - it makes Bantam's "New Age" "science" books look prescient. We need to distinguish "hallucination" from "visionary" as much as "visionary" from "retro". I know that people thought going to the moon was Impossible and people who thought about it were crazy, yet we now know them to be visionary. But people also thought they could make perpetual motion machines and talk telepathically with folks on Mars. We still think they're crazy. Similarly, until we have any proof of time travel or multiverses and have some indication that they could have any possible bearing on us, I'd prefer that "SF" focus not only on the possible future but the possible future in this here actual universe."

I mean, he says, "Far be it from the author of The Iron Dream to contend that there’s anything literarily objectionable in writing alternate history fiction. But fiction set in alternate past histories cannot be speculative fiction, and ipso facto is fantasy." I agree. But not if you subscribe to the time travel/many world stuff which Spinrad says is the basis of the Jeschke.

 

[Brian G Turner]

It's interesting to see how much space opera and military fiction in space have really taken off via the self-publishing world. Would it therefore be true to say that while there has often been an element of speculation in science fiction, it has always been a minority part of the genre, with the majority as predominantly escapist first with no interest in exploring anything relating to science or technology?

 

[J-Sun]

It's interesting to see how much space opera and military fiction in space have really taken off via the self-publishing world. Would it therefore be true to say that while there has often been an element of speculation in science fiction, it has always been a minority part of the genre, with the majority as predominantly escapist first with no interest in exploring anything relating to science or technology?

I wouldn't say so. Jules Verne was all about science and technology. Gernsback & Co. was primarily driven by science and technology. Campbell & Co. didn't try to be escapist but tried to address technology's effect on humanity. Even the New Wave, while not especially interested in science and technology, was trying to be "relevant" rather than escapist. Cyberpunk had almost zero interest in science, as such, but was fascinated by technological toys.

That said, Gernsback had a hard time getting all the material exactly how he ideally wanted it and the 30s pulp zine audience encouraged him to loosen his principles and still made post-Gernsback Amazing and pre-Campbell Astounding bigger than Gernsback's own zines. But Campbell did become the dominant strain in the Golden Age and less escapist stuff did maintain varying degrees of dominance for a long while thereafter.

So I'd say unscientific escapism has almost always been a significant part of the genre but rarely dominant. Since the New Wave, though, the science in science fiction has been decreasing and, since cyberpunk (more accurately, a little earlier, since Star Wars), the escapist part may have become more dominant. I have no first-hand familiarity with the self-published market but grant that it probably is dominated by space opera/milsf. Speaking of Star Wars, I'd hazard that this is just a reflection of movies and television driving SF these days instead of print. Most people are most familiar with those strains and, honestly, they're about the easiest to write. They can be high art and can be heavily scientifically or socially oriented but space opera can be heavily-templated pure escapism requiring no scientific knowledge and milsf can be a combat version of the "horse opera" kind of SF. This is just of a piece with the decline of interest in science and the rise of fantasy - the majority of SF is now fantasy-like.

(BTW, the link in the first post is now broken due to the Asimov's website redesign. Here's a link that will hopefully last: On Books. Any chance of the first post's link being edited?)