"Rationality" Sets Science Fiction Apart from Fantasy

In an article published in the journal CLCWeb:Comparative Litarature and Culture, Simone Caroti argues that "cognition" is what sets science fiction apart from fantasy, using Greg Bear's Blood Music
as an example:

The act of cognition, of rationally making sense of – and coming to terms with – the estranging elements, increases the sense of wonder inherent in [science fiction], whereas it destroys the pleasure of reading [fantasy]. Magic as represented by writers like Tolkien is best left unexplained, because it belongs to the realm of the irrational. Like a fairy, it is a fragile thing, and trying to rationalize it or explain it away will kill it. On the other hand, a rationally constructed estranging element thrives on cognition, as will readily become apparent when a typical example of the genre is examined. Greg Bear's Blood Music (1985) is set in our times, and at the beginning of the novel no difference from the world we know is offered. However, estrangement soon rears its head in the form of a biologist's development of a new strain of sentient bacteria. When the private lab he is working for cuts his funds and fires him, deeming his experiment illegal and dangerous, this modern-day Victor Frankenstein injects himself with he latest batch of his creations and goes away. In only a few days, these bacteria spread from their original host to contaminate half the population of the planet. As the novel nears its completion, the world has indeed become estranged from what the reader is used to, but this is nothing compared to the discovery lying in wait at the very end, when the true nature of this biological agent is revealed. Far from being just another outlandish example of malevolent disease (like the monstrous alien virus in John Carpenter's 1982 film The Thing), these bacteria have in fact evolved into a completely new life-form inhabiting an entirely different plane of existence, and have taken with them all the human beings who were thought dead. After finishing the last page, the sense of wonder is still with us, even stronger than before.

Caroti's conclusion - that plausible scientific revelations in science fiction are part of what makes the genre entertaining – is one I agree with. As he puts it:

The cognitive discovery of the new life-form's true nature implies a series of revelations regarding our understanding of reality and our place in the universe. Far from diminishing our sense of wonder, these revelations greatly increase it, first of all by grounding its presence within a plausible rational framework, and then by extending the implications of this framework far beyond what we had at first imagined.

I'm just not sure that "cognitive discovery"  universally separates science fiction from fantasy.

There are many science fiction novels in which the "cognitive discoveries" have little basis in real science, and sometimes are difficult to distinguish from magic. I haven't read that much fantasy, but it also rings false to me that magic is necessarily always "unexplained" and "irrational", at least in the context of the story.

I think there's a great gray area between Tolkien's fantasy and Bear's hard science fiction, which includes science fiction with a seemingly fantasy setting like the McCaffrey's Pern novels or Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun, space operas that are focused on adventure and space battles, science fictional heroes with amazing mental or physical powers who seem to differ from wizards in name only, and stories with science fictional settings like Le Guin's The Dispossessed that explore political systems, rather than science or technology.


It's kind of fun to try to imagine the classics of fantasy rewritten as science fiction.  In the Lord of the Rings the One Ring could have been fabricated in a laboratory by a mad genius scientist, rather than forged in the heat of a volcano by a powerful wizard.  In the Harry Potter novels, the horcruxes would be computer devices for storing copies of Lord Voldemort's uploaded mind, rather than magical devices used to hide "a part of his soul for the purpose of attaining immortality".  But while the plot and characters might stay essentially the same in such a re-genred novel, that shift from magical devices to objects developed through science and technology represents a significant difference in world view.

What sets science fiction apart from fantasy is not just the tropes of the genre –  future or extraterrestrial setting, space travel, advanced technology or scientific discoveries.  It also the underlying assumption that the universe is controlled by natural mechanisms, rather than supernatural forces.  Even though a sufficiently advanced technology may be indistinguishable from magic,  such a technology must have been created through the application of scientific principals. And as speculative as that technology or the science it is based on might be, it's a feat that humans could hope to achieve. Magic, on the other hand, can exist only in the realm of fiction.

So I agree with Caroti that science fiction uses a "plausible rational framework" to support the speculative aspects of the story. Where I think we disagree is whether the "cognitive discovery" that's central to hard science fiction stories like Bear's Blood Music is also a necessary part of SF, or if the framework alone is enough to set the genre apart from fantasy.  I'd argue the latter.

Reference:

Caroti, Simone. "Science Fiction, Forbidden Planet, and Shakespeare's The Tempest." CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 6.1 (2004): http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol6/iss1/11

How OMNI Ruined Me for Analog

I just got home from a nice stay at my mom's and it's put me in a reminiscing mood.


I have a confession to make.

Despite being a voracious reader of science fiction (among other genres), I never picked up a copy of one of the "big three" science fiction magazines - Asimov's, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Analog - until I was in my early 20s. And when I did finally start picking up the occasional copy of Asimov's or Analog, I often felt like they fell a bit short of my expectations.

Part of the problem, I suspect, was that much of my short story reading had been in anthologies, which highlights an author's or magazine's best stories.

But it's also almost certainly because the magazine with science fiction I did read regularly was OMNI.  It was the first grown-up magazine I had a subscription to and it was awesome.  The magazine had science articles - in retrospect often pretty "fringy" or pseudoscience-based, yet always interesting - and original short science fiction stories, all in a glossy colorful package.

 Just look at the short stories OMNI published - during my subscription that spanned from 1980ish to 1987ish the list included William Gibson, Pat Cadigan, Robert Silverberg, Harlan Ellison, Greg Bear and many others edited by the Ellen Datlow. These were the short stories of my teenage years and they came in a shiny sciency wrapper.

OMNI eventually ceased publication in the late 1990s, but it lives on at the OMNI Online tribute site (from which I borrowed the cover images) and some pages of the web-only version of the magazine that were archived by the Internet Archive.

To my 20-year-old self Analog and Asimov's seemed dull in comparison. And honestly, they still seem a bit dull me as a 40-something. It's not just the lack of pretty pictures, but the magazines' stiff "attitude" (for want of a better word) and old-fashioned feel.  To my mind the spirit of OMNI is closer to current personal science blogs than any print magazine.



And sure, the "big three" still publish good short fiction. But there is strong competition from other mags like Strange Horizons,  Clarkesworld Magazine, and Subterranean Magazine, to name a few. It's not a surprise to me that the circulation numbers for the big three has been declining.

I don't know what science & SF-loving teenagers are reading these days, but I hope whatever it is provides as much entertainment to them as OMNI did to me.

(See also Frederick Pohl's recent post about writing about the July 1991 solar eclipse for OMNI.)

No Really, Extrapolated Bioscience Can Be the Basis of Science Fiction

Jimmy's father worked for OrganInc Farms. He was a genographer, one of the best in the field. He'd done some of the key studies on mapping the proteonome when he was still a post-grad, and then he'd helped engineer the Methuselah Mouse as part of Operation Immortality. After that, at OrganInc Farms, he'd been one of the foremost architects of the pigoon project, along with a team of transplant experts and the microbiologists who were splicing against infections. Pigoon was only a nickname: the official name was sus multiorganifer. But pigoon was what everyone said.
[... snip ...]
The goal of the pigoon project was to grown an assortment of foolproof human-tissue organs in a transgenic knockout pig host - organs that would transplant smoothly and avoid rejection, but would also be able to fend off attacks by opportunistic microbes and viruses, of which there were more strains every year. A rapid-maturity gene was spliced in so the pigoon kidneys and livers and hearts would be ready sooner, and now they were perfecting a pigoon that could grow five or six kidneys at a time.

~ Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood (2003)

Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake is set in a fictional future where advanced genetic engineering and other biotechnology is in widely used. Atwood has talked about her longstanding interest in biology, which is based in part on conversations with the scientists in her family:

Several of my close relatives are scientists, and the main topic at the annual family Christmas dinner is likely to be intestinal parasites or sex hormones in mice, or, when that makes the non-scientists too queasy, the nature of the Universe. My recreational reading — books I read for fun, magazines I read in airplanes — is likely to be pop science of the Stephen Jay Gould or Scientific American type, partly so I'll be able to keep up with the family dialogue and maybe throw a curve or two. (‘Supercavitation?’) So I'd been clipping small items from the back pages of newspapers for years, and noting with alarm that trends derided ten years ago as paranoid fantasies had become possibilities, then actualities. The rules of biology are as inexorable as those of physics: run out of food and water and you die. No animal can exhaust its resource base and hope to survive. Human civilizations are subject to the same law.

The general interest in science, the casual reading of science magazines, the following of scientific trends - all are pretty typical behaviors for science fiction writers. That's why I find it disappointing that Atwood claims that what she has written totally isn't science fiction.

Here is what she wrote at the time Oryx and Crake was published:

Like The Handmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake is a speculative fiction, not a science fiction proper. It contains no intergalactic space travel, no teleportation, no Martians. As with The Handmaid's Tale, it invents nothing we haven't already invented or started to invent. Every novel begins with a what if, and then sets forth its axioms. The what if of Oryx and Crake is simply, What if we continue down the road we're already on? How slippery is the slope? What are our saving graces? Who's got the will to stop us?

After acknowledging that it was science fiction in a 2005 article, she has once again backed away from the term in an interview published several weeks ago in the New York Times:

Her nightmarish, futuristic scenarios have caused some of her books to be tagged as science fiction, though she thinks that genre doesn’t quite fit — “since there aren’t aliens and spaceships and the other usual things,” she said.

It's not as if Atwood isn't familiar with the genre, or willing to acknowledge that some SF works are "brilliant", it's that she wants to draw a line between science fiction, which is "gizmo-riddled and theory-based space travel, time travel, or cybertravel to other worlds, with aliens frequent" and speculative fiction, which is about "human society and its possible future forms, which are either much better than what we have now, or much worse". The problem is that her definition excludes many award-winning works that are considered by most to be science fiction, including Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio and Nancy Kress's Beggars in Spain (to name two stories that are bioscience based), as well as the entire ribofunk subgenre.

Science fiction readers consider novels like hers that look at the future of humanity to be part of the genre, so I think she's pretty much stuck with the label. I just wish she could embrace the genre that she seems so reluctant to be a part of.

(If you are interested in a longer discussion of "science fiction" as a genre category, there is a long thread on the topic at Making Light.)

Tags:science fiction, genetic engineering, Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

Biology in Science Fiction Roundup: December 13 edition

It's been a while since I did a round up, so there are lots of links!

General SF

SF Signal has video of a 1997 discussion between Harlan Ellison, J. Michael Straczynski, Herb Solow and Yvonne Fern about the meaning of the terms "science fiction" and "SciFi". Be sure to read the comments too.

Livemint.com has an extensive article about the state of science fiction in India with a number of video interviews with Indian SF writers, including Indian Science Fiction Writers Association secretary (and frequent commenter here) Arvind Mishra, Mohan Sanjeevan, Nellai Muthu, YH Deshpande, and GS Unnikrishnan.

John Scalzi points out that Technology Changes, People Not So Much

Ursula LeGuin and George RR Martin appeared on the public radio show To The Best of Our Knowlege, and discussed the future of science fiction and the genre boundaries between fantasy and science fiction (via io9)

Written Word

There's a great post at Metafilter about John Wyndham (author of Day of the Triffids), including links to the BBC Four documentary "The Invisible Man of Science Fiction".

The 2009 One Book - One Edinburgh reading campaign will feature Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World.

In 2009 it will also be 200 years ago that Charles Darwin was born, who also has ties to our city. It was during his study at the University of Edinburgh that he developed a keen interest in natural history, and it was here and around the Forth that the foundations for his theory of evolution were developed.

To mark this double celebration, it seems only natural that the 2009 reading campaign - The Lost World Read 2009 - will focus on Conan Doyle's classic adventure story, The Lost World, in which a group of explorers set out on an expedition to South America to prove that deep in the jungle there is a forgotten world where dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals still survive.

They will be distributing thousands of free copies of The Lost World with a special cover by Aardman Animations, as well as a comic book biography of the life of Charles Darwin.

Moira Gunn at ITConversations has posted her 2003 interview with Michael Crichton about his novel Prey.


Movies

Annalee Newitz at io9 has a detailed review of The Day The Earth Stood Still

BioethicsBytes has a discussion of the 2004 DeNiro cloning movie Godsend.

Chris Mooney writes about the new science-Hollywood venture, The Science and Entertainment Exchange.

At io9 Lauren Davis rounds up Science Fiction's Deadliest Plants

There will not, as rumored, be a sequel to I Am Legend, but plans for a prequel apparently are real.

Jennifer Ouellette at Cocktail Party Physics writes about The Blob, slime molds and endocytosis

Rich Handley has recently published Timeline of the Planet of the Apes: The Definitive Chronology. It sounds like it provides the background information on how the apes came into power on Earth, including a bunch of biology:

• How the apes acquired sentience and the power of speech—while man descended into mute savagery
• Where the plague that ravaged the planet originated, and the effects it had not only on man and ape, but on other creatures
• The many unique simian and human cultures that spawned around the globe in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust—and how the Statue of Liberty ended up in pieces on a desolate beach

Television

Science Not Fiction looks at the Stargate Atlantis episode "Remnants" and speculates on colonizing the galaxy by sending out pods with our DNA.

Science Not Fiction also discusses Skynet's bioweapon in this week's episode of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

Armchair Commentary has an interview with Primeval cast members Hannah Spearritt and Andrew Lee Potts.

About Eleventh Hour:

• Science Not Fiction: Eleventh Hour: Super Soldiers and Beyond
  
• Genevieve Valentine @ Tor.com: Eleventh Hour: Surge
  
• Genevieve Valentine @ Tor.com: Eleventh Hour: Frozen
• Genevieve Valentine @ Tor.com: Eleventh Hour: Titans
• Science Not fiction: Eleveth Hour and Decompression Chambers
• Genevieve Valentine @ Tor.com: Eleventh Hour: Flesh
  

About Fringe:

• Kate Schweitzer @ Popular Mechanics: Episode 7: Scientist Say Fringe Parasites are Far From Realistic
  
• Kate Schweitzer @ Popular Mechanics: Episode 9: How Fringe Gets Memory Science Wrong
  

Cool Bioscience

Mike Brotherton explains how to build a giant monster

Seed Magazine profiles Mac Cowell, the cofounder of DIYbio and "the biohacking hobbyist"

Invitrogen is sponsoring a new ScienceBlogs biotech blog, "What's new in life science research". A few interesting recent posts: "Genetically Modified Humans? No Thanks." and "Bizarre cloners and serious questions" by Marcy Darnovsky; "10 Things You Should Know About Cloning" by Hsien-Hsien Lei; and "Short, Euphonious, and Different: Clone is Born, 1903" by Alexandra Stern.

Japanese scientists were able to create clones from the nuclei of cells isolated from dead mice that had been frozen for 16 years. What made this particular experiment unique is that the mice had not been frozen using chemicals to protect cells from damage. That suggests that extinct animals for which frozen samples exist could be resurrected by cloning.

A virus carrying the DNA encoding a light-sensitive protein was introduced into the spinal chord of nerve-damaged rats. The infected cells produced the protein which allowed the scientists to restore the function of the neurons by pulsing them with light.

Jonah Lehrer at The Frontal Cortex explains that "Hell is a Perfect Memory"

Scientific American has an in-depth article about Peptide Nucleic Acids (PNAs), which "combines the information-storage properties of DNA with the chemical stability of a proteinlike backbone"

"The Big Picture" at Boston.com has a fantastic collection of micrograph images. The very very small is like an alien world. (via Hoyden About Town)

WebEcoist has pictures of 20 Strange and Exotic Endangered Species (via BoingBoing)

Zooillogix has video of spiders spinning webs in the microgravity environment of the space shuttle.

Ask Metafilter tackles the question of whether virulent microbes can survive in crypts.

Sequencing of the Neanderthal genome is about 50% complete, and the first draft should be completed "by year's end" the NewScientist reports. So far there is no evidence that prehistoric European humans regularly interbred with Neanderthals. Meanwhile,William Saletan at Slate asks "Should we resurrect the Neanderthals?"

The J. Craig Venter Institute has made the news again. This time they successfully manufactured the first synthetic yeast organism in a single step. Meanwhile, scientists have created a virus from scratch based on SARS.

Virginia Hughes posts about "Genes & Jazz", a collaboration between virologist Harold Varmus and his musician son Jacob.

A new type of giant squid with "elbows" has been caught on video.

The IRAM radio telescope has discovered a sugar molecule - glycolaldehyde - in a star-forming region of space where planets that can support life as we know it might exist.

Wired Science has the Top 10 Amazing Biology Videos

io9 looks at the winners of the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition

Tags:science fiction, biology

Hard Science Fiction, Biology and Women (again)

"Sorry guys, I can't join you at the pub until I finish this ELISA for Professor Ribbit."

LiveJournaler badgerbag has put up a transcript of the WisCon 32* panel on "Women and Hard SF". The panelists were Margaret McBride, Janice Bogstad, Victoria Gaydosik and Sue Lange. Not surprisingly (to me anyway) their discussion touched on the biological sciences:

JB: Part of the reason the concept, the term [hard science fiction] is problematic is it's used as a norm for "real science fiction" and however we define it, it has changed as more women enter the field. Fantastic, speculative, there's other terms they call it when they don't want to call it sf. Femspec. In early days of 50s and 60s sf, male authors would write about social issues and the social issues around tech but when women do it's soft sf. Then we come to 70s and 80s when writing about biology was considered soft, because (the rhetoric is that) women are their biology in some way, women can therefore more easily be biochemical scientists... I expect the next thing to fall is going to be mathematics. Real, normative, actual, the only kind we should really care about, that counts, used in book reviews, not included in canon. This changing definition has a gender bias to it.

The argument that the association between women and biology is part of the reason why it's considered less "hard" than physics isn't a new one (for example see my previous post on Women, Biology and Hard Science Fiction). And it's true that many more women receive degrees in the biological sciences than in the physical sciences.**

The discussion also touches on one of my pet peeves: the conflation of "science" and "technology". SF with gadgets and gizmos and exotic engineering is often considered "hard", even if those gadgets don't have any scientific basis (FTL travel, for example). And I think that feeds into the notion that biology isn't "hard" - there aren't that many gadgets that have come out of the biological sciences, at least as compared to the physical sciences.

I don't completely agree with the idea that women don't like SF because there is too much science and technology in it, however.

Aud: I would like to like hard sf, but, it's like the cold skeleton, bare bones, boy playing with his toys, in Singularity Charlie Stross (something), there's no movement, human touch, it's the skeleton of ideas without people moving through it.

Margaret: This raises a very significant thing for me. The people who doesn't read SF at all, especially women, because they think that's what it is. Even more importantly, is it making the feeling of science less interesting or important to women, because they think that's what it is?? That's why it's important and that's why these tropes and definitions matter.

She seems to be arguing that women are less interested in hard science fiction - and science - because we prefer the "human touch" to technology. While it may be true for some women, it's definitely not true for me. I like the nifty gadgets and descriptions of black holes and weird speculation about the evolution of mutant alien viruses, as long as there is an entertaining story to go along with it.***

Anyway, there are many male writers whose science fiction people consider to be "hard", but who don't actually use much rigorous science in their stories. The discussion brought up Heinlein and Crichton and Bear, who got thwacked pretty hard:

Annalee: Greg Bear, number one our list of criminals, he sits on a committee that advises the DOD on future scenarios, he's very proud of it! He thinks he's the hardest of the hard, but his science is terrible! and he's dealing with biology! Which a ton of women have dealt with.

Ouch.

For some good hard science fiction by women, Annalee Newitz at io9 lists "10 books that prove science fiction just got harder", which includes The Nanotech Quartet by Kathleen Goonan, The Color of Distance by Amy Thomson, Nano Comes to Clifford Falls and Other Stories by Nancy Kress, Lilith's Brood by Octavia Butler, Downbelow Station by CJ Cherryh, and Ethan of Athos by Lois McMaster Bujold. There's lots of bioscience in the list too.

(via Feminist Science Fiction)



* WisCon is "the first and foremost feminist science fiction convention in the world."

** In the 1999-2000 academic year (pdf) women received 58% of the bachelors degrees in the biological and life sciences and 40% of the bachelor's degrees in physical sciences. In the same period women received 44% of the doctoral degrees in the biological and life sciences , but only 25% of the doctoral degrees in the physical sciences.

*** That especially bugs me, because it's the kind of argument SciFi has made for reducing the actual science fiction on its schedule - according to them, women like the ghost hunting and psychics and the "touchy feely". What I do like is science fiction that doesn't give short shrift to it's female characters. Or even better - puts women in the starring role. It can be soft or hard science-wise, but please give me women who are more than eye candy or info dumpees. Definitely read Annalee Newitz's rant on the subject.

Image: Half nude chick doing biology inspired by this exchange: "Margaret: I have to be a little bit cynical. editor at tor, book cover panel, memo, I don't care what you people think, the half nude broad is what sells it. Annalee: Well if that half nude broad is doing biology, I'm down with it." I used my leet Photoshop skillz to mashup an old Avon paperback cover with the tools of the trade.

Tags:hard science fiction, biology, women

Mundane Bioscience

There has been a bit of blog discussion this past week about Mundane Science Fiction, a SF sub-genre described by Geoff Ryman, Julian Todd and others. As Wikipedia puts it: "[Mundane Science Fiction] focuses on stories set on or near the Earth, with a believable use of technology and science as it exists at the time the story is written." That means no faster-than-light travel, no aliens, and no alternative universes, among other science fiction staples.

Now you may be asking yourself, "What's the big deal about some SF writers wanting to focus on more realistic science in their fiction?" That's a good question. As far as I can tell, what irritates people a bit is that some of the Mundane proponents seem to think that that is the only way science fiction should be written. For example, here's Geoff Ryman in a 2004 interview with Infinity Plus:

"I hope the Mundane rules force Hard SF writers to focus on life on Earth lived by people and force humanists to get their facts right and to do some original SF speculation. The rules, not the group does the forcing, like a corset can feel great, liberating as well as confining, as it's more fun to play tennis by the rules."

The recent conversation started with a blog post by Rudy Rucker about recent article by Ryman in the New York Review of Science Fiction.

Mundane SF is to be about picturing possible futures, drawing on such sober-sided Sunday magazine think-piece topics as “Disaster, innovation, climate change, virtual reality, understanding of our DNA, and biocomputers that evolve.”

(Read the post for discussion of possible realities with FTL travel and aliens)

There's nothing wrong with those topics as the basis of science fiction. But what strikes me is that genetic engineering and "biocomputers" would have fantastically speculative topics 50 years ago. Perhaps brain downloading and human immortality or near-immortality* will be more scientifically realistic a few decades from now. And that is where I think some proponents of the mundane miss the point. For example, Mundane-SF blogger "goatchurch" writes about a recent interview with William Gibson:

There are some good quotes, which can be read with a Mundane-SF interpretation -- that the SF genre is being left behind by events and circumstances of the present day.

That's the diagnosis. The treatment is to either abandon the genre somewhat and simply report things as they are happening, because they are so ridiculous you cannot make them up. Or you can hypothesize that the problem is due to the pernicious weeds that have grown up within the genre, such as faster than light travel, aliens, brain downloads, etc. which strangle all other development. Gibson, below, mentions that he dropped the space travel and aliens in order to make his seminal book, Neuromancer. Mundane-SF suggests getting rid of the rest of the non-existent clutter and seeing how that works.

His solution is getting rid of the "non-mundane," but perhaps the fact that SF seems to be "falling behind" science is because today's authors don't think big enough. Biotechnology is moving very rapidly and keeping to "mundane" topics means that the science will be rapidly out of date.

But really what bothers me is the idea that it's the quality of the science that determines the quality of science fiction. A good author can use intelligent aliens, distant planets and fantastic science to provide insight into the human condition and present-day Earth. An example is Huxley's Brave New World, which had many non-mundane elements when published in 193 such as human cloning and genetic engineering. Today is considered one of the best novels of the 20th century.

While there is a place for the mundane in SF, I think it would be a less interesting genre without at least a touch of science fantasy.

* Interzone Magazine is looking for story submissions for a Mundane SF issue. Prohibited topics include : Faster than light travel, Psi power, Nanobot technology, Extraterrestrial life, Computer consciousness, Materially profitable space travel, Human immortality,Brain downloading, Teleportation, Time travel, Faster than light travel, Psi power, Nanobot technology, Extraterrestrial life, Computer consciousness, Materially profitable space travel, Human immortality, Brain downloading, Teleportation, and Time travel

Tags: mundane science fiction

Biology in SF a kid thing?

Last week Jannie Lee Simner posted to the SFWA LiveJournal community about the difference she sees between what "older" science fiction fans and young adult science fiction fans are reading.

But it's become standard wisdom that the science fiction readership is aging, and I'm not convinced this is true.

What is happening, I think, is that the sort of science fiction young people are reading is changing. I see SF in the YA section of the bookstore all the time. But it doesn't look anything like the SF older generations of fans read; even the packaging is very, very different. On last weekend's panel, we concluded the content is different, too, with much more of a bent toward the sociological and biological, and less of a bent toward space travel.

I think that because the kid and teen SF out there looks nothing like the SF we're used to reading, and because kids and teens aren't crossing over to read the stuff that's packaged for adults, many folks assume that kids and teens aren't reading SF at all.

Now this argument puzzles me a bit. Now, I'm not at all surprised that science fiction in the young adult section of the bookstore frequently has a biological bent. As a commenter on that thread, demonicfangirl, points out:

I think that the reason why young adult SF has changed more towards sociological and biological is because right now, technology is here. Most everything that used to just be in the realm of science fiction is now reality. Kids these days are learning how to type before they learn how to write with a pencil. So, that leaves us younger readers - and writers - with the society-side of the future, asking the questions about how Humans would interact with Aliens, and what really constitutes AS an alien.

That sounds right to me. What I don't agree with is the implicit assumption in Simner's post that most science fiction for adults is about "space travel."

I honestly haven't had any trouble finding adult SF with biological (and sociological) themes and nary a spaceship in sight. And the number of such books seems to have increased over the last couple of decades, at least. In fact, much of the cyberpunk of the 80s (when I made the transition from "young adult" to adult), while not being biology-based is very much earth bound, and the subsequent "biopunk" of the 90s is both biological and earthly. I see the treatment of similar themes in current young adult titles as the logical development of the genre.

Here are the books specifically mentioned in Simner's post with their Amazon.com descriptions:

• Feed by M.T. Anderson
  

  "This brilliantly ironic satire is set in a future world where television and computers are connected directly into people's brains when they are babies. The result is a chillingly recognizable consumer society where empty-headed kids are driven by fashion and shopping and the avid pursuit of silly entertainment--even on trips to Mars and the moon--and by constant customized murmurs in their brains of encouragement to buy, buy, buy."

• Spacer and Rat, by Margaret Bechard
  

  "Those Earthies. First they ruin their own planet, and now they are going to ruin the rest of the solar system! No wonder Jack and the other Spacers on Freedom Station call them "rats." Then Jack meets Kit, a rat, and her sentient Bot, Waldo, and against his better judgment finds himself drawn into their--well, orbit--and fleeing for his life."

• The City of Ember (The First Book of Ember) and The People of Sparks (Books of Ember), by Jeanne DuPrau
  

  City of Ember: "It is always night in the city of Ember. But there is no moon, no stars. The only light during the regular twelve hours of "day" comes from floodlamps that cast a yellowish glow over the streets of the city. Beyond are the pitch-black Unknown Regions, which no one has ever explored because an understanding of fire and electricity has been lost, and with it the idea of a Moveable Light. "Besides," they tell each other, "there is nowhere but here" Among the many other things the people of Ember have forgotten is their past and a direction for their future. For 250 years they have lived pleasantly, because there has been plenty of everything in the vast storerooms. But now there are more and more empty shelves--and more and more times when the lights flicker and go out, leaving them in terrifying blackness for long minutes. What will happen when the generator finally fails?"

• Siberia, by Ann Halam
  

  "In a dystopian (though vaguely familiar) wilderness called Siberia, young Rosita and her mother live in a camp as political prisoners. By day, Rosita's mother makes nails, but secretly at night, she performs her "magic" of creating and harvesting animal life with a Lindquist kit. When Rosita excels at the prison school, she is sent away to board at New Dawn School. She is quickly disenchanted, tricked into betraying her mother and sending her to die, and becomes "Sloe," helping to run a stolen-goods ring in the school. When Sloe is expelled, she returns home long enough to steal the Lindquist kit and then makes a break for the enlightened city several hundred miles to the north where her mother told her she would find safety. Halam intertwines issues of ecology, climate change, and nature conservancy with more personal themes of loneliness, identity, and trust."
  

• Taylor Five, by Ann Halam
  

  "Taylor Walker seems like any ordinary 14-year-old. Ordinary—if you overlook the fact that she lives on the island of Borneo, on a primate reserve run by her parents, and knows how to survive in the jungle. Obviously, Tay isn’t just like everyone else. But she is like one other person. She’s exactly like one other person. Tay is a clone, one of only five in the world, and her clone mother is Pam Taylor, a brilliant scientist."
  

• Life As We Knew It, by Susan Beth Pfeffer
  

  "It's almost the end of Miranda's sophomore year in high school, and her journal reflects the busy life of a typical teenager: conversations with friends, fights with mom, and fervent hopes for a driver's license. When Miranda first begins hearing the reports of a meteor on a collision course with the moon, it hardly seems worth a mention in her diary. But after the meteor hits, pushing the moon off its axis and causing worldwide earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanoes, all the things Miranda used to take for granted begin to disappear. Food and gas shortages, along with extreme weather changes, come to her small Pennsylvania town; and Miranda's voice is by turns petulant, angry, and finally resigned, as her family is forced to make tough choices while they consider their increasingly limited options. Yet even as suspicious neighbors stockpile food in anticipation of a looming winter without heat or electricity, Miranda knows that that her future is still hers to decide even if life as she knew it is over."

• Peeps and The Last Days, by Scott Westerfeld
  

  Peeps: "Nineteen-year-old Cal, a Texas transplant, lost his virginity–and a lot more–when he first arrived in New York City. He became a parasite-positive, or peep–he prefers not to use the v-word. Now he works for the Night Watch, a secret branch of city government dedicated to tracking others of his kind. Unlike the rare natural carriers like Cal, who has acquired night vision, superhuman strength, and a craving for lots of protein, most peeps are insane cannibals lurking in darkness. But now the teen has found the young woman who infected him–and learns that something worse than peeps is threatening the city, and he is on the front lines."
  
  The Last Days: "Something horrifying is bubbling up from the earth, and vampires stalk the streets of New York--but in this electric sequel to Peeps (2005), Moz and his buddy Zahler think only of forming a band. One night Moz, with the help of passerby Pearl, rescues a Fender Stratocaster guitar. Like Moz, Pearl is a musician, and a band is born. Soon the band recruits a singer, a Peep with her parasite mostly under control, and a drummer who literally sees the music and the terrifying things it attracts. Eventually it becomes clear that the new band will play a key role in the coming struggle against the powerful evil."
  

• Uglies (Uglies Trilogy, Book 1), Pretties (Uglies Trilogy, Book 2), and Specials (Uglies Trilogy, Book 3) by Scott Westerfeld
  

  "Set some time in the future, after a human-made bacteria destroyed the modern world, the trilogy tells of new cities established and tightly controlled through brainwashing and a series of operations leading to a compliant society. Tally Youngblood, the 16-year-old protagonist, learns in the first two books that free will and truth are more important than a false sense of security. In Specials, she has become an elite fighting machine, fully enhanced with nanotechnology and super-fast reflexes, and made to work as a Special Circumstances agent for the nameless city that she fled
  

Take away the teen protagonists, and I don't think these would be out of place thematically with "adult" science fiction - at least the kind I enjoy reading. So my question is this: if you exclude all the Star Wars and Star Trek tie-in novels, is the majority of current science fiction about space travel and not biology or sociology? Or are my own personal preferences blinding me to the continuing dominance of space opera?

Tags:science fiction, biology

Science Fiction Writers (and Readers) are Schizo?

I've been browsing the Time Magazine archives and ran across the following gem from 1954:

Argues [psychiatric social worker Robert] Plank (in International Record of Medicine and General Practice Clinics): many science-fiction plots betray "schizophrenic manifestations" in the minds of their authors, who work out their fantasies by literary catharsis. Similarly, he concludes, readers release the steam from their own unconscious by reading the fantasies.

Plank actually stops short of calling science fiction writers "crazy," instead claiming "these signs are becoming more conspicuous in a mechanized civilization." So the I guess it's just the times that are crazy.

(The article also taught me the term "wig-picker" as a synonym for "psychiatrist." Learn something new every day!)

Tags:science fiction, psychiatry