On science fiction and the novel
I’m getting closer to finishing my “sci-fi” novel — about California, nuclear war, nationalism, zionism, the trauma of immigration, drugs, and how modernity broke our connection to the world and ourselves, forcing us to look for meaning in the darkest places. In the process of writing it, I’ve been thinking a lot about the genre I’m nominally working in — “science fiction.” I naturally gravitated towards this genre. In part because, like a lot of teenagers, sci-fi is how I got into reading and literature. It was the gateway through which I learned to love to read, and that interest has stuck with me, although I consider most science fiction to be trashy and superficial. But the real reason I decided to write a sci-fi novel is because I thought sci-fi is the only genre that’s able to describe our lived reality with any sort of accuracy. We live in a scientific world — a world remade by industrialization, technology, and the scientific method. So much of our lives are mediated and controlled and regimented by a million different technologies that to describe the human condition today requires a writer to make technology central to whatever story they are telling.
At some point, though, I started having doubts about the whole sci-fi/non-sci-fi divide. I realized that on a fundamental level, many novels are science fiction novels. To put it another way: it became apparent to me that quite a few of the 19th-century novels that defined this literary form could be described as working within the science fiction genre. To me, the science fiction novel is a novel that deals with the impact of technology on the human condition. And many early novels fit that bill: They’re about people living in a world of rapid technological change of the industrial age. When I think about many of the early novels I’ve read, I realize that their settings are dominated by technology. They feature urban slums, factories, cramped city living, the lives of harried clerks, and the desperation of the working poor, mechanized warfare, and the malaise and psychological struggles of a new prosperous bourgeoisie and professional class created and propped up by capitalism, modernization, mass literacy, railroads, factories, global trade, and massive urban bureaucracies. I can pick out any one of the great classic novels from the last several centuries I’ve read and look at its themes, and they’ll all have social upheaval and change driven by scientific/technological progress lurking in the background.
Obviously, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, published in 1818, telegraphs its “science fiction” identity by dealing with a fantastical version of the industrial revolution — where the scientific method is taken to its logical conclusion and where man literally tries to become a god. Frankenstein is frequently cited as the defining science fiction novel, and it comes out of the Romantic tradition opposing the ugly destructiveness of industrialization. The inverted twin of Frankenstein is Edward Bellamy’s moronically simplistic Looking Backward, which imagined a limitless consumer utopia based on industrial technologies. In his world, the industrial revolution is taken to its logical conclusion, and that logical conclusion is fully automated luxury communism with no downsides. These two novels are explicitly “science fiction.” They stand out because they are very forward in their scientific dystopian/utopian narratives. But other 19th novels deal with the same themes of industrial upheaval just in a quieter, more matter-of-fact kind of way. Dickens, Zola, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Hugo, Austen…their novels all have social change driven by industrialization and modernization as themes or plots in their works. These forces are at work in the background, shaping people’s lives.
It’s not just the themes. There’s the technological reality of the genre itself. The novel emerged as a distinct form during a period of industrialization and rapid technological progress. Even how it was distributed was based on cutting-edge scientific technology: mass-producing printing presses powered in mass quantities by steam engine technology. With this new tech, novels were able to reach a mass audience on a scale never before seen. The novel was part of an emerging technological mass media society. It didn’t just describe it, it emerged out of it — and also played a big role in shaping how people thought about it, related to it. The novel — the themes and narratives that the novel took on, and the technology that made it widely accessible — it all had to do with industrialization and rapid technological change. So it’s not surprising that the novel and science are so interlinked. And the novel is still an incredible technology. It is still — despite our supposed advances in computation and virtual reality — the closest tool we have to transferring one person’s inner world to another. The novel is a technology of mental transference.
The scholarship that I’ve seen on the appearance of the novel places it in the context of the scientific revolution, capitalism, rationalism, and individualism — which are all cultural and economic trends that underpinned industrialization.1 So it’s not surprising that technological change and disruption have been central to the novel from the very beginning. The novel was born in a science fiction world where people thought there would be no limit to technological progress: immortality, unlimited growth, the colonization of the stars…all these ideas are not new but were born at the same time that the novel emerged. There’s nothing unusual about it. Just that the novel was attempting to describe life right at the moment when our world started being bulldozed and fed into the steel maws of industrialization. It’s all very organic that way.
So yeah, it doesn’t seem like a stretch that science fiction goes to the very root of the novel. We just don’t recognize most 19th-century novels as science fiction because the technologies that underpin them seem anachronistic to us today. We’ve been trained by our culture to think that anything “science fiction” has to do with super advanced technologies — flying cars, spaceships, time travel, etc.
What people now think of as “science fiction” now is a mass-market genre developed in America after World War II — geared towards adolescents and men commuting to work. Some incredible literature came out of this pulpy mass of cheap garbage, including Philip K. Dick. But this is just a tiny subsection of “science fiction” that has naturally existed in novel form since the beginning of the novel.
If we take just the novels that this post-1950s sci-fi literary subculture produced, most of them are set in exotic interplanetary locations or the deep mystical past or parallel fantastical universes with wizards and dragons. But even if they are fantastical and take place somewhere far away, these sci-fi novels always took their inspiration from the political, cultural, and technological conditions that existed at the time when they were written. That’s how the creative process works. You can only write about what you know. Writers may try to mask the personal rootedness of their fiction by introducing fantastical settings that have seemingly nothing to do with them, but it is a cheap magician’s trick. You can only write about what you know. It is physically impossible to do anything else. So sci-fi novels (like all novels) are always about the experience and the inner world of the author. Strip down the exotic space dress and a lot of these sci-fi novels — or at least the great and good ones — are a lot closer to the classic 19th-century novel form: novels that told stories about the socio-technological disturbances of their own time.
What’s interesting is that J.G. Ballard understood this. He was a “sci-fi” writer but sought to bring sci-fi back home to reality. He wanted to rescue it from the juvenile path that it had taken — with its swashbuckling space operas and magic dragons — and bring it down to our world. He wanted to make science fiction a regular novel again. Instead of projecting our technological insanity onto some distant star system, he wanted to keep it close to home…to make it explicitly about today…about his own world. Here’s how he described his approach to science fiction in an old interview. And, rereading it now, I’m realizing that he probably would have agreed with my characterization of the modern novel as basically rooted in science fiction:
I was tremendously exhilarated when I started reading American science fiction - the excitement, the enormous power of imagination, etc. But I felt they weren’t really making the most of their own landscapes and subject-matter. Right from the start what I wanted to do was write a science fiction book that got away from spaceships, the far future, and all this stuff which I felt was basically rather juvenile, to writing a kind of adult science fiction based upon the present. Why couldn’t one harness this freedom and vitality? SF is a form, above all else, that puts a tremendous premium upon the imagination, and that’s something that seems to have left the English novel in the last 150 years. Imagination is enormously important, and I felt that if one could only harness this capacity to think imaginatively in an adult SF, one would have achieved something. Right from the beginning I tried with varying success to write a science fiction about the present day, which is more difficult to do than one realizes, because the natural tendency when writing in a basically allegorical mode is to set something at a distance because it makes the separateness of the allegory that much more obvious. I wanted to write about the present day, and I think Crash, Concrete Island and the book I’ve just finished, which are a kind of trilogy, represent the conclusion of the particular logic I’ve been trying to unfold ever since I began writing. Are they SF? I don’t know - maybe the science fiction of the present day will be some-think like Crash. They come into the category of imaginative fiction, don’t they? With a strong moralistic, cautionary and exploratory note. But I don’t know whether they’re SF or not.2
