by Niall Alexander
To begin with, a confession of sorts: I don’t read nearly as much science fiction as I used to. For whatever reason – be it repetition from one novel to the next, a hunger for something more relatable or just too much of a good thing – my interest in the genre waned dramatically after a great literary binge that lasted from my late teens through my early twenties, during which I gobbled up all the greats, new and old alike, that I could get my grubby paws on. I didn’t quite go cold turkey thereafter, reading the occasional novel that the community buzzed about so loudly that I could hardly ignore its recommendations, but shame on me, it wasn’t until I kick-started The Speculative Scotsman on the first day of the first month of this shiny new decade that I returned to the genre in earnest.
I can hardly express how glad I am to have rediscovered my enthusiasm for science fiction. In a few short months, I’ve devoured The Dreaming Void, the uplifting Shine anthology, Infoquake, Silversands by Gareth Powell and both of Michael Cobley’s Humanity’s Fire novels. I’ve had to put off a return to Peter F. Hamilton’s glorious Commonwealth and the Jump 225 universe due to other, more immediate concerns (blogging, everyone – it’s a lot of work), but I’m positively hankering to make a return journey.
So there’s some context for you. The crux of all my burbling is as follows: having loved science fiction in my youth – so much so, in fact, that I look in retrospect on a few novels of its oeuvre as having inspired my affection for other genres; none more so than Dan Simmons’ Hyperion cantos – and loving it again, now, I find myself wondering, what was it that drove me away for so long? I’ve already outlined a few of the possible causes of the curious case of sci-fi fatigue I suffered from, and though I fear a definitive answer remains beyond my reach, a post on the Orbit blog by the aforementioned author of Seeds of Earth and The Orphaned Worlds raises a related issue that demands further discussion. Michael Cobley writes:
“One of the great strengths of the SF field is the way concepts and tropes are in constant flux, being shared and tweaked, refurbed and upgraded, modded and galvanised, riveted for the steampunk milieu, or even just given go-faster stripes. Of course, some carping cynics will say that this is also a major weakness since it encourages lazy writing and a lack of speculative rigour, and I have to say that there’s a lot to that.”
I’d really rather not be one of Cobley’s “carping cynics,” but though the author alludes to as much, I feel he’s a little dismissive of the “lack of speculative rigour” that riddles so much science fiction throughout the remainder of his rather optimistic short-form essay. If there was a single thing I could point to as a causal factor of my sci-fi sabbatical, it would surely be that: the concepts and tropes common across the genre. Why take so long building a world, for instance – brick by laborious brick in some cases – when you’re only going to tell the same old stories in it? Why refit an old idea simply to employ it in the same way it’s been used countless times before?
For all that science fiction purports to be a genre in which boundless imagination roams the narrative wilds untamed by such dullard concerns as reality and mere mortality, towards the end of my reading spree those words, so often spoken to champion the genre, felt somewhat hollow. Rather than freeing, sci-fi seemed to me a storytelling medium as constricting as any real-world space. It has the potential to be infinitely greater, certainly, to reach farther and harder than those novels the bookstores like to shelve under General Fiction, but the harsh reality of it was that as often as not, even the most esteemed of the genre’s fodder fell back on the same old constructs. Cobley mentions a few: the faster than light drive; the ancient, unknowable alien race. Add to those notions the once-wonderful world now made miserable and oppressive by human greed, the living spaceship, an artificial intelligence awakening to consciousness... no doubt each and every one of us could contribute a couple of other tired sci-fi concepts to the collective.
These are concepts so thoroughly explored, in fact, and from each and every angle, that they are as familiar to readers of the genre as automobiles, as mobile phones. Iteration and endless reiteration have endowed these fictions with a strange, contradictory quality: reality – no less. Figuratively speaking, the spaceship and the android, say, are no more or less real to me than those tangible things I have only experienced vicariously, through film and literature and the like. In a sense, the more science fiction I read, the less fictional it became, and during the years I indulged my appreciation for sci-fi, that exponential realism became something of a bore. I know about your AIs, I was thinking. I’ve read about them a hundred hundred times already. Tell me a story about something else. For goodness sake, imagine something new!
But genuinely new ideas are a rare commodity, and the time I took out from these far-flung, imagined worlds opened my eyes to the fact that science fiction, for all its circumspection, is in those terms a more daring genre than almost any other. And there is something to be said, no doubt, for the notion of generations of writers returning to cast bright new light on dull old concepts, or else reinvent them entirely. In a piece here on Walker of Worlds only a few days ago, Peter F. Hamilton argued that certain reports of the death of science fiction have been hugely exaggerated, and while, as the gent asserts, “debate on the internet is like throwing shoes into the sky to knock down clouds,” perhaps there is hope for us yet, for I have arrived at a conclusion not so very different from his own. The sedimentation process Hamilton speaks of, whereby “those books that keep going harden their place in culture and the market, becoming the bedrock of SF,” can also, I think, be applied to those concepts and tropes Cobley discussed earlier. Perhaps, after all, it is not groundbreaking new ideas that science fiction thrives on, per se – as, to my detriment, I once believed – but rather new ideas of ideas.
And there’s no shortage of those.
