Science Fiction Archives - Carl Kruse

Thoughts on Science Fiction

by Fraser Hibbitt for the Carl Kruse Arts Blog

Science fiction has striven off its striking position in the world of letters. In the past century, it has evolved tremendously, unexpectedly, and not without its controversies. This transformative potential of SF signals something of its quality; this fiction of the speculative in which speculation can become troubled; a method of projection where the project can become equivocal. After the phases of SF seen in the last century, it has become increasingly difficult to define. There was a time when Heinlein could state: ‘a handy short definition of almost all science fiction might be read: realistic speculation about possible future events, based solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world, past and present, and on a thorough understanding of the nature and significance of the scientific method’. A prosaic line that many SF writers after Heinlein disagreed with, and taking Heinlein’s definition in mind, the points of contention, of diversion, are already there: ‘realistic’, ‘adequate knowledge’, ‘real world’, ‘past and present’, are all terms that SF writers interrogate in significantly perceptive ways. SF is, and continues to be, an open form with a remarkable receptivity for the limits of thought.

SF has been able to divide itself into sub-genres with relative ease, and the cause and impetus behind definition seems no more than a method for categorization, a method of hemming, outlining the richness of its themes, all radiating from the central SF point: Steampunk, Biopunk, Post-apocalyptic, Dying Earth, Space Opera etc. There have been significant and obvious transitions in the last century alone: Pulp SF to the Golden Age, from there to New Wave. With the inventive foundations of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, ‘scientification’ in a narrativized romance could be more than just entertainment. The composition of artistic vision and scientific fact was felt to be, in the words of Hugo Gernsback, publisher of the first US SF magazine, “instructive […] They supple knowledge…in a very palatable form…New adventures pictured for us in the science fiction of today are not at all impossible of realization tomorrow”. And, possibly not what Gernsback had in mind, a story by J.G. Ballard still has this message, even if the story’s outcome is a damning one.

Carl Kruse Arts Blog - War of the Worlds

It is the SF form, then, that supplies this distinct experience: an instructive sense of wonder. It is remarkable that it should so considering the essential mechanism of alienation which SF often employs. A SF novel can confirm a reality far distant from our own, but still display the essential experience of humanity – if it didn’t, if some mirror did not reflect our self, our society, our grasp of knowledge, then it would make for trying reading. It may be, arguably, able to reach a sense of clarity on being so far removed from daily experience. As with all literature, it has that unique quality of depicting, simulating, ideas, only SF has the extended metaphor of scientific speculation as an aid. For example, looking at the heads of the ‘Golden Age’, Heinlein, Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, there are particular themes that emerge from each: Libertarianism, the wonder of science, and a return of spiritualism which had been neglected during the Gernsback years. SF proved equal to take the burden of these ideas comfortably.

The question emerges: why write in the SF form if you are interested, for example, as Heinlein was, in libertarianism? Of course, Heinlein was free to choose, and being a scientist himself, it makes sense, but not focusing on Heinlein explicitly makes it an ambiguous question to answer. Literary fiction, from the early twentieth century, and still into the period in which Heinlein began writing, had been under the tension of Modernism, and the form of the novel had been shown to be amenable to experimentation. We can think of Joyce’s Ulysses or Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. The Modernist fascination with the experience of Being, and the ambiguity of life, is, in some ways diametrically opposite to the sharp-cut mission of science. It is precisely because form and content could be fashioned with clarity, and with something analogous to the ‘scientific method’ that one would pen a SF novel. SF, at least during the Golden Age, could distill ideas into a manageable form, could extrapolate principles from what they knew then, and use the novel as an informed exploration. It was operating on a larger scale than the minute subtleties sought by other fictions.

It is not only this clarity of style and content that the earlier SF writers employed; they were also alerting readers to another facet of experience: our relationship with technology. Much of SF points to the fact that, not only is our relationship to experience mediated by technology, but a large part of how we gain access, understanding, and control of ourselves and our environment, is through technology. It is the stuff that coheres our societies, and enables our scientific ambitions to understand the universe. The SF interest in an object, a ‘gizmo’, especially during the Golden Age and before, can be measured by its utility for humanity, and by this the reader can infer a certain outlook on how the world is perceived, felt to function. The New Wave transition in SF, around the 60s, found that there was another facet to explore in our relationship to technology, one not so optimistic.

New Wave Writers were looking back on the Modernist tradition and wondering how to bring experimentation into the form and content of SF. It was felt as a less gripping, more pretentious, age of SF, but it did give space for a certain sensitivity to break through into the SF channel; themes and explorations awaking to a more anxious note would be found in a writer like Philip K. Dick; the subtle complexities of social classes were explored in writers like Samuel Delaney and Ursula Le Guin; each, in their turn, awake to the fundamental ambiguity of humanity’s position in the universe. After the dust of experimentation settled, even a Golden Age writer like Isaac Asimov made use of this shift in sensitivity, finding space to write about a menage-a-trois and homo-eroticism where before sexuality featured little in his novels. There is no doubt that New Wave help introduce what used to be called the ‘soft sciences’ into SF: psychology, sociology, political science and history. It is not that the foundations of SF were forgotten, but that they were complicated; no longer did the scientific method seem useful. Understanding that technology is an extension of human consciousness, and that the schools of psychology and sociology had expanded rigorously, rendered new cause to engage with this relationship between the self and technology.

Where this technology came from, how it was and could be used, became of interest. The fuel of the 60’s ‘consciousness expanding’ culture definitely played a part in SF’s response to its legacy. It gave them the critical ability to look back and re-work older themes, contemplate with the time past how SF could be a pertinent form of writing for the world that had seen a man on the moon, and was growing increasingly bureaucratic and technologically driven. By pushing the boundaries of what could be considered SF in a similar way that Modernism pushed the boundaries of what could be considered literary fiction, New Wave also opened a space for concern; concerns about human delusions, stupidity, and the myth of human superiority. This pessimism was a first step into a more rounded SF, once the furore of New Wave died down.

But much more was happening here, and looking closely, the significant shift, or tension, of New Wave appears to be only a way-station on the journey of speculation, of sense-making, and the sense of wonder over the latter. What part of SF one prefers shouldn’t cloud the judgment on its movement – whether how much something ‘progresses’, or merely changes, means it has evolved for the better is difficult to discern; any controversy is only highlighting the tension in the shift. SF was, and continues to be, an open endeavour of thought. What can be discerned in SF, especially in the SF of the last century, is a stable form of conception that has some baring, some pertinence, to our cultural milieu. It is tempting to read its pattern throughout the last century as a kind of undercurrent to history – one that is aware of the subtle shifts in consciousness, shifts in attitudes towards human limitations. The sense of wonder that lingers throughout, perhaps dipping now and then, but remaining a stalwart agent of its prose, is more than wonder for wonder’s sake – a strange wonder that can be both exciting and terrifying, ambiguous and painfully clear; a multi-form conduit for the myriad conceptions SF attempts to reveal.

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The Carl Kruse Arts Blog homepage.
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
Other articles by Fraser Hibbitt include the Art of Insane51, Vangelis, and the Art of Atari|
An author beloved by the blog, who also ventured into the fantastical, was Borges.

Thinking About Realism

by Fraser Hibbitt for the Carl Kruse Arts Blog

Realism tells tales like any other genre, and it is odd that we should be forced through much digression knowing that point. What I mean when I say Realism is the specific genre of fiction that wishes to imitate contemporary life in a ‘realistic’ manner. Realism has come to possess a high-standing position in fiction, perhaps because of its focus on being ‘realistic’, though the terms aren’t interchangeable. Somewhere from the birth of Realism, the idea and notion of what is ‘realistic’ began to be associated with the genre. This confusion shouldn’t cause other genres to be remonstrated for their disobedience to the Realist notion of fiction, or to art more generally.

If the term, Realism, were put to me, I would immediately conjure up the nineteenth century. Courbet and his manifesto to paint ‘real history’; Dickens and the convoluted tales of Victorian London. What this meant for them, and it was something remarkable, was seeing history as it was lived in their own time. Courbet wanted to paint life in nineteenth century France, not figures from Classical mythology; Dickens wanted to scrutinize the culture in which he lived. Realism made fiction relatable in a new and subtle way.

Gustave Courbet’s, The Stonebreakers – 1849

But as to being realistic, Dickens’ novels are full on inconsistencies and things that either aren’t true or are at least far-fetched. I’m not going to fling a novel aside if there are some inconsistencies, or ‘unrealistic’ things occurring. What then has Realism offered to vouchsafe an association with being realistic? Victorian novelists were able to take large swathes of society and inspect them; compose a story through them in a form that is relatable and thought-provoking to the audience. The style of writing too, for the most part, took on a third-person narrator, an omniscient voice which the reader followed. Realism makes use of imagination to create events that could happen, and people that we might meet. It is this use of imagination painting itself as ‘realistic’ that gives Realism such force.

Realism united the storyteller with a vision of the ‘now’, bolstered by the ‘realistic’ framework. Realism is composed as any other genre of fiction or art is. The Realist artist wants to express something, to create something, as any other artist does – to bring something to attention, to express something from a different perspective. As for the case of Realism, there are solid grounds for viewing its formation as one directed towards social conscientiousness: Dickens’ semi-moralizing; Thackeray’s satires. Yet a piece of fiction Realism remains, and writing, as an ambiguous fiction, has always been troubled by its relationship with reality.

The story of Realism becomes complex when we cross into the twentieth century. The movements of the fin-de-siecle were more interested in style and expression than to show what was ‘realistic’ – but then again, this made a presumption between the link of Realism and the realistic, an easy connection that one might make. Yet what the outbreak of Modernism in the first half of the twentieth century shows us is a profound and incredible search for a form to express their time. This is arguably a search for what could be termed ‘Realism’. The fascination with the nature of time and the conscious mind made their work experimental but it does not mean that it was in any way ‘unrealistic’ considering what they understood about the nature of living. It was partly in search for a new Realism that gave rise to the multi-faceted complexity of Modernist art.

Carl Kruse Art Blog - Marcel Duchamp Painting

Nude Descending the Staircase No. 2 by Marcel Duchamp, 1910. One of Carl Kruse’s favorite Modernist paintings.

If we were to see genres, and stylistic forms of writing, as trying to come close to certain forms of reality, we would be closer to something like a working critical framework. Take, for example, James Joyce’s Ulysses, for all that it details, it is also a tapestry of forms which work in different ways to express specific things. A beach scene can be written in sentimental prose, the contemplative in a stream of consciousness. Ulysses is postulating that different forms work to express different sentiments of life, and what a true ‘Realism’ would entail is a complex intersection of the various forms.

Yet arguably, as opposed to the search for new forms, the classical nineteenth century Realism reigns. Why this Realism has such a prominent place in our artistic tradition is hard to answer with any certainty; it may be its inclusive nature; its desire to tell the tale of the common citizen, and its association with the realistic only adds strength and appeal. On another hand, it seriously limits our capability to contemplate other truths that experimental, speculative, and fantastical genres may be reaching towards. When we read Science Fiction, we comprehend the story precisely because we can play the detective. We understand patterns and an idea of coherency. These stories can cohere in complex and interesting ways to engage the audience, producing a whole range of emotional and intellectual attachment.

And it is all the more remarkable that genres such as Fantasy and Science Fiction can evoke emotion without the tendency towards grounding us in a resemblance of our own world – with all the sense of meaning which that has. In fact, it offers such a fertile ground for developing ideas that represent, and express, features of our lived experience in a way that could not be described so in a Realist piece of fiction. The freedom from the Realist frame gives us yet another method of discriminating what we make of the world and of ourselves.

The Realist frame sets out to cover all bases but clearly is unable to do so. Realism is readily relatable because its strict desire to imitate the experience of life, though what that means becomes ambiguous on inspection. We begin to see that Realism is only a kind of imitation, not the imitation of life. Realism works on a hidden presumption that its style, its kind of imitation should be the case, but it must be remembered, or at least contemplated, at what loss does this imitation come? The act of creation is also that of seclusion and the question of representation is a huge one.

Criticism which presumes a Realist approach to judge something can neglect the finer, and poetic, devices of a narrative. The position of criticizing any novel is no easy feat, and it needs to scrutinize the method of the work. It is always interesting when a critic formulates a vocabulary for judging something, but there is a danger of this vocabulary becoming prescriptive, leaving supposed ‘unrelated’ features by the wayside – like the use of Realism, criticism judges by one side of a work which may offer a multi-faceted interpretation.

Indeed, some things come down taste. If you don’t like something you’ve read, or seen, you’re likely to begin to think of reason as to why you don’t like it. If you land on ‘it’s not realistic’ then you can safely be done with the problem of disliking something for no reason. That the term ‘not being realistic’ can be utilized as a ready-made objection removes us from the work of actually discussing the work; it does not show whether this makes the work unsuccessful in its own objective, or if its universally a poor piece of art, it only shows a favoring of a kind of imitation.

The promotion of Realism, through its association of being ‘realistic’, cuts through the ambiguity of what it means to write ‘realistically’. To recognize genre as an extension of style, however, gives us a capability to discern how art works to express itself. It may be our tastes vary from this to that, but I doubt it is so absolute. Science Fiction and other speculative genres sponsor a reality of their own – the fact that we can understand them and sense their coherency solves any ambiguity around that matter. This is not to throw away Realism, it is a wonderful frame of expression and can serve as an excellent foil to other styles, other kinds of imitation. However, the dependability on, and the standardization of, Realism, as more than a stylistic approach, sincerely limits our thinking on the act of expression.

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Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
The last blog post was an expose of the ceramic work of Manon de Vlieger.
Fraser Hibbitt also wrote on the exquisitely quirky MONA Musem in Tasmania.
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