...than continue trying to persuade people that Star Wars isn't science fiction. I do know that I have an itch in my mind that is satisfied when I think about some new, interesting idea, and its ramifications for human society. Reading science fiction stories usually scratches this itch, so that's why I like them. But a lot of science fiction stories are just tricking me into thinking about real world problems of the present ("Dynasties"), or age-old aspects of the human condition like love ("Impossible Dreams"). I feel ripped off when I hear these stories, because I invested my time with them, and I still itch. Like ordering a beer and getting a non-alcoholic beer. They may be great in every other way, but I find them unsatisfying and sometimes they actually piss me off. In the end I don't actually care if they are science fiction or not, I just know that I don't like them.
To be honest I find this kind of depressing. I used to think that expressing novel-ness was the point of science fiction. But after participating on the EP forum, reading the Nebula nominees and the Hugo nominees, I guess I'm wrong. Now I don't know what the point is.
Can I stand up and say
YES,
completely?
I think the big problem we're having here is that a lot of people are piping up after a story they find unsatisfying to say "This piece is conceptually weak, and not imaginatively rigorous enough" but the way they are choosing to say that is "This isn't Science Fiction". Its a fair position to go for, because for roughly the first 30 years of the modern-genre, one of SF's main trappings was that the
idea had to be primary. And further, this
idea game role became so pivotal to the genre (which had everything from the political tracts of Le Guin and Rand to the religious space-battles of Zelazny, but all still playing a game of "how do I make this idea consistent") that it was regarded by many as what held it together.
I get quite angry with "forget genre" people (a group who I seem to encounter in every creative-writing setting, whatever I am trying to write), because a genre is not a straight jacket - its a shared language. If you take away all your limitations: of style, setting, concept, language... You don't get the pure quill of new invention, you get a blank page with nothing on it. The great leaps forward in creativity occur when someone shows a new framework to work in, not breaks down restrictive barriers of the old. A genre is a shared set of tools that allow you to build within it, an accepted relationship between the author and their ideal reader. Early SF was written with "How do I get this past John Campbell and Horace Gold" in mind for almost every word, so I suppose you could define SF as "The genre of people writing to please Gold and Campbell". In any venue where you see creativity taking place, you see people using a shared language in order to speak. Some of the most creative fiction (and I am thinking of House Of Leaves by Mark Danielewski here for horror, or Paul Auster's New York Trilogy for Noire) not only embraces it's genre, but the genre rules become so primary to it that it couldn't possibly be original the way it is, without it.
The problem is that such a large proportion of SF is now written around a different set of rules, this old fashioned fundamental is not only rejected, but irritating to others. To a vast amount of the readership, SF is a fantastic genre with a futuristic setting and action. The escapist side to the genre has become the primary trapping, and what a lot of the readership are looking for when they buy an SF book/ watch an SF film/ listen to an SF podcast. If people didn't care about genre, we wouldn't be investing this amount of emotional effort into having this argument time and time again, the problem is that Escapism/imaginative whimsy and Concept are two different underlying priorities, and shouldn't really be trying to co-exist in one genre. I don't think we're going to solve this argument just by saying "SF is whatever I say it is" and wielding a big stick.
I, personally, am never going to embrace SF stories that revolve primarily around Escapism. Not what I want with my meat and potatoes. That's fair enough, I don't run this podcast, but I think that those of us commenting from this position need to come to an agreement about how we say this "this is insufficiently developed imaginatively to be good imaginative fiction" argument, without being bashed on the head for
arguing about genre again.
I don't think that is the argument we are trying to have. I passionately wish there was a genre of fiction based on Idea development as a vehicle to tell a story, but unfortunately we lost this battle about 30 years ago, due to a man named Lucas... According to the Damon Knight rule, SF is whatever the SF community as a median thinks it is. They disagree with us.
"EP is a genre ‘zine. We’re looking for science fiction and fantasy. Please don’t send us anything that doesn’t fit those descriptions. And by the way, we mean SF/F on a level that matters to the plot. Your story about a little boy receiving a balloon before his heart transplant may be touching literature, but it probably isn’t something we’re interested in, even if you edit it so that the balloon’s an alien and the heart came from Satan." - From the EP submissions guideline, because SF is what we all want, if only we could agree on what it is.