Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
What would you say to a book lover who has never read science fiction, to persuade them to try the genre?
Written science fiction has as much variety inside it as all of literature has outside it. If you haven’t been reading sci-fi, chances are you know of it only through science fiction movies. Unfortunately, with rare exceptions, sci-fi films resemble written science fiction of the 1920s and 30s – full of adventure, a gosh-wow attitude toward technology and characters who are paper-thin, there to have terrible things happen to them and somehow find a way to survive. Mostly they’re pretty empty.
Written science fiction, on the other hand, has gone through many generations since the 1920s, few of which show up in film. When they do, nobody thinks of them as sci-fi, but they are. The Time-Traveler’s Wife, Slaughterhouse-Five and Jurassic Park are all science fiction – they just weren’t marketed that way. Somewhere in Time is well within the time-travel sub-genre. The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Being John Malkovich are absolutely science fiction, with the reality-bending inventiveness of the 1960s new wave sci-fi.
That doesn’t mean you should pop into the sci-fi or fantasy section of Barnes & Noble and grab something off the shelves at random. What you’ll find there is an awful lot of vampire novels – Twilight is making its influence felt – and heroic fantasy. I don’t read vampire novels, so I can’t tell you much about that. In fantasy, there are good and bad works depending on your tastes.
What are the good ones?
It happens that fantasy is where the best work in speculative fiction is being done right now. Long before Harry Potter reared his bespectacled head, sci-fi writers had started to migrate into fantasy, taking their science fictional techniques with them. That is, instead of mere handwavium, they devised magic systems that worked like science and created fully-realised worlds. Perhaps the most substantial example of this is George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, a work in progress that is already excellent, beginning with A Game of Thrones. But other fantasy writers, like Lynn Flewelling, Patrick Rothfuss, Robin Hobb, Brandon Sanderson and KJ Parker, are doing some of the best work ever done in science fiction – only they’re doing it in the fantasy genre.
How much of what science fiction has imagined do you think will become science fact in the future?
The point of a futuristic novel isn’t to predict the future. The point is to show how humans adapt and change to deal with whatever the future brings. The skills that sci-fi readers practice are adaptability, resourcefulness, calmness in the face of change and stress. When we read, we practice extrapolation – if this changed, then these other things would have to change as well, but this and that might remain the same. What is at the core of human nature, and what can change according to the winds of fashion or culture? So the question of sci-fi ideas becoming fact is merely a matter of coincidence.
What separates the wheat from the chaff?
Sci-fi and fantasy are author-driven genres. That is, fans do not read indiscriminately but rather look for writers who tell the kind of story they want to read. Then they become loyal to those selected writers, continuing to follow them through many books. So if you’re looking to try out science fiction, the best idea is to ask somebody who reads within the genre. Don’t ask them what they read, ask them what they reread. That’s how you’re likely to find the favourites, the classics and the best entry points.
In fact, that’s what you’re doing by looking at my five books. For me, there are three writers who brought science fiction to a place where it can endure: Asimov, Bradbury and Robert A Heinlein.
Let's begin with Isaac Asimov and The Foundation Trilogy.
Isaac Asimov wrote many good books, but the one that stands as his finest, and the one that most rewards periodic rereading, is The Foundation Trilogy – Foundation, Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation. (Yes, Second Foundation is the third volume of the trilogy.) Following Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in tracing the predictable collapse of a galaxy-wide interstellar empire, Asimov wrote with an episodic structure because each section was to be published separately in John W Campbell’s magazine Astounding.
The stories never feel fragmentary, though, because they are all woven together by the Seldon plan. Hari Seldon, at the beginning of the book, is a psychohistorian who predicts the fall of the empire – not a politically safe move to make – but instead of being executed for treason he is given safe passage to Terminus, a world at the edge of the galaxy. There, he and a team of scientists can work on the Encyclopedia Galactica, a compendium of all human knowledge, so that the dark ages following the collapse of the empire won’t take so long or sink so deeply into ignorance.
But it soon emerges that this is all a blind. Terminus is really a place for the successor empire to be seeded and grow in isolation, with Seldon’s plan marking great psychohistorical thresholds that the new empire will pass through. At each important juncture, Seldon himself reappears as a holographic image. But midway through the second book we run into something that even psychohistory couldn’t predict – a charismatic leader who throws a wrench into the works, derailing the Seldon plan and leaving the secret guardians of his future empire to scramble in order to put things back on track.
Foundation and its sequels show you the scope of first-rate extrapolative science fiction, and there is no better writer of the American plain style than Isaac Asimov. He never calls attention to himself as writer, but invisible as he is, he writes with such lucidity that everything is always clear and you slip through the story effortlessly. I loved it when I first read it at 16, and I loved it still when I reread it recently in my late 50s.
Moving onto Ray Bradbury and The Martian Chronicles.
Ray Bradbury also fits naturally into the early magazine days. The short story was and remains his natural length. It’s a shame that Fahrenheit 451 is his most-read book (schoolteachers love its tale of rescuing books from the flames) as it is far from Bradbury’s best work. In fact, the stories I love best are those collected in Dandelion Wine.
Bradbury’s love was science fiction, but not because of technology. When he went to space in The Martian Chronicles, it was already well-known that Mars was nearly or completely lifeless. It didn’t matter. He was writing about the Mars of the dreams of children growing up in the 1930s, the Mars that Edgar Rice Burroughs had written about. Bradbury’s martian stories are infused with tragedy, lost dreams, ancient glories and hope resurgent.
And the way he writes! This is language that is meant, like ancient Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse, to be read aloud. It contains its own music. It is music. When my future wife had a procedure done that required her to have her eyes covered for a time, I came over and read to her a couple of stories from I Sing the Body Electric – a marvellous collection – and that was when I realised that Bradbury’s work is crippled when you read it silently. Your lips have to form the language, you have to let his words flow out of you.
Orson Scott Card is an American author. He writes in several genres, but is best known for his science fiction. His 1985 novel Ender's Game and its sequel Speaker for the Dead both won Hugo and Nebula Awards, and he has also edited numerous anthologies of science fiction
Plausible if partisan argument that Britain is in a golden age of science fiction, overlooked and undervalued by mainstream critics
Fascinating read on how deist myths supply sci-fi's most powerful plots
Rough-hewn science fiction for pro-military libertarians. Profile of sci fi legend Robert A Heinlein 100 years on
Short, touching history of the "amateur press associations", which exchanged fanzines and functioned like a blogosphere for pre-internet science fiction fans
Tor Books, sci-fi, and the legacy of Robert A Heinlein
