Dark SF in the modern world
I find a pleasing irony in the concept that while the mother of dark SF, Mary Shelley, wrote with such insight into human nature that it still holds meaning today, it is the popular misconception of Frankenstein that holds a lesson for the modern world: Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein was the man who created the monster, but Hollywood made the uninformed believe that Frankenstein was the monster’s name, not the man’s.
We haven’t merely created the monster, we’ve created the tool that showed us we are the monster.
Although this is far from a new concept (Shelley knew it all along), there seems to have been a strengthening movement over the last decade in dark SF toward the idea that it is the human handling of technology (or, in some cases, the too-human characteristics of technology) in which the horror lies, not the technology itself. Look at Jennifer Pelland’s “Captive Girl,” in which it is being stripped of technology that causes problems, not the other way around. The failings are purely human.
There is also a long-growing movement away from the traditional roles of good and evil, acknowledging the range of motives and actions in protagonists and antagonists alike. Look at Orson Scott Card’s “Dogwalker,” in the 80s, whose hacker protagonist offers few redeeming qualities, yet one feels empathy for him in the end. The nearly overwhelming fame of Anne Rice’s vampire books in the early 90s is another example of this bad-as-good emergence. Evil became smart, sexy, utterly compelling, and sold millions of copies worldwide.
Then there is the current proliferation of superhero and crimefighting fiction that has monopolized TV prime time for most of the last decade (anyone want a CSI franchise or a comic book spinoff?). Ratings go up when the “good guys” get themselves into trouble of their own making or when moral dilemmas lead them into grey areas where personal integrity must be sacrificed for a questionable “greater good.” It isn’t a wholehearted move into dark SF, but it points the way for a broader exploration to begin.
Meeting the Darkness
Some readers dismisses any kind of horror as fiction as something to be read only for voyeuristic pleasure or a cathartic adrenaline rush. It’s true that the shadows of literature can have those somewhat guilty pleasures, but there is a great richness in the exploration of hidden or forbidden fears and experiencing the full spectrum of human possibility.
Horror, in its best form, teaches the reader something about herself. It’s no surprise the original fairy tales were full of blood and gore and little girls getting mauled by primal forces; it’s also no coincidence that they were used to teach. Charming strangers will gobble you up (Little Red Riding Hood); getting what you want can come at great price (King Midas, various wish-related tales); not everything is as it appears on the surface (Beauty and the Beast, Diamonds and Toads, etc).
Today, we live in a science fiction world. I remember when no one knew what a url was, then the next week, when every billboard had one. Dark SF can range from the dystopian to true horror in a science fiction setting, but every part of the spectrum has something to learn from, and many of the lessons are the same now as they ever were—especially that one about charming strangers. The news has become our teaching tale, showing us little girls who stray from the path into the clutches of pedophiles met on MySpace or Google Lively. The forests of social networking have tempting fruits and dark poisons, both of which await the unwary.
Big Brother may not be watching as closely as Orwell prophesied, but he’s there, and so is the rest of the world, just waiting for the next blog post, FaceBook update, MySpace photo, or Twitter. We’ve created the vehicle for the monsters we fear, but instead of the dark maze of the woods, we’ve embedded it in delicately soldered microchips. The clean lines of metal and silicone aren’t much comfort when we know the monster lurks behind them, so at some point we have to look into the mechanical eye and see what is staring back.
Exploring the Darkness
A story that disturbs, on a deep level, your faith in the rightness of the world—a book that makes you want to put it down because your mind refuses to wrap around the concepts contained within—is a book that makes you think. You can’t help it. The human brain requires a response to fear; that’s basic survival. A reader knows a book won’t harm her, but instinct kicks in and the mind doesn’t rest until some sort of resolution is found.
It was Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters
Human history is riddled with major change based on scientific discovery and advances in technology and physics—we can’t pull back from such developments, can’t un-prove what has been proven; it changes our lives forever, just like the Titans in The Puppet Masters. The universe stopped revolving around the Earth, and the fundamentals of religious belief were forced to change. The atom was split; warfare suddenly had further-reaching consequences than anyone had imagined, and the basic belief that the world would always be there died overnight. It is no wonder our relationship with emerging science is one of fascinated fear, and no wonder that many authors of science fiction choose to stretch into the darkness and see what kind of ideas they can pull back out to examine in the light of the backlit page.
Letting the Darkness In
Reading is a safe activity. It lets us sit in comfort and absorb ideas on our own time, turn them over until we can process them, make sense of them, and file them away. This makes it the ideal vehicle for meeting the fears that surround us.
We created that Frankensteinian monster of technology. Then we went and made ourselves dependent upon it for information, communication, finances and commerce. We can’t destroy the monster and go back to the way things were. Our world has changed, and the only choice now is to learn from it.
This is what dark SF teaches us: the world is a frightening, fantastic place, but you don’t need to be a superhero to live in it. You don’t have to be a 100% “good guy.” You don’t even have to survive in the end. What you must do is learn, adapt, and keep pushing the edges of the darkness; keep looking in its face until you have the strength to either stand up to it or invite it in on your own terms. There are choices to be made even when every option is terrible, and dark fiction lets us sort through the worst of those options a writer’s mind can share, learning how to handle our true options with greater strength and determination. Lillith Iyapo says it best in Octavia Butler’s Dawn
Deb Taber is Senior Book Editor at Apex Publications and a graduate of the Clarion West Writers’ Workshop. She is also Managing Editor at a trade magazine for the horse industry by day and a writer by the light of the moon when it manages to peer out from the Pacific Northwest cloud cover. Her fiction has appeared in Apex Digest, Shadowed Realms, and is forthcoming in Fantasy Magazine. Her nonfiction has appeared in many places, but she rarely admits where. The most disturbing book she ever read was M.J. Engh’s Arslan. One day, she plans to read it again.
You can find her infrequent ramblings at her blog.
