I know it when I read it

Guest Blog by Sheila Finch on October 28 2008

Numerous people far more knowledgeable than I have taken a crack at defining science fiction without pinning the subject down to everybody’s satisfaction. Norman Spinrad seemed to throw his hands up in despair, claiming, “Science fiction is anything published as science fiction.” This is rather like the Supreme Court judge who claimed to know porno when he saw it. Lately I’ve been reading a number of books that weren’t published as science fiction yet seem to me to slide across the border when the critics weren’t looking. But what makes the difference?

Let’s begin with the two main starting points of sf. The first is, “If this goes on...” and the second, “What if...?” The answer to these questions gives us a genre story. (Obviously, a mainstream story that introduces – say – a dysfunctional family and their misadventures is answering the first question. But in sf, we intend that “this” be more than just personal circumstance, that it be more culturally or globally significant, and that it have to do with science or technology.) And add to these starting points, Theodore Sturgeon‘s admonition to writers to speculate just a bit further: “Ask the next question.”

I find most non-genre works that venture into the sf field fail to do that, adopting sf tropes but not willing to go much further. The prime example of this is John Updike’s Roger’s Version, which begins with a wonderful “what if” scenario: A computer scientist hits upon the idea of setting up a program to finally prove the existence of God one way or another. But alas, instead of following this idea to its probably sensational end, Updike wimps out and Roger gives up his search before it gets there. I really don’t think an audience of sf readers would have allowed him to get away with that.

In similar fashion, Cormac McCarthy’s recent bestseller The Road takes on the “if this goes on” premise. McCarthy gives us a truly futuristic feel of landscape after the collapse of civilization, and a harrowing story of a man and his son trying to survive, but it’s all scenery and no new revelation. McCarthy fails to ask Sturgeon’s next question: Okay, the world is ruined, but then what? What I’m talking about here are the sf reader’s expectations, the belief that the story should offer something more than just plot and scenery and good characterization. Science fiction has trained us to expect the working out of an original idea to its possible conclusion.

Then I picked up Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. I’d read Ishiguro’s earlier work such as The Remains of the Day, and I’d heard that he’d strayed into science fiction recently, but I’d forgotten that possibility. Consequently, I came to the novel with no preconceived ideas. This is a first-person narrative from a character named “Kathy H.” Nobody has last names in this book, which at first annoyed me as a possible affectation on the author’s part, but later added to the ominous tone that develops. Kathy tells us that she is something called a “carer,” never defined but gradually coming into focus as the book progresses. Her time as a carer is about to run out, and there’s something sinister about that because she’s still young and good at her job. It becomes increasingly obvious to the reader that the reason Kathy spends no time agonizing over her situation is that she finds it absolutely normal. As the parameters of her world and her expected role in it emerge, the central story becomes horrifyingly clear. Yet while the reader is shuddering, Kathy takes her fate for granted. And that is the scariest part of the novel – and the most science fictional. Ishiguro has given us a prime example of “if this goes on” – taking an idea that today is just a gleam in a medical researcher’s eye and following it to its chilling conclusion.

Ishiguro brings us into his story right in the middle of things without a roadmap. The best science fiction has been doing this for a very long time and is often initially difficult to read. Think of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange for a notable example. Readers unused to the conventions of sf often complain about this. But stopping for explanation would destroy the illusion of being there, wouldn’t it? Ursula Le Guin described this kind of expository lump in fiction this way: The captain of the starship turns to his crew, in the middle of a huge battle, and says, “As you know, men, this starship runs on the X method.....” No such lumps in Ishiguro’s wonderful novel! Too bad it’s too late to recommend it for a Nebula.

So, what’s the answer to the question we started with? What actually distinguishes science fiction from mainstream borrowing its tropes? Not just stories set in the future, or even stories using future technology. It’s the exploration – comic or tragic – of the way the lives of ordinary people would be changed, by technology or societal upheaval, from what we consider the norm today that makes an sf story. Sam Goldwyn is reputed to have told aspiring screenwriters, “If you want to send a message, use Western Union,” but as sf readers, we seem to have no problem with “message” in our fiction; in fact we often demand it. (A young man I know who had just read The Road said, “Yeah, it was well done. But what was the point?”) Damon Knight once said the definition of fiction is “something changes for someone.” We want a book to ask the next question about that change, going beyond the sensational to probabilities that we must ponder.

Science fiction isn’t just literature published as science fiction. It doesn’t really matter who publishes it, or what label gets put on it. Science fiction is a special form of Einstein’s gedanken experimenten. As readers, we are asked to consider the most important question of all before it’s too late: Do we really want this to happen?

The author of eight novels, more than thirty short stories, dozens of poems and articles about science fiction, SHEILA FINCH has received several awards, including the Nebula Award, the Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel in the Field, and the San Diego Book Award for Young Adult fiction. She has given workshops at
writers’ conferences all over Southern California and recently retired from twenty-eight years of teaching creative writing and science fiction at El Camino College, California. She lives in Long Beach, California, with a cat and two retired racing greyhounds.
To learn more about Sheila, see her website or read her blog.

All Guest Blogs

You can view all guest blogs here.

RSS Feed

Email Updates

You can also subscribe to receive new guest blog posts via email.

2009 Nebula Award Novel Nominees

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

The Love We Share Without Knowingby Christopher Barzak

Flesh and Fire by Laura Anne Gilman

The City & The Cityby China Miéville

Bone Shakerby Cherie Priest

Finch by Jeff VanderMeer

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

Anderson Lake is a company man, AgriGen's Calorie Man in Thailand. Under cover as a factory manager, Anderson combs Bangkok's street markets in search of foodstuffs thought to be extinct, hoping to reap the bounty of history's lost calories. There, he encounters Emiko...

Emiko is the Windup Girl, a strange and beautiful creature. One of the New People, Emiko is not human; instead, she is an engineered being, creche-grown and programmed to satisfy the decadent whims of a Kyoto businessman, but now abandoned to the streets of Bangkok. Regarded as soulless beings by some, devils by others, New People are slaves, soldiers, and toys of the rich in a chilling near future in which calorie companies rule the world, the oil age has passed, and the side effects of bio-engineered plagues run rampant across the globe.

What Happens when calories become currency? What happens when bio-terrorism becomes a tool for corporate profits, when said bio-terrorism's genetic drift forces mankind to the cusp of post-human evolution? In The Windup Girl, award-winning author Paolo Bacigalupi returns to the world of "The Calorie Man" ( Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award-winner, Hugo Award nominee, 2006) and "Yellow Card Man" (Hugo Award nominee, 2007) in order to address these poignant questions.

About the Author

Paolo Bacigalupi’s writing has appeared in High Country News, Salon.com, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. It has been anthologized in various “Year’s Best” collections of short science fiction and fantasy, nominated for a Nebula and four Hugo awards, and has won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for best sf short story of the year.

The Love We Share Without Knowing by Christopher Barzak

In this haunting, richly woven novel of modern life in Japan, the author of the acclaimed debut One for Sorrow explores the ties that bind humanity across the deepest divides. Here is a Murakamiesque jewel box of intertwined narratives in which the lives of several strangers are gently linked through love, loss, and fate.

On a train filled with quietly sleeping passengers, a young man’s life is forever altered when he is miraculously seen by a blind man. In a quiet town an American teacher who has lost her Japanese lover to death begins to lose her own self. On a remote road amid fallow rice fields, four young friends carefully take their own lives—and in that moment they become almost as one. In a small village a disaffected American teenager stranded in a strange land discovers compassion after an encounter with an enigmatic red fox, and in Tokyo a girl named Love learns the deepest lessons about its true meaning from a coma patient lost in dreams of an affair gone wrong.

From the neon colors of Tokyo, with its game centers and karaoke bars, to the bamboo groves and hidden shrines of the countryside, these souls and others mingle, revealing a profound tale of connection—uncovering the love we share without knowing.

Exquisitely perceptive and deeply affecting, Barzak’s artful storytelling deftly illuminates the inner lives of those attempting to find—or lose—themselves in an often incomprehensible world.

About the Author

Christopher Barzak grew up in rural Ohio, went to university in a decaying post-industrial city in Ohio, and has lived in a Southern California beach town, the capital of Michigan, and in the suburbs of Tokyo, Japan, where he taught English in rural junior high and elementary schools. His stories have appeared in a many venues, including Nerve.com, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Strange Horizons, Salon Fantastique, Interfictions, Asimov’s, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. His first novel, One for Sorrow, was published by Bantam Books in Fall of 2007, and won the Crawford Award that same year. He is the co-editor (with Delia Sherman) of Interfictions 2, and has done Japanese-English translation on Kant: For Eternal Peace, a peace theory book published in Japan for Japanese teens. Currently he lives in Youngstown, Ohio, where he teaches writing at Youngstown State University.

Flesh and Fire by Laura Anne Gilman

Once, all power in the Vin Lands was held by the prince-mages, who alone could craft spellwines, and selfishly used them to increase their own wealth and influence. But their abuse of power caused a demigod to break the Vine, shattering the power of the mages. Now, fourteen centuries later, it is the humble Vinearts who hold the secret of crafting spells from wines, the source of magic, and they are prohibited from holding power.

But now rumors come of a new darkness rising in the vineyards. Strange, terrifying creatures, sudden plagues, and mysterious disappearances threaten the land. Only one Vineart senses the danger, and he has only one weapon to use against it: a young slave. His name is Jerzy, and his origins are unknown, even to him. Yet his uncanny sense of the Vinearts' craft offers a hint of greater magics within -- magics that his Master, the Vineart Malech, must cultivate and grow. But time is running out. If Malech cannot teach his new apprentice the secrets of the spellwines, and if Jerzy cannot master his own untapped powers, the Vin Lands shall surely be destroyed.

In Flesh and Fire, first in a spellbinding new trilogy, Laura Anne Gilman conjures a story as powerful as magic itself, as intoxicating as the finest of wines, and as timeless as the greatest legends ever told.

About the Author

Born in the late 1960’s in suburban New Jersey, Laura Anne endured only moderate trauma - and some good times - before escaping to Skidmore College. After graduation, given the choice between grad school and employment, the lure of a paycheck took her to NYC and a career in publishing, while working nights and weekends to get her writing career started. In 2004, she and corporate America decided they needed a break from each other. Her first original novel contract in-hand, Laura Anne became a full-time freelancer, and never looked back. She is the author of the Cosa Nostradamus books for Luna (the “Retrievers” and “Paranormal Scene Investigations” series), a YA trilogy for HarperCollins, and the forthcoming Vineart War books from Pocket, while continuing to write and sell short fiction. She also writes paranormal romances for Nocturne as Anna Leonard. Laura Anne is also an amateur chef, oenophile, and cat-servant. She lives in New York City, where she also runs d.y.m.k. productions.

The City & The City by China Miéville

When a murdered woman is found in the city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks to be a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad. But as he investigates, the evidence points to conspiracies far stranger and more deadly than anything he could have imagined.

Borlú must travel from the decaying Beszel to the only metropolis on Earth as strange as his own. This is a border crossing like no other, a journey as psychic as it is physical, a shift in perception, a seeing of the unseen. His destination is Beszel’s equal, rival, and intimate neighbor, the rich and vibrant city of Ul Qoma. With Ul Qoman detective Qussim Dhatt, and struggling with his own transition, Borlú is enmeshed in a sordid underworld of rabid nationalists intent on destroying their neighboring city, and unificationists who dream of dissolving the two into one. As the detectives uncover the dead woman’s secrets, they begin to suspect a truth that could cost them and those they care about more than their lives.

What stands against them are murderous powers in Beszel and in Ul Qoma: and, most terrifying of all, that which lies between these two cities.

Casting shades of Kafka and Philip K. Dick, Raymond Chandler and 1984, The City & the City is a murder mystery taken to dazzling metaphysical and artistic heights.

About the Author

China Miéville is the author of King Rat; Perdido Street Station, winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the British Fantasy Award; The Scar, winner of the Locus Award and the British Fantasy Award; Iron Council, winner of the Locus Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award; Looking for Jake, a collection of short stories; and Un Lun Dun, his New York Times bestselling book for younger readers. He lives and works in London.

Boneshaker by Cherie Priest

In the early days of the Civil War, rumors of gold in the frozen Klondike brought hordes of newcomers to the Pacific Northwest. Anxious to compete, Russian prospectors commissioned inventor Leviticus Blue to create a great machine that could mine through Alaska’s ice. Thus was Dr. Blue’s Incredible Bone-Shaking Drill Engine born.

But on its first test run the Boneshaker went terribly awry, destroying several blocks of downtown Seattle and unearthing a subterranean vein of blight gas that turned anyone who breathed it into the living dead.

Now it is sixteen years later, and a wall has been built to enclose the devastated and toxic city. Just beyond it lives Blue’s widow, Briar Wilkes. Life is hard with a ruined reputation and a teenaged boy to support, but she and Ezekiel are managing. Until Ezekiel undertakes a secret crusade to rewrite history.

His quest will take him under the wall and into a city teeming with ravenous undead, air pirates, criminal overlords, and heavily armed refugees. And only Briar can bring him out alive.

About the Author

Cherie Priest made her debut with the Eden Moore series of Southern Gothic ghost stories that began with Four and Twenty Blackbirds. She lives in Seattle, Washington, and keeps a popular blog at cmpriest.livejournal.com.

Finch by Jeff VanderMeer

Tasked with solving an impossible double murder, detective John Finch searches for the truth among the rubble of the once-mighty city of Ambergris. Under the rule of the mysterious gray caps, Ambergris is falling into anarchy. The remnants of a rebel force are demoralized and dispersed, their leader, the Lady in Blue, not seen for months. Partials—human traitors transformed by the gray caps—walk the streets brutalizing the city’s inhabitants. Finch’s partner Wyte, stricken with a fungal disease, is literally disintegrating. And strange forces are marshaling themselves against detective Finch even as he pursues his one clue: the elusive spymaster Ethan Bliss. How much time does Finch have before time itself runs out?

About the Author

Award-winning writer Jeff VanderMeer's final novel in his Ambergris Cycle, Finch, has just been published in the US, and will appear in the UK from Atlantic's Corvus imprint. His writer guide Booklife and associated Booklifenow website focus on sustainable creativity. With his wife, he recently edited the charity anthology Last Drink Bird Head. His short fiction has appeared in Conjunctions, Library of America's American Fantastic Tales, and several year's best anthologies. He writes nonfiction for The Washington Post Book World, Omnivoracious, The New York Times Book Review, the B&N Review, and many others. Murder by Death recently completed a CD soundtrack based on Finch./.

The Nebula Awards