“International SF” and Problems of Identity
A world of tears
It’s a world of hopes
And a world of fears
There’s so much that we share
That it’s time we’re aware
It’s a small world after all
We live in a world that increasingly is not defined by national borders. Depending on where one goes, one can hear “Me encanta,” “Ich liebe es,” or “Love ko ‘to” whenever a McDonald’s jingo plays on the radio or television. Levi’s, the quintessential American blue jeans, are not made in the United States anymore, but in factories across the globe. Watch many of the “Adult Swim” shows on the Cartoon Network in the US and one is bound to find Japanese anime-influenced animation. In some ways, the “global village” espoused by Hillary Clinton and others over the past two decades has come to fruition.
But what about Science Fiction? Why is there such a buzz happening now, over two decades after many other pop cultural trends, for “international” SF? What has taken so long for a literary/cultural mode to catch up? These questions may be nigh impossible to address adequately in a short article, but they do bear some consideration, especially as we move toward potential conflicts within and outside the various “international” groups of SF writers and fans.
Literature by its very deliberative nature generally is among the most reactive of various cultural units. It often takes years for a writer to conceive a story, write a rough draft, and then undergo the various revision/editing rounds before it is published. Writers often use elements of everyday life around them in their work, whether or not it be central elements in their stories. Look back at the so-called “Golden Age” of American and British SF. How long was it before concerns raised by second-wave feminists and civil rights activists began to be expressed in speculative fiction? Or what about concerns about environmental degradation? The first Earth Day was held in 1970. How long after that was there much attention being paid to those concerns in SF writings? There always seems to be a lag of a few years between profound socio-cultural events (say, the Stonewall riots) and widespread exploration/acceptance in various literary media. So perhaps it should not be a surprise that it has taken several years for Anglophone audiences to see literature that reflects the increasingly interdependent, international trends of the past thirty years.
However, larger questions lurk under the surface here. If there is such a unified narrative mode called “science fiction” (and for the purposes of this discussion, all perceived forms of speculative fiction may be lumped in with this, despite the inevitable risk of distortion), then how well (if at all) can such a perceived narrative mode be transmitted from culture to culture? Are the Chinese, who apparently have one of, if not the largest, active SF communities outside the Anglophone countries (United States, Great Britain, Canada, South Africa, and New Zealand), writing stories that an American SF fan would accept as being “true SF?” Are writers from Brazil or India, two emerging markets out of several possible examples, altering presumed “core” elements that a British reader might expect to be a sine qua non for a story to be labeled SF?
These are tricky waters to explore, especially since there are so many languages at play. From what I can tell, having read Brazilian, Argentine, Mexican, and Spanish SF writers in their native Portuguese and Spanish, there is a conflict of sorts that can be seen in several writings. This conflict arises from the perception among many writers in these countries that there are certain topics/approaches that are almost inviolable. For many of these writers and even more for many of those countries’ SF fans, SF is a model to be followed and that any substantive deviations would lead to a perceived “lessening” of the work. While similar attitudes can be found in the United States and Great Britain, it is especially true in several of the newer SF markets, where Anglo-American SF, whether in the original English or in translation, outnumbers native-produced works, sometimes by several magnitudes.
This problem raises what might be a central problem involving “international SF,” that of possible conflicts between Anglo-American expectations of what “SF” constitutes and what the various non-Anglophone countries might view as being an essential story. Some might argue that the very use of the term “international SF” might constitute a form of cultural hegemony, where norms established by American and British writers are viewed as being not just dominant, but pre-eminent over any other possible conceptions of SF. There might be something to this. After all, no matter how many ways one might say “I’m loving it” when one enters a McDonald’s, there is a pre-determined template that allows only for a little bit of variation for local customs and expressions.
So how does “international SF” fit in with various local developments? Is there as strongly-connected form of cultural discourse as what might exist between say American SF and the political, social, and cultural developments of the past 50 years? Or does the notion that there is an “international” form of SF that not only transcends national boundaries but also cultural expressions run counter to what is occurring in China, Brazil, Nigeria, Iran, and elsewhere? Mexican writer Jorge Volpí had something interesting to say about the late Roberto Bolaño that might be applicable here:
It is not accidental that Bolaño, a Chilean who owned a house in Spain, wrote Mexican, Chilean, Argentinean, or Peruvian short stories and novels with the same ease and conviction. It was not about only copying the linguistic peculiarities of each place—a mere exercise of memory and a good ear—but of creating books that would really deal with the tradition of each one of these countries. If the members of the Boom wrote books centered in their respective places of origin with the goal of summoning an elusive Latin American essence, Bolaño did just the opposite: he wrote books that played at belonging to the literature of these countries and ended up revealing the vacuity of the concept. While he sounded the voices of his compatriots, Bolaño assumed the role of the last total Latin American, capable of supplanting a full generation of writers single-handed. Or in another sense, his imitation of different accents and idiosyncrasies, taking it all the way to parody (for example the Argentinean in the wonderful tale ”El Gaucho insufrible”), hid a hilarious critique of the proper idea of national literature. Since Bolaño, writing in the solemn Bolivian faith of the Boom has become impossible: one of the central ruptures that mark his work. That does not mean that Latin America has disappeared as scenery or point of interest, but it is beginning to be perceived with that post-national character, devoid of a fixed identity, that is appropriate in a global world at the beginning of the 21st century. And Bolaño is, in a good measure, responsible of this change.
Perhaps a similar thing is now occurring with SF. Perhaps in the course of writing in a narrative mode that often emphasizes some degree of separation from current everyday realities, there is a shift away from national modes of expression toward something that is a bit artificial and as Volpí expressed it, “devoid of a fixed identity.” Perhaps there is a new literary form developing that is not wholly of one country, language, or literary tradition. Regardless, there still exists more questions than answers in trying to perceive what is so important about international SF and where it might lead us in the coming years. Whether it be akin to the globalization of McDonald’s or the emergence of a truly global narrative that is not dominated by any one country or model, the next few decades will be telling. Should be fun, no?
Larry Nolen is a history and English teacher who has taught for most of the past ten years in Tennessee and Florida, in both public and private school settings. Fascinated with languages from an early age, he devotes much of his spare time to reading and translating interviews and articles from Spanish into English. Larry also has an unhealthy fascination with squirrels and dreams to one day edit an anthology of squirrel SF. His blog can be found at ofblog.blogspot.com.
3 comments so far.
Larry, that’s a very thoughtful article. I’d like to refer you, since you might be interested and you can read Portuguese, to a couple of short pieces that have been discussed in Portuguese blogs of lately (one is mine, the other is a response from a writer/editor). It’s about the inability or uselessness of the “international SF” as a concept:
In sequence:
http://www.tecnofantasia.com/cgi-bin/tfmaint.cgi/01/00/B1055070632/1246844459
http://spaceshipdown.blogspot.com/2009/07/leitura-obrigatoria.html
Thanks
This issue of a possible “post-national character” is very interesting, and all too much possible. In fact, it´s been happening all the time in Brazilian SF - and, I suspect, all over the world as well - since the sixties, when it became fashionable to write what I use to call “cold” stories, that is, extremely scientific-minded stories.
One must be very careful not to mistake them for hard SF, because most of them are not hard at all; they just spill lots of technobabble and hope to hell the reader doesn´t notice (sometimes the writer herself/himself doesn´t have a clue, that´s the bitter truth).
A few months ago, a Brazilian publishing house published an anthology of original SF stories written mostly by mainstream authors - almost all of them wrote cold stories. And almost all of those stories were awful.
However, I think the search for this post-national character is good; writers like Jacques Barcia (who has just sold a story to Jetse De Vries´s SHINE anthology) are doing just that now, but in a good way, keeping the characters “hot” instead of “cool” (pardon the McLuhan-like jargon here, but IMHO it´s still one the best ways to explain this dichotomy).
1. Valentin D. Ivanov on 24th November 2009 at 3:08 pm
The first dividing line is inside us, as usual.
When I reach for the pen, I always ask myself who I am writing for. And I don’t mean here a Western or an Eastern reader. The difference is not geographical, it is in the cultural background (a few would enjoy reading a book if they have to google the Bulgarian mythology twice per page; it is different if this is something you know from your grandmother) that severely limits the possible context of the story. Most SF of fantasy worlds are poorly disguised twentieth century Western Earths. The characters may fly to other galaxies or fight with swords but they react emotionally, morally, ethically, etc. like our contemporaries. The “International SF” is faced with a dilemma - to offer the recognizable patterns or to be left out, even at the home markets of the writers. This has the effect of killing the diversity before it is even born. The fight for the “International SF” should be won first on the home turf.
To finish on positive tone, I have been delighted to see Western SF writers - Ian McDolanld comes to mind - that explore foreign cultures. Ironically, these are probably the best “International SF” books of today.