From: jessec@yang.earlham.edu
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written,alt.cyberpunk
Subject: Re: Diamond-hard SF
Date: 17 Nov 92 18:05:34 GMT
 <1992Nov6.195713.14495@math.ucla.edu> <1dfifgINN3mm@agate.berkeley.edu> <BxtJ4w.FDs@techbook.com>
Organization: Earlham College, Richmond, Indiana

In article <BxtJ4w.FDs@techbook.com>, szabo@techbook.com (Nick Szabo) writes:
>>In article <1992Nov6.195713.14495@math.ucla.edu> 
dstein@oak.math.ucla.edu (David Stein) writes: 
> 
>>I'm willing to read a so-so
>>written sf novel if it is full of original and startling ideas.
> 
> I second this, and go further.  Characters and plot are the
> exemplar components of mundane fiction.  I do not care to see them 
> at all, unless they are important to the technology or to the artistry 
> of the story -- and almost always these days the artistry of the story 
> is defecated upon by the introduction of mundane characters or plot 
> elements, polluting the potentially fertile vast tracts of the SF 
> landscape with the toxic reek of an inferiority complex to mundane 
> genres.

   First point on which I agree with you: science fiction tends to have an 
inferiority complex with regard to "mundane" or mainstream fiction.  
However, I interpret this a bit differently.  To my mind, the placing of 
emphasis on background, and particularly on *things* in the background, to 
the detriment of characterization and style (I also agree that plot is not 
*necessarily* important, although the hard-SF you valorize tends to 
enshrine plot almost as much as techno-speculation), is a *symptom* of the 
inferiority complex.  By confining science fiction to dry, abstract 
speculation, authors keep safely away from competition with the big, tough 
world of mainstream lit outside the ghetto walls.  It's an ego defense.

> For example: a poetic description of weird, original psychoactive 
> effects of a genetically engineered aphrodisiac would be quite 
> interesting.  The mere unaugmented desire of character X to take character 
> Y to bed I could read about in other genres, or live out in real life 
> myself for that matter, which is quite preferable to the fiction.  

   Why settle for fiction *about* the technogizmo, then? As someone else 
suggested, why not go for real science instead?
   More importantly: why read fiction if it can't tell you anything about 
what it is to be human? To be alive?

> In good diamond-hard SF, mundane characterization or plot movement 
> is edited out, right along with the bad grammar, violations of the 
> laws of physics, cliched ideas, engineering illiteracy, economic
> illiteracy, and other crap that we should not have to put up with.   

   I take it that "bad grammar" refers here to any stylistic 
experimentation, as in Greg Bear's *Queen of Angels*, Faulkner's *The 
Sound and the Fury*, and Joyce's *Finnegan's Wake*.  If I'm reading you 
right: boy, what a strange attitude to take for someone who seems to want 
greater freedom for experimentation!
   As for cliched ideas: traditionally, hard SF has been full of them.  
You refer to several of them, including the enshrinement of an idea of 
the inevitability of space colonization.  William Gibson, far from a 
computer engineer, or even a computer-literate layperson, understood the 
emerging reality of a postindustrial technosphere far better than the 
hard SF contingent of the late seventies or early eighties did-- maybe 
because he understood it as a series of changes in the patterns of 
everyday human life, and tried to grasp at it through techniques such as 
the hijacked language (i.e., "virus" and "sarariman") of *Neuromancer*, 
*Count Zero*, etc.  He also understood the economics better than hard SF 
types, who seem to have this perpetual belief that laissez-faire, 
individualistic capitalism is the system of the future.

> [...] I've been nauseated by way too many lunar bases that 
> function in no believable economy but merely as a religious 
> tokens of some mass-delusional ritual that plagues SF authors.

   That would be a beginning comment for me, too...

> Diamond-hard SF should be free from techno-cliches like space
> stations, O'Neill space colonies, lunar bases, AIs, humanoid
> aliens, etc. unless they are done in a radically different, 
> interesting way.

   Yes.  Second point of agreement for me-- again, with obviously 
different implications.

> Sadly, most SF has been polluted with 
> either cliched styles from mundane writing style or cliched
> settings from techno-religions, and as a result, most of what 
> could be the best genre on the planet _reeks_.  Our task: to 
> find the gems in the manure pile. 

   Now, this is a bizarre suggestion-- the overuse of cliches in science 
fiction comes from some mysterious infection emanating from the mainstream??

   Some of the most incredible fiction has come from authors who show us 
just how weird, just how *bizarre* everyday, ordinary, *mundane* life is.  
I think this is a worthwhile subject for literature.
   If you look real close, it happens.  Coincidences seem to attain 
numinous meaning.  Humdrum routines become mythic cycles.  And under the 
surface of consciousness, operating in its nice rigid logical framework, 
is this fantastic treasure-- the radically chaotic interior world, a storm 
of images and words unbound by Grammar that falls short of the Universal.  
(Is it too messy for science fiction to deal with? Elizabeth Hand, Pat 
Cadigan and others say no.) Like Kafka said: literature should be an ax to 
break up the frozen sea within us.

   I think that fiction should address *ideas* (not things) in the way 
that Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Milan Kundera do-- not as abstract 
things, but in their full dimensions, in terms of what they can mean to 
human beings.  And, although I think fiction should be free to build up 
and/or tear down any system of ideas, there should be a base system, a 
deep structure underlying it all, which is the idea of Love-- a concept 
which embraces the overwhelming importance of characters (i.e., of human 
beings).  This idea, if none else, should be regarded as inviolable.


   --Jesse.