From: eschneid@sparc8.tamu.edu (Erich R Schneider)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
Subject: Re: Is SF imaginative? (somewhat long)
Date: 21 Jan 93 17:28:16
Organization: Texas A&M University
NNTP-Posting-Host: sparc8.cs.tamu.edu
In-reply-to: w95_cook@wums.wustl.edu's message of 21 JAN 93 14:08:19 GMT

In article <21JAN93.14081941@wums.wustl.edu> w95_cook@wums.wustl.edu writes:

>I saw a play last night entitled "Six Degrees of Separation".
>One of the many themes of the play was the lack of true
>imagination in contemporary society.  The main character at
>one point criticized science fiction and _Star_Wars_ as pathetic
>excuses for true imagination, which he felt should be something
>that connects us to the "real world"
>
>Is anyone else here familiar with this play?  What do you think?
>Does SF possess "true imagination"?

I was thinking, a while ago, about how modern literature (in the most
general sense, not the "snobby" one) relates to storytelling as
practiced since the ancient days. My thoughts turned to: how are they
different? How are they the same?

An (admittedly simplistic) answer I dredged up was that traditional
storytelling can be seen as a social act that reinforces current
cultural norms. In your traditional story, you have situations like
the following: "'evil' threatens 'good' but 'good', by using the
intrinsic qualities of the 'good', wins the day", "'good' people lose
their good status via a moral lapse of some kind". One also has
stories which attempt to impose a structure on our otherwise chaotic
world (creation stories of various cultures serve this purpose) and
show how this structure relates to the current cultural norms.

However, a certain subset of modern literature can be seen to be
questioning the current cultural norms, rather than reinforcing them.
Rather than confirming that what everyone sees as "right" is in fact
so, these more radical works challenge our notions of "rightness".
Much modern literature, of course, acts in the usual way to reinforce
current norms.

The author of the play, I think, might say that a "truly imaginative"
individual would be questioning how our culture works rather than
reinforcing it. I would say that some SF possesses "true imagination",
while a great deal of SF does not. The stuff that does not, not
coincidentally, is very popular; the endless quest fantasies, space
operas, and "cool toy"/gadget SF works basically reinforce the
standard cultural codes. Note also the split which seems to exist
between aficionados of "hard SF" versus supporters of the New Wave-ish
"soft SF"; "hard SF" focuses on technical issues, and so tends to
assume present cultural norms without question, while "soft SF"
focuses on psychological and sociological issues and _must_ deal with
our present cultural norms and the ways in which they are/may be
flawed.

I think much of Delany's later work (the stuff so many people seem to
hate) is truly imaginative. _Triton_, _Stars in My Pocket Like Grains
of Sand_, and the Neveryon stories really confront the reader with
examples of our present-day cultural norms breaking down. (_Dhalgren_
does this too, but is less accessible.) Some of the more thoughtful
cyberpunk stuff can be seen to do this as well, if one can get past
the surface gloss.

I also think the "challenge"/"does not challenge" aspect of literature
lies at the heart of the endless Usenet debate about "entertainment"
versus "social commentary" (if you will). The people who just want to
be "entertained" are, in general, not willing to have their cultural
norms questioned again and again. (Note that I'm using "entertainment"
in a very shallow sense here; I know many people (myself included)
find socially critical SF enormously entertaining.)

If you find this article insulting, apologies in advance.
--
Erich Schneider  eschneid@cs.tamu.edu

"Even the AI hated [my book]?"
"The AI _loved_ it. That's when we knew for sure that _people_ were going
 to hate it."
                      -Dan Simmons, _Hyperion_