Do Androids Dream of Equality
Tags: Literature, Literary, Issues

The Relationship Between Science Fiction and Social Change

There is a literary divide between genre fiction and literary fiction. Genre fiction — primarily science fiction and fantasy, but also romance, mystery and a number of other formulas for a story to follow — has not been treated as if it has the same value as literary fiction — realistic, often intellectual and artistic fiction. But genre fiction at its core has a unique opportunity to address social issues in a way realistic fiction cannot, especially science fiction; a genre with a rich history of discussing social issues and prompting change.

Genre fiction has been devalued because it is popular; people like to read it. Literary culture has had its fair share of problems with elitism: while the bestseller lists are often populated with fantasy, mystery, and science fiction, the awards go to the less popular and often less accessible “artistic” literary novels (Leddy). Historically, a small group of people have had a disproportionate influence in what books become respected literary fiction. These people are typically the critics or the bookstore owners, and usually upper middle class, sharing many values between them. Science fiction and fantasy novels have not traditionally aligned with these values, which accounts in part for the disparity between the influence of literary fiction and genre fiction (Ohmann). As science fiction and fantasy in particular have entered mainstream culture recently, these attitudes are starting to change, but as traditions do, the imbalance in fiction has lingered past the time when it was most relevant.

Science fiction as a genre evokes a certain image: aliens and spaceships, or post-apocalyptic landscapes. But scholarship surrounding the genre often has to work hard to define just what “Science Fiction” includes and entails. This definition is important, because the qualities of the genre are often tools to address social change, yet frequently hard to nail down.

The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature suggests that science fiction “challenges readers to decide whether what they are reading is within the bounds of the possible…” or that it “considers the mythologies of power: to travel through time or space, to enter the thoughts of another, to overcome death, or the process of evolutionary forces…” (“Science fiction”).

To many readers of science fiction, it is intuitive whether a text falls into the category or not; you just know it when you see it (Atwood, In Other Worlds 2). In his book, Critical Theory and Science Fiction, Carl Freedman establishes a many-part definition of science fiction. Science fiction takes place in a fictional world that doesn’t take the real world for granted, and questions elements of the real world (Freedman 41). This idea lets us retroactively think about texts that existed before science fiction was ever a concept as belonging to the genre; Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, for example. At the same time, you could argue that all fiction takes place in a fictional world — telling stories that did not happen is the most basic point of fiction — even if some are based more closely on the real world than others. Freedman writes “The science-fictional world is not only one different in time or place from our own, but one whose chief interest is precisely the difference that such difference makes…” (Freedman 18).

The reason it’s worth spending so much time on defining science fiction as a genre is that as a genre, it is predisposed to addressing social issues, because of its ability to isolate these issues in a world not completely like our own. Not every work of science fiction does this, and not every work that does it, does it well. Science fiction is defined by its difference to the world we live in; in many cases this difference becomes a commentary on real world issues. James Gunn wrote for the New York Times: “the most effective social documents these days are … science-fiction novels that can make the world the protagonist, the background foreground. By isolating the issues … the present embodies or the future may bring, science fiction can … make real the consequences of social injustice or human folly” (Gunn). In the very structure of the genre and its alternate worlds is an opportunity to address social issues.

A very closely related genre to science fiction is the even harder to define speculative fiction. The term was originally used to describe the function of science fiction: to speculate through fiction, but has expanded to have more than one different meaning (“speculative fiction”). It is sometimes used to justify fantastical or science fiction elements in literary fiction, but also works to bridge that separation. Ursula K. Le Guin accused Margaret Atwood of not being willing to classify her novels, The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake, and The Year of the Flood, as science fiction because Atwood wanted to “protect her novels from being relegated to a genre still shunned by hidebound readers, reviewers and prize-awarders. She doesn’t want the literary bigots to shove her into the literary ghetto” (Le Guin). Le Guin was defining science fiction as any alternate world that could happen. Atwood has said she doesn’t classify her novels as science fiction because she doesn’t want to mislead the reader into thinking that there will be aliens and other planets; she says that she “put nothing into this book [The Year of the Flood] that we don’t have or are not on the way to having” (qtd in Appleton 4). The two authors came to an understanding later that they just were defining the genre differently (In Other Worlds 6), but the attitude differentiating science fiction and speculative fiction persists in the literary world. For our purposes, these novels of Atwood’s focus on the differences between the real world and the one depicted, and fall under the broader umbrella of science fiction.

One clear example of a subgenre of science fiction that easily provides a commentary about social change is the dystopian story. Often, these stories follow the trends that are happening in society to their logical conclusion (societal collapse or total authoritarianism), to warn people that the things they are doing could have dire consequences. An example of this is Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam Trilogy, in particular Oryx and Crake, the first volume. It clearly presents issues of today, amplified: the growing gap between the upper and lower class in society that we can see today is illustrated explicitly. The elites of the society live in almost completely self-contained corporate compounds, and they have their own system of education to perpetuate their separation from the masses. The lower class is relegated to the “pleeblands,” “overpopulated and crime ridden urban areas…” (Appleton 65). In Oryx and Crake, capitalism is taken to an extreme: the government is run by corporations, and the police force is replaced with corporate enforcers. The for-profit healthcare companies, as they cure diseases, are creating new diseases and they use the people living in the pleeblands as test subjects as well as audiences to whom to sell things. In that world, “Death is capitalized on” (Appleton 68), and it is not that different from our own: for-profit healthcare raises the prices of medicine and medical care, and it becomes inaccessible to those who cannot afford it.

We see this theme of warning society of the extreme potential effects of what is currently going on in other media such as George Orwell’s 1984, which expands on the tensions of propaganda and war, or Phillip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and the much more popular film that was based on it, Blade Runner. The film opens with establishing shots of a giant city with smog-filled skies, smokestacks spewing fire and giant corporate ziggurats, just after they describe how humans built android slaves called Replicants. There is a clear warning about climate change and about exploitation present in the themes of the film, and these warnings are characteristic of almost all dystopian science fiction.

Still from Scott, Blade Runner (1:14)

A more practical extension of science fiction into the real world exists in the aesthetic movement of Afrofuturism, defined in a 2016 New York Times article as: “a social, political and cultural genre that projects black space voyagers, warriors and their heroic like into a fantasy landscape, one that has long been the province of their mostly white counterparts” (La Ferla). It originated in literature, and is closely tied to science fiction and speculative fiction, but has grown from just the written word to encompass art in many different media and genres, such as art, music, and is emerging into popular culture, seen in the elaborate costumes of musicians including Janelle Monae or Beyoncé.

As a subgenre of science fiction, it tells “stories of changing science and societal condition pertaining to African-American history and future…” (Afrofuturism), not just pertaining to the state of the world now, but a future that is reclaimed, liberated, and viewed through a black cultural lens. One popular example is the Marvel Studios 2018 superhero film, Black Panther, directed by Ryan Coogler. The fictional country of Wakanda, while aware of the bloody history of the rest of the world, is a technological utopia centered on African aesthetics and has never experienced colonization. The authors Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany are also examples of people who make space in their science fiction stories to discuss race and to present an Afrofuturist vision. But moving outward from literature to the world, this aesthetic movement prompts “the emergence of a black identity framework…” (Anderson and Jones vii-viii) that extends into the world and identifies and changes the relationship that African American people have with the world and technology. This identity denies the legacies of slavery and colonialization, and is perpetuated through science fiction.

Still from Coogler, Black Panther (21:03) illustrating an Afrofuturist vision.

Science fiction — in all its different forms — provides a foundation for the discussion of social issues and ultimately provides a platform to begin to work for that change; regardless of its reputation as “less serious” fiction than literary fiction. In his roundtable discussion for the New York Times, James Gunn wrote that often, the more attention an author gives to any particular social issue, the more likely that work is to be classified as science fiction, rather than literary fiction, and this elitism in literature can prevent an open and extensive conversation about the social issues which feature in these texts. Science fiction is seen as lesser for being “popular literature” in academic circles, but on a more optimistic note, that very popularity spreads the messages it discusses to a wider audience of readers. When we look more deeply at these texts, we can see conversations about social issues that are accessible to a wide array of people.

Works Cited

“Afrofuturism.” Grinnell College, haenfler.sites.grinnell.edu/afrofuturism/.

Anderson, Reynaldo, and Charles E. Jones. Afrofuturism 2.0. Lexington, 2016.

Appleton, Sarah A. “Corp(Se)Ocracy: Marketing Death in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood.” LATCH: A Journal for the Study of the Literary Artifact in Theory, Culture, or History, vol. 4, 2011, pp. 63–73. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=2013140159&site=ehost-live.

Atwood, Margaret. In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination. Random House, 2011.

Atwood, Margaret. Oryx and Crake: a Novel. Anchor Books, 2017.

Coogler, Ryan, director. Black Panther. Disney, 2018.

Freedman, Carl. Critical Theory and Science Fiction, Wesleyan University Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/fredonia-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1354775.

Gunn, James. “Genre Fiction Like Sci-Fi Has Clearest Social Critiques.” New York Times, 2 June 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/06/06/is-fiction-changing-for-better-or-worse/genre-fiction-like-sci-fi-has-clearest-social-critiques.

“Insouciance.” Merriam-Webster, Encyclopædia Britannica. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/insouciance. Accessed 27 April 2020.

La Ferla, Ruth. “Afrofuturism: The Next Generation.” The New York Times, 12 Dec. 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/12/fashion/afrofuturism-the-next-generation.html.

Leddy, Chuck. “Loot vs. literature: genre and literary fiction.” The Writer, vol. 121, no. 4, Jan. 2008, p. 8. Gale Academic OneFile, https://link-gale-com.dbsearch.fredonia.edu:2443/apps/doc/A171536499/AONE?u=sunyfredonia&sid=AONE&xid=1d00656c. Accessed 28 Apr. 2020.

Le Guin, Ursula K. “Review of The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 28 Aug. 2009, www.theguardian.com/books/2009/aug/29/margaret-atwood-year-of-flood.

Ohmann, Richard. “The Shaping of a Canon: U.S. Fiction, 1960–1975.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 10, no. 1, 1983, pp. 199–223. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1343412. Accessed 28 Apr. 2020.

“science fiction.” The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature. Eds. Birch, Dinah, and Katy Hooper. Oxford University Press, 2013. Oxford Reference. Date Accessed 28 Apr. 2020 <https://www-oxfordreference-com.dbsearch.fredonia.edu:2443/view/10.1093/acref/9780199608218.001.0001/acref-9780199608218-e-6772>.

Scott, Ridley, director. Blade Runner — the Final Cut. Warner Bros., 2007.

“speculative fiction.” The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature. Eds. Birch, Dinah, and Katy Hooper. Oxford University Press, 2013. Oxford Reference. Date Accessed 28 Apr. 2020 <https://www-oxfordreference-com.dbsearch.fredonia.edu:2443/view/10.1093/acref/9780199608218.001.0001/acref-9780199608218-e-9388>.