0. Editor’s Note

First Light Of A Crooked Sun — August Linn

Machine Learning — Tan Jing Min

Grape, Backwards — ash chua

And They All Lived: Remembering the Happy Smiley Writers Group — Ng Yi-Sheng

Searching for One’s Roots 2.0 — Shawn Seah

Island — Stephany Zoo

Falling into a black hole — Ann Grá

Monsoon Season — Zavier Seow

The Winter of Our Science-Fiction Discontent, Part 2
— Vivekanandan Sharan

When They Burned the Butterfly: An Interview with Wen-yi — Megan Chee

Strange New Worlds — Brandon David Servos

The Winter of Our Science-Fiction Discontent Part 2: So, what is science fiction, really?

Vivekanandan Sharan

Vivekanandan Sharan is a third-year student studying at NUS. He can be found spending most of his time reading, taking notes and listening to music. He read Isaac Asimov's collection The Early Asimov when he was 16 and was never the same again. Currently trying to triangulate German Idealism, science fiction and his engineering major.

In the previous part, we sketched out certain criticisms against the “death of” science fiction that derive from historical pessimism and “syncretism. Part #2 begins by attacking these arguments: the arguments sketched above regarding tropes do not specifically refer to science fiction. They might as well be applied to popular culture as a whole. What justifies applying this to science fiction in specific? What makes science fiction so special?

To understand this, we might want to define what science fiction is. Samuel Delany’s interview, “The Semiology of Silence” is about as concise as a description of what he calls the “protocols of science fiction” as it gets.
For the last hundred years, the interpretative conventions of all the literary reading codes have been organized, tyrannized even, by what, in philosophical jargon, you could call "the priority of the subject." Everything is taken to be about mind, about psychology. And, in literature, the odder or more fantastical or surreal it is, the more it's assumed to be about mind or psychology.

Delaney, by pointing out the subject obsession of literary reading, introduces a distinction between literature, which is concerned with the subject, and the various para-literary genres (which includes science fiction), which is concerned with the object. Take for example, the naturalist novel.. Naturalism is distinguished from the earlier forms of the novel in literary realism and romanticism in that the author takes himself to be a kind of scientist who observes the world with careful detachment. The naturalist novel takes itself to be exemplifying the scientific laws of nature in a certain situation, like a love-affair or a family, and works out the inexorable determinist logic at play. Zola himself was interested in genealogy for this reason, in his belief that the actions of people were genetically determined, and so a properly scientific novel would include all these biological factors.

The difference between science fiction and the naturalism of Zola is that the naturalists were still trying to understand our world, but science fiction detaches the laws of science from our world in particular, and generalizes it, so that it can apply to a plurality of possible worlds that can be constructed in the imagination. When science fiction critic James E. Gunn suggests that the closest literary antecedent to science fiction in worldview must have been the naturalist novel, Gunn’s suggestion is that the similarity between science fiction and naturalism comes from the shared influence from Darwin. The difference is that, pace Zola, the evolutionary process is still at work, which opens up the possibility of inhuman descendants of humanity, alien life-forms and so on. This is why Gunn suggests that science fiction is “fantastic naturalism, or naturalized fantasy, or simply that which hasn't happened yet, that we know of, treated naturalistically”. Therefore, we can say that science fiction takes the worldview of naturalism and applies it toward other worlds, making it focused on the objects of an open, multiplying world rather than the subjects of a closed, determined one.

Another useful interlocutor is the dyad of modernist and postmodernist literature. Brian McHale, in Postmodernist Fiction (1987), suggests that the difference between modernist and postmodernist fiction is that the former is concerned with the epistemological, while the latter is concerned with the ontological. The modernist novel (McHale’s example is William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!) is concerned with questions like “How can I interpret this world I am in?” while the postmodernist novel (his prototype is Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49) is concerned with questions like “What kind of world is this?”. McHale connects both to two “lower” genres, the detective novel for modernism and the science fiction novel for postmodernism. In his own words, “Science fiction, we might say, is to postmodernism what detective fiction was to modernism: it is the ontological genre par excellence (as the detective story is the epistemological genre par excellence)...” The detective and modernist novel both consider “the accessibility and circulation of knowledge, the different structuring imposed on the “same” knowledge by different minds, and the problem of “unknowability” or the limits of knowledge”. The difference between the detective story and the modernist novel is that the former presents a puzzle to solve, while the latter itself is a puzzle (which may not be solvable) which has a subjective dimension.

Science fiction and postmodernist fiction on the other hand are concerned with the world; where they differ is that the postmodernist writer is happy to make the world itself inconsistent, or incomplete, with the world itself being threatening or uncanny. The naturalist emphasis of science fiction, however, means that science fiction usually cannot go this far. If science fiction presents a logically possible world, the postmodern novel questions the possibility of a coherent world itself. This is why ultimately despite the ontological proximity between science fiction and postmodernist fiction, a gulf separates the two. Science fiction is thus caught between naturalism and postmodernism.

Reading Science Fiction

SF demands a form of close reading that differs from that of literary fiction. Delany’s favourite example is literalization on the level of the sentence in science fiction. Take something that in a literary text might be taken figuratively: “her world exploded”. In a literary text, it would be read figuratively, as a banal figure at that. We would attribute its meaning to the internal drama of some character. Science fiction, as a paraliterary genre, offers the possibility that this is made literal, that for example, the planet (or even the universe) that the character comes from has been literally destroyed in a conflagration.

Take, for instance, Delany’s favourite example, the sentence fragment “The monopole magnet mining operations in the outer asteroid belt of Delta Cygni…”. This segment demands the reader to construct a world using a fair deal of knowledge about basic science and some imagination. Reading SF well also means being able to fill in the gaps when needed and to know which gaps will be filled out by the author soon. It’s an intuitive understanding of this that an acquaintance with science fiction and its reading protocols can give you.

Another useful reference is Greg Egan’s short story “Reasons to be Cheerful” (1997). Much of Egan’s work takes as a starting point eliminative materialism, of the sort seen in philosophers and cognitive scientists like Thomas Metzinger and Patricia Churchland, and Daniel Dennett to a lesser extent. Eliminative materialists argue that the commonsense framework we use to understand the mind, often referred to as folk psychology, is fundamentally flawed and likely to be entirely replaced by future neuroscientific theories. They contend that concepts such as beliefs, desires, and intentions, central to folk psychology, are not just incomplete but inherently misguided. According to eliminative materialism, consciousness, cognition, and subjectivity are best understood as phenomena rooted in brain processes, but they predict that these will not be merely reduced to current neuroscientific terms; rather, the very concepts we use to describe mental phenomena may be radically revised or eliminated altogether in favor of a more scientifically accurate understanding.

What Egan takes from this is that manipulation on the level of brains (through biological or cybernetic mechanisms) can manipulate subjectivity itself, and his stories are often thought-experiments that try to simulate the effect of these changes, not simply as scientific extrapolation but also in showing how it would feel from the inside. The narrator of “Reasons to be Cheerful”, Mark, starts feeling an elevated level of happiness from the time that he is twelve years old. The reason for this is a brain tumour that as a side-effect is producing elevated levels of an endorphin, Leu-enkephalin. The cure, however, plunges him into a persistent depression, which the adults around him assume is caused by survivor’s guilt or the trauma of cancer treatment, but which he realizes is the effect of his Leu-enkephalin receptors being killed off with the tumour, making him unable to feel happiness. His depression would not be out of place in a modernist novel like Georges Perec’s A Man Asleep (which also concerns a narrator struck with a deep depression), where it would be a marker of the alienation of the narrator, which would have a political or existential meaning to it. But Mark’s changing affects (he gets a neural prosthetic allowing him to feel happiness again) is not like that because it’s meaningless, it turns on the objective and fundamentally mechanistic processes happening on the level of his brain.

This explains Egan’s sly reference to a major modernist work, in a way that directly contrasts literary and science fiction modes of writing. “But one Sunday in June, when I jogged past and saw a copy of The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil in the front window, I had to stop and laugh.” Musil’s main character, Ulrich, is a “man without qualities” insofar as he is indifferent, ambivalent, infinitely malleable. But Mark is literally without qualities. His neural prosthesis comprises a neural network that is the superposition of four thousand dead strangers, which makes him, on a neurological level, feel all their desires equally, and he is able to control which desires are expressed so that he can choose what would make him happy. Ulrich’s malleability is not the literal, neuron-to-neuron malleability of desire that Mark has. It’s the difference between Mark and Ulrich that is testament to SF’s potential of making manifest on a subjective level (in the form of narrative) what is un-symbolizable and “real” (the impersonally objective facts about my neurobiology). The figures of science fiction, like distant planets and alien life-forms can have metaphorical associations but exceed these associations; there’s something “really real” about Mark’s condition and prosthesis.

If a text constructs a world, the world is not merely a collection of facts, in the sense of, “oh, in the future, we have FTL…”. The significance of the same rhetorical figure, or even trope, depends on the situation that we place it in, as Delany himself points out.

The FTL drive which so delighted the audiences of Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back simply doesn't carry the same critical thrust as the FTL drives that appear in written SF. As a number of SF writers noted when Star Wars first came out, perhaps the largest fantasy element in the films was the sound of the spaceships roaring across what was presumably hard vacuum..

Science Fiction as Philosophical Orientation

It is useful to loop back to another piece by Delany, his 1980 essay “Reflections on Historical Models in Modern English Science Fiction”, which is collected in Starboard Wine. It is a very good reflection of the facile kind of periodization of SF, where supposedly there was a period of uncritical trust in technology, and then a dystopian, pessimistic period. Under this approach, under the prelapsarian period of SF, which encompasses the Golden Age, authors and readers were naively positive about science and technology (since this crops up for many critics, whether this is a good or bad thing depends on the one making the claim.) Delany’s alternate periodization goes as follows, the introduction of “theoretical plurality” in science fiction .

The early writers, associated with Campbell from 1937 on, took the nascent critique of the philosophy of science they had found in a fraction of the science fiction from the ’20s and ’30s and developed it into a full critique of the philosophy of science-as-it-was-then-popularly-conceived.

This is important. What makes an SFnal world hold together isn’t “just” logical consistency, but also a philosophical orientation that is knotted into the world itself, which creates the sense of a world. The presence of an FTL spaceship in a world does not solely mean “In the world of ‘So-and-so’ written by ‘So and so’ the galaxy can be traversed through faster than light travel”. This would be perhaps part of the list of facts about a fictional world set down in a Wiki for it.

Too often this is what people who talk about science fiction think that worlds are about. The FTL drive plays the role of an image, yes, and it plays the role of a plot mechanism that moves the plot forward, so that our intrepid hero finds himself in the alien fortresses in Tau Ceti before dying of old age. But there is a “sense” to the FTL drive, it is connected with a particular attitude toward science, it is overdetermined by a series of causes that gives it a particular meaning. In the writers of the Golden Age, FTL itself finds its sense as the affirmation of a “theoretical plurality”, that the current reigning theories of science itself could find itself in the dustbin of history, this is the pneuma of the trope that embeds it into a horizon.

Delany continues to discuss the sense opened up by the SF text through innovations in its form, with the advent of the SF series, opening up “historical plurality”. A note. These are not themes in the ordinary sense of the world, such that this is what the work is actually about. The point of a literary work is of course not to simply transmit a theme, especially if it can be put in a pat little line. Would it make sense to sum up a poem by Wilfrid Owen into a single line “war is bad?” It is important to him, and it pervades the work, and he would agree with the statement. But if he had wanted to simply say that war is bad, he would have just said so. Regardless it is part of the field of sense that pervades poem, which is a complex of language.

When a trope like FTL is detached from the field of sense that it is originally found in, yes. It is not merely the scientific inaccuracies in Star Wars that deprive FTL of its particular meaning (slightly contra Delany), it is the fact that the concern with the philosophy of science is not part of the fabric of Star Wars. (Which in this case is fine, because Star Wars does not mean to do this at all.)

If anything, the definitions of science fiction implicitly provide the answers to Blish’s question as to why even serious science fiction entertains such “notions as time travel, ESP, dianetics, Dean Drives, faster-than-light travel, reincarnation and parallel universes” despite being scientific absurdities. In the mainstream of science fiction today, when the awareness of this dimension to the trope of FTL is lost, FTL falls back into “merely” becoming an image and a plot device, and it becomes grafted to the universally exchangeable trope-form. For the third, and last part, we will look back at those initial claims of the “death of science fiction”, and how we might synthesise those criticisms alongside this apology towards a better theoretical understanding of how science fiction writing functions and what challenges it faces in the current day.

1 pg.https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/interviews/delany42interview.htmll

2 In “The Worldview of Science Fiction” in The Science of Science-Fiction Writing, pg. 82
Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, pg. 16
3 Ibid., pg 9
4 Some authors have been able to overcome this, most notably Barry Malzberg, who tends toward metafictional ripostes of SF. Malzberg’s Beyond Apollo (1972) purports to be a book written by an unreliable narrator who is the sole survivor of a botched mission to Venus, who changes particulars on a whim. Galaxies (1975) is not even a novel but purports to be a series of notes toward a science fiction novel, Galaxies, and The Remaking of Sigmund Freud (1985) places alternate versions of robotic simulacra of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain and Sigmund Freud in a space opera pastiche.
5 https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/materialism-eliminative
6 “Reasons to be Cheerful” in The Hard SF Renaissance, pg. 563
7 Ibid.
8 Barry Malzberg’s 1980 essay “Wrong Rabbit”, collected in Breakfast in the Ruins (2007), explodes to satisfaction the myth of the happy engineer. As he points out, there was plenty darkness in Astounding Science Fiction during the 1940s. The turn to the Happy Engineer in Astounding came in the 1950s with Horace Gold and Anthony Boucher encouraging dystopian themes in their magazines.
9 “Reflections on Historical Models in Modern English Science Fiction” in Starboard Wine, pg. 221