Paucity of Sci-Fi

Adam Elkus takes on the sorry state of military sci-fi, positing that: "A focus on the technologies, strategies, and tactics involved tends to amplify some of the worst tendencies of science fiction in general: a fascination with the technical details of machines or the outlines of future worlds rather than the people who populate them." Fiction is the tale of people, and it is too easy for science fiction to miss the forest for the trees. "When in doubt, lean towards character."

But I'm not sure I buy that thesis, at least not wholesale. At the very least, I'd come at from the opposite end, saying that what makes the majority of most current science fiction so derivative is the excessive focus on characters, treating the worlds they live in as simple analogues to contemporary life, just with shinier toys, which ultimately teach us little about ourselves, forces us to confront uncomfortable possibilities, or leverages the possibilities of the genre. The possibility of science fiction isn't simply to conceive of a new technology and then populate a world and tell a story about people using that tech. By changing only the backdrop and then telling the same timeless tale of love, revenge or whatever, it sends the message that the setting was irrelevant to the point of the story and the technology is a MacGuffin. While the environment might be enjoyed for aesthetic reasons or admiring the craft of the author, it recreates a Waiting for Godot-scenario wherein people tune out the background and focus only on the characters.

And that leaves the potential of science fiction's potential untapped. This is the kind of fiction that gives birth to this (awesome) website. Incredibly rich stories of personalities are possible by addressing characters in far-flung and extreme scenarios. I'm certainly not saying that fiction of characters in analogous worlds with new toys is inferior or cheap. People are fascinating, wherever they are found. District 9 was a superbly well-written and directed movie, but it was a movie about apartheid, using extra-terrestrial props as stand-ins for humans. So, I'd simply call that fiction, with "science" functioning as a adjective signifying "mecha abound" than as a composite noun denoting equal admiration to the possibilities of science (though potentially hypothetical or theoretical science) and fiction. It needn't be true down to the last equation, but it asks us to question how science, and popularized technology in most commonly, alters our fundamental human interactions.

Science fiction is a unique genre with possibility beyond just imagining our next door neighbors in giant robots. At its core, science fiction are our modern works of popular philosophy. They challenge ourselves to become the brain-in-the-vat. They ask us to question the nature of the human soul by asking us to define when consciousness exists and how it can interact with ours in a virtual world, or by asking us to conceptualize an authentic artificial intelligence, as we needed to do to resolve the reveal of Blade Runner

Some, like Ghost in the Shell, do a fantastic job of creating a universe melding the imminently possible and the distant potential with characters made authentic by their adherence to the rules of their world. Doing so lets us explore questions like surpassing the mind-machine interface, and does so in a radically different way than The Matrix or Sleep Dealers. (By this typology, I would call the first Matrix as science fiction, and the second and third as fiction using science as props). Some, like Aurther C. Clark's Rendevous at Rama, asked us to confront our essential humanity by creating something truly alien, not simply "aliens" living in Johannesburg. One of my personal favorites, Carl Sagan's Contact combines the interface of religion, science, skepticism, and all through the immediate medium of science and the mechanics of extra-terrestrial communication.

Two of the classics of military science fiction, Starship Troopers and Ender's Game, straddles this divide. Starship Troopers is ostensibly a futuristic story of a fascist state that explores the questions of citizenship, governance, the role of the military, and the character of soldiers, but in reality, the "science" is totally irrelevant to the story and ultimately offers little upon which to enhance the above questions. Those are all fascinating questions, and Heinlein explores them in ways few have matched since, but ultimately, Starship Troopers treats the science and technology as props in which to situate broader exploration, not as characters in their own right.

Ender's Game, conversely, leverages both the Battle Room and the Command School as crucial devices in which to challenge our conceptions. Both the realization that "the gate is down" and the final reveal that Ender was actually fighting the buggers and not computer simulations forced the reader to question fundamental assumptions they had made regarding the motivations and capabilities of Ender and his jeesh. Using Graff as a Greek chorus framed the dichotomy even more starkly, as Graff explains that had Ender realized his commands were actual deployment orders, and his decision to commit xenocide, would have been impossible without "knowing" he was participating only in simulations. The technologies are integral to the conception and telling of the story.

To briefly return to Elkus and his critique of military science fiction, I'd argue that the issue isn't inherent to science fiction per se, but is instead reflective of technological fetishism, a phenomenon by no means isolated to science fiction. Tom Clancy actually perfectly reflects the obsession, as he both conceives of awesome scenarios and potential military conflicts, and then almost universally resolves them with some wazoo tech unveiled in the last 100 pages that solves everything and makes the previous 900 pages of conflict and inevitable doom seem silly enough to chastise people for worrying in the first place. Crichton is a little harder to pigeonhole, but that's partially because his bibliography is so hit-or-miss. Jurassic Park, asking about the limits of genetic exploring and cloning, good. Timeline just made my mind bleed, to say nothing of my sense of style.

So while I agree with Adam that obsessive fascination with the little details of the military operations undermines the narrative quality of the story, I tack that up more to bad writing than a flaw of the genre. Plus, I'd argue that for science fiction as I'm describing it to perform as advertised, it requires detailed understanding and explication of the involved technologies. Without this level of detail, Daemon would have been unable to make our peek around the corner at imminent technologies seem plausible (who appends a bibliography to a work of fiction anyways?). I don't want to drown in the details, but I need at least a few feet of water to stay afloat.


Parsing this finely between "science" fiction as props and science fiction as futurism may seem fairly silly, the insistence of the purist. But in our modern world a rapidly exploding technologies, we would be well served to have a genre of fiction that actively addresses that technology directly and honestly, forcing us to situate the narratives of our new technologies in our lives, and what they mean for who and what we are. Differentiating between fiction that employs science and technology to ask questions of the humanities, and science fiction as a medium in which to posit the future worlds our current actions and technological advances may create is therefore a highly practical differentiation. The humanities asks who we are, science fiction where we're going and who we're becoming.

Video Games as Civil-Military Estrangement

Jim Gourley's recent guest post on Rick's Best Defense raises some very thorny issues about the hyper-realism of modern first-person shooters. It's a trenchant summary of the state of modern wargame shooters and the potential effects they have on soldiers and the predispositions it creates for actions like the "Rogue Platoon".

But what really got me thinking was that this frames the experience of how the vast majority of the American population experiences the war. As Andrew Exum has noted before:

"This is the thing,” he told me. “Point 5 percent of this country actually fights in these conflicts.” Nearly 80,000 Americans are deployed in Afghanistan, Exum said, while 2.2 million played Modern Warfare 2 on Xbox Live during a single day last fall. “There’s something annoying that most of America experiences the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which are actually taking place, through a video game,” he said."

The problem is, I don't think America is actually experiencing the war. What they're experiencing is what they are told is the war. Both movies and video games are victim to this. Hurt Locker or the new Medal of Honor are both purported to be authentic depictions of war time experiences, yet they're not. When the discordant is labeled as genuine and it goes uncorrected, it gets used as a basis for forming opinions or framing the experiences of veterans. The Hurt Locker had factual errors and some ridiculous plotholes, yet managed to largely convey the personalities involved and their reactions to the world around them. But video games, even those based on real events, like Delta Force: Blackhawk Down or Medal of Honor, feature hours upon hours of unrelenting combat and little in the way of characters as people. Even when acknowledged to be the "for dramatic effect" changes necessary to make a game playable, it ends up leaving the impression that the common veteran's experience is wholesale slaughter.

So to return to Gourley, I end up wondering if, based on their "experiences" playing these games and watching these movies, these are the frames stateside uses to interact with soldiers. It makes me wonder if this is what underpins scenarios like this.

Technology in Fiction

An interesting thought piece on the role of modern communication technologies in fiction. Money graf:

The average fictional character is either so thoroughly disinterested in email, social media, and text messages he never thinks of it, or else hastily mentions electronic communications in the past tense. Sure, characters in fiction may own smart phones, but few have the urge to compulsively play with the device while waiting to meet a friend or catch a flight. This ever-present anachronism has made it so that almost all literary fiction is science fiction, a thought experiment as to what life might be like if we weren't so absorbed in our iPhones but instead watched and listened to the world around us at a moment's rest..

Even science fiction isn't immune to this curious disconnect. They'll pay lip service to having the props of future settings, but it's rare for a book to explore how communication technology (or technology in general) is radically restructuring our communication with each other. The closest I've seen recently was David Suarez's Daemon and it does a good job of capturing the dichotomies between the connected and the not, and the exploitable vulnerabilities of those who have wired in without really understanding the system to which they now belong.