Of course it's possible that nothing happened to SF, and that what happened actually happened to me. Relativity, etc 🙂. But since we inhabit a world which exists very much in the 'comfort zone' between the quantum and the relativistic, we can at least use the illusions of time and place to tell a story.
My relationship with SF started when I was about 11 years old. My father had joined a book club, and received a copy of von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods.
It seems unlikely to me that my father, who was at the time a Methodist minister, ever intended to own this book. But book clubs have always been unscrupulous entities, often sending people ( and charging people for ) books without any positive expression of desire on the part of their customers, and I suspect my father simply received the 'book of the month' and put it on his shelves.
Of course, I read this book not having yet developed any sort of real critical facility, and certainly without knowing that it was, in fact, fiction. That understanding came later. But the book introduced me to the concept of spacefaring aliens with technologies beyond our own, and as a curious 11 ( or maybe 10 ) year old who had never felt ( or ever would feel ) any affinity for religion, I was hooked.
Over the course of the next 30 years, SF would form a backdrop to my life, both in terms of how I spent time and how I modelled the world and thought about the future. Bookshelves were built, catalogues were made. I bought into the idea that SF was somehow predictive, if speculative. I enjoyed the idea that humans might solve big problems using science and technology, and that 'progress' was a meaningful concept even if it's direction was somewhat vague. I watched as the concerns and tropes of SF twisted and turned to both escape and incorporate the zeitgeist.
It's hard to say what happened. In the course of contemplating art, and it's relationship with science, I encountered the idea that art was all about expressing truths about the 'human condition', whatever that means. It's not entirely obvious that this idea applies equally to all forms of art, but of course for an easy life one can invert the semantics and simply define art as that which does indeed do this.
I could not avoid the conclusion that SF was art, since it was definitely fiction even if the speculative elements attempted to cloak themselves in rational garb. I'm discounting the oxymoron 'Science Fantasy', which never needed, and rarely employs, any such constraint. Also, SF is almost exclusively concerned with the feelings and actions of humans - it's a rare SF work that attempts to build any sort of model of 'alien' that goes much beyond the superficial.
So I began to think about SF differently, and to value it not so much for what it could reveal about future technologies, but for what it could say about future humans. How would we respond in the face of such and such a technical development or environmental challenge ? How would our nature - or natures - be expressed ? What would change ?
Of course, this was where SF began. HG Wells and Olaf Stapledon, even Mary Shelley, were speculating about the nature and form of future humans, and technology was merely a convenient enabler.
Cyberpunk and the stirrings of the internet caused a spurt in examination of the boundaries between flesh and information systems, although more often in the form of dystopian visions than critical assessments. This energy carried SF into the 21st century, but began slowly to fade. That was the first tolling of the bell.
The bell tolled because the world, or at least the sum of our perspectives on it, had begun to change at 'internet speed'. SF, as with art in general, but unlike science and technology, is not a collective endeavour. There are certainly communities of interest, but ultimately authors are singular entities, and they select and digest change only at the speed of a human individual. Their art depends on their particular understanding and perception. in essence, the pace of change began to exceed the pace at which SF authors could digest the consequences and create rational speculations.
This became apparent to me when, in the course of reading about recent science on various internet sites, I began to notice that fascinating ideas were cropping up there which no fiction I was aware of had ever incorporated or explored. It could certainly be argued that there were, in fact, always such ideas - nothing ever obliged an SF author to incorporate a particular technology or scientific finding in their work. It's also arguable that science and technology has only ever been used to 'set the scene' in SF, with it's true focus being that of art in general, as noted above.
However, it seems to me that SF today has entered a different mode. The key is the 'rational speculation' term I used above. By 'rational', what I'm really getting at is that the speculation should endeavour to extrapolate. It takes the form of saying 'given where this particular knowledge or technology is right now, let's assume that it might head in such and such a direction and see where we end up'.
But if it is not clear where we are right now, if indeed we are in a singular place, then the directions that can be rationalised are also unclear, and the concept of 'rational speculation' fails. We are left simply with speculation.
If the defining characteristic of SF is now merely speculation, what does that mean ? Has the form itself been diminished ? Is it fair to compare the SF of 20+ years ago with current material ? What can a reader expect to be able to get from SF today ?
The latter question is probably the easiest to answer. SF still provides entertainment. It is still concerned with human reactions and relationships. It still falls into the 'art' bucket, in a general sense. But, and I shall tread lightly here because nobody expects the SF Inquisition ( which sadly is all too real ), isn't that also true of 'Science Fantasy' ? If SF really has lost the ability to say 'and here is a plausible possible future', and instead is only able to say 'here is a future with aliens and lots of wacky technology that has no explanation', isn't that tantamount to saying 'here is an imaginary world with dragons and magic' ? As Arthur C. Clarke ( and numerous antecedents ) noted, 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.'.
The question vis a vis comparison is a hardy perennial in the art world. Can art from different genres or contexts be compared ? One can look at a Picasso and a Vermeer and tell that these things are not using the same visual language, and appear to exist in very different contexts. There is no single scale on which both of these works sit - it's an 'apples and oranges' situation. If you wish to place one in relation to the other, this is itself an act of creation - you must create ( and justify ) the dimensions you will use, and hence risk getting lost in a metaphysical maze.
I'm not sure that the changes in SF forms have been quite so radical.
< TBD >
© Mark de Roussier 2021, all rights reserved.