The Core Conflict in Science Fiction

Most of my favorite science fiction authors were members of the literary science fiction movement. These are authors who grew up reading pulp, Golden, and Silver Age scifi. They loved the scope and potential of these types of speculative stories, but they were frustrated by the lack of artistry in the writing. A lot of classic scifi was, let’s be honest, pretty poorly written. Hugely imaginative but there wasn’t much style. When their turn came to become authors and storytellers, they wanted to play in this genre but they also wanted to innovate stylistically, to explore the potentials of language and storytelling structure in a way that matched the technological and scientific innovation that drove scifi from the beginning. They wanted to transform scifi into a literature with deeper artistic merit.

And that’s how most of us tend to understand literary scifi: it made scifi more artsy.

But I think there was a much deeper revolution that happened here. One of main gripes I have with older scifi is the near complete lack of character development. Most characters in most classic novels and stories are one-dimensional archetypes at best, and lazy stereotypes at worst. Characters exist only as vehicles to explore the Big Idea.

Another failing of classic scifi is the near-complete lack of imagination when it comes to world-building. Despite the incredible technology, and people living in space, galivanting about the galaxy, the societies and culture depicted in pulp and Golden Age scifi is clearly just mid-20th century white patriarchal middle-class America writ large. The thought that society, behaviors, and values would remain unchanged (and strictly Western) despite radical innovation in technology and science, is laughable.

Literary scifi brought a tremendous depth of character development to the genre. They explored how society would be altered by such massive alterations in how we live our lives. They asked the question: What would it be like to actually live in a world like this? How would it affect people? How would it change us? What would it do to society?

What does it mean to be human in a world filled with aliens? When we live on planets very different from Earth? When we can alter our bodies or expand our capacities via technology?

One of my favorite of my own posts is SF as Psychological Exploration, especially what I consider the core quote:

SF is one big thought experiment exploring the breadth and depth, the capacity and essence, the potential of human nature.

I get this from the literary scifi authors I love. Scifi was built to explore the potential of science, technology, and engineering, to imagine what it makes possible. Literary scifi authors took that imaginative capacity and turned it on ourselves. They transformed the genre into an exploration of human nature and society.

Which is exactly why men like John Campbell and L. Ron Hubbard hated it.

It’s well known that Campbell and Hubbard despised the so-called “soft” sciences, especially psychology and sociology. They believed everything should be subject to rigorous mathematical analysis. If it’s not backed by math, it’s not science. They didn’t trust anything they didn’t consider science, and dismissed everything outside the realm of what they considered science as superstition.

Campbell and Hubbard wanted to subject psychology and sociology to mathematical analysis. They believed they could transform them into a type of engineering: a reliable, predictable way to engineer society and human behavior. The first expression of this idea was psychohistory in Asimov’s Foundation novels. The second major expression of it was Dianetics. (While Dianetics is credited to Hubbard, Campbell was just as much its architect.)

Golden Age scifi was dedicated to the exploration of technology, science, and engineering. It was a literature of rationality. And then the literary scifi movement turned it into a genre of psychological and sociological exploration. They made it “soft.”

This is the core of the conflict that exists in scifi fandom. This is the heart of the Star Trek vs. Star Wars / scifi vs. fantasy argument. This is ultimately what gave rise to the Sad Puppies movement… and they certainly weren’t the first people to protest the various ways scifi has changed over the years.

There are people even today who believe that scifi should only be “hard” scifi. Anything that isn’t “hard” undermines and dilutes the genre. Anything outside of “hard” scifi isn’t scifi at all. The Sad Puppies and their ilk don’t see themselves as intolerant of diversity. They believe they’re protecting their beloved genre from people who are destroying it.

Which is ridiculous. And they are a bunch of misogynistic, racist, transphobic, intolerant bigots, whether they see it or not.

There are all kinds of problems with any type of “purity” movement, and there are many, many works exploring this issue. In this specific case of scifi, any insistence on restricting it to only science, technology, and engineering makes the genre subject to the same issues every other STEM field is struggling with: barriers to access and lack of diversity. It’s how we end up with a bunch of over-educated white dudes who think they deserve sole ownership of it.

It’s also connected to the larger issues we’re struggling with in modern society with the role of science and technology in our lives. Many people still think technology can fix things, change people and our world for the better, which is deeply naive. Science and technology are powerful tools that can drive significant improvements, they can certainly be a major part of any solution, but they can also do (and have done, and are doing) tremendous damage. No matter what science and technology make possible, people are still people, and we’re the ones using these tools. The classic dismissal of psychology and sociology, the resistance to integrate these bodies of knowledge into our technological and scientific planning, is a major point of failure and one of the reasons why science hasn’t saved the world the way Golden Age scifi authors thought it would.

As a wise man once said to me: If your solution ignores how people actually behave, then you don’t have a solution.

I love science and technology. I love what it makes possible. I love scifi that explores really Big Ideas. But it’s most interesting when we explore how these things affect real people in their lived experiences. “Hard” vs. “soft” is a false dichotomy and meaningless distinction. The ways we use, or could use, science and technology is the most fascinating part. Using science and technology is a human act, an expression of who we are and what we want. Science and technology are human expressions, and the literature we dedicate to these subjects deserves a proper depth of humanity.