Three surprising theories about science fiction

Adam Roberts

Texts

Picturesque, poetic and pastoral: Adam Roberts explores the calm at the eye of science fiction’s storm

I write science-fiction novels, in prose, often set in technologically advanced environments. Despite this I consider SF to be: a visual medium; a poetry; and a form of pastoral. Permit me to explain what I mean, in ascending order of surprisingosity.

First, and least surprising: SF is a visual art . Once upon a time it was a literature of ideas, and its tales often had a satirical or contemporary relevance. Since Star Wars SF’s biggest impact has been visual. Readers of SF are a small though dedicated subculture; more or less everybody loves SF on the screen. Of the 20 highest-grossing films of all time, 19 are SF or fantasy. Avatar and films from the franchises Star Wars , Harry Potter , The Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean possess nugatory intellectual content, but their visual logics are nonetheless extraordinary, powerful and stirring. (The one "mainstream" entry in this top 20, James Cameron’s Titanic , embodies a similar big-screen visual aesthetic.) SF has conquered the world; it just hasn’t done so as a Ray Bradbury short story. That’s neither good nor bad; it just is.

Second, and a little more surprising: SF is a poetry . To many, this idea seems counterintuitive. They assume that science fiction (look at the name! ) is a genre specifically extrapolated from science, and they see science as antithetical to poetry. But "science" isn’t SF’s crucial component.

SF represents the world without reproducing it. It does not "hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature" after the manner of mimetic art. SF refracts nature through a series of estranging metaphors. Often these metaphors are formalised (the spaceship, the robot, the time machine). Sometimes they aren’t. Metaphors talk about one thing in terms of another. They are surprising conceptual leaps : the mental knight’s moves that thrill us with their unexpected eloquence.

The epitome of SF is the ape-man’s bone, thrown in the sky only to turn – suddenly, amazingly, eloquently – into a spaceship. It is hard to say why this is as powerful as it is. Its effectiveness does not translate easily into the idiom of rational or scientific discourse. But this is the transcendent quality SF fans love, the genre’s prized "sense of wonder". This is what makes the hairs frizz on the back of your neck: the extraordinary ending of Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End ; the chilly thrill of Ursula Le Guin’s winter planet; the pathos and terror of Asimov’s "Nightfall"; and, in the works of Philip K. Dick, the vertiginous sense of reality corroding around you. None of these are quasi-scientific extrapolations from reality. All of them are poetic, metaphorical moments of affective insight.

The secret appeal of SF is essentially poetic, and that, I think, is why big-screen SF cinema is as popular as it is. Film provides visual correlatives for SF’s intense metaphor-making. The Matrix films were, on the level of intellectual content, pretty risible; but their core metaphor – that modern city living is like being snared in a dream devised by malign machine intelligences – is a strong one, and the films glitter with moments of heart-stopping visual poetry.

Third, and surprisingest of all: SF is a pastoral . But – doesn’t pastoral literature concern itself with the countryside? With an old-fashioned, humble, bucolic existence, free from the trappings and technologies of urban life? With fields of grass, rather than fields of stars?

Well, one way of talking about pastoral is to say it is art made about a different sort of space, where food is plentiful and work is unnecessary, and where we can devote ourselves to play and love: an Arcadian countryside like the fields in Virgil’s Eclogues or the forest of Arden in As You Like It . In a deeper sense, pastoral is not about a different place at all; it is about a different time . The pastoral dream is childishly innocent, recuperating the moments before the complexities of adulthood weighed us down. (There’s an old saw that the Golden Age of SF is twelve.)

In fact, the version of pastoral I’m talking about here is derived from William Empson’s brilliant book called, er, Some Versions of Pastoral (1935). For Empson, pastoral is only trivially about shepherds, sheep and fields. In fact it is about "putting the complex into the simple." His book ends with a reading, not of the usual pastoral suspects, but of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, where adult anxieties and desires, refracted through the lens of a simpler, childlike consciousness, transmogrify into fantastical, metaphorical forms.

We can replace the props of classical pastoral (sheep and shepherds, songs and lovemaking) with the props of SF (spaceships, robots and time machines, distant planets and alien encounters) without disturbing this underlying logic. Essentially, SF is about putting the complex into the simple.

Mimetic art leans upon our collective sense of "reality" as upon a crutch. SF has to make its reality new each time. It does this by fashioning and inhabiting a simplified, eloquent model of the complexities of real life. It folds complexity into its simplicity.

The literary theorist Paul de Man reckoned that Empsonian pastoral sat at the junction between "the mind that distinguishes, negates, legislates, and the originary simplicity of the natural". Replace "the natural" with Nature itself – more or less directly apprehended, more or less amenable to study – and you have SF in a nutshell. Above all, the eloquent, metaphorical, poetic way in which SF puts the complex into the simple ought to be surprising . If SF doesn’t surprise, it is not doing its job. And neither am I.