I have to apologise for the naivete of this post. I'm stumbling my way through thinking about these things.
I used to joke that I wrote SF because I didn’t know enough about reality to write in it. It wasn’t wholly a joke. Eighteen years into my professional writing life, I still don’t know much about the 'real' world. My life experience is limited and my education is somewhat sketchy, so some writers have much wider life experience than I do, and many have studied more. Still, I suspect that writers glean a good percentage of our working material by recycling it to some extent or another out of stories—books and movies. By ‘recycling’ I don’t mean literally nicking things and using them (although this happens) but rather, that we digest a mix of story and real life and then it emerges in a different form in our own work.
So what is the reality of what we have digested? Especially, of what we have digested from second-hand sources?
I constantly complain about fight scenes in books (and obviously movies too) on this basis. Most of them are unselfconsciously ridiculous. My sister, a nursing professor, complains about medical scenes. The phenomenon could extend in many directions depending on what it is that you know more-than-most about. Certainly in reading the recent discussions on colonialism, globalisation, and the failure of world literature to include genuine non-Western viewpoints, I’ve been thinking a lot about the particulars of the SFF genre and my own work in this context. I’ve been thinking about a kind of self-perpetuating bullshit cycle that seems to turn up.
I’m not speaking specifically about colonialism here, which is deserving of its own space. This more of a tangential thought about the genre: I wonder if fantasy literature, which by its definition allows us to bypass reality checks, is particularly vulnerable to allowing us to delude ourselves and therefore get away with stuff that is distortionary and prejudicial in whatever manner. Because it’s not ‘real.’ And anything is fair game. We wouldn’t expect to publish a political thriller without knowing the ins and outs of government and world affairs and lots of other fact-checkable nuts and bolts, but if we write that thriller in dressed-up fantasy terms, there’s a lot of fudge-space there. I’ve used it myself. I think there could be something extra-pernicious about our genre in this department. Maybe that's not an insight to anybody but me?
Granted, it’s hard to get a reality-check on something that doesn’t exist—a theoretical projection or a proposed future, for example. But even when I’m going out there as far as I know how to do I must necessarily refer to what I do know. I reach for some example of what I already know and try to bend or stretch it, or juxtapose it with another object so as to create an interaction that may generate something genuinely original. I suppose in way that’s a definitional problem of writing SFF—no matter how I may try to set up a philosophical experiment, it always has to have some grounding in the concrete world. I try to notice my real-life reference points. I try to make some honest attempt to face up to the pitfalls of the way I’m using them, although the pitfalls aren’t always obvious to me at the time.
But what about the idea of inventing because actually learning the facts is too hard? SFF writers are in a particularly privileged position in terms of being able to do this. What about saying, ‘I don’t know shit about how X works so I’ll just borrow a pinch of this and a dash of that and throw in some stuff that I saw this other writer do, and it’ll all be OK in the mix’?
That might not be actively harmful. Or it might. What if the stuff you borrow and (inevitably) distort is actually a portion of someone’s reality? I mean, it seems obvious to say that’s uncool, but the uncoolness seems somehow unexamined, glossed-over, when in our genre it should probably be an area of mainstream writerly concern--there's no shortage of discussion on how to write an effective query letter, after all, but cultural appropriation doesn't get enough coverage at entry-level even though writers are effectively gods of our made-from-whole-cloth worlds.
The marketing machine demands fodder, of course, so it skews toward the derivative anyway. Within the dominant culture, this skew can be very annoying. But when you start to think about what is happening globally when Blockbuster X comes rolling into town, it seems what we can end up with is this big armoured tank of derivative untrue nonsense rolling in and crushing the original cultural ecosystem, wrecking it and replacing it with the machine’s own paradigm. Never mind what writers inside that culture produce; it's now irrelevant as far as the machine is concerned.
If it’s not my culture that’s being destroyed by globalisation, I can be upset about this overwriting and the losses it entails, on a theoretical level. I can try to empathise with the people being silenced, and I can feel badly about it when I choose to think about it. But I don’t have to think about it if I don’t want to. And I can’t actually know or imagine how it feels to be in the path of that oncoming machine, how incredibly toxic the whole business is. As a whitebread USian I’m riding more or less on top of a wave of destruction.
I need to really think about it and decide what my level of complicity with that armoured tank, or that wave, actually is. To what extent am I OK with letting this destruction occur rather than stating up front that I prefer the complexities and disagreements and dangers of a world in which my culture might not end up in total absolute power over all things? Because that is what it comes down to, right? Actually giving others some space and not just coopting everything. I don't know why that should be so hard, but apparently the capitalist model does what it does, and too bad if people don't like it on an individual level--I don't know how to stop it, personally.
I want to say, oh nonono, this isn’t of my making, it’s not under my control, I don’t want it at all not even one tiny bit. But I suspect that subconsciously some part of me must be a little relieved to be safely inside that tank. I’m not proud of it, but I really need to look at that cowardice and make some changes in my head.
Fumbling, rambling. Thinking.
I'm really just thinking aloud here, trying to articulate my unease. Processing the World SF blog rountable on non-Western SF, mostly.
His idea is that, when we look at reality, we don't actually see reality. We see "myths", that is, images that are not perceived neutrally anymore, but that have been given a special meaning by society. For instance, when you see a red rose, you don't just see a red flower with a pleasant smell. You see a symbol of love, passion, romanticism... A red rose is a "myth", ie. something that has been constructed by society to have a certain meaning, to tell us a certain story.
So, according to Barthes, when you talk or write about reality, what you're really talking or writing about is "myths", narratives that pretend to be "real" and neutral but actually aren't. He wrote at some point that at least, fantasy has this advantage over realistic fiction that it doesn't pretend to be real. Yes, writers can completely bypass reality checks, as you said; but it might be less pernicious to do it in a way that doesn't pretend to represent reality.
Writers of realistic fiction don't always do a better job at researching their books than writers of fantasy (hell, researching is actually a trade; it's not like you can read a couple of books and expect to come up with an accurate picture of a historical period or place), but when readers read their books, they assume that reality must look like that, because that's what the book is telling them. And occasionally, since the human mind is very good at reading biased stories in their supposedly neutral surroundings, they will suddenly start to "recognise" what they read in the book in their daily life (I had a long conversation about that with my PhD tutor a few weeks ago; he was saying that "everybody knows a Madame Bovary", while I'm rather convinced that everybody will read a Madame Bovary in a person they know, even if that person is a complex human being with a unique personality that has many different aspects from the Madame Bovary in the book).
Of course it's more complicated, because as you said, readers are likely to assume that what they read about in a fantasy book more or less mirrors reality. They're just even more likely to trust the writer down to every detail if it's a book that's supposed to happen in the real world, which makes realistic fiction even more deceptive (because incomplete research can pass off as thorough, not as invention). Still, I definitely agree that fantasy writers should be more thorough in their research, and more respectful of stories not their own. I just don't think the problem is bigger in genre fiction than in mainstream.
"And occasionally, since the human mind is very good at reading biased stories in their supposedly neutral surroundings, they will suddenly start to "recognise" what they read in the book in their daily life (I had a long conversation about that with my PhD tutor a few weeks ago; he was saying that "everybody knows a Madame Bovary", while I'm rather convinced that everybody will read a Madame Bovary in a person they know, even if that person is a complex human being with a unique personality that has many different aspects from the Madame Bovary in the book)."
Yes! I certainly recognise this tendency. Matching people to their symbols becomes a kind of shorthand instead of actually paying attention.
I do think you are speaking on rather a deeper level than I'd begun thinking. What you say here also calls to mind the way neuroscience is beginning to unpack the way we develop internal representations based on our senses and prior context. If I have time later I'll try to chase up some links. The lack of absolutes in this department comes to mind; we tend to literally see and hear what we know how to see and hear--all of which relates to prior experience and learned filtration systems.
"They're just even more likely to trust the writer down to every detail if it's a book that's supposed to happen in the real world, which makes realistic fiction even more deceptive (because incomplete research can pass off as thorough, not as invention"
Very good point, thank you.
"I just don't think the problem is bigger in genre fiction than in mainstream."
Well, that's fair enough, and thank you for bringing the mainstream issue into the picture. I do think there is a particular quality of problem with invention that affects SFF writers in terms of 'uncheckable facts' or maybe 'unexamined points of reference' for example. And without knowing anything about it I'm guessing maybe historical writers would have some overlap with SFF writers in this area. (Which is not at all to negate or neglect what you have said about the reliability of 'facts' in the first place!)
Certainly. And it's problematic because even if we say that of course, we're all aware that it's just invention, I guess we all have a tendency to use reality to make sense of imaginary stories, eg. assume that, even if the story is imaginary, it still reflects basic human psychology, or the basic workings of politics... I do agree that there's a problem there that SFF writers have to adress.
What I guess I meant is that our relationship to reality, and how we read reality, is so problematic in the first place, that I'm a bit wary of drawing lines between invention and realism. Orientalist writers often meant, in good faith, to give realistic descriptions of faraway places, for instance. Of course anybody could have checked the facts and called them on their (frequent) rubbish, but since their stories were often supposed to come from first-hand experience (like Pierre Loti's, for instance), I don't think many people did anyway. And then imgination in fiction has been so stigmatised that presenting a book as "realistic" gives it instant authority, while presenting it as "fantasy" makes it suspect (and thus may, paradoxically, encourage readers to do more fact-checking... in fact, for what it's worth, I once did an amateur survey on my journal about what kind of extras readers liked to find in novels, and it turned out that many of the respondants enjoyed research notes above all else)
But then I do agree that SFF writers shouldn't get a free pass by saying "Oh, it's all my invention anyway" anytime they give a mangled impression of other people's narratives because they were too lazy to do their research! :)
When you say that it makes me realise I've gotten drawn into thinking in conventional rather than useful categories. Thanks.
Thanks for looking at this issue and talking about it.
It's a tough one to think about so I really appreciate the encouragement :)
Also loving the posts on your blog and at Kate Elliott's :)