One of the few benefits of being my age is that it helps you to develop a sense of historical perspective.
Most people, it increasingly seems to me, live inside a temporal bubble that is at best about ten years long. To such people five years ago is ancient history, and thus irrelevant, while five years in the future is so far away as to be impossible to imagine.
Ironic, then, that so many science fiction writers spend so much of their time and energy trying to envision the distant future, while completely stuck in the bubble of their own contemporary reality.
You will find that the business of writing and publishing science fiction abounds in such ironies.
Science fiction perhaps has an undeserved reputation for being a visionary literature. This is in large part a function of the genre’s commercial history. Before World War II, science fiction lived mostly in the pages of cheap and ephemeral pulp magazines. The mass-market paperback book simply did not exist in the American market before May, 1939.
During the war, paper rationing limited the production of books, while at the same time the military services found it necessary to teach people by the millions to read. After the war, then, when rationing was at last lifted, there followed an enormous demand for new books, but A.I. not having been invented yet, the demand for new books far outpaced the supply of new content.
The solution was obvious. Companies like Street & Smith already owned the copyrights to the enormous amounts of pulp science fiction they’d published in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. All they had to do was bundle the stuff up in new packages, slap on new covers with exciting new ad copy, and put it on the book racks.
Given that, science fiction’s reputation as a visionary literature was easy to come by. To become known as a visionary, all you need to do is make a ton of prognostications, and then, ten or twenty years later, cherry-pick through them to find the ones that held up and say, “See?! I was right!!!”
If you make enough predictions, some are bound to come true, eventually.
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With this historical perspective comes another pair of conjoined realizations: that this thing we call “science fiction” existed long before Hugo Gernsback named it or John W. Campbell Jr. began to relentlessly promote it as being something new, different, and visionary, and that the trends in the literature and the business of publishing it are cyclical, and approximately generational. Boom and bust; optimism and pessimism; utopian and dystopian; rockets and ray-guns action or introspective and thoughtful inaction: whatever you think science fiction is now, stick around five years, and it will change. In ten years it will be the diametric opposite of whatever you think it is today. In twenty years, what’s fashionable now will be back again, but in slightly different form.
It rarely comes back in exactly the same form, unless it’s self-consciously being presented as retro style. Writers can’t help but reflect the times in which they live. This is what makes so much Golden Age science fiction so uncomfortable to read now. It’s not that our knowledge of science has advanced. (Although I do chortle at the memory of an early Isaac Asimov story I once read in which the hero, faced with the challenge of having to get his spaceship through the asteroid belt, decides to save time and fuel by flying up and over the asteroid belt, and then cutting the engines and coasting back down to the plane of the ecliptic.)
It’s the characters who make us uncomfortable, with the way they speak and act in ways that unconsciously reflect the mores, attitudes, and assumptions of people who lived more than fifty years ago.
But again, this is cyclical, approximately generational, and what is unacceptably outré in one decade can become just fine in the next. Difficult as it may be to believe, there was a time when all correctly thinking people in the SF business criticized the original Star Trek, as being “too militaristic.” This is why the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation was so bad. They were trying to make the Enterprise D “a ship of peace.”
It wasn’t until the second season, when Roddenberry stepped back from hands-on control of the scripts, Riker grew a beard and a pair of cojones, and the new show runners introduced the Borg, that Star Trek became the juggernaut franchise we know today.
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SF tropes and trends are cyclical. Themes and ideas come and go, and then come back again. Utopian SF will be a hot category for a while, but then it gives way to dark and dystopian visions, as, let’s face it, utopian novels are always boring and preachy, and have been at least since William Dean Howells wrote A Traveler from Altruria.
One trend that always comes back around again is The End Of The World (As We Know It). We SF fans and writers do love our deity-free eschatons. I’m not sure why. Sometimes I think it’s simply a failure of imagination. We find that we can’t imagine living in a world more than five or ten years in the future, so we decide to blow the damned thing up and start over in the stone age. It was either that or adopt the Star Trek “California über alles” approach, and envision a future in which Western liberal civilization and values have ascended directly to the stars, mostly intact and unchanged and with only a few insignificant bumps in the road along the way.
So we reboot the world. It doesn’t matter how. “How” is always a reflection of the most popular “We’re doomed!” scenario du jour. When H. G. Wells wrote The War of the Worlds, it was at a time when novels depicting England being invaded, usually by Germans, but sometimes by the Russians, Prussians, or French, were popular and sold well. Wells, though, made his invaders Martians, and gave them all kinds of horrific new weapons that even the Germans didn’t have yet. That was what made The War of the Worlds an enduring masterpiece: the grotesque horror of people being slaughtered by tripods with heat rays or captured by monstrous aliens who wanted to drink their blood. That made it live far past its time. I mean, for comparison’s sake, just try to find a copy of George Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking now.
We reboot the world. We don’t actually destroy it. (Unless we also give the elect a way to escape and carry on the struggle, as in Greg Bear’s The Forge of God.) We just want to shock contemporary civilization to a flat line and start over. It doesn’t matter how; how is always a function of what’s currently in fashion. In the 1940s and 1950s there were a lot of atomic wars and bioweapon plagues in science fiction; later, as flying saucer hysteria took hold, we were invaded by yet more aliens. Towards the end of the 1960s global ecological catastrophes became very popular end-of-the-world scenarios, and in the 1970s there was a period when what Larry Niven termed “Big Rock Hits Earth” books were in vogue, resulting in novels like Lucifer’s Hammer and Shiva Descending. “Bioweapon plague that causes people to turn into homicidal zombies” seems to be an unstoppable two-fer: no matter how tired you personally may be of seeing such stories, the SF-consuming world, collectively, isn’t. At least, not yet.
In all such end-of-the-world tropes, there is an embedded epicycle. At first, the scenario is seemingly a new and fresh idea, and it results in some thoughtful and interesting books: e.g., Alas, Babylon, by Pat Frank (atomic war); Earth Abides, by George R. Stewart (plague); I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson (zombies); The Day of the Triffids, by John Wyndham (GMO plants run amok)…
[Seriously, if you’ve never read The Day of the Triffids, you owe it to yourself to do so. The novel is much better than any of the films that have been based on it.]
…The Postman, by David Brin (combined EMP and bioweapon attack)…
And then along comes a Mary Sue,* who looks at the shattered ruins of this post-apocalyptic landscape, and thinks, “Wow. Wouldn’t it be cool to live in this world?!”
[ * Or maybe a Kevin Costner ]
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There was a poster that was very popular in the early 1970s. There were many variations on it, as the text, being adapted from Psalm 23, wasn’t copyrightable, but it usually said something like this:
“Yea, though I walk through the valley of
the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for I
am the meanest motherfucker in the valley.”
That, in a single sentence, is the essence of the Mary Sue, Survivalist story. The author has projected his (typically his, but not always*) idealized self into a survival scenario, and then gamed out exactly what he would pack along and all the ways in which he would be prepared to handily defeat all the obstacles that he, being the author, will put in his own way. The result is typically a story that is half testosterone-soaked macho chest-thumping, half REI outdoor gear catalog copy, with a big scoop of gun-porn thrown in on top.
[* On the other hand, if the protagonist is female, the author will likely substitute a familiar such as a small dragon, telepathic mountain lion, or some other cryptid in lieu of all the guns.]
Half this, half that, but all idealized self-image, absurdly over-competent and over-prepared to deal with the line of straw-man menaces the author has lined up for them to knock over. (Said menaces, by the way, will all politely wait their turns to attack the Mary Sue character one at a time, until the final boss fight with the biggest menace of all.)
Survival situation stories can be exciting. Survival stories can be dramatic. Survival stories can be revealing tests of character, with the ultimate stake—life itself—on the line.
But in the Mary Sue Survivalist story, the character enjoys the survival situation, thrives, succeeds, and dominates in it, and doesn’t want to get out of it!
Another ironic aside: I’ve noticed that the authors who like to write these kinds of stories tend to be people who in real life can’t get through a hotel breakfast buffet line without putting their lives at risk. As in, “One entire plate just for bacon? Dude, that can’t be healthy!”
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One final sidebar: when I got to this line in the critique—
I
think he’d be loaded down and I think there might be stuff attached to
the baby carriage, too.
I thought of Lone Wolf and Cub. If you’ve never read the manga, or watched any of the movies or TV programs based on it, Lone Wolf and Cub is the story of a disgraced samurai who is making his way across Tokugawa shogunate-era Japan, pushing a baby cart carrying his infant son. It’s a dangerous journey, as they’re both under death sentences and being pursued by a plethora of bad guys, but Ogami has a secret weapon: the baby cart. It’s been tricked-out and turned into a rolling arsenal that puts the Batmobile to shame!Good stuff. Bloody, violent, and ridiculously over the top, but if you’re a fan of samurai movies or manga, it’s definitely worth checking out.
