I Don't Really Talk to my Family Right Now (Part 2) (Fremder)

Previously we looked at why Science Fiction shares nothing with the wussy, unmanly genre of the Family Saga. Unfortunately, I didn't actually get the time to put across my theory that the Kitchen Sink Drama is actually a form of science fiction, because it is all about the relationship between people and technology, and the way in which technology changes and shapes people's lives. Basically, that's the theory there.

I'm guessing that any Hard SF purist who might be reading this will now be telling the screen that I am wrong, because kitchen sinks, and indeed the whole agricultural/domestic set-up, haven't been cutting edge science for hundreds, if not thousands of years, and the whole thrust of most of those books is about the people rather than the machines. The thing is, they should really be agreeing with me, because talking about current tech is about as hard as SF can get; there's little chance you're going to get the possibilities wrong when the tech is literally as old as houses.

(Also, although only tangentially related, everyone should read Rachel's Machine, by Martin Wagner and then get back to me. This is your homework.)

The big thing is, even the best Hard SF is as much about the people as it is about the machines - in fact, most of the SF that I can think of that is mainly about the machines is actually pretty soft, scientifically speaking; Terminator and The Matrix are parables, not predictions. Even Foundation, one of the dreariest things I've ever read, is all about the people and their reaction to living in a profoundly deterministic universe. Rather than detailing the process of quantifying the determinism itself, or even arguing the necessity of the philosophy behind the determinist assumption, it is just stated - in the first book at least, that some very clever people worked it out. In other words, a wizard did it.

So, as I said in the first part of this double-post, scratch the surface and a lot of sci-fi is really just about people; their relationships to each other and the way those relationships are affected by, enabled by or predicated by technology. Without the people you often end up losing the fiction element - off it goes there as a discrete energy packet - and unless you are writing about something you have really fully researched then the new quantum state you are most likely to find yourself having settled into is going to be futurism, rather than reference, and no-one in their right mind wants to end up there.

Sometimes people write about the way in which groups of related people interact, which is how you know it is definitely not a Family Saga, and sometimes they write about how mainly two people interact, which is how you know it is most definitely not a soppy romance novel for girls.

Fremder, by Russell Hoban is one of those books. Sort of. I can't really say much without giving away what happens in it, but it is an awful lot about love, and about how love interacts with technology, and about how love can be exploited by people who think that they have the best interests of the world at heart. It's a beautiful little book with a pleasingly classic kind of dystopia - think 1984 or A Clockwork Orange. It's also, as was How to Live Safely... about the kind of people who do science, without having or needing to have any meaningful relationship to current scientific thinking.

In conclusion: if men can write stories (and be accepted and acclaimed) within the sci-fi umbrella, that would outside of it be considered part of a more denigrated, female, genre; 1) Why the hell do we denigrate those genres anyway? 2) What could possibly stop a woman-as-she-is (any woman, the platonic woman), and not as-you-think-she-ought-to-be from being able to write something that could meaningfully be classified as sci-fi? 3) When will many of my fellow science fiction fans grow up?

For the record, the question of when I will grow up is not going to be asked, or indeed answered here.