Authors: Gerry Canavan
As for people in the future reading my work, hopefully it would be like reading any literature from older times. Books are a window back into previous minds and their thoughts. Old science fiction inevitably looks creaky and dated, but in revealing ways, and hopefully despite the datedness, some of the ordinary pleasures of the novel will remain, if they were there in the first place. It is a worry, that
SF
becomes wrong in ways that obscure everything else about it. But when I was reading for
Galileo's Dream
, I learned about the genre you could call renaissance fantasia, which includes works like the
Hypnerotomachia
, or Bruno's
The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast
, or
Somnium
by Kepler. These are strange texts, but they have an inventiveness and linguistic energy that reminded me of science fiction. Maybe they were the science fiction of their time, when science was still natural philosophy. In the future people may judge our science to be almost as unformed and primitive as natural philosophy (our science not yet ruling the world, after all, as it might in the year 3000), but hopefully our science fiction will still hold some pleasure as a kind of fantasia.
I don't think people in the future will judge science fiction readers of our time as being especially hypocritical, just because we were reading science fiction while not acting on its lessons in the real world. We will be complicit with all the rest of our time, whatever happens, and it may be that science fiction readers will be judged to be among the secret agents of whatever good comes out of our time. It will be very hard to untangle all that and assign culpability or praise.
By and large I think science fiction has been fulfilling its role as a tool of human thought, while at the same time striving to entertain enough people to make money in the current economy. That's the usual odd combination of requirements that art deals with.
GC
âº
How do you evaluate the influence of
SF
on ecological and environmentalist discourse? For every
Silent Spring
that uses science fictional imagery to mobilize people, there is a
Star Trek
that persuades us that we just have to sit back and wait for cold fusion to fix everything. Does
SF
generally steer us right, or wrong?
KSR
âº
Science fiction is a genre, and can hold many different kinds of content, across a wide ideological range.
It probably does have certain generic attributes that constitute its “content of the form.” For instance, as it is composed of stories set in the future, or in alternative histories, or in prehistoryâthus, all the histories that we can never knowâit does seem to indicate a commitment to history. It's a strange version of that commitment, focusing as it does on the histories we can't know; a kind of realism of the absent, made of thought experiments that use the counterfactual or the unknowable.
Another kind of content of the form comes from the genre's focus on the future; this seems to be saying that there will be a future, and maybe a human future. And because future histories are sketched out to explain these fictional futures, there's also usually the implication of causality, even an explanatory causality. Most stories have that, however.
Beyond these contents of the form, many different messages can be conveyed, some helpful, others harmful. Some thought experiments are so badly designed that their results (the contents of the form) are “not even wrong.”
Still, pretty prominent in science fiction is a body of work that concerns itself with planets and how humans live on them, and these stories are always ecological in some loose sense. And a subset of this group of stories is about Earth as a planet. One basic message they all convey goes something like, “We live on a planet, and planets are therefore interesting.” This is a good thing to remember and think about, as being inescapably ecological. So again, my feeling is that science fiction has by and large done its job as a form, and helped us to think ecologically.
GC
âº
How does this concern impact your own practice as a writer? What sort of research do you do when you set out to write? How do you square a commitment to the facts to your commitment to the art?
KSR
âº
Facts are stories, and often the raw material for my stories, so really it is just one single commitment. Most of my stories are realist stories in some sense.
One recent exception that might help illustrate my attitude toward these matters:
Galileo's Dream
is a time travel novel, so I felt more comfortable writing that as a fantasia. Time travel does regularly get defined as a science fictional idea, of course, but I think it is unreal enough to be best presented as a fantasia, so that's what I did. But more often I'm trying for science fiction with a strong reality effect, so the physical facts of the world are very much part of those projects.
My research consists mostly of a lot of reading, augmented by conversations with scientists, historians, and others. I generally sketch out a story in my mind and then start researching it, and what I learn often greatly alters the initial
idea. I keep researching right to the end of the writing, so often the later parts of a book (especially the multivolume ones) will seem to know things that the earlier parts didn't, and this is indeed the case.
Because I am trying to create a strong reality effect for variously unreal situations, research is important. It is always bringing me more stories, and many of these are at least as interesting as my initial idea, and they all seem to be woven together and lead off in all directions. It can become a problem finding where the appropriate edge of the spreading network of interesting stories should be cut. It's like cutting a patterned fabric when you love all the patterns. Thus the length of my novels, and the crowded feeling they often have. But I am seeing better now that cut stories can be interesting in their cuts, and that's been helping me to shape the latest novels.
GC
âº
Did earlier ecological
SF
provide examples or inspiration to you?
KSR
âº
Yes, my very first attraction to science fiction had a lot to do with the strand in the genre that could be called the planetary romance. What I got was often simply the joy of exploration, something I had already found as a young reader in Jules Verne, but now that joy extended to a romantic feeling about visiting other planets, and regarding them as places or landscapes. My discovery of science fiction happened in the same years I was discovering the Sierra Nevada on foot, also the years I was first reading Gary Snyder and then Buddhist texts, so the three interests were wrapped together for me, they became parts of a single pursuit.
I particularly enjoyed books like Edgar Pangborn's early novels (
West of the Sun
, etc.) and many of the planetary adventures of Jack Vance, who had a very evocative way with landscapes, no doubt because of the way he lived and sailed around Earth during his working life. I also enjoyed Clifford Simak, who managed to make Wisconsin a mysterious planetary surface, connected to places all over the cosmos. Then the first four novels of Ursula K. Le Guin cast a very strong spell, and in
City of Illusions
the exotic planet to be traversed was a far future Earth, which was nice as well. After that I read Herbert's
Dune
as a planetary romance, but also an ecological primer on desert survival.
All these together won me over. It was then I read John Brunner's
Stand on Zanzibar
quartet, which made a very different impact, a somber corrective: planets were great, but we were wrecking ours. Quite a few of Brunner's earlier novels had been planetary romances in the old joyful style, so for him to put the Dos Passos lens on the damage we were doing to Earth was powerful. This for me marked the moment when ecology was added to the original romance.
That allowed me to resituate Ballard as more than a psychological novelist, and
The Crystal World
became a great novel of our alienation from a wrecked
Earth.
Since then I have continued to enjoy novels about other planets, everything from Lem's
Solaris
to Molly Gloss's
The Dazzle of Day
. I'm sure this strand in science fiction is what led me to my work on Mars. There exists a kind of canon of planetary science fiction by now, and ecological science fiction is either a subset of that, or vice versa.
GC
âº
Do any particularly bad stories spring to mind from your early reading? Stories with ridiculous or repugnant premises that point us in a completely wrong direction?
KSR
âº
Oh, yes, there are several types of bad stories. One that points us in a completely wrong direction is this commonly expressed notion that Earth is humanity's cradle. I know this story began with Tsiolkovsky, but it became a commonplace in American science fiction, and I still hear it a lot in discussions about inhabiting Mars or space more generally, both in the science fiction community and in the space advocacy community. The assumption in that phrase and the future history it suggests is that humanity can survive apart from Earth, which is completely unproven and is likely to be wrong. It further suggests that, as humanity has a destiny to colonize the universe, the “cradle” is of only momentary importance, a thing to be used in infancy and then discarded, or at most revered as “Old Earth.” This story therefore carries within it terrible mistakes in thinking about our reliance on our planet, and it rightly causes an instinctive revulsion against the space project on the part of people who are a little more grounded. It is much more accurate, considering that only 10 percent of the
DNA
inside us is human
DNA
, to recall Flora Thompson's line from
Lark Rise to Candleford
, which is quoted in John Crowley's
Little, Big
: “We are bubbles of Earth! Bubbles of Earth!”
Another bad story is the one about “the Singularity,” which is also connected, though it is not exactly the same idea, to the notion of uploading human minds into computers. These both point us in wrong directions, as being disguised versions of immortality or transcendenceâthe rapture of the nerds, as Ken MacLeod put it. They are religious stories, misunderstanding or misrepresenting the brain, computers, consciousness, and history. And again they encourage carelessness toward Earth as our indispensable home, and even toward our own bodies, and our historical project as a species.
GC
âº
It's interesting that you bring up religion, as in addition to denigrating
climate change as a science fiction, the denialist Right has frequently insisted it is a “religion.” I think we'd both feel comfortable criticizing these characterizations in fairly strident termsâand yet it seems to me one must admit that reality has been taking on the aura of a biblical apocalypse of late. If science fiction is the realism of our time, as you have often said, what to do with the fact that it frequently seems to be the opening crawl for some B-movie dystopia?
KSR
âº
What I've said is that we are now living in a science fiction novel that we are all writing together. That doesn't necessarily mean we are writing realistic science fiction. If our imaginations are crawling with B-movie dystopias, it may mark that in some Ballardian symbolic way we are hoping for these, rather than fearing them. The underlying feeling may be that anything would be better than now, and that only a big break will free us from the chains we have forged and wrapped around ourselves. But this is mostly hoping for an easy way out, an alternative to revolution where we don't have to do anything. These dystopian scenarios would break the hold of the present order, yes, but they would also make things even worse. We would be freed of some constraints, but worse ones would replace them. This is where Ballard's apocalyptic fantasies, depicting disaster as a flight to freedom, are wrong, because in the chaos he describes so lovingly (I'm thinking of the end of
The Drowned World
) we would be much less free than we are now. I think Ballard himself recognizes and says something like this in
The Crystal World
, the last and most beautiful of his planetary disaster series. The painfully ironic thing is that the kind of freedoms he seemed to crave, which were psychological and personal, can be had by merely walking outdoors, or by hanging out with people you love. It doesn't take the collapse of civilization to defeat suburban alienation. In this project the Dalai Lama is a better guide to happiness than J. G. Ballard. I guess that should be immediately obvious, but I mean that focusing on present reality, and what you can do in it to better things for yourself and everyone, is better than the imaginary freedom expressed in the apocalyptic strain in our science fiction.
Maybe we can say that we need to see the real situation more imaginatively, while imagining what we want more realistically.
GC
âº
Along the same lines: Is utopia a religion? Or, perhaps it would be better to say: Is there continuity between the vision of utopia you set out and the (happy) end of history figured by something like the Christian kingdom of heaven?
KSR
âº
Is science a religion? I have trouble grasping exactly what a religion is, once you take it out of church. It's a big word. I think the Christian kingdom of heaven is meant to be an end state, where the operating rules are fixed for
good, and the inhabitants are immortal souls. That seems to me very different from an idea that we could try to make a more just society, which is my notion of utopia. That will always be a receding horizon ahead of us, which we can at best approach asymptotically, and will never reach. So it's the difference between a desired end state (but what do they do there?) and a set of means to operate in a process that will never end.