SF and its impact

[Jubal]

So I recently saw this piece linked and read it:
https://ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/2023/12/31/an-anti-defense-of-science-fiction/

And I found it interesting, in an "I'm not sure this tallies at all with my worldview but maybe I'm just looking at the wrong bits of the genre". The writer seems to largely be arguing against some positions that I've not come across people who hold, like people thinking that reading diverse SF is in and of itself a moral act (who argues this)? And also seems to be arguing that a) SF doesn't really have a political impact but also b) is aligned with bad political and technological change as much as good. Perhaps the argument is that it's really a positive reflection of society rather than providing the reimagining or critique of society that it promises - as he puts it, he thinks SF is "by turns the muse and the mouthpiece of an economic-technologic system committing atrocities that implicate us all".

This... seems an odd critique to me, but maybe I'm just reading the wrong SF? I don't really even think of SF and SF-leaning works as being essentially mapping and imagining technology, so much as envisaging societies in which our current technological limitations aren't in play in one way or another. So the mapping closely of "defending" SF being a pro-tech-at-all-costs position and "not defending" it being a techno-cautious position doesn't feel like a natural set of things that click together in my head. I get that there are real connections where as the author shows e.g. there's connections from the military to SF fandom spaces, but I don't know how much one can conflate fandom spaces with SF as a genre. I dunno, I dont necessarily disagree with the author, I was mostly interested in how different our assumptions about "what is SF and what does it look like and what do people think about it" seemed to be.

Any thoughts?

[dubsartur]

I don't yet have time to read that and form an opinion, but other essays along those lines are a recent one by Charlie Stross and a strange older essay by David Brin where he set up Star Wars as reactionary and mystical (OK) but Star Trek as a model of rational scientific humanism (um ...)  A lot of powerful people are implementing technologies like buttonless touch-screen interfaces and voice control and orbital space habitats which seemed cool on TV or in Analog magazine when they were 12.

Ursula le Guin has essays on science fiction and fantasy which are also worth reading too.

Stross says something I said in a talk a few years ago:

SF authors such as myself are popular entertainers who work to amuse an audience that is trained on what to expect by previous generations of science-fiction authors. We are not trying to accurately predict possible futures but to earn a living: any foresight is strictly coincidental. We recycle the existing material—and the result is influenced heavily by the biases of earlier writers and readers. The genre operates a lot like a large language model that is trained using a body of text heavily contaminated by previous LLMs; it tends to emit material like that of its predecessors. Most SF is small-c conservative insofar as it reflects the history of the field rather than trying to break ground or question received wisdom.

Could we change the default styling on this forum so that text in BlockQuotes is at least as tall and weighty as in the body of a post?

[Jubal]

Stross says something I said in a talk a few years ago:

Most SF is small-c conservative insofar as it reflects the history of the field rather than trying to break ground or question received wisdom.

Yeah, I think this may be a major part of it: perhaps I don't tend to read enough as-conventionally-understood SF to be reading or consuming a lot of the "bulk" of the genre, so things feel fresher to me and break more ground when I do so?

Could we change the default styling on this forum so that text in BlockQuotes is at least as tall and weighty as in the body of a post?

Probably! I'll need to check other people are OK with it but I don't see a reason why we can't change that bit of CSS if I can find the time to work out where it is. Could you pop a thread or something about it in the Questions & Suggestions section? That'll make it easier for me to remember to do it than if the note is mid-thread in Discussion & Debate someplace.

[dubsartur]

I will see what I can do.

The essay by Jake Casella Brookins is trying to use drama on the internet or social media to show something about society in general, and his jeremiad against digital-industrial civilization could be picked at in the details (eg. a smaller proportion of humans are very poor today than any time in the past 150 years, and Mr. Biden actually ended one of the forever wars - and Highland New Guinea had forever wars with neolithic technology).  Classic California sci-fi fandom was full of people who would go to a party and say something provocative and watch the sparks!

[Jubal]

Yeah, I take your point. I think the bit I find odd is rhetorically pigeonholing genres to an overarching ideological position, whether it's one you like or not. I'm not sure I'd even do that for fantasy, which more than SF I think has always had a small-c conservative and indeed to some extent a large-c Conservative underpinning to it (fundamentally a huge chunk of fantasy is "the social order is threatened and good rule must be restored like it was before"). But saying "one shouldn't defend fantasy as a genre" because of that makes no sense to me, it may be an argument for writing that genre differently or an indictment on particular authors, communities, or ideas, but I think genres are rarely properly reducible to a subset of those elements. In any case, that makes this sort of argument work less well for me than if someone was a bit more precise in saying what sort of SFF or what authors or issues they're more particularly talking about. The idea that "Science Fiction" is a sufficiently unitary thing to have a record to be defended or opposed feels pretty strange to me.

[dubsartur]

If you train yourself into a good scientist, either through academe or through doing things which are continuously tested against evidence, it becomes hard to believe in 'big ideas' books and essays.  Unfortunately, the Internet and social media reward the 'big ideas' much better than specific nuanced expertise.  Something that seems truthy and provocative to someone with no specific knowledge of the topic gets more shares, angry responses, 30 second clips on TV, etc.  Its one of the simple pleasures you have to give up with education or experience, like getting a medical or paramedical education makes it hard to enjoy medical dramas.

For every romantic reactionary in classic American science fiction such as Poul Anderson there is an anarchist expat Esperantoist like Harry Harrison or a feminist such as Ursula le Guin.

Mystery and comedy are all about restoring the proper order of society, and romance tends to promote the romantic pair bond as the ideal way to live a life.  So you could argue that popular fiction tends to be conservative.

Edit: Also, debates like "are organized sci fi fans self-important?" go on because they continue to be issues! But If you have heard the argument go back and forth 10 times, then an 11th version is probably not for you.

Edit: essay from 2015 which defines the fiction it is talking about https://scholars-stage.org/fiction-and-the-strategist/