A spirited defense of speculative fiction

(6) As the comments on the article say, it’s a click-baity headline. And needlessly derogative.

“He was awake in his bunk just a few hours ago, staring at …”; the narrative realism version then continues: “… the shadows of his ceiling slowly ebbing to pink, when the delivery kid’s bicycle rattled onto the gravel of his driveway,” while the science fiction version continues: “… the gray of his sky-replicating ceiling slowly ebbing to pink, when the satellite dish mounted above his quarters started grinding into position to receive the day’s messages relayed from Earth.”

I’ve got two reactions to this. One is that good SF (at least the kind I enjoy) makes you put the pieces together. I’m constantly figuring things out. On lots of different levels. The BEST SF/F gives you a different reading every time you read it. I pick up new layers every time I re-read Bujold, which is a trick as I’ve re-read some of her books five or six times.

Or look at Anathem by Stephenson. There’s a crapton of levels.
– Basic Plot
– Figuring out the words
– The fun of realizing (or even tracking down) all the our-world analogues to such things as Saunt Cartas or the Sconic movement
– Figuring out the basic worldbuilding
– Following the sub-plots, romance and otherwise
– On re-reading, you realize things where happening right there that you didn’t realize were happening the first time. (For a FANTASTIC book that does this better than any other I’ve read, go out and read, then re-read, Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein RIGHT NOW. It’s practically two different books.)
– Realizing what Antarct is
– Comprehending quantum physics and the many-worlds hypothosis
– And how that all relates to your brain (read Roger Penrose)
– What the heck is the difference between Incantors and Rhetors and which character follows which philosophy
– And then there’s Fraa Jad

Of course I would do poorly on comprehension quiz after the first read-through. Stephenson is throwing all these unfamiliar words and concepts at me.

(Aside – When I was at University, I took a class on teaching reading to elementary school children. One exercise we were given was to read a short passage about an Inuit hunting a seal–with all the native terminology–then take a comprehension quiz. Most of us failed. The point being that if you don’t have a good grasp of the cultural norms you’re reading in, your comprehension of written prose is lower than when you do. If we offered more culturally relevant reading to our “poorly performing” students their comprehension would be more on par with their peers.)

In GOOD science fiction and fantasy, we are often reading outside anybody’s cultural norms. We spend a chunk of our reading energy figuring out what a Weyr is, how ansibles work, whether we’re on Earth or some alien planet, is our Heroine imagining this or is this how the world really works? Am *I* imagining this or is that how this world really works? Why does everyone’s name start with “Vor”? And, wait, didn’t Shakespeare only write 38 plays?

My second thought is that you can’t write Science Fiction just by replacing the word bicycle with satellite dish. It sounds like they wrote what might have been a decent “Literary” fiction piece and then made a very bad Science Fiction piece out of it, which messes with their data right from the get-go.​

PhilRM on November 7, 2017 at 9:07 am said:

NB: it’s very important to realize that what the paper calls ‘Science Fiction readers’ are simply the subset of online volunteers who were given the ‘Science Fiction’ version of the story to read; they are not people who identified in any way as regular readers of SF. And it’s hard to tell how much the result was influenced by what was likely a terrible SF story, since they constructed it by taking their ‘literary’ story and replacing everyday terminology with ‘SF’ terms.

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Which is another problem with the study. It’s not that non-SF readers can’t understand SF, that would be a stupid and elitist take. But regular SF readers have training in … setting aside early expectations, I guess. I *expect* to not understand what’s going on in the beginning. I *expect* I have to figure it out and build contextual clues not only from scratch, but from other SF stories. I go in to a story knowing what an ansible is. I also go in knowing if the author says “the alligator bus” they are more probably being literal as opposed to a metaphor. I have a toolbox built up over the decades to help me over the unfamiliar. And the author can expect that and work with it.

Many readers with limited experience with SF literature don’t have those examples, or that built-up toolbox*. Thus many of them work a bit harder to build the cultural connotations that results in a good reading comprehension score.

This is compounded with a story that doesn’t even try to explain things. If they’re just substituting “bicycle” with “satellite dish” they’re not taking the time to drop cultural clues for new readers to pick up. No halfway decent author just says “he called them on the ansible and asked what he should have for lunch” without dropping something in the text to help readers figure out what an ansible is. (Or at least help the reader realize the call is going someplace ten light years away and getting an instant response.)

*Nowadays, more and more people DO have that toolbox. They’re picking it up out of the ether of the permeation of SF into mainstream culture. But even so, that won’t help much in figuring out what an ansible is without some context clues.​