There Is no Such Thing as Coincidence: Fictional Plot and Verisimilitude

I am currently enjoying Swedish state television SVT's big science fiction venture Äkta människor (Eng. Real Humans) and would like to urge any and all Swedish readers who have missed out thus far to catch up via SVT Play. International readers should definitely keep an eye out for the series, because I would argue that chances are good that this will be exported. It is an excellent take on an alternate reality / near future, where hubots (i.e. humanoid robots) have become an integrated commodity on the market and in society, yet where both ideological resistance against machines replacing real humans and questions of what constitutes actual humanity and intelligence exist side by side, and in opposition to a smooth integration. Through make-up and superb acting, another reality is projected unto the screen and the result is quite possibly Swedish television's finest hour in a loooooong time.

However, fond as I am of the series after its first eight (out of ten) episodes, there is one thing that has started to bug me somewhat as the plot is slowly gaining its momentum: the nature of coincidence.

There is an old adage that knowingly states that there is no such thing as coincidence. While I am not necessarily ready to subscribe to such a notion completely (if for no other reason than the fact that we would have to define coincidence in a pretty precise fashion), I am willing to agree that there is not really any such thing as coincidence in a fictional plot.

Do not get me wrong: there is clearly a possibility of real world coincidences influencing authors or artists in their narrative choices (in film or television this would furthermore seem even more true as casting choices or even weather conditions on a shooting day might affect the finished product). However, that being said, the nature of plot itself is to create a believable sequence of events, or a mesh of intricate plot strands that unite in a complex yet unified story. Reality may very well be quite disorganised, but a narrative requires a certain sense of order, let us call it narrative logic, to be believable. This line of reasoning obviously resonates in the old Chekov quote about a gun on the wall in the first act of a play needing to be used in the second. In short, a reader will only tolerate so many red herrings, and even then they need to be relevant herrings.

As such, plot is its own enemy, because in trying to create this narrative logic and impose verisimilitude, it also runs the risk of violating the same verisimilitude it tries to achieve. We may not accept the disorganised chaos of reality as narrative proper, but nor do we accept the too neat narrative as real. And this is where coincidence becomes relevant.

Chekov's example above is good because it shows that stories should avoid being bogged down with needless things. Just because an author has a whole world at his disposal, it does not necessarily mean that going anywhere and everywhere in it is beneficial. In fact, and following Chekov's logic, authors need to restrain themselves and only go where their plot needs them to go. The trick is to follow that logic while masking its blatant intentionality.

If every piece and part of a narrative services the plot and the story, it needs to do so without calling attention to the plot or the story (unless it is a case of metafiction, where such a tactic may be suitable). What do I mean? Well, if coincidences are starting to stack up (e.g. chance meetings between characters, deus ex machina type scenarios where there are just enough guns on the relevant wall at the much needed time, etc), we as an audience are less likely to believe that they are coincidences, and we inevitably start sensing the intentionality of plot. It is not that we normally are entirely unaware of the fact that there is a plot, nor even that we do not look for it; it is more a case of a plot suddenly staring us in the face or in other ways calling attention to itself as a plot.

So why do I feel the urge to discuss this in connection with Äkta människor then? Well, the series and its creators have done a fine job of creating an alternative reality or near future, and do an impressive job selling it to the viewer. Verisimilitude is high in this series, to be sure. Yet then there is a nagging sensation, which grows the further into the story we go, that all of our characters (several, but still fairly limited) are interconnected on far too many levels. In this sense, it becomes less an interconnected weave á la Altman's Short Cuts or Haggis' Crash, and much more of an everyone crossing paths with everyone else. The effect, quite naturally, is the sensation of a shrinking fictional reality, where the intentionality of plot is starting to be visible at the seams.

Still, I would not want to end on too harsh a note, because (as stated) this really is SVT's finest hour in a long time. And it bodes well for the future of Swedish science fiction.

Nine Seminars, Five Mini Seminars, Ten Signed Books and Four Days: The Göteborg Book Fair 2010, Pt 2

So, time for part two of my report from this year's Book Fair.

Saturday opened with my third and final Africa-themed seminar: "Maktens språk och språkets makt" (Eng. trans. The Language of Power and the Power of Language) featuring a discussion between Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and Professor Raoul J. Granqvist of Umeå University. The conversation focused on the importance of not depriving humans of their native languages through colonial or neo-colonial school systems. Ngũgĩ also spoke both of oriture (i.e. orality's equivalent of literacy's literature), stressing the connectivity between 0ral and textual language, and what he called cyborality/cyboriture. The latter of which, to my understanding, refers to the oral language impulses that the internet currently feeds directly back into written language; in essence generating texts that end up functioning much more like spoken language than written, in that it often tends towards a greater immediacy.

They also discussed the vicious circle of African publishing, that is, that there are few authors writing in African languages (Chinua Achebe's books for instance are not available in his native tongue, Igbo), which in turn leads to there being few publishers who publish books in African languages; which in turn... I guess, you get the picture. In this context, the importance of translation – of transferring important texts between smaller languages so as to not be overly dependent on bigger languages (i.e. the languages of the colonisers) – is of the essence.

The rest of the Saturday (four mini seminars and one more regular seminar) was coloured by the fantastic. This started with the mini seminar "Kick-ass chick-litt-fantasy" (I somehow think translation is somewhat superfluous here), in which Karin Waller ("Cap'n" of Science Fiction Bokhandeln's store in Malmö) and Nene Ormes (author and "crew") introduced the aforementioned fantasy subgenre which comes out of a combination of elements from chic lit (e.g. Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary), urban fantasy (e.g. Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere and Jim Butcher's Dresden Case Files series) and paranormal romance (e.g. Stephanie Meyer's Twilight Saga). This heroine based genre includes romance but never allows this to be its sole plot purpose or drive. Rather than stumbling over the mouthful of joint nomenclatures, Waller and Ormes offered the hopefully more catchy and snappy "fantzy". We will have to wait and see if the name catches on, but if you are a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the seminar suggested that this might be your kind of genre (with titles such as Jaqueline Carey's Santa Olivia and Gail Carriger's Parasol Protectorate series).

This seminar was followed by two short solo flights by Johan Theorin and John Ajvide Lindqvist respectively: "Mord på Öland" (Eng. trans. Murder on Öland) and "Med absolut gehör för skräck" (Eng. trans. With Perfect Pitch for Horror). Both authors were a lot of fun to listen to. I had attended seminars with Ajvide Lindqvist before, but Theorin was new to me, and he really made me interested in reading his books about Öland.

After this brief interlude, it was time to see more of Ormes, this time in a mini seminar entitled "Fantasy på svenska" (Eng. trans. Fantasy in Swedish). Here Ormes was interviewed by her publisher Anna Henriksson from Styxx Fantasy. The full seminar is available on YouTube (albeit in Swedish) and is highly recommended viewing.





Finally, Saturday's seminars ended with "Det magiska norden" (Eng. trans. The Magical North), in which four Nordic authors discussed elements of the fantastic in their fiction together with moderator Janina Orlov. The authors in question were Lene Kaaberbøl (Denmark), Jo Nesbø (Norway), Andri Snær Magnason (Iceland) and John Ajvide Lindqvist (Sweden). Finland should have been represented by Maria Turtschaninoff, who for some reason or another was not able to attend the Fair (although, I did pick up her book Underfors about a secret fantastic city underneath Helsinki). The discussion was interesting even though some of the question were a bit hit and miss. That being said, the questions that really hit home went down very well indeed, and really made it a worthwhile seminar to have attended.

The evening ended with a lovely dinner with some friends from Bookcrossing, all gathering in these glorified days of bookishness.

On Sunday, I only visited two seminars: the added seminar with Jan Lööf and "Livet, universum och allting" (Eng. trans. Life, the Universe and Everything). After having had the pleasure of listening to Jan Lööf in discussion with his sometimes-partner-in-crime Carl Johan deGeer last year, I jumped at the occasion for something of a repeat performance. Granted that his discussion with Kartago's Rolf Classon did not quite match that of the preceding year, but it was nevertheless an amusing and insightful seminar, and I have certainly no regrets for having spent my time on it.

The second one featured a panel debate between science fiction writer Peter F. Hamilton, publisher, journalist and writer Johan Ehrenberg, astroparticle physicist and blogger Anna Davour, and Glenn Petersen from Science Fiction Bokhandeln's Göteborg store. The panel was moderated by Math Claesson from Science Fiction Bokhandeln's Stockholm store. The discussion touched on questions of technology (and its theoretical limits), human norms and what it is that constantly drives us to wonder what is out there among the stars. All in all, a very good seminar with a lot of highlights, and earlier in the morning, I had also had the chance to buy Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained (the first two novels in Hamilton's Commonwealth Saga) and get them signed by the author.

The afternoon was spent mingling about a bit on the floor, meeting up with friends (both old and new) and also getting my copy of Karin Tidbeck's debut collection of short fiction, Vem är Arvid Pekon? (Eng. trans. Who Is Arvid Pekon?), signed. This book is not only very good and an extremely charming read, I would also dare to say that it is a book that is necessary on the Swedish literary scene. Writing in a tradition of short fiction that sports such names as Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Ray Bradbury, Philip José Farmer and Harlan Ellison, Tidbeck tells us stories which are unabashedly fantastic in nature, yet which adhere to no strict mainstream conventions of fantasy or science fiction (in particular as such definitions are understood on the Swedish literary market). I strongly doubt that this beautiful little book will match Nene Ormes' urban fantasy debut in terms of sales and audience (sadly), but it is a truism that short story collections sell worse as if by an unfortunate default setting, and the very fact which makes Tidbeck's contribution so necessary (even more so, perhaps, than Ormes' book, which I rate very highly) will most likely be part of the obstacles it (and she) will have to overcome. The fact that the book is out there, however, speaks well for the future of the fantastic in Swedish literature.


So, nine seminars, five mini seminars, ten signed books (and a few more bought) and four days of mingling, browsing, and having an awful lot of fun. I would not trade that away for the world.

A Stunning Visual Experience: Thoughts on James Cameron's Avatar

Yesterday, I finally went to see James Cameron's Avatar in 3D. I had heard a lot of good things about it (primarily about the visuals) as well as a fairly equal amount of criticism concerning the film's lack of originality. Either way, my expectations were fairly high.

And Cameron delivered.

Avatar (in 3D) is one of the most stunning visual experiences of my life. In that regard, Cameron has clearly taken the film medium to a new level. In terms of the story told, I can understand the criticism that it is not original. It simply isn't. Not even by a long shot. If you have seen, say Dances With Wolves and Braveheart, the film is not likely to shock or surprise you with its plot. Nor is Cameron's critique of corporate culture and non-ecological thinking by any means subtle. However, what is all the more fascinating in that respect is that, despite being so unoriginal and unsubtle, it is nevertheless ever so topical and current. And sadly so, I hasten to add. Because it would have been nice if the human race could ever learn something from past mistakes and leave greed (corporate or otherwise) behind.

All of this aside, Avatar tells its story well. Not only in a purely visual sense, but also in terms of storytelling. While it is original neither in terms of themes nor narrative structuring, it nevertheless tells its story in a way I find compelling. Don't get me wrong, the visuals are clearly part of this, but then again, the visuals are also very much a part of telling stories in the medium of film. Cameron's film may not shock or surprise me, but it can still make me invested in the narrative, its world and the characters in it. So, the MacGuffin (of a sort) of the film is neither innovatively nor subtly named (as if all things in real life are), but really, how much of the narrative focuses upon the Unobtainium itself? It is there simply to present the reason for corporate or imperialist greed in whatever form it appears (oil, ivory, diamonds, animal hides, you name it). Would the film really have been so much better if Cameron had come up with a better name for it or invented a more subtle political spectrum for his story? Sure, it might have added dimension to the film, no argument there, but would it necessarily have made it a better story? I'm not so sure. We live in a culture which (sometimes quite paradoxically) puts too much emphasis on originality as if that in and of itself would grant a work artistic or narrative quality.
(In fact, the criticism surrounding Cameron's film has very much reminded me of this particular hobby-horse of mine yet again and as a result I aim to deal with that subject more closely in an upcoming post.)

All in all, Avatar is an enjoyable story and, more than anything else, it is a stunning visual experience. If ever there was a reason to urge people to get out of their sofas and head down to their nearest cinema (and preferably then one with 3D capability), this is it.

A Not So Invisible Man: On H. G. Wells

Having just finished The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells (having previously read an omnibus edition with The Time Machine and The War of the World), I thought it worthwhile to talk about him and his work, not to mention his importance for the genre of science fiction.

To quote from the biography in my edition of The Invisible Man:

"Herbert George Wells—novelist, social critic, and visionary futurist who became one of the most prolific and widely read writers of his generation—was born in the London suburb of Bromley, Kent, on September 21, 1866."

It might sometimes be easily forgotten that Wells was not only an early (and very important) science fiction writer, but that he also wrote other types of fiction as well as engaged in historical and political writing. In particular, his social interest as related to history and politics quite clearly shines through in his science fiction writing as well, and it might be these interests, at least in part, which earned him disparaging comments from Jules Verne (1828–1905) for the lack of strict scientific accuracy in his stories. Despite Verne's opinion in the matter, I think Wells manages to create a convincing sense of verisimilitude that allows him to tackle not only science in and of itself, but society (without which there can be no science) and its role. Don't get me wrong, there is absolutely nothing wrong with Verne's approach to science fiction, but I doubt he could, for instance, have made as an intriguing study of the concept of invisibility as Wells does in The Invisible Man; simply because of the pseudo-science Wells has to resort to as a backdrop for his real agenda.

As such, I would argue, Wells probably has a stronger kinship to his fellow countryman Mary Shelley, whose creation of Frankenstein operates in similar ways to Wells' fiction (granted that Wells resorts more verbally to both the science of his day and pseudo-science if need be). Whereas Verne's focus seems to often be connected to the technological, Wells is entrenched in the realm of the social; and I would actually argue that the latter has been of overall more importance to the science fiction genre. Perhaps that is why it is easy to trace most if not all of science fiction's primary topics as already there in Wells writing.

In The Time Machine (1895), Wells covered the concept of time travel, clearly a popular science fiction topos throughout the history of the genre. It is also clear from his main focus on the Eloi and Morlocks that his future vision is strongly tied into a societal thinking (formed by many of the ideas of the time).

In The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), the idea is all about scientific experiments and the moral issues related to them (much like in Shelley's Frankenstein). More importantly, perhaps, is the strong suggestions of the science of genetics, which are at least implied by the general plot of the story. Not to mention the fact that this was far before the the discovery of DNA and the concept of cloning really entered the scientific and public debate.

In The Invisible Man (1897), the scientific experiment is once more part of the analysis, but perhaps to a greater degree, it is thought experiment on how a supernatural phenomenon like invisibility would function in the world; both practically in a sort of scientific sense and socially.

In War of the Worlds (1898), Wells turned to the notion of alien invasion, a topos so common to science fiction, both in literature and film, that it almost seems redundant to point out.

In When the Sleeper Wakes (1899), Wells revisits the future, but while the plot obviously (on a strictly technical level) involves a form of "time travel," it is different from The Time Machine in that it is merely an enhanced version of the time travelling we all do on a daily basis. As such, perhaps, the focus should be more on the topos of stories set in the future; but it is hard to not also note that the notion of extended sleep brings cryogenics and options for space travel to mind for modern readers.

And finally, in The First Men in the Moon (1901), Wells turned his attention to space travel (Verne having, of course, been there ahead of him in From the Earth to the Moon and Round the Moon) as well as another instance of first contact with an alien culture.

In short, Wells managed to cover most (if not all) of the major topoi of science fiction in a period of six years and, it could arguably be said, laid a good foundation for the genre; both terms of establishing topoi and in terms of literary style. Because I dare anyone to call Wells writing lesser literature. This is writing with a fine and acute sense for language, to be sure.

When he dies on August 13, 1946, he had long since turned to other forms of writing, but his influence on the genre of science fiction cannot be denied. In fact, it can be quite clearly seen to this day.

A Literary Crush: C. J. Cherryh and the Other

Okay, let me first off start by saying this; I have a literary crush on C. J. Cherryh. Well, actually, I honestly think it's moved beyond the stage of a crush and into some serious, long term loving. And a healthy case of it indeed.

Cherryh's books caught my eye ages ago, though it took me a while longer to reach the point where I bought myself one of them and then a little longer still until I took that book off the shelf and read it (at least I assume the latter, since there is normally a bit of shelf time between my getting a book and reading it). At any rate, the first book I read was Foreigner (the first in Cherryh's series of the same name), and it was in the spring of 2004. I remember this as the book travelled with me to the Netherlands, where I participated at a conference on Identities and Alterities (fittingly enough).

Now, I wouldn't say that I immediately fell in love with Foreigner. The book is divided into three "books," where the first two (which takes up less than the first 100 pages of the novel) merely provide an historical background to the rest of the novel (and in fact the whole series). Those first two, short story-esque "books," however, didn't really grab me. Don't get me wrong. It wasn't bad. It just wasn't something that grabbed me that strongly. Then the third "book" opened and I was hooked. As soon as Cherryh focalised her story through paidhi Bren Cameron, lone human representative and simplistically put translator among the atevi (the indigenous species on a planet where lost space travelling humans have been stranded), she had me.

Everything after that point, the internal politics of the atevi world, the politics of the human colony and the paidhi's continual struggle to understand the situation he is in and mediate the cultural divide, is pure narrative gravy. But certainly not without some proper sustenance. Cherryh is absolutely amazing at depicting intercultural and interspecies meetings, or perhaps more theoretically put, the encounter with the Other.

In the Foreigner series (of which I just recently finished reading the seventh book, Destroyer (see review), and am currently halfway through the eighth, Pretender), one of the main points throughout is that humans and atevi are differently hard-wired, genetically speaking. Atevi do not have human emotions, nor can humans ever feel man'chi, which governs not only atevi (emotionally speaking) but more or less all species of the atevi world in some fashion. Despite this, however, humans are extremely good at being anthropocentric and, Cherryh argues through her fiction, tend to ascribe human emotional content to situations as they see them. Something which in the Foreigner universe has been the very cause for developing the paidhi's office in the first place and for the humans having an island community isolated from mainland atevi society.

Now, the Foreigner series (and I would like to stress that it is a series and not a serial) just had its tenth instalment, Conspirator, released earlier this year. This is the first book in the fourth trilogy of the series (though even these trilogies are more strictly series than serial in nature), the previous three sets being, first, Foreigner, Invader and Inheritor; secondly, Precursor, Defender and Explorer; thirdly, Destroyer, Pretender and Deliverer. Currently reading Pretender (as stated above), I can honestly say that Cherryh hasn't lost a beat in the development of this universe and the characters with which she's inhabited it.

Still, one obvious question would be, how is Cherryh's writing outside of this particular series? Is the style, good as it is, something which is repeated throughout? Well, looking at the back covers of her other books (many of which sits on my shelf waiting to be read, I'll admit), a certain focus upon intercultural meetings and encounters with the Other seems to be a running thread through her authorship to be sure. Now, this would be enough to at least give pause for caution, but having also read her novel The Pride of Chanur (the first novel of five in her Chanur series, and the first one in The Chanur Saga omnibus collecting the first three), I would like to take some edge out of that argument. The theme is clearly at the focus here as well, but it is treated in a very different manner. First of all, by focalising this novel through the catlike hani (specifically captain Pyanfar Chanur and her crew on the spaceship The Pride of Chanur), Cherryh to some degree (at the very least) bypasses certain amounts of anthropocentrism. When the ship picks up an unwanted stowaway (who turn out to be a human named Tully, hopelessly lost in this sector of space), this sets off enormous political conflicts on interspecies levels, as a previously unknown species hints at a new, unclaimed market for the various species of Compact Space. This set up radically differs from anything I've read so far in the Foreigner series, yet still allows Cherryh to play to her strengths, i.e. political intrigue and the question of otherness.

Perhaps needless to say, I cannot recommend Cherryh enough. And I'm sure there will be plenty of opportunity to revisit her authorship in future posts, what with the remaining Foreigner and Chanur books sitting on my shelves, not to mention The Faded Sun Trilogy or Hammerfall and Forge of Heaven (both in her Gene Wars series), Downbelow Station (which won the Hugo in 1982) or The Collected Short Fiction of C. J. Cherryh.

And that's just what's on my shelves as we speak. For a man in love that hardly constitutes an absolute limit, right?

Leaps of the Imagination

Apologies for the slight delay in posting this. The Midsummer weekend (which is a time of celebration here in Sweden) simply came in between, but now I am back in the proverbial saddle.

Having recently written of how SF (and indeed all literature) is, as it were, a victim of its own time in my previous post entitled "Visions of the Future Are Always Anchored in the Past and the Present", I figured it might be appropriate to write a few words on the subject of why, perhaps, certain SF indeed does succeed in some of its predictions (despite of its failure to accomplish a complete prophetic vision).

I remember watching a documentary program called Cyberpunk on Swedish television back in the early 90s. Truth to tell, I believe I still have the program somewhere on a VHS tape since I recorded it and viewed it at least a few more times. The most interesting aspect of the program (filled as it was with editing effects of various kinds and some rather frightening people waiting to be jacked into their computers for good) was the included interview material with William Gibson, who is one of the founding fathers (if not THE founding father) of the cyberpunk genre.

One of the things that has really stuck with me from those interview bits, was Gibson's confession that his first novels were all written on typewriter, contrary to what one might easily believe. In fact, Gibson tells an anecdote about getting himself a computer around the time of (if I remember correctly) writing Mona Lisa Overdrive (i.e. the third novel in his Cyberspace trilogy). The account is amusing as it reveals Gibson, who already at this point had made a name for himself among computer people, to be fairly unaware of how a computer actually works, even in the most rudimentary fashion. He relates to his audience how he brought the computer home, turned it on and got worried from hearing a whining kind of sound. Because of this he nervously called the store and told them that the computer was making this noise, whereupon the person in the other end responded something like, "that, sir, is the sound of your hard drive." Gibson laughs after revealing this to the audience and admits that he'd never really considered the inner workings of the computer as a machine. Yet all in all, he had expected it to be more sophisticated somehow; liquid crystals or some such thing.

Yet, I think that there is something revealing about this revelation (and not only in the most obvious sense). It, in fact, suggests an explanation as to how SF as a genre might accurately predict certain things which might not have been predicted through the application of scientific data and pure logic. I would suggest that there are occasions when fiction has a much stronger capability of predicting something than pure factually based accounts do. I am, of course, talking about leaps of the imagination.

Don't get me wrong. There are plenty of good SF writers out there who are very grounded in the science of our own time, and who are making excellent use of that knowledge to generate their own credible future worlds. Yet even these writers need to rely on said leaps to get where they want to go often-times. As SF writer Arthur C. Clarke has been known to say on more than one occasion (in fact, I've heard him say so in few interview snippets myself), sufficiently advanced technology would seem like magic to a technologically lesser advanced society or individual. To get past one's own less advanced position and mine those future technological possibilities in some manner of speaking would, to my mind, require said leaps of imagination.

Now the interesting thing is that these leaps seem very much to actually help our technological advancement. While we undeniably need hard science to define our possibilities, it strikes me that at times we also need leaps of imagination to break out of what we know to be possible (or in fact, perhaps more importantly, impossible). It is matter of looking at the world with fresh, unburdened eyes, and while such eyes certainly cannot alter the laws of physics, it might be that they can occasionally unlock new potential understandings of these laws for someone who knows them, but who is also blinded from seeing new potentials by the known limitations of the laws.

All of this being a (perhaps) circuitous way of saying that ignorant points of view, on occasion, can help the knowledgeable to review their own knowledge from another perspective; i.e. to view existing data in a manner not previously thought of and which the data itself might actually make it nigh impossible to see.

As for the fictional universes themselves, as always, real world limitations mean nothing. Verisimilitude is the key. The word, derived from the verisimilar, refers to something having the appearance of truth, which is more than a few steps away from portraying any kind of actual truth or reality (if that, in the strictest sense, is even remotely possible). As such, there can be few genres to which verisimilitude is more important than those of the fantastic, like SF, fantasy and horror. But that, ladies and gentlemen, strikes me as a different subject than the one at hand, although one which I am more than certain we will have reason to return to in future posts.

Visions of the Future Are Always Anchored in the Past and the Present

It is no secret that literature (and in fact most any form of narrative fiction regardless of medium) is contextual in nature. It is shaped and bound by parameters of geographical and socio-historical nature, and guided by literary and cultural traditions, which it both follows and attempts to break away from.

As such, the genre of science fiction (or at least, and in particular, futuristic SF) is perhaps the one which is most visibly affected by said phenomenon. Don't get me wrong. It isn't as if historical fiction (of any sort and including several types of fantasy) or contemporary fiction (of any era) escape in any way. The former shows us the past through the inevitable lens of its own present (whether it be Victorian England seen through the lens of early 21st century England as in the case of Sarah Waters or the Middle Ages seen through the lens of Scottish Romanticism as in the case of Sir Walter Scott), whereas the latter is inevitably focused upon its own present moment in time and is therefore, at least to some degree, interested in capturing those very elements. The possible exceptions (or at least near exceptions) being fiction that through the use of aesthetic traditions attempts to use an older lens in its endeavour to depict past, present or even future, for that matter.

SF, however, strives to a large degree as a genre to depict that which is not yet upon us. Not merely a fantasy based on whatever historical or empirical fancy of sorts appeals to the author's imagination, but an actual attempt at prophecy of what will come, in terms of social, cultural and technological developments and upheavals.

Whereas our knowledge of the past or the present is never complete or absolute, it is nevertheless something that is somewhat fixed. It is true that both our understanding of the past and our way of viewing our contemporary age alter over time, but there are set boundaries within which such alteration occurs (even though some of those boundaries can admittedly themselves change over time as well). The future, on the other hand, is in a state of constant flux.

Our future (or even historical and contemporary) understanding of space travel, for instance, differs vastly from that of any science fiction produced before actual space flight and the moon landing. The projections made way back then could not conceive of all the changes which have happened after those events or those which are still happening now. In fact, even when science fiction does hit the mark (which it does remarkably well every so often), there are still more often than not things that fall through the cracks, as it were. Sometimes these things are small, sometimes perhaps just seemingly small and sometimes they are of enormous size or consequence.

I am reminded of something British SF writer Richard Morgan said on this subject at a seminar at the Gothenburg Book Fair a few years ago. He pointed to the example of William Gibson, who in his breakthrough novel Neuromancer introduced concepts like cyberspace and software/hardware interfaces in various ways, some of which we've now seen realised and some of which we are still working towards realising. Thus Gibson arguably presented a future which still holds up even to this day. This statement is fully true in terms of literary power and effect, but not entirely so in terms of future vision however. Morgan's point was that even Gibson, for all his visionary power, failed to see the future in toto as it were.

In a scene, late in Neuromancer, the protagonist Case has discovered the existence of an A.I. and the A.I. in turn knows it has been discovered. In an attempt to contact Case, the A.I. uses the existing phone system and the scene depicts Case walking by a line of payphones, each one ringing in turn as Case moves past them. Morgan said that this scene was one of his favourites in the novel and from a literary viewpoint I would say that the scene is inspired in the sense of dramaturgy and narrative effect. But, as Morgan made a point of stating, when was the last time you saw a line of payphones? Gibson, for all his seeming prescience vis-a-vis cyberspace and the internet, quite obviously failed to predict the coming of the cellphone; a technical achievement which of course has had enormous effect on our current society.

Now, Gibson obviously kept his writing in the area of the near future, a future period which is perhaps most susceptible to becoming dated in such a manner. It always becomes a question of balancing the urge to make the advances too profound and the risk to make them lesser than they actually turn out (or, of course, simply failing to foresee an important social, cultural or technological change).

Asimov, on the other hand (and yes, we are back at Asimov yet again. What with my working my way through his Foundation books now, these texts of mine are wont to touch upon the man's oeuvre for a while longer, I fear), manages to avoid some of this problem by working in the far distant future. With the exception of the Robot short stories, both his Robot and Foundation books are set in the very distant future, and the very distant future allows both for certain technological aspects of near magic (from our present day limited perspective) and, to some degree, for the possible notion of regression within various fields, both cultural and technological. This notion is very prevalent even within the fictional universe of Foundation books (what with the basic premise being the inevitable decline of an Empire that has slowly forgotten its own technological advances) and certainly helps to generate a sense of verisimilitude, of believability.

And yet, it is hard (looking at these books today) not to notice a glaring point which Asimov obviously failed to foresee. That is, that of the slow but continuous shift from paper to screen media and internet communication. Contrary to what many may believe, print media and the use of paper is not yet out, but similarly any contemporary depiction of the future (even a very distant one, or perhaps especially a very distant one) would have to take into account trends and probabilities pointing towards a paper-less (or close to paper-less) society. Yet Asimov's learned Foundation and its people rely on books, in a very physical sense. Messages are delivered on paper, and even when said messages are delivered within electronic (or perhaps atomic) devices, the medium used within the devices to hold the actual messages is nevertheless paper.

Perhaps this shows that the real trick is not in tracing the larger developments per se in either technology, society or culture, but to manage to spot the small things that will change, though such change may be impossible to predict (at least in full). Because clearly some of these things (whether they be cellphones or internet, e-mail and e-books) will affect other things on a much larger scale within society, culture and technology.

The Bad Place Is Always Present

Apropos of last week's post concerning language and definitions, and also to some extent my continued immersement in Asimov's ouevre (currently making the acquaintance of one Dr Hari Seldon), I've been thinking of dystopian fiction, and in particular science fiction where the concept of dystopia has deep roots. Not because Asimov's work reads as dystopian (though one could argue that the whole concept of Asimov's Foundation seems to fluctuate between notions of dystopia and utopia, never fully landing in the one or the other), but more because his visions of the future have made me think of other such visions which I have enjoyed. Many of which undeniably are dystopian in nature. One needs only consider H. G. Wells, Philip K. Dick and William Gibson, all of whom I rate highly, or films like Blade Runner, The Terminator and The Matrix.

It is interesting to note that the latter film (which I personally would count as the first truly succesful film to adapt the cyberpunk genre fully from literature to film) contains a quote which has always fascinated me from the time when I first saw the movie back in the late 90s. Agent Smith, while interrogating Morpheus, says the following:

Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world. Where none suffered. Where everyone would be happy. There was a disaster. No one would except the program, entire crops were lost. Some believe that we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world, but I believe that as a species human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. The perfect world were a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the matrix was redesigned to this. The peak of your civilisation. (transcription mine)

The quote, to my mind, describes not only something within the context of the movie itself, but also to some extent a general human fascination with dystopian fiction.

Why is that so, you might wonder. After all, the concept of utopia is not absent from fiction in general, or science fiction in particular for that matter (where it too has deep roots; the world of classic Star Trek perhaps being one of the most clear cut and well-known examples to leap to mind). The answer is simple. It all comes down to etymology and definitions (yet again). After all, the term utopia first made its entrance on the scene, as it were, in Thomas Moore's Utopia from 1516. There it referred to the eponymous country Moore presented to his readers, a country both imaginary and ideal, and while the word has since come to mean such an ideal place in a more general sense, it is still firmly based in its Greek roots. That is, in the Greek words topos, meaning place, and ou, meaning not or no; literally giving us the meaning ”no-place”. In short, the concept of perfect world is revealed to be perceived, much as Agent Smith tells Morpheus, as a place of dreams and unreality; a place always and ever distant in time and place. And it is the very roots of the word used to describe the concept which reveals this to us.

By contrast, the word dystopia, while much younger as a word (Merriam-Webster dates it at about 1950) though not necessarily a younger concept as such, is a word set up as to be the antonym of utopia, its opposing principle as it were. But the roots of the word dystopia in contrast to the roots of utopia do not easily generate a logical set of antonyms. Dystopia in a literal sense, simply means ”bad place”. Yet the imperfect, nightmarish world of a dystopia (or ”bad place”, if you will) is not a good place (with would presumably be something along the line of agathostopos) but rather a utopia or ”no-place”.

Put differently this means that the perfect world can only ever be out of reach, even in the terms in which we imagine it, whereas the bad place is always (at least imaginatively and linguistically speaking) present.