Who's afraid of Science Fiction?

‘Books are not about passing time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds. Far from wanting the time to pass, Sir, one just wishes one had more of it’.
Alan Bennett: The uncommon reader (2007)

 In the 1970s, a new movement developed in Science Fiction, originally mostly in England and then in America: a movement called the New Age – nothing to do with the social movement though. New Age then meant bringing Literature and Science Fiction closer together: bridging the gap between what was then perceived as very distinct fields of writing.

Then? I’m not sure much has changed since, despite closet SF writers like Margaret Atwood coming clean, most notably in her 2011 book of essays ‘In other worlds’, where she (finally) admits to what we had known for a while: that she had used and still uses SF tropes herself.  And so she owned up to what we SF readers have known all along: mainstream writers are not afraid to use typical SF tropes while claiming that what they write is most definitely not SF. From Philip Roth to Cormac McCarthy to Paul Auster (to name only three very big ones), anyone who knows SF can trace their premise to earlier SF works: Alternative history for Roth, Post-apocalypse for McCarthy, a bit of both for Auster (see his ‘Country of lost things’, for example). And to avoid confusion, there is no need to go back to Mary Shelley, Jules Verne nor in fact to Kingsley Amis (who not only wrote an Alternative history novel (‘The Alteration’, 1976)).

And that’s without mentioning hugely successful mainstream books like Matt Haig’s The midnight library, or any of the latest Ishiguro of course. Because after all, what is science fiction if not a form of speculative fiction? A term many writers would certainly prefer in any case, and a term that is much better suited to the majority of science fiction which has little – if anything at all – to do with science. For most writers, it is enough to hop in a spaceship and get somewhere: the point is not the science, it is at most the effects of science, or who does the science and why, or what science potentially helps us think about. And very often science fiction is not at all about science…but it is always about humanity.

Here a quick reminder: as the famous phrase goes, ‘Fantasy is the impossible; SF is the plausible’: Fantasy deals in the impossible: flying carpets and magical swords for example. SF deals in the plausible: it might not exist yet but there’s nothing that says it won’t at some stage. SF extrapolates from what is, Fantasy just…imagines; SF speculates about what could be and Fantasy just invents: they are two very different types of texts. The Lord of the Rings is Fantasy, it is certainly not SF. Ditto Harry Potter, or Games of throne.

Seen that way, it’s not difficult to argue (as many have done) that from Cyrano de Bergerac to Mary Shelley, from Victor Hugo to Conan Doyle, speculative tropes are everywhere in mainstream fiction. When Paul Lynch won the Booker Prize in 2023, no-one called it SF – and yet its premise is a non-existent society. When Kazuo Ishiguro is praised for Klara and the sun, or Never let me go, no-one complains that these are good old science fiction premises – artificial intelligence for the first, cloning farms for the second. And when the world celebrates Margaret Atwood for being so prescient with her Handmaid’s tale (1985), nobody dares point out that SF – speculative fiction – had been playing with that trope for decades (see Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1916), or J.D. Beresford’ A world of women (1913), or S. H. Elgin’s Native tongue (1984)). William Gibson was writing science fiction when he invented the idea of Cyberspace in one of his novels, long before anything cyber actually existed, but retrospectively he’s a visionary who had seen it all coming.

It’s important to remind ourselves of this (and of thousands more examples) because it begs the question: why do some teachers still consider anything labeled SF a no-no in the classroom? And why do so many explain their choice by the idea that ‘SF is not literature’? An immediate answer here is ‘Cultural capital’ of course: historically and culturally, literature is a type of books studied at university, talked about in magazines and known to the cognoscenti – literature is also a way to situate oneself in culture. Another answer is the steady pollution of the SF field by visual products: Star Trek, Star Wars or The Avengers-type of movies, which convey a certain idea of SF…but only that idea – lasers, spaceships, aliens, time-travel, robots and a few more.

But forget about that and let us focus on what SF can actually do for us teachers.

• SF is, at heart, a political type of writing, in the old Greek sense of the word polis: SF is about what societies are, how they organize themselves and therefore what they could be. Any world created by science fiction is, by definition, based on an existing world; any society thought up as an experiment is related to an existing society. Any creation of a non-existing world can only be compared to what is: our world, our societies. That means that a good SF text is both about what is, and what could be: great material to think about what we do and who we are, and what else we could be. Suvin (1979) famously called that ‘Cognitive estrangement’, arguing that this is where, in a Brechtian fashion, the reader can start questioning their own world, comparing the invention with its source, the possible with the real – the famous ‘Is and Ought’. And that is the material we need for citizenship discussions.

• SF is also metaphorical. Yes, all fiction is, in a sense, metaphorical or symbolic: a text says A but we understand it’s talking about B. But SF offers a very wide range of metaphors: Aliens are the unknown, or the political opponents, or the fears, or the confrontation with our failings, or a revelator of our weaknesses (or strengths). Aliens can be refugees, they can be those around us we don’t understand. Similarly, space exploration is often a version of colonization and a way to question our own history, as well as a take on what is means to be human (curiosity, invention or pathetic need to escape). Technology, as Arthur C. Clark famously said, is indistinguishable from magic if sufficiently advanced: SF has long been a way to think about technology and about who’s in charge: the creator, or the creature?
  
  
• Importantly, SF offers a safe reading place [Read this to know more] for both teachers and learners. It’s a lot easier to discuss discrimination and racism when the characters are blue or when they wear feathers or have two heads: these attributes do not make any demands on someone’s loyalties (family, friends, ancestry). It’s easier to think about Gender issues with Ursula Leguin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) as she invents a world where there are three genders; it’s easier to discuss capitalism and its effects with Mcintosh’s Burning Midnight (a Young Adult novel from 2016) than with a realist novel full of the learners’ neighbours and family. By being at least one step removed from observable reality, Science Fiction offers a safe place from which to consider our world, its failings and how to go about improving things.
  
  
• And finally, the genre tends to be attractive to many young readers and reluctant ones, as it is usually typified by a strong narrative engine with pace and purpose, characters that may be surprising or unexpected, and situations that call on the imagination. And those aspects matter when it comes to asking inexperienced (and often reluctant) readers to go through hundreds of pages. Let’s not dismiss exciting narratives just because they were not written by Dickens – and really, what is a Dickens narrative if not a simple story going through many exciting events which, ultimately, will have little to say about the world? Big names are fine, good stories are better.

Remember: what matters is the text and the ideas it contains, and how those ideas can be discussed, thought about, considered, debated. The genre is nothing but the skin on the bones: as teachers, we need to consider the bones first, irrespective of what society thinks is appropriate or ‘good’. There are hundreds of science fiction books out there that open up new ways of thinking about the here and now: let’s not look down on a genre that can give us so much in class.