When Metaphors Attack!

Science Fiction has a problem. The problem is that it is (among other things) a literature of prediction. Writers extrapolate future worlds and new technologies. A huge part of the genre's appeal is simply seeing what the future might be like.

The trouble with predictions is that either they come true, or they don't, and it's a problem either way.

Failed predictions become laughable. How could writers in the 1950s have worried that robots would take over by the year 2000? How could writers in the 1970s have worried that clones would take over by the year 2000? How could writers in the 1990s have worried that Japanese megacorporations would take over by the year 2000? At best, failed predictions turn into retro camp nostalgia-fodder. ("Where's my flying car?")
   
But predictions that do come true are equally problematic. See, the thing most people don't notice about science fiction is that it's fiction. Stories, made up by storytellers. Which means that when storytellers extrapolate a future world or technology, they're doing it in the service of telling a story.

Technologies, in particular, get used as metaphors. In another place I've mentioned how cybernetics has long been a metaphor for dehumanization. We've also seen robots used as a metaphor for both Marxist class warfare and racism (and probably other things as well). Cloning: metaphor for loss of individuality, exploitation, slavery again. Being able to "literalize your metaphors" is one of the big strengths of the fantastic in literature.

The problem is that when a technology becomes real, it stops being a metaphor. And therefore it loses a lot of its thematic power. Consider space travel: right up to about 1969 space travel was a huge metaphor for transcendance and escape. Travel to other worlds could be used to tell stories about culture clash, the desire for independence, imperialism, and isolation.

But once it became a real technology, space travel lost all that metaphorical heft. In fiction it becomes simply a background element, the way that we get our characters from planet to planet. No modern writer wastes more than a paragraph describing how the characters travel in space, unless some part of the voyage is important to the plot.

As many "next decade" technologies finally make their way to the shelves at Best Buy, this is becoming a bigger problem for SF writers. I complained recently about how irritating I found it when people relied upon "unexamined assumptions" about science fictional events. Later I realized that the problem was people applying metaphorical thinking to things which are becoming real. When people worry about clones being an oppressed class of slaves, that's metaphor-thinking. When I bitch about how unrealistic that is, that's real-technology thinking.

Is it possible to write science fiction without literalizing metaphors? Just write about future worlds as future worlds? But if the world is just window-dressing to a story about character, why put it in a future world at all?

Perhaps we just have to get used to the idea that science fiction is a genre with built-in obsolescence.

Comments

[Alexander Jablokov]

I work with a definition of SF something like "systems-thinking-based fiction using concepts that aren't true." The lack of truth frees a certain type of reader's mind to work with concepts, situations, and characters it would otherwise reject out of hand, find boring, or not understand.

So SF has to find new tropes or die, because once they become true they become useless for SFnal purposes. As you point out in that other post, most social thinking in the field is pretty banal, so relying on that for genre energy is doom.

The question, of course, is whether we have passed a condition of "peak trope". Are there undiscovered trope reserves of untrue SFnal concepts? We both suspect there aren't.

To make our metaphors last we have to reduce, reuse, recycle--virtuous in the real world, tedious and unoriginal in the fictional world.