Just The Caffeine Talking

Season of the Witch

It's Halloween today, and I notice that Google has chosen to celebrate the day with a "Google Doodle" of a witch busy at her cauldron. I've written about Halloween witches elsewhere, but one of the links off the Google page (this one) reminded me of something I've come to detest in modern supernatural fiction.

In modern fantasy, the poor persecuted witch has become something of a cliché. Writers draw on the historical tragedy of innocents being accused, convicted, and sometimes executed for the crime of witchcraft, and use it to make their fantasy magic-users the victims of organized oppression so we can feel sorry for them even though they can shoot lightning from their hands.

This, to my mind, is a case of massively missing the point.

The tragedy of historical witch panics -- not to mention the ones that still go on from time to time in parts of Africa and Asia -- is not just that witches are being killed. The tragedy is that there are no such things as witches. That's why every witch trial has been a cruel miscarriage of justice and why we use the term "witch hunt" to describe relentless pursuit of an evil which doesn't actually exist.

If your fictional world has witches, with genuine supernatural power, then the witch-hunters are chasing after something that really exists, and really has the potential to do harm. This changes the whole dynamic of the story.

In real life, Matthew Hopkins, rooting out witches in order to collect his finder's fee, was at best deluded and overzealous, and at worst was knowingly torturing and murdering people for money. That's a villain. But if Matthew Hopkins was finding real witches, then he suddenly turns into a hero. Rides into town armed with nothing but faith and a flintlock to clean up the place. He's Solomon Kane.

In short: if you want villainous witch-hunters, leave the witches out of it. Write about historical people (or even moderns) dealing with witchcraft panics and cynical opportunists trying to profit from those panics.

If you want witches to be real, then it hardly seems fair to make them the heroes instead of the brave souls trying to stop them with nothing but steel and Scripture. Everone likes to root for the underdog.  

The Big News

Over the past few weeks we've been bombarded with all sorts of news, as we always are: political goings-on, economic crises, scandals, celebrity shenanigans, sports . . . and it all seems terribly important and everyone feels it necessary to let the world know what they think via Twitter and Facebook.

Meanwhile there's this: fusion experiments that release more energy than they consume.

Now I know this doesn't mean fusion power has finally arrived. It will doubtless take years or decades more before fusion power is practical.

But take the long view. In a hundred years, will 2013 be the date people give as the answer to trivia questions about "when was fusion power invented?" Is that the event of this year that will be remembered down the generations?

And all the stuff we're so passionate about right now, these crises and scandals and outrages, will be as obscure as the Great Bangor Fire of 1911 or the Panic of 1907. 

Which raises the question: why are we so passionate? None of those things will be remembered. Do you think anyone will care about the "Government shutdown" in ten years? Hell, will anyone remember it in ten weeks?

Meanwhile some guys at Livermore with a laser may have done the most important thing this year. Why aren't you passionate about that? 

     

Welcome to the Twenty-First Century

I got a surprise package in the mail the other day: my contributor copy of Twenty-First Century Science Fiction, an anthology edited by David Hartwell and Patrick Nielsen Hayden. It's a collection of stories by science fiction writers whose careers have taken off since the start of the new century, and the list of authors is certainly impressive. We've got me, Jo Walton, me, Charles Stross, me, Paolo Baciagalupi, me, Cory Doctorow, me, Elizabeth Bear, me, John Scalzi, me, Vandana Singh, me, Yoon-Ha Lee, me . . .

. . . and ME!

My story in the collection is "Balancing Accounts," making this the third time that story has been collected since it first appeared in F&SF. (I'll have to write another "How I Did It" post about that story, since it's showing signs of being my best-known work.)

Since I just got my copy yesterday, I haven't had a chance to read through all the stories yet -- although I've already read some of them elsewhere. It will be interesting to see if any common themes or recognizable trends show up. Is there any characteristic of science fiction in the new century? I recently ventured to speculate about current and future trends in SF, so this will provide a chance to see if I hit the mark.  

The All-Seeing Eye

I recently attended another stimulating meeting of the mighty Cambridge SF Workshop, and we wound up spending a lot of time talking about the use of the "omniscient" narrative voice in the work under discussion.

For those who slept through high-school English, a work has an omniscient narrator when the narrative voice describes things which aren't necessarily known or apparent to the characters during the action of the story. A well-known example from English class is Jane Austen, who uses it in almost all her books. You hear about the family's background and the state of their fortunes, or what characters are doing off in Bath or London, even while the heroines are sitting at home. It's a staple of 19th Century European literature, and turns up in Tolstoy, Balzac, Conrad, and Victor Hugo.

One of my favorites is Henry Fielding's narrative voice in Tom Jones. The omniscient narrator, with his deadpan commentary on the action, is probably the most vivid character in the story.  

This contrasts with more limited points of view, like the first-person narrator who recounts only what that character saw and did, as he understood it. Or the first cousin of first-person, the "limited" third-person narrator who more or less sits on one character's shoulder and only describes that person's point of view.

But it occurs to me that even the "omniscient" narrator isn't truly all-knowing, or at least doesn't tell everything. After all, the narrator doesn't tell the reader in advance what's going to happen to all the characters, or spoil all the startling revelations before their time.

So in a way the "omniscient" narrator is kind of a card trick: the author overloads the reader with information, while holding back the key elements which drive the story. The mark reading the book is distracted by background details and history, and doesn't notice the author palming the plot.

Writing, we all know, is the art of telling a story. But sometimes the most important part of telling is what you don't tell. Narration is one way to control what information you pass along to the reader, and sometimes even the omniscient narrator is keeping secrets.

 

Comic Con

This past Friday my talented wife and I spent the day on the placid isle of Manhattan, at the New York Comic Con. 

I've gone to a lot of science fiction and game conventions in my time. I've manned a booth at Gen-Con during the peak of the card game boom. I've been to World Science Fiction conventions in Baltimore, Glasgow, Philadelphia, Montreal, Boston, Yokohama, Chicago, and San Antonio. I went to the old Atlanta Fantasy Fest a couple of times.

But nothing prepared me for the scale of Comic Con. The enormous Javits Center was packed like Bourbon Street on Mardi Gras -- and that was on Friday, the "slow day" of the convention. According to local media about 125,000 people attended this year's Comic Con. By contrast, this year's World Science Fiction Convention in San Antonio boasted between 4,000 and 6,000 people, depending on how one counts. In short, Comic Con in New York managed to pull about 20 times more people than what is supposed to be SF's "flagship event."

Now, admittedly, New York is a bigger city than San Antonio -- 8 million to 1.4 million -- and it's in the more densely-populated northeast. There are something like 50 million people within a couple of hours' drive or train ride of New York, so the Comic Con membership represents only a quarter of a percent of that population. On the other hand, there's 26 million people in Texas alone, so a comparable attendance rate would have given this summer's Worldcon a very respectable 65,000 members!

So why weren't they there? We have panels and discussions at Worldcon on the "graying" of SF, and every panel room has to have parking space for mobility scooters -- but the crowd at Comic Con was young. Not a gray head in sight. Why aren't we attracting these bright-eyed, energetic fans who represent the next generation of SF readers?

There is a difference in cost: membership in Comic Con was $85 for a four-day pass, while LoneStarCon cost $240 for a full membership. Presumably some of that cost difference would be offset by the cheaper food and hotels in San Antonio, but people don't always think of that. A kid might be able to pay for a bus ticket and Comic Con membership who couldn't necessarily afford a plane ticket and Worldcon. But surely that can't account for a tenfold difference in attendance. (And a ten-times-bigger convention can surely cut costs through economies of scale.)

My question is simple: why is Worldcon so small? Why is it dwarfed, not only by the New York Comic Con, but also by Dragon Con in Atlanta and the mighty San Diego Comic Con? Somehow regional comics conventions can pull in an order of magnitude more people than our "World" SF convention. 

I'm not privy to the deliberations of the Secret Masters of Fandom. I don't know if Worldcon's modest size is a conscious decision by organizers or not. But I do know what Worldcon could be -- I've seen it in New York this past weekend.

Default Futures

One of the comments on my last 'blog post, by the inimitable Alexander Jablokow, brings up the idea of what he describes as "consensus futurelike places" as story settings, which may or may not have anything to do with the author's actual vision of what the future will look like.

This is not a new idea. Ever since the Gernsback era, science fiction has had a "default" vision of what The Future is going to look like. The indispensable Tropes Wiki has one version here. 

Interestingly, we seem to go through periods of "contending futures" in which there are rival visions, which then settle down to a single standard for a while. In the 1970s, for instance, the expansionist view of humans spreading through the Solar System and across the Galaxy found competition from the dystopian picture of an overcrowded, resource-poor Earth in a Solar System which turned out to be a lot less hospitable than anyone had previously realized. 

In the wake of the Cyberpunk boom we seem to have gone through another period of competing futures, when the transhumanist visions of people like Bruce Sterling or Greg Egan bumped against the more humanist ideas of Kim Stanley Robinson. 

Right now I'd say we're developing a new consensus future, based on slower-than-light interstellar travel, a kind of "Lite Transhumanism," and the growing suspicion that we're alone in the Galaxy (or nearly so). The "Orion's Arm" project neatly encapsulates a lot of what is becoming standard SF furniture.

I think it's almost inevitable that something like this will happen, especially in genres like science fiction and fantasy. These are stories which (mostly) don't take place in the world we see around us. Consequently writers must manage the difficult task of depicting an entire future society without bogging down a short story in endless exposition. If you can save yourself a thousand words or so by simply using off-the-shelf concepts like "robot" or "spaceship" or "Galactic Empire" you'll naturally do it.

One aspect of this which fascinates me is the moment when the meaning of a stock trope shifts. "Spaceship" once meant a pointy-nosed rocket with tail fins, capable of launching from Earth, visiting other worlds, and returning in one piece -- right up until 1960 or so, when it turned into a piece of real-life hardware, much more flimsy and constrained than its fictional forebear. 

"Robot" once meant a mechanical man with an electronic brain; now it's a machine of virtually any shape, controlled by an "Artificial Intelligence" which acts more like a spirit than a mechanism.

And so on. I submit that the times of transition, when future worlds collide and science fictional tropes bounce off their real-world applications, can be very fruitful times for literature. The Cyberpunk writers of the 1980s and 1990s were overhauling the standard future as the implications of the computer revolution and the fall of Communism were making it obvious that the future wasn't going to look like either Star Trek or A Canticle For Liebowitz. 

So, venturing to predict the Future of the Future, I suggest that we'll see another shift in scientifictional futures sometime around 2020. The environmental apocalypse trope will have burned itself out by then (or become part of the fabric of daily life) and we'll be seeing the first fruits of the new private-enterprise space age (or its failure).

As to what form that future vision of the future will take . . . wait and see. We're still writing it.