Last weekend's Virtual PhilCon went very well, and gave me a couple of 'blog post ideas. This is the first.
On Saturday the 21st, I moderated the panel on "The Oceans of Space." Moderating was easy because there was only one other panelist, the brilliant and charming Kelli Fitzpatrick. We had a pretty good audience, too.
The topic of that panel was aquatic science fiction, and I guess I got tapped because I wrote A Darkling Sea. Both Ms. Fitzpatrick and I made up lists of ocean-themed SF for the discussion*, and both of us were struck by how short our respective lists were. There simply isn't as much oceanic science fiction out there. Which is odd, given that one of the taproot texts for the whole science fiction genre is Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
So: why is there so little underwater science fiction? I can think of three main reasons.
Number One: It's not science fiction. If you write a story of undersea adventure aboard a submarine, that's a sea story, or a "technothriller," not a science fiction story. Even if your tale has a madman with a futuristic undersea base, and super-tech undersea vehicles, that's still technothriller territory. Consider the works of Clive Cussler, who wrote undersea adventures for thirty years. His books included such things as unknown elements with fantastic properties, sonic weapons, a secret moonbase, and a vast array of apocalyptic plots. But Cussler's books aren't in the science fiction section of the bookstore. They're thrillers, ostensibly set in the contemporary world. Apparently weird goings-on in the ocean are normal.
Number Two: It's limited. Oceans on Earth are fascinating places — but they don't have strange new worlds and new civilizations. Quite simply, you can't really hang a novel on a newly-discovered species of cephalopod. You can put the story into an ocean on another planet (as I did) but that's a lot of work. Trust me on that.
Number Three: Symbolism. When you fly up into space you are literally ascending into the heavens. You are leaving Earth and Earthly cares behind. In SF you are soaring among the stars. But underwater? It's dark. It's cold. You're both literally and metaphorically under pressure. If space travel is a metaphor for liberation and transcendance; going deep underwater is a metaphor for confinement, blindness, and death.
So if you want to write a swashbuckling futuristic sea story, you can do it — but send the pitch to a publisher of technothrillers, not science fiction. If you want to write stories about alien contact underwater you can do it — but you'll have to create an entire alien world. And if you want to write a story with a big honking metaphor for death in it, there's your topic.
*Here's my list:
The Man Who Counts/War of the Wing-Men, by Poul Anderson
The Godwhale, T.J. Bass
Startide Rising, David Brin
A Darkling Sea, James L. Cambias
The Deep Range, Arthur C. Clarke
"The Maracot Deep," Arthur Conan Doyle
Dragon in the Sea/Under Pressure, Frank Herbert
Half the Day is Night, Maureen McHugh
The Face of the Waters, Robert Silverberg
A Door Into Ocean, Joan Slonczewski
OceanSpace, Allen Steele
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne
The Kraken Wakes, John Wyndham
"The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth," Roger Zelazny
I loved Pohl and Williamson's Undersea Fleet as a kid, and there's also Monica Hughes with Crisis on Conshelf Ten.
Posted by: Chuk Goodin | 11/27/2020 at 05:22 PM