Science Fiction as the art of looking beyond
“Art” is one of those terms that can mean nearly anything. Painting, film, well-written prose, photography—any of these terms could conceivably be defined as “art.” While the question of what qualifies as art could surely be debated to no avail, perhaps a partial definition can be established for the purposes of this manifesto. Art, in essence, is any work that moves beyond a factual representation of an empirical reality. A set of data, while potentially elegant, would not necessarily be art in this case, while a photograph for which the photographer changed their camera settings to not only capture what the eye might see, but what the viewer feels they see would certainly be art. It would seem, then, that the objective realities that science tries to represent would not be art. Science fiction in all its forms, on the other hand, would have to be considered art, as it is speculative by its very nature.
In fact, S. G. Weinbaum may have defined science fiction as “the literature of ‘what if.’” Works of science fiction are art because they, by definition, move beyond the objective reality of the present, and these works themselves can also be about art. Thus, science fiction requires its creators to be artists by definition. This does not mean they need to know how to draw a picture or create sculpture. What being an artist means, in this case, is to get as close to telepathy with their viewer or reader as is currently possible through their work. The artist may take in empirical data about their present, but this data will be filtered through the speculation that lay in the artist’s inner world. The final work may not resemble the artist’s current reality in the slightest, but it will inevitably communicate the relative importance of various thoughts, themes, and ideas in a way that cannot be expressed by simply knowing what the artist knew or being where the artist was. Some fragment of the artist’s experience will reach the reader in a way that is the closest the inner worlds of different individuals might ever get.[1]
The artist shares what they hope might persist in the future or voices a concern in a way that data or objective reality might not be able to express. Such articulation can take many forms. For some, it may mean painting a picture. For others, it may mean writing a short story. But the facts remain the same. Art has the power to externalize and essentialize the complex, and for science fiction, the art of speculation, it separates the happenings of its stories from a projection of the future produced by data. Thus, to not view science fiction as art, or to intentionally interpret it as a data-based projection is to miss out on a primary means of engaging with science fiction. This is not to say that science fiction has nothing to do with the future, but simply that it has the power to join the present and future by essentializing what is present in both: beings capable of higher thought. Whether that is a human living a century from now or a robot that can comprehend religion as in Seonghwan Park’s “Readymade Bodhisattva,” the ability to see beyond what is will always be essential to a story that navigates the future, as is common in science fiction.
Future, however, does not have to be literal. While it is true that much of science fiction uses scenarios that might be more probable further down the technological road, such as cloning and deep space exploration as seen in “Nine Lives” by Ursula Le Guin, science fiction would be no different from a data projection if its purpose was to demonstrate a technological future where clones exist. While “Nine Lives” does describe one perspective of what it might be like to live and work with clones, a reader in 2020 may not find such a situation relevant. That being said, the reader in 2020 absolutely should read “Nine Lives” and other science fiction because, as Brian Aldiss states, “Good Science Fiction does not necessarily traffic in reality; but it makes reality clearer to us.” In Le Guin’s “Nine Lives,” a clone whose “siblings” died must learn to live as a “singleton.” What the reader stands to gain from science fiction is not a glimpse into the future, but a reflection of the present, and a postulation of how things may persist or die out over time. In the case of “Nine Lives,” the presence of clones and “singletons” allows for a fascinating exploration of humans as social beings. For as much as science fiction is about the technologically sophisticated futures that might someday be the present, it is the conveyance of emotion and experience in spite of the raw data that remains a powerful force in the technological landscapes of science fictional futures. Particularly in American and European science fiction, the individuals who do not conform to the conventions of the technological landscape make for great main characters because they, even within their stories, look beyond their reality and aspire to something more in their own way. This is seen in “Goodnight, Sophie” by Lino Aldani, where Sophie, an actress in the “Oneirofilms” that create a highly attractive virtual experience where the consumer acts as the main character, struggles with her identity across these real and virtual spaces. In “Computer Friendly” by Eileen Gunn, at the secret heart of the vast, orderly, and predictable “system,” spontaneity, mischief, and rebellion are valued, and the main character chooses this path of unpredictability in favor of being officially recognized by the system. “More,” in both these cases, has to do with these characters’ emotional experiences.
Science fiction is also home to evocative and powerful imagery in its more visual forms. Artists have visualized uncountable futures, some of which figure heavily into a collective prototype of what the future may look like. For example, thinking of a “futuristic city” may conjure up a mental image of gleaming glass city of sweeping, sleek architecture due to its exposure through sci-fi films and television.[2] Because an artist thought to imagine and render the future in such a way, perhaps one day a building is that intentionally designed to be “futuristic” might call upon this common prototype. That’s why the creation of art, the creation of stories and works of fiction that seem real because they continue to tap into the truth, no matter how green and big-eyed the characters are or flying saucer-like the settings may be.
Visual science fiction and written science fiction are not necessarily different things. Words are not always enough, and Alastair Reynolds’ “Zima Blue” brings a more traditional understanding of art to a futuristic setting, while continuing to establish that in a world full of “helpful” technology, sometimes the emotional experience defies the capabilities of a perfect technological reproduction. Zima could depict the vast wonders of the universe from a unique perspective, but he remembered a time when his entire world was the blue of a tiled swimming pool, and that demanded an expression more powerful than factual reproductions of the universe. Thus, Zima attempted to depict this emotional experience of being surrounded entirely by blue that defied factual explanation and eluded recall. Ultimately, his final work was to return himself to the blue, but not before sharing the beauty of imperfect memory. The hazy, inaccurate memory of experience, and the artist’s subsequent depiction of not the hazy memory, but the feeling it evokes ultimately proves more powerful than a factual recollection of events. Imagery also lives on where words fail, and where language represents a barrier. In Octavia Butler’s “Speech Sounds,” a virus eliminates humanity’s ability to speak and read. Significance comes to live in the objects people in “Speech Sounds” carry, for images and items can speak where words cannot, though it is clear that the characters recognize this leaves room to be misunderstood. In “Mono no Aware” by Ken Liu, the main character illustrates his setting and situation by guiding them along the pictorial impression of characters in Japanese kanji, the script of his native language, rather than their literal meaning. The visual elements evoked by written science fiction do more than communicate facts about the story’s characters. Imagery, rather than description, can capture more than the character’s present reality. In this artistic understanding of science fiction, images, whether drawn or described, allow the creator to illustrate relative importance. The imagery invoked will often holds emotional significance for the character, an indicator of the world beyond their setting, and this will help the creator draw the reader’s attention.
Art has long been a way to put things in perspective. Science fiction, like many other forms of art, allows for introspection by externalizing and questioning the essentials of the present reality. It is of central importance in understanding and rationalizing humanity’s place in the universe because, this potential for speculation and emotional experience is the potential to create art. If there are other beings who have this same potential, it is likely that they would have some form of art as well. If, in viewing each other’s art, some small form of telepathy can occur and through that, understanding, perhaps humanity’s first contact will not be as grisly as the science fiction counterfactual would sometimes indicate.
Works Referenced
Aldani, Lino. “Goodnight, Sophie” (1973). The Science Fiction Century. Ed. David G. Hartwell.
New York: Tor, 1997. 352-368.
Butler, Octavia E. “Speech Sounds” (1983). The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction. Ed.
Arthur B. Evans, et al. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2019. 566-579.
Gunn, Eileen. “Computer Friendly” (1989). The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction. Ed.
Arthur B. Evans, et al. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2019. 637-653.
Le Guin, Ursula K. “Nine Lives” (1969). The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction. Ed. Arthur B.
Evans, et al. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2019. 452-476.
Liu, Ken. “Mono no Aware.” The Future is Japanese. Ed. Nick Mamatas and Masumi
Washington. San Francisco: Haika Soru, 2012. 11-32.
Park, Seonghwan. “Readymade Bodhisattva” (2005). The Kaya Anthology of South Korean
Science Fiction. Ed. Sunyoung Park and Sang Joon Park. Los Angeles: Kaya Press, 2019. 23-41.
Reynolds, Alastair. “Zima Blue” (2005). Zima Blue and Other Stories. London: Gollancz, 2010.
429-451.
TV Tropes. “Crystal Spires and Togas.” TV Tropes. Last modified April 18, 2020.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CrystalSpiresAndTogas
[1] Reader-response theory is way of reading a text I’m invoking here. The author must communicate with the reader not through a report, but a piece of written art.
[2] TV Tropes, “Crystal Spires and Togas.”