my wee speech

At the British Library event on Friday, I wrote my introductory remarks down because I didn't think I'd be able to speak extemporaneously without making a mess of it.  When I listened to what Adam, China and Erik had to say I'm pretty sure I was right.  They were very polished--I haven't had enough practice to open up a talk that way.

A couple of people asked me afterward if I would post the text that I read out.  Here it is (with apologies for LJ-cut fail):

In the science fiction community we often refer to genre as the 'ghetto' to which our work is relegated.  To me looking at it that way is ass-backwards--or, to be British--arse-about-face.  Science fiction is a literature whose scope includes the entire nature of reality--or realities--from the universe (or multiverse) right on down to the smallest individual action.  The breadth of possibility in science fiction is no less than what is available to us philosphically and empirically in the totality of our senses and their extrapolation.  In a Venn diagram, all other literatures would be a subset of SF. 

There is no ghetto.

But there are issues of definition. 

I want to talk about the intermolecular tensions within the term 'science fiction.'  Let's just look at these words.  Science and fiction.  One is based on reductionism, on measurement, on rules.  The other is based on wild leaps of imagination.  The term is an oxymoron--or if you want to be kind, you could call it a paradox.  The science component wants to make sense, to jibe with reality as we know it now and to rigorously follow the rules that centuries of scientific exploration have given us.  The fiction part leaps into the unknown and makes some stuff up.  Fiction offers up whatever nonsense our imaginations can supply when we don't have facts, and so it can look pretty silly in the cold light of rationality.  When all else fails, put in tentacles!  Faster-than-light spaceships that make Earl Gray tea.  A succession of white male Time Lords.  But even if it's silly, imagination also brings metaphor to the table, and without metaphor the rigour of science can very quickly resemble rigour mortis.

The tensions in the paradox of science fiction have the potential to create a complex, seething idea-space that is pluralistic in viewpoint and outcome.  Instead, we often end up with a definitional discussion based on dichotomies and the axe of binary: Zero or one?  Is it or isn't it?  Yes or no?  In or out? 

(If you have a cat you know what it's like trying to get the cat to decide whether it wants to be in or out.  Shroedinger's problem would have been so much easier for me to grasp if instead of being neither alive nor dead til observed, the cat had been neither in nor out because it couldn't make up its mind.)

Back to dichotomies.  I do blame the scientific mindset for this problem, at least a bit.  This yes-or-no attitude so deeply ingrained in modern SF is reductionist in unhelpful ways.  And let's face it, if we were to subject the Gordian knot of science fiction to such a sword, we would indeed render it into two perfectly useless pieces. Science fiction stories work not in spite of, but precisely because of the dynamic tensions and frictions between reductionism and fantasy.

When I was studying music in college we used to play a game invented by the composer Benjamin Boretz.  It was the days of LPs and cassettes, and the idea was that everybody would bring a stack of juicy records to the session, and somebody would start by playing one track.  We'd listen, and then somebody would put on a different track, from their stack, as a response to what they'd heard.  It was a bit like a card game.  'I see your Mahler, and I raise you Jimi Hendrix.'  The kinds of juxtapositions and interactions that arose were illuminating in ways that can't be measured, and although it was subjective, the game was essentially empirical.  It had to be experienced to be understood.  You couldn't predict the outcome by theorizing.  You had to actually run the model.

All of this happened before hip hop really got off the ground, before the art of the remix went mainstream.  Now we have software that makes it easy to grab material and use it in new combinations, to carry it further or subvert it or use it to build completely new monsters.  We can make musical and literary hippogriffs, with the head of Tolstoi and the body of Lady Gaga, or vice versa.  These bionic powers open up all kinds of possibilities, and in science fiction and its cousin fantasy we see heavy remixing going on right now.  We also see mainstream fiction picking up science fictional undertones, and this phenomenon seems to threaten some within the bastions of the old-school genre.

Remixes are healthy.  Cross-pollination is healthy.  The process of building up definitions like walls and then tearing them down seems to me a natural respiration in any philosophical enterprise.  The argument about what is entitled to call itself science fiction is really beside the point.  Just as breathing in and breathing out is not the actual purpose of respiration, so arguing about genre definitions is beside the point of science fiction.  The purpose of respiration is to oxygenate the system, to energise it and keep it functioning in the world.  And that's the spirit in which these arguments have to be taken.

What really interests me about science fiction--and all literature--is the question of how can it expose the world?  How can it deepen my understanding?  How it can change me--and us?  And even, how can it change the world?  Perhaps these changes only work by degrees, but if you add up a whole bunch of degrees you get a revolution.