Science Fiction: Platonic Ideal or Rorschach Blot?

A poster in a prior thread inquired: "Sorry to bring this up if you're purposefully ignoring it, but any comment on the Cook BS?"

I am somewhat bemused by how very many people have felt it necessary to bring this to my attention this week. Go figure.

This refers to a guest post earlier this week at the Amazing Stories website, by, apparently, an aging academic much devoted to science fiction as he sees it. The original post was, shall we say, rather carelessly written and marred by status posturing, which unfortunately obscured what I suspect the man was trying to say, and sent the subsequent net conversation reeling off to other concerns. I'll take one pass at getting things back on track in a more interesting direction, after which you are all on your own.

Since I came in as a reader a bit over fifty years ago, the debate over "What is science fiction?" (or "real" science fiction, or "hard" science fiction, or "important" science fiction, or pick the valorizing modifier of your choice) has formed and reformed without, as nearly as I can tell, getting any forwarder. Each decade seems to have had its own version of the barbarians at the gates – the New Wave in the late 60s and early 70s, Cyberpunk in the 80s, the rise of fantasy since Tolkien, and so on. (Some reader older than me will have to tell us what the 50s and 40s and 30s were kvetching about, but I guarantee there was something.) Boiled down, it was as if each camp in the arguments believed that there existed some Platonic Ideal of SF (suspiciously matching the promoter's own tastes), toward which all works and all authors ought convergently to aspire.

There have always seemed to be mixed up in it issues of generational control and perceived status, which naturally heightens emotions. In theory there is a difference between arguing about the status of science fiction, and using science fiction as a platform to jockey for status, although in practice, alas, the two slop over into each other pretty uncontrollably.

I see the field a bit differently.

The metaphor of emergent properties was not available fifty years ago, as chaos and fractal theory had not yet been developed enough to trickle out to the public discourse. What I think is actually happening is that each writer (and reader and critic) is supplying their own bright thread to a growing tapestry that we shorthand "the SF field", and when people squint at it as a whole, they see some picture emerge. No single thread is the picture, though it could not exist without all of its threads, any more than a painting is some measured amount of canvas and pigment and glue; if you reduced a painting to its elements, the image would disappear. That image is an emergent property, no less real for not being material. (Some people think human consciousness itself is something like this.)

People being what they are, I think it is also probable that everyone perceives a different picture from this tapestry (thank you, Dr. Rorschach), just the way every person reading the same book constructs a different reading experience in their head.

Happily, I am not responsible for the entire tapestry (no one person could be), only my own thread, which I spin as well as I am able. This is, I suspect, a much more relaxing view than that held by the urgent cat-herders attempting to impose their own visions of SF perfectibility on the masses.

My view is not, actually, intrinsically opposed to Platonic ideals, plural, which should be free to joust it out in the marketplace of ideas; just to the restrictive notion of A Single Best Platonic Ideal whose manifest destiny it is to consume all the others. That tends not to work out well, as anyone who has observed a pond taken over by duckweed can attest. It plays hell with the ecosystem.

(Publishing fads, although they have duckweed-like properties, tend to be self-limiting and go away on their own, so I try not to waste energy worrying too much about them.)

(I also observe, reading this over, that we are once more in the old "prescriptive versus descriptive" territories with these views. Hm.)

I have more on these notions, and how they play with various genres, in some of the pieces (including my 2008 WorldCon Guest of Honor speech) in Sidelines: Talks and Essays, my 2013 e-collection available from the usual suspects. But I think this is long enough, now.

So. What's your favorite Platonic Ideal of science fiction?

Ta, L.