Author: photog

A Great Science Fiction Story?

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Lately I’ve been thinking about this topic.  What makes a great science fiction story?  Can it be a great science fiction story if the story’s not great?  How about if the science isn’t great?  I think you know what I’m saying.  A great story, meaning great fiction, has characters drawn in a way that makes them compelling.  It doesn’t have to be Shakespeare but it can’t be two-dimensional cut-outs that wouldn’t make it through a toothpaste commercial.  And by the same token, what if the science is just stupid?  Sure, you can just say it’s fantasy instead and then the sky’s the limit.  But let’s stick to science fiction.

When I was a kid, I would have said that “great” science fiction needed the science but the fiction was not that important.  If there were enough star cruisers and anti-matter bombs and giant amoebas then all was right with the world.  In fact, the fewer human relations involved in the story, the better.  I was much more interested in the non-human characters acting “realistic” than any dialog between humans.  And the male/female dynamic was completely off the table.  The last thing a Lensman needed before, during or after a battle was a woman getting in the way.

Suffice it to say that time changes things.  I look at some of the “classics” of the golden age and I see a flatness to the story.  Now, this isn’t an all-encompassing criticism.  There are plenty of stories from the day that have nuanced characters and plots that reflect actual human personality types.  So, it’s not black and white.

Now, the modern literary science fiction has been described as having the opposite problem.  It’s all about human feelings and relations.  What isn’t as important is the “science.”  When that’s the case I will just declare that if a story doesn’t have any science at all then it isn’t a great science fiction story because it isn’t science fiction.  Period.

And without a doubt if a story has an exciting plot and memorable characters and also a clever science fiction premise then without a doubt it’s great science fiction.

So that leaves the other extreme.  What if a story is built on incredibly imaginative science fiction plot devices but the characters are cardboard cut-outs of human beings?  Can that be a great science fiction story?  In this category the works of Arthur C Clarke comes to mind and specifically 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Here is an epic tale stretching all the way from the dawn of Man to the first human interstellar voyage.  And yet the most human character in the book is HAL9000; a schizophrenic homicidal computer.  Now, is it an interesting story?  Well, yeah.  There are cave men and monoliths and moon bases and worm holes.  But honestly, do you find yourself rooting for anyone?  There’s just something so inhumanly stolid and wooden about everyone in the story that I feel that each one being murdered by HAL might be his happiest moment.  At least liveliest.

But anyway, I want to pose this as a question.  Can a technically engrossing sf story be considered great if the characters are ciphers?  What do you think?

Short Fiction Collected

photog Literature, photog's Corner, Science Fiction / Fantasy , , , ,

I have an old beat up collection of Ray Bradbury’s short fiction.  It’s called “The Stories of Ray Bradbury.”  It was published in 1980 and contains about a hundred of his stories.  These stories appeared earlier in a number of short story collections that came out over the years that Bradbury was writing.  And he also wrote after this collection came out so there’s nothing original or definitive about this collection but it contains most of the short stories that his reputation was based on.  And because it is such a large selection (almost nine hundred pages in a 9.5 X 6.5 hardcover volume), there are great stories and poor ones.  There is fantasy, horror, something like science fiction and even nondescript fiction.  And because it was written over the course of about forty years it changes.  The emphasis, the stylistic touches, the topics all change.  But the voice is always recognizably Bradbury.  For the most part he is interested in the people.  The science is not the story.  In fact, most of the time it’s just the excuse for poking and prodding the people and watching them react.  It’s a pleasure to walk through this old volume and relive old stories and find out how I’ve changed over the years.  Have my preferences changed?  Yes.  But my likes and dislikes have mostly remained the same.  Possibly I’m a little bit more sensitive to the quality of the prose rather than the surprise in the ending.

It’s interesting to consider that science fiction short stories have been declared a dead field.  No one buys the stories either in book collections or in magazines (paper or electronic).  And that strikes me as a sad situation.  So many of these short stories contain wonderful ideas and characters and images that stir the imagination.  But somehow, they no longer have any value in the present world.  Can that be the permanent state of literature?  I guess it could be.  Capitalism is ruled by the law of supply and demand.  So, there’s no demand for short stories.

Well, that’s too bad.  Maybe the future will include a manner for artists to exhibit their works for people similar to how musicians currently perform concerts.  A live presentation where the audience listens to the story or watches a video presentation of it in a format that can’t be pirated and therefore has value as a single use experience.  All that’s left is the memory of the story.  Of course, that’s what movies were but now they’ve also lost their value.  So maybe not.  But I find a book of short stories to be a treasure trove.  A hundred stories and maybe fifty are very good and ten are wonderful.  That’s a pretty impressive collection.  I think any prolific author would be satisfied with that track record.

One thing that Bradbury liked to do was string together some of his short stories into a larger framework.  He did this with turning his Green Town stories into “Dandelion Wine” and his dark carnival stories into “Something Wicked This Way Comes.”  And what that shows me is these short stories can be the seeds for longer fiction.  But if no one reads them and rates them how will these seeds ever sprout.  Oh well.