Cory Doctorow
Science fiction isn't collection of tropes, nor is it a literary style, nor is it a marketing category. It can *encompass* all of these, but what sf really is, is an *outlook*.
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Cory Doctorow
At the core of sf is an approach to technology (and, sometimes, science): sf treats technology as a kind of crux that the rest of the tale revolves around. The Bechdel test invites us to notice that in most fiction, stories revolve around men - that it's rare for two or more non-male characters to interact with one another, and if they do, that interaction is triggered by a man.
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Cory Doctorow
The sftnal version of this would go something like this: "a story gets increasingly stfnal to the extent that interactions among characters either directly relate to a technology, or are triggered by the consequences of such a relation, or fears, plans or aspirations for same."
(Note that this implies that science fiction is a spectrum: things can be more or less science fictional, and that gradient reflects the centrality of a technology to the narrative.)
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Cory Doctorow
No one's work demonstrates this better than Neal Stephenson. Stephenson's work covers a lot of settings and storytelling modes. His debut, *The Big U*, was a contemporary novel lampooning academic life. Then came *Zodiac*, another contemporary novel, but one where science - in this case, extremely toxic polychlorinated biphenyls - take center stage. Then came his cyberpunk classic, *Snow Crash*, which was unambiguously (and gloriously) science fiction.
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Cory Doctorow
A couple of books later, we got *Cryptonomicon*, a finance novel that treated *money* as a technology, and, notably, did so across both a near-future setting and the historic setting of WWII. In addition to being a cracking novel, *Cryptonomicon* is exciting in that it treats the technological endeavors *of the past* in exactly the same way as it does the *imaginary* technological endeavors *of the future*.
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Cory Doctorow
Here's Stephenson fusing his contemporary sensibilities with his deep interests in history, and approaching *historical fiction* as an sf writer, doing the sftnal thing to gadgets and ideas that have been around for more than two generations.
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Cory Doctorow
Stephenson's next novel was *Quicksilver*, the first book of the *massive* "System of the World" trilogy, in which the *extremely* historical events of Newton and Leibniz's quest to discover "the calculus" are given a sweeping, world-spanning sftnal treatment. As "system of the world" suggests, Stephenson uses this sftnal trick to situate a scientific advancement in the context of a global, contingent, complex *system* that it both grows out of an defines.
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Cory Doctorow
This is the pure water of science fiction, applied *entirely* to real seventeenth century events, and it's definitive proof that sf isn't a trope, a style or a category - but rather, it is a way of framing and understanding the world.
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Cory Doctorow
You can think of Stephenson's career up to this point as a series of experiments in applying the stfnal lens to events that are progressively less historical (and, with *The Diamond Age*, events that are *atemporal* inasmuch as the book is set in a futuristic revival of the Victorian Age). Experiments that range over contemporary settings, and then contemporary settings blended with historical settings, then a deep historical sf trilogy.
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Cory Doctorow
(It's rather exciting that these books came out right as @GreatDismal was entering his own "predicting the present" decade, where he exclusively published sf about the recent past, a prelude to a series of sf novels set in a future so far from our present that the characters literally have no record of which events led up to their own circumstances):
https://memex.craphound.com/2014/10/28/the-peripheral-william-gibson-vs-william-gibson/
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Cory Doctorow
Having proved how successful an historical sf novel could be, Stephenson then bopped around with a lot of stfnal historical ideas, from the "transmedia" 12th century setting of the *Mongoliad* to a madcap time-travel book (*The Rise and Fall of DODO*). Stephenson's work since then have been pretty straightforwardly sftnal, which means that he's a little overdue for a return to historical sf.
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Cory Doctorow
That's where *Polostan* comes in, the just-published inaugural volume of a new interwar series about the birth of atomic science:
https://www.harpercollins.com/products/polostan-neal-stephenson
Critics and even the publisher have called this a "spy novel" or a "historical novel" but it is neither of those. What *Polostan* is, is a science fiction novel, *about spies in an historical setting*. This isn't to say that Stephenson tramples on, or ignores spy trope: this is absolutely a first-rate spy novel.
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Cory Doctorow
Nor does Stephenson skimp on the lush, gorgeously realized and painstakingly researched detail you'd want from an historical novel (Stephenson has long enjoyed a fruitful collaboration with the brilliant researcher Lisa Gold, whom we can thank for much of the historical detail across his body of work).
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Cory Doctorow
But the overarching sensibility of this work is a world full of people who revolve around technology. You'd be hard-pressed to list more than a handful of actions taken by the characters that aren't driven by technology, and most of the dialog either concerns technology, or the actions that characters have taken in relation to technology. It's unmistakably and indelibly a science fiction novel.
It's great.
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Cory Doctorow
*Polostan* raises the curtain on the story of Dawn Rae Bjornberg, AKA Aurora Maximovna Artemyeva, whose upbringing is split between the American West in the early 20th century and the Leningrad of revolutionary Russia (her parents are an American anarchist and a Ukrainian Communist who meet when her father travels to America as a Communist agitator).
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Cory Doctorow
Aurora's parents' marriage does not survive their sojourn to the USSR, and eventually Aurora and her father end up back in the States, after her father is tasked with radicalizing the veterans of the Bonus Army that occupied DC, demanding the military benefits they'd been promised:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonus_Army
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Cory Doctorow
After the efforts of Communist organizers in the Bonus Army were mercilessly crushed by George S Patton, Aurora ends up living in a Communist commune in Chicago, where she falls into a job selling comfortable shoes to the footsore women who visit the Century of Progress, as the 1933 World's Fair was known:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_of_Progress
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Cory Doctorow
At the Century of Progress, Aurora sits at the junction where many global currents are mixing: she is there when Mussolini's air armada lands on Lake Michigan to the cheers of thronged fascist sympathizers; and also when Neils Bohr lectures on the newly discovered - and still controversial - neutron. She is also exposed to her first boyfriend, a young physicist from New York, who greatly expands her interest in nuclear physics and also impregnates her.
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Cory Doctorow
This latter turn in her life sends Aurora back into the American west, where, after a complex series of misadventures and derring-do, she embarks on a career as a tommy gun-toting bank robber, part of an armed gang of her cowboy shirttail cousins.
All of this culminates in her return sojourn to the Soviet Union, where she first falls under suspicion of being an American spy, and then her recruitment as a *Soviet* spy.
Also: she plays a *lot* of polo. Like, on a horse.
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Cory Doctorow
This isn't just an unmistakably sftnal novel, it's also an unmistakably *Stephensonian* novel: embroidered, discursive, and brilliantly expositional:
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Cory Doctorow
It is funny, it is interesting, it is even daffy in places. It's sometimes absolutely horrifying. It skips around in time like a subatomic particle bouncing around in a theoretical physics model. It creates and resolves all manner of little subplots in most satisfying ways, but also ultimately exists just to tee up the main action, which will come in future volumes. It's a curtain raiser, and like any good opening number, it hooks you for what is to come.
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Cory Doctorow
Next weekend (November 8-10), I'll be in Tucson, AZ: I'm the Guest of Honor at the Tuscon science fiction convention:
eof/
icastico
Interesting take on what makes a novel science fictional - makes me think of Philip K. Dick’s early manuscript “Voices From The Street” - where the HiFi equipment (new in the 50s when the book was written) is the technology of focus. Not marketed as sci-fi for sure, but it fits the framing here.
Unpartitioned Variance 50% off
@icastico @pluralistic I'm thinking of William Gibson's Blue Ant trilogy. I love those books, not least because Gibson (@GreatDismal ) appears to have done a huge amount of research to find real, verifiable things that sound science fictional but actually exist. The books are arguably "trade fiction" or something like that (IDK the right labels) but they 100% feel like sci fi.
Time to read them again.
icastico
@guyjantic @pluralistic @GreatDismal
Samuel R. Delany called it “mundane fiction”
Jack William Bell
@icastico @guyjantic @pluralistic @GreatDismal
Being nitpicky here, but only because I was a big and vocal proponent of it back in the day…
… but the proper tag is 'Mundane Science Fiction'.
The intent was two-fold:
1. Write SF based ENTIRELY on known to work technology and science
2. Point out how we ALREADY live in a Science Fictional world
icastico
@guyjantic @pluralistic @GreatDismal
It comes from his amazing book "The Jewel Hinged Jaw" which is a series of essays about writing, sf, and language. Worth digging up if you are interested in the topic. It was out of print for a long time, but has been reissued recently, I believe.
Charlie Stross
@icastico @guyjantic @pluralistic @GreatDismal IIRC Chip's book predates the "Mundane SF Manifesto", which was launched by Geoff Ryman in the 00's … but I'm pretty sure Geoff knows Chip, so there's probably some terminological interplay there.
Unpartitioned Variance 50% off
@icastico @pluralistic @GreatDismal New term! It fits the contrast I was trying to draw much better than the term I used. Thanks.
Simon Bisson
@cstross @icastico @guyjantic @pluralistic @GreatDismal There are also similarities with Rudy Rucker's transrealism.
Unpartitioned Variance 50% off
@sbisson @cstross @icastico @pluralistic @GreatDismal Y'all are giving me new stuff to read, so this is a good day.
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