Fantasy and science-fiction

and the suspension of disbelief

Photo by Judeus Samson on Unsplash

I’ve tried really hard to enjoy science fiction, but it has always been an uphill battle. When I am particularly patient I can read some Asimov, but usually, Phillip K. Dick or Ray Bradbury is the farthest I can go in that particular direction. I’ve always thought it was a simple matter of taste, but as I’ve been quite engrossed these days with books on literature genres, I’ve found out what the real problem is.

Dean Koontz, the famous American writer, put it in a wonderful way,even if he has it upside-down:

«As with science fiction, fantasy has improved in recent years, both in the substance of its themes and the depth of its characterization, though it remains less relevant to the real world, on the whole, than science fiction. This lack of relevancy is an unavoidable part of the form, by its very definition: a literature dealing with magic and/or the supernatural, without the scientific rationale for its "wonders" that science fiction must contain. Because it lacks a reasonable, scientific explanation, fantasy is divorced from reality and requires more "faith" on the part of its readership, a greater willingness to suspend disbelief

[…]

Except in especially unique stories, fantasy does not deal with extra-terrestrial creatures, time machines, strange new inventions, or space travel. It employs, instead, many sorts of superstitions: […]»

(Dean Koontz, in his book on “Writing Popular Fiction”)

I finally realized that my problem with sci-fi comes from the extreme difficulty of suspending disbelief to the point necessary to leave the magical reality of the world and confine myself in the superstitious and extremely limited worldview the genre requires. Precisely the opposite of his argument, you see, but in a very real way we do agree on the essential.

Sci-fi, after all, is a genre that flourished in basically two societies, very similar from a philosophical point of view: the Cold-War-epoch USA and the Soviet Union. Never, in the vast history of mankind, have there been societies so oblivious to all the really important stuff (art, beauty, love, religion), so stuck in the mire of the most shallow and crass materialism. Never has gone so far the cult of human action, the folly of trying to build a new and supposedly better world, as the builders of Babel’s Tower tried to build their way to Heaven mudbrick by mudbrick. Both societies believed they had the key to universal happiness, and both believed attaining it was just a matter of having enough material riches. Both societies saw Technology (or rather, to make it sound nobler, “Science”; science is the theory, and technology its real-world application, fictional or not) as the key to an immanent Paradise. The goal of both ideological systems was exactly the same; the only difference is that while Communism failed spectacularly, Capitalism succeeded in its sad goal of providing people those material riches that would theoretically make them happy, but in fact, only increased their misery. After all, the materially rich and spiritually poor have everything, except what really matters.

It is interesting to notice that apart from these two gloomy outlying societies fantastic imagination in literature will more often than not be expressed in the genres called fantasy and “magic realism”, in which weird superstitions like “extra-terrestrial creatures, time machines, strange new inventions, or space travel” give way to more realistic story-telling devices, to time-proved literary artifices as old as mankind’s need for a good story.

The greatest trick of story-telling is the possibility of exaggerating aspects of the human condition so as to make them clearer. The aspects picked for that have usually been human virtues and vices, as running from one towards the other (and vice-versa) has always been the most important human activity in the sublunar world. That is why classical Greek heroes and gods were always so much larger than life, in the good and in the bad senses. In modern fantasy literature that is the case of Robert E. Howard’s Conan, for instance, or of Lovecraftian monsters.

Another trope of traditional story-telling is the mixture of strange stuff that comes from some mythological and larger-than-life origin with the life of regular people; in this “attenuated” form of the previous trick, the other-worldly elements help illuminate what is normal, what is regular, without having to deny its normality by making regular people godlike. That’s what one will find in the works of the Colombian García Marquez, the Indian Rushdie, the Argentinian Borges, the Brazilian Érico Veríssimo, the Bohemian Kafka, and so on.

There is also a midway, in which normalness itself is exaggerated and projected onto the alien-ness of different characters. The best example of this is the works of Tolkien, whose hobbits are so normal, so common, so regular he had to make them something other than human in order to make them so fully human, and whose friends and enemies — elves, dwarves, orcs, and so —, by exaggerating one or another aspect of common humanity, makes the balanced humanity of hobbits even more human, by comparison.

Science fiction, on the other hand, does the opposite. Instead of taking what makes us human, it takes a (thoroughly dull) by-product of our faculties — technology — and substitutes it for humanity. Thus, instead of shedding light on what it is to be human, instead of providing readers a deeper understanding of our common human-ness, it denies it wholesale while basking in the dim glory of tedious gadgetry and gratuitous games of shallow logic.

That fascination with technology makes no more sense than would a similar fascination with Autumn-Winter fashion, the color of fruits, or the different timbres of wind instruments: for someone who works with it or for the dedicated amateur it might be interesting, but it would be ludicrous to pretend such interests were universal. Tech is about ways of doing things, about means to certain ends. One’s interest in doing that thing might make the means somehow interesting, but most of the time it will be a non-issue.

But that’s not how sci-fi goes. Most of it is the sectarian offspring of a sectarian worldview, in which all that could possibly matter is the tiny speck of the human experience that science deals with: stuff that can be literally measured, literally weighted, literally poked and probed. A disembodied and shallow form of logic (as in Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics), more akin to a word game than to real-life material logic, is presumed to lend significance to otherwise ludicrously stereotyped stories. The thrill of that power that comes with knowing how to make machines do this and that substitutes for righteousness, and even human-ness.

It gets even worse when sci-fi authors try to be “deep”. It usually ends up being an exaggeration not of anything universally human, but of whatever nonsense is press-worthy at the time. The inanities of newspaper opinion-pages “issues” are made magical through the addition of ludicrous superstitions as “extra-terrestrial creatures, time machines, strange new inventions, or space travel”. Sexual perversion started being fashionable in 1968; let’s have a naked pervert from the future (therefore automatically our superior), with — gasp! — a number as part of his name, and there you have The Masks of Time, as “deep” as a puddle. Small wonder Robert Silverberg, the author, could write at least 50,000 words a week. In 1966, Neo-Malthusian pundits were trying (again!) to scare people with that old overpopulation baloney. Add some water and some tired old dystopian tropes and you’ve got Make Room! Make Room!, by Harry Harrison (the book on which was based the quite better movie Soylent Green). “Organized religion” was getting a bad rap in 1961. Suffice to make the most common idiocies said at the time on the subject come from the mouth of a Martian, and you’ve got Stranger in a Strange Land, whose only contribution to mankind was the verb “to grok”. It can get even worse, as when human astronauts teach centipedes from another planet not to be so easily scared by using their oh-so-superior technological knowledge, in Mission of Gravity. I won’t even talk about the transparent disguise of American “race” issues in stories about earthlings meeting alien “species”. It’s frankly disgusting.

Please notice that I’m talking about what one finds in some that rank among the most acclaimed sci-fi books ever published; I am not talking about second-rate sci-fi in which rayguns substitute for swords that substitute for, well, ask Freud. I’m talking about the ones that are supposed to be “deep”, supposed to be good.

What they have in common is the same superstitious view of the world, in which nothing that really matters — love, art, beauty, religion… — counts, but magic machines are exciting. Furthermore, it takes even less imagination than your regular Harry Potter novel to claim the sci-fi kind of magic as one’s own. I am not a Harry Potter fan, at all; nonetheless, while a Harry Potter fan needs to pretend he could get a letter from Hogwarts, the regular sci-fi fan can claim the great and magical powers of Science (the legitimating cloaking-device worn by fictitious Tech) as his birthright for having been born in a society enslaved by it. He does not even need to actually study science, and the fictitious tech in the story obviously does not exist, but the magic of science fiction makes it all his as long as he can reduce his world to that sad superstitious worldview.

And magic it is. In fact, the acclaimed sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke famously said that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” As the trick in sci-fi is adding “sufficiently advanced technology” to all manners of shallow and shoddy stories, magic is the key element in the genre. Unlike what happens in fantastic fiction (of which magical realism is a subgenre), magic is essential in sci-fi. Magic is the main course, and storytelling is but the seasoning. On the other hand, in fantastic fiction in general, and even more so in magical realism, magic is the seasoning, whose sole function is making the taste of human nature rise to the surface and shine brighter. Why, human nature is literally what makes us human, and what makes our storytelling truly compelling.

The ghosts or the kid with a pig’s tail in García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, for instance, are much easier to believe than Heinlein’s Sixties-hipster Martian in Stranger in a Strange Land. The Martian is too cheap a magical trick, too thin a disguise for the hip discourse of that time; the “magical” elements of García Márquez’ work are seamless story-telling devices, perfectly fitting the fictional universe in which, as is commonly the case, reality is seen to be way more fantastical, way more magical than fiction could ever try to depict. Likewise with the talking dead bodies in Érico Veríssimo’s Incidente em Antares (in Portuguese - this great book has not been translated into English yet), or the giant bug Gregor Samsa wakes up transformed into in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. They are true, truer than life as Tolkien’s hobbits are more human than real humans, more common than common people, and much less effort is required to suspend disbelief in them than in any number of superstitious sci-fi entities as aliens, time machines, robots, or whatever.

Interestingly, the very same Dean Koontz whose words I quoted at the beginning of this article — and who converted to Catholicism — tried his hand at a kind of magical realism with his character Odd Thomas, a fry cook who can see ghosts (and is haunted by that of Elvis Presley), and, lo and behold, it’s a lot easier to suspend disbelief in these books than it used to be the case with his older sci-fi works. Except, of course, when he mixes aliens and sufficiently-advanced technology in the stories. Too much superstition for me, I’m afraid.