Why SF? at Tobias Buckell Online

Journal Entry

Why SF?

September 19th 2007 at 11:00 am

Often I’m asked why I read and write SF. And one of the points I made is that it’s necessary for a literature to keep up with the things that are changing it rapidly. Think about how many thrillers plots are obviated by the fact that a simple cellphone call now could hold off the complicated shenanigans.

Now consider, the modern psychological literary novel about people finding themselves, angst, and so on, is the sort of thing that science is doing its best to sort of fix. The bilgungsroman may one day be considered as a dated artifact of our society before it started doing things like putting electrodes in our heads to stop that icky depression and so on.

The room looks brighter to her. The faces, the big, circular lights overhead, the ceiling—they all seem clearer. Malone asks her how she feels. “I’m really happy,” she replies, clearly surprised. “I feel like I could get up and do all sorts of things.” But even more telling than her words is the look on her face. For the first time in 20 years, with a halo bolted to her head and two freshly drilled holes in her skull, Hire smiles.

I’m fascinated to be working in a literature that is not trying to pretend this stuff doesn’t exist, isn’t coming, and everything is as it was.

Which isn’t to say that regular literature doesn’t engage with some of this, but I get a lot more latitude in mine!

Share and Enjoy:

These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

Filed in Tech. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for this entry to keep track of comments. You can also use to trackback.

7 Responses so far

1. Mark Terry on Sep 19th, 2007 at 3:53 pm

That’s sorta deep. You can’t just say, “I like it.”???

On the other hand, two weeks ago I was moderating a panel at the Kerrytown Book Festival in Ann Arbor called “Original Voices in Mystery,” with Tom Grace, Judy Clemens, Karen Tintori, Jan Brogan and Jill Gregory. Not once, but twice!–gotta be some sort of record–people in the audience asked why we had so much death and violence in our books. Couldn’t we write write mysteries or thrillers without a corpse.

[Warning: No real people were killed in the writing of these novels! (that we’ll admit to)]

I mentioned Dick Francis’ “Decider” but I also commented that those sound a lot like romantic comedies. One guy was really hounding us about this and all you want to do is point at the title of the panel and say, “Hey, dude, they’re not mysteries if nobody dies.” (Well, either that or wade into the audience and slap him upside the head, but that might, in the long-term, be detrimental to your career).

Stephen King, when asked why he wrote horror, often says, “What makes you think I have a choice?”

It’s like your internal magnet pointing to true north.
2. harmfulguy on Sep 19th, 2007 at 5:37 pm

What, there’s no mystery in theft? Kidnapping? Blackmail?
3. Steve Buchheit on Sep 19th, 2007 at 8:06 pm

“Think about how many thrillers plots are obviated by the fact that a simple cellphone call now could hold off the complicated shenanigans.”

The majority of work that business/management consultants do is communications. Just because the technology exists doesn’t mean that 1) it works reliably (he said from a community that’s lucky to have cell phone coverage even though we are always in the calling areas and whose own phone often shows “no service” when at home), 2) that it works for everybody (understand that some preventive medicines when they say they are 300% more effective - than placebo - that may only mean 6 people out of a thousand are affected) or 3) cost available to the general populace. Also, battery dependant systems have an achilles heel.

But, yeah, to the person who asks that question, “what makes you think I have a choice,” is an excellent response. It’s what I like. It’s what turns my knobs all the way to 11.
4. Samuel Tinianow on Sep 20th, 2007 at 3:24 am

I tell people that that’s like asking LeBron James, “Why basketball?”
5. Mark Terry on Sep 20th, 2007 at 9:23 am

harmfulguy,
They are indeed, but it’s been commented before that the last taboo may very well be murder. When we discuss stakes in a novel, death is usually the worst. And aren’t the likely stakes in a novel about kidnapping death? The threat of death? Pay us… or else we’ll kill…

Blackmail’s trickier. I can’t think of a single crime novel–doesn’t mean there isn’t one–that has a plot based on blackmail that doesn’t in some way escalate to murder.

Even the novel I mentioned, Dick Francis’ “Decider” ends in a death, albeit an accidental one of sorts that occurs when the “bad guy” attempts to kill the main character and his family.
6. Tobias Buckell on Sep 20th, 2007 at 11:17 pm

How can you not write a mystery and have murders? Let alone thrillers without the world being threatened? Good golly!
7. harmfulguy on Sep 21st, 2007 at 10:01 am

OK, I can see the threat of death always being part of the stakes in a good mystery.