Writing good science fiction is hard. Writing good anything is hard, but science fiction multiplies the complexity. Science fiction requires a writer to project the effect that a scientific development will have on society. Moreover, the writer must portray this future society plausibly, which means distinguishing it from our current culture by extrapolating/inventing new mores and activities. I think this is why so many authors, even quite good ones, come up with brilliant technical ideas, but their visions of the future look uncannily like our world of the late 1950s.
Take smoking, for example. Smoking is practically ubiquitous in our current society, but there is now a small but vocal movement by doctors and scientists to alert us to the potential dangers of tobacco. They include a variety of respiratory ailments and even cancer. Yet, smoking is just as commonplace in the future worlds of science fiction. You would think someone would portray a smokeless future.
Another example is the portrayal of women. For centuries, women have struggled for and obtained the rights and privileges of men. The trend has historically been in their favor. They fought for and got the vote—quite recently, in fact. In the last war, they “manned” our factories and flew our planes. There seems to be a backlash against this these days; between soap operas and nuclear families, women are expected to stay at home and be seen and not heard. Still, on a long time-scale, this seems to be an anomalous blip. You would think a future in which women are portrayed as leaders and scientists and businessmen would be more common. Yet you can go through an entire issue of Astounding and find just one female character in ten, and odds are that woman will be a wife with little agency of her own. It is a man's future, if you read science fiction—a smoking man's future.
It could be argued that this is not all the fault of the writer. Even the greatest virtuoso must play to his or her audience, which in this case includes both the readers and editors. This audience is usually forgiving of one or two deviations from the norm. We call them “hand-waves.” For instance, so far as we currently know, it is impossible to go faster than light. Yet, science fiction is full of stories featuring vessels that do just that. That's a hand-wave. Psionic powers are another hand-wave. People only have two hands; too many extrapolations results in an alien world that may be too unfamiliar to its audience.
Maybe. I'd like to think we science fiction fans are a more sophisticated lot than the average person on the street. Also, Heinlein certainly doesn't have a problem dreaming up new ideas by the baker's dozen and incorporating them into his worlds. The few standout female characters (e.g. Asimov's Susan Calvin, Piper's Martha Dane, the protagonists of Zenna Henderson's The People series) have not driven fans away in droves.
But in the end, science fiction writers start out wearing the same cultural blinders as everyone else. And so the Randall Garretts, Poul Andersons and Bob Silverbergs write their stories filled with chain-smoking men because they can't imagine a different world. Someday, perhaps, they will read the few great, truly visionary stories of their peers, and light will shine through their blinders.
If you're wondering what triggered this screed, stay tuned for my next piece. I promise I'll get back to reviewing the latest magazines.
(Confused? Click here for an explanation as to what's really going on)
This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth, where it has comments. Please comment here or there.
The "in the future, almost everyone will still smoke all of the time" assumption which irritates you bothers me as well. The closest thing to an anti-smoking crusader in old or modern sf stories that I can think of is Taine of San Francisco, who appeared in a dozen or so stories by David H. Keller, M.D. (I'd hope Keller was not one of those "doctors who smoke Camels") in Gernsback magazines of the late 1920s and early 1930s. In (virtually?) every story someone would offer Taine a cigarette, only to get his standard response: "No thank you, I used to smoke, but I found that the tobacco was bad for the delicate enamel of my teeth, and once that is destroyed, it is never replaced." Not really a crusader, then, but as close as anything I can recall in the field even now, thirty or so years later, in what I'd like to think is our more advanced society.
(Unfortunately, no matter how rational Taine may have been in regard to tobacco use, the stories showed him as having far less enlightened views on such subjects as women and the Negro race, so I don't think a revival of interest in the series is going to happen — and I rather hope not.)
I suppose in our less enlightened times, even one progressive attitude is a blessing!
I'm glad that you and I are on the same page and find tobacco use revolting. Particularly when our beloved pulps are made to smell like cigarettes. Yuck!