In terms of scifi (as fantasy is a blindspot for me) Ive been thinking about this lately. While I agree that a lot of it tends to be reactionary I don't think this is because of a coherent belief, or a consciously stated political opinion--for the most part at least. Its more of a confluence of discourses that comes out of a certain way of thinking, ideology, and so on.
From my wealth of experience in writing (like 1 month lmao) I see that most sci-fi writers are fixated on their "concept". While conceptual writing is obviously not a problem in itself it does have some traps: namely, being reductive. By being so impossibly broad in scope having a novel concept that you then build a world around necessarily leads to being reductive. The world is already an unimaginably complex place, and we understand very little of it. There is no unified grand narrative of sciences, so why can your crafted world implicitly have one? How could that ever be non-ideological? A common example is writers will make a world that has some interesting physical characteristics (say like a highly elliptical orbit) and then try to derive everything from psychology to culture to this one thing. We can't even do that with things that are intimately familiar to us, let alone with so-called aliens! What you end up with are dead, totalizing, and brittle concepts that when re-read onto the world threaten to do very real harm to things that they do not, or cannot account for. My working thesis, or galaxy-brained crackpot theory, is that it's precisely this reductive, leap-of-faith thinking that is the reactionary mindset. Not that i would blame anyone trying to write like this as if it was inherently bad or anything--its not. But imagine applying that same way of thinking to the real world. We would all have Jared Diamond tier takes like 'Africa got colonized because of the shape of the continent' or whatever.
So what can we do? The genre is very much salvageable IMO. Ill leave this as a cliffhanger for now, but there is something.
From my wealth of experience in writing (like 1 month lmao) I see that most sci-fi writers are fixated on their “concept”
Paraphrasing, but I think it was KSR quoting LeGuin(?), saying something along the lines of fantasy explore characters, sci-fi explores ideas. And with all ideas, the dominant forces of society will set the tone for the media. Until the access and distribution is democratized, it will suffer from who decides who’s work get pushed.
Here is what I had in mind in terms of a solution.
What I'm getting at is there is a fundamental misunderstanding of scientific progress at play here. Take Newtonian physics for example: there has never been a neatly packaged idea ordained from god that says 'F=ma'. Instead things like 'F=ma' is something generated out of observing the materials at hand, and out of an intellectual milieu. To put it another way, it's not like you can just unravel enough layers of reality to the point where the laws are literally inscribed there. (I'm vaguely referring to Structural Realism here.) The naive polar opposite of this picture is the "conceptual" world described in the previous comment. The nature of reality in their stories is definite, and final--sometimes they will even out right tell you. They are the God of their world, and their word is Law, etc., etc. But this is not true. You'll have to excuse the poetry but words are like holes in the page, they reveal in themselves innumerable relations to other words, chains of signification, and systems of meaning that by necessity are always connected back to the real world. Any semblance of control over what you create is illusory in my opinion. And we need to acknowledge this in how we write. Both in the characters and our creation of the world itself. There is always an error in understanding, always a misrecognition in seeing, every system has its breakdown, so we should reflect this. Writing then should evoke an openness to interpretation, systems of understanding should be challenged, and most importantly, it should be dynamic in its development.
One example I like to think of is approaching some aspects of worldbuilding as if you were being asked questions. Like you want to write about a completely different society? Okay, take a step back and consider how to approach knowing such a thing. Imagine if someone walked up to you and asked 'What is your society?' without a frame of reference I would be at a loss for words. It is pretty much impossible to answer directly. Woe is you if you are trying to create an actual alien species: 'what is humanity?' That is a question we've been mulling over since the dawn of time! Plus these nebulous concepts only really become apparent out of their everydayness when they break down (the state manifests itself through repression, or even something as simple as the exclamation 'O Humanity!')
Basically just be pretentious, ambiguous, and have a whole lot of double-meanings. At least that is what I'm trying to do. Thoughts?
In terms of scifi (as fantasy is a blindspot for me) Ive been thinking about this lately. While I agree that a lot of it tends to be reactionary I don't think this is because of a coherent belief, or a consciously stated political opinion--for the most part at least. Its more of a confluence of discourses that comes out of a certain way of thinking, ideology, and so on.
From my wealth of experience in writing (like 1 month lmao) I see that most sci-fi writers are fixated on their "concept". While conceptual writing is obviously not a problem in itself it does have some traps: namely, being reductive. By being so impossibly broad in scope having a novel concept that you then build a world around necessarily leads to being reductive. The world is already an unimaginably complex place, and we understand very little of it. There is no unified grand narrative of sciences, so why can your crafted world implicitly have one? How could that ever be non-ideological? A common example is writers will make a world that has some interesting physical characteristics (say like a highly elliptical orbit) and then try to derive everything from psychology to culture to this one thing. We can't even do that with things that are intimately familiar to us, let alone with so-called aliens! What you end up with are dead, totalizing, and brittle concepts that when re-read onto the world threaten to do very real harm to things that they do not, or cannot account for. My working thesis, or galaxy-brained crackpot theory, is that it's precisely this reductive, leap-of-faith thinking that is the reactionary mindset. Not that i would blame anyone trying to write like this as if it was inherently bad or anything--its not. But imagine applying that same way of thinking to the real world. We would all have Jared Diamond tier takes like 'Africa got colonized because of the shape of the continent' or whatever.
So what can we do? The genre is very much salvageable IMO. Ill leave this as a cliffhanger for now, but there is something.
Paraphrasing, but I think it was KSR quoting LeGuin(?), saying something along the lines of fantasy explore characters, sci-fi explores ideas. And with all ideas, the dominant forces of society will set the tone for the media. Until the access and distribution is democratized, it will suffer from who decides who’s work get pushed.
deleted by creator
Here is what I had in mind in terms of a solution.
What I'm getting at is there is a fundamental misunderstanding of scientific progress at play here. Take Newtonian physics for example: there has never been a neatly packaged idea ordained from god that says 'F=ma'. Instead things like 'F=ma' is something generated out of observing the materials at hand, and out of an intellectual milieu. To put it another way, it's not like you can just unravel enough layers of reality to the point where the laws are literally inscribed there. (I'm vaguely referring to Structural Realism here.) The naive polar opposite of this picture is the "conceptual" world described in the previous comment. The nature of reality in their stories is definite, and final--sometimes they will even out right tell you. They are the God of their world, and their word is Law, etc., etc. But this is not true. You'll have to excuse the poetry but words are like holes in the page, they reveal in themselves innumerable relations to other words, chains of signification, and systems of meaning that by necessity are always connected back to the real world. Any semblance of control over what you create is illusory in my opinion. And we need to acknowledge this in how we write. Both in the characters and our creation of the world itself. There is always an error in understanding, always a misrecognition in seeing, every system has its breakdown, so we should reflect this. Writing then should evoke an openness to interpretation, systems of understanding should be challenged, and most importantly, it should be dynamic in its development.
One example I like to think of is approaching some aspects of worldbuilding as if you were being asked questions. Like you want to write about a completely different society? Okay, take a step back and consider how to approach knowing such a thing. Imagine if someone walked up to you and asked 'What is your society?' without a frame of reference I would be at a loss for words. It is pretty much impossible to answer directly. Woe is you if you are trying to create an actual alien species: 'what is humanity?' That is a question we've been mulling over since the dawn of time! Plus these nebulous concepts only really become apparent out of their everydayness when they break down (the state manifests itself through repression, or even something as simple as the exclamation 'O Humanity!')
Basically just be pretentious, ambiguous, and have a whole lot of double-meanings. At least that is what I'm trying to do. Thoughts?