ed_rex

One of the many knocks against science fiction is that it tends towards the "heroic"; that is, SF follows the formulaic tropes of adventure stories, in which an exceptional hero, through courage, brains and sheer grit, triumphs over evil forces of (apparently) vastly superior powers.

Like most slanders, there is some truth to the claim and, in the early days of SF, there was a great deal of truth to it. In the 1930s and into the 1940s, written SF was sold to the pulp magazine market at (if the writer was lucky) a penny a word, and hacks cranked the stuff out so long as there was a market. Polished prose was a luxury the few writers capable of it did not have time for, and so its (mostly young) readers were treated to westerns in space, as it were. Unidimensional heroes that made Star Trek's Captain Kirk seem as conflicted as Hamlet were forever saving babes, worlds and the universe itself, apparently undergoing no psychological growth whatsoever while doing so.

But those were the early days and the field has matured, both commercially over the past 30 years and artistically, over an even longer period of time.

Yet the slander remains, and "serious" literary people won't deign to even read the stuff unless it is written by Margaret Atwood or some other literary author who has chosen to slum. (That they almost always do a piss-poor job of it - Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale being an excellent case-in-point. The novel said little, politically or psychologically, that had not been said by Robert A. Heinlein in his novella, If This Goes On, published in 1941. But I digress.)

As things now stand, written science fiction, in terms of the quality of its prose, is probably no better and no worse than other fields of fiction (SF is not a genre, though there are genres within the field of science fiction - space-opera, for example; it is a field of literature with certain conventions, yes, but not the strict formulae of Harlequin Romance novels or superhero comic books). Where SF differs from so-called "mundane fiction" is that it is not restricted to what is commonly considered the "real world", nor is it restricted to dealing with human psychology as it is now.

Science fiction can be set in the past, the present or the future, just as an SF novel's narrative can be followed on Earth, in space or on a world located thousands of light-years away. It requires author and reader, both, to make use of their imaginations in a manner that mundane fiction seldom does. Done well, it provides the double-pleasure of showing the reader something utterly new, while at the same time providing a distorting - and so, creative - reflection of that reader's own time and place. In other words, SF can do all that mundane fiction can, with a whole lot of extras thrown in at no extra charge.

Which brings me to Neal Stephenson's very long novel, Quicksilver. At nearly 1,000 pages of small, close-set type it is only the first volume of his three volume trilogy, System of the World. It is at once an literary tour-de-force in its loose, comfortable style, and a traditional exercise in plot-driven, heroic adventure in its guts - though I was deep into the second volume, The Confusion, before I realized it.( I know, I've waited a hell of a long time before asking you to read on! )

Cross-posted to my own journal, to bookish, to bookreview_lj, to books, to mere_review, to review_o_rama, to sf_book_reviews, and to the you_review communities.