It’s not "Space Adventure"
(warning: this post has nothing to do with my currently location and life)
The recent perusal and patronage of a used bookstore allowed me to reread one of my favorite science fiction short stories.
Growing up, I frequented the homey, basement Children’s Section of our local library until I realized that some of my favorite authors had more books upstairs, in the General Fiction section. Those tall people and taller shelves were intimidating, but the promise of fascinating new worlds eventually lured me up to the main floor. Several unsuccessful searches later, I noted that many of the books I was looking for were not, in fact, in the General Fiction section but in the separate Science Fiction and Fantasy section.
The sci-fi/fantasy section!? Why had nobody told me about this?
From then on I forgot about the rest of the library, glancing only at the sci-fi/fantasy new arrivals shelf on my way in. On my way out, carting home as many books as I could fit under my chin, my only stop was the checkout counter –where I also paid my overdue fines.
Although it was just a small portion of the library’s collection, I did read a lot of books. I won the award for "most pages read by a male seventh grader in a trimester" --or something to that effect-- for diving through more than 7000 pages. Until I figured out that it was useful to carry around an entire backpack, I was rarely seen scurrying through the halls of Middle School without a thick volume of science fiction on top of my textbooks and green trapper keeper; lots of class time was spent on other planets.
Many of those thick volumes were not novels or series but collections of short stories. The short story is, in my view, the most natural form of science fiction. I’ll explain why in a minute but first, for those of you who are distastefully imagining ray guns and green monsters at every mention of the genre, I am going to quote Philip K. Dick’s excellent explanation (which comes from the introduction to another used short story collection I picked up). According to Dick, science fiction (sf) contains a fictitious world
When Dick refers to a chain reaction, he doesn’t necessarily mean you will sit there and contemplate the story for several hours afterward. He means (if I may be so bold) that the stories stay with you and color your interpretation of the “real” world we live in, not by making you constantly wish you were tramping around mars with a big electronic sword and strangely-named buxom princess, but by connecting the ideas present in good science fiction to their larger implications for how the “real” world works and functions.
To set off that chain reaction an author usually doesn’t need more than 30 or 40 pages –it’s not the idea itself that’s complex, it’s the ramifications. That’s why science fiction works so well as a short story. It doesn’t help that many excellent science fiction writers are not excellent “writers” in the senses of the word implied by most other (generally longer and more consistently affective) genres. They are, however, fascinating thinkers.
I was going to get around to summarizing the story I mentioned above, the one that provoked this post. But I think maybe I’ll just tell you the title, since I don’t want to ruin anything: The Tunnel Under the World, by Frederick Pohl. It was at GPL a few years back, maybe you can even find it online...
update actually you can! ...as a radio broadcast! Fantastic. But they changed the story quite a bit. It sounds a lot more dated (and cheesy) than the story reads.
The recent perusal and patronage of a used bookstore allowed me to reread one of my favorite science fiction short stories.
Growing up, I frequented the homey, basement Children’s Section of our local library until I realized that some of my favorite authors had more books upstairs, in the General Fiction section. Those tall people and taller shelves were intimidating, but the promise of fascinating new worlds eventually lured me up to the main floor. Several unsuccessful searches later, I noted that many of the books I was looking for were not, in fact, in the General Fiction section but in the separate Science Fiction and Fantasy section.
The sci-fi/fantasy section!? Why had nobody told me about this?
From then on I forgot about the rest of the library, glancing only at the sci-fi/fantasy new arrivals shelf on my way in. On my way out, carting home as many books as I could fit under my chin, my only stop was the checkout counter –where I also paid my overdue fines.
Although it was just a small portion of the library’s collection, I did read a lot of books. I won the award for "most pages read by a male seventh grader in a trimester" --or something to that effect-- for diving through more than 7000 pages. Until I figured out that it was useful to carry around an entire backpack, I was rarely seen scurrying through the halls of Middle School without a thick volume of science fiction on top of my textbooks and green trapper keeper; lots of class time was spent on other planets.
Many of those thick volumes were not novels or series but collections of short stories. The short story is, in my view, the most natural form of science fiction. I’ll explain why in a minute but first, for those of you who are distastefully imagining ray guns and green monsters at every mention of the genre, I am going to quote Philip K. Dick’s excellent explanation (which comes from the introduction to another used short story collection I picked up). According to Dick, science fiction (sf) contains a fictitious world
that is our world dislocated by some kind of mental effort on the part of the author, or our world transformed in a way which it is not or not yet. […] This world must differ from the given in at least one way, and this one way must be sufficient to give rise to events that could not occur in our society – or in any known society present or past. There must be a coherent idea involved in this dislocation; that is, the dislocation must be a conceptual one, not merely a trivial or bizarre one – this is the essence of science fiction, the conceptual dislocation within the society so that as a result a new society is generated in the author’s mind, transferred to paper, and from paper it occurs as a convulsive shock in the reader’s mind, the shock of dysrecognition. He knows that it is not his actual world he is reading about.
…The true protagonist of an sf story or novel is an idea and not a person. If it is good sf the idea is new, it is stimulating, and probably most important of all, it sets off a chain-reaction of ramifications in the mind of the reader; it so-to-speak unlocks the reader’s mind so that that mind, like the author’s, begins to create. Thus sf is creative and it inspires creativity, which mainstream fiction by-and-large does not do. We who read sf […] read it because we love to experience this chain-reaction of ideas being set off in our minds by something we read, something with a new idea in it; hence the very best science fiction ultimately winds up being a collaboration between author and reader, in which both create –and enjoy doing it: joy is the essential and final ingredient of science fiction, the joy of discovery of newness
When Dick refers to a chain reaction, he doesn’t necessarily mean you will sit there and contemplate the story for several hours afterward. He means (if I may be so bold) that the stories stay with you and color your interpretation of the “real” world we live in, not by making you constantly wish you were tramping around mars with a big electronic sword and strangely-named buxom princess, but by connecting the ideas present in good science fiction to their larger implications for how the “real” world works and functions.
To set off that chain reaction an author usually doesn’t need more than 30 or 40 pages –it’s not the idea itself that’s complex, it’s the ramifications. That’s why science fiction works so well as a short story. It doesn’t help that many excellent science fiction writers are not excellent “writers” in the senses of the word implied by most other (generally longer and more consistently affective) genres. They are, however, fascinating thinkers.
I was going to get around to summarizing the story I mentioned above, the one that provoked this post. But I think maybe I’ll just tell you the title, since I don’t want to ruin anything: The Tunnel Under the World, by Frederick Pohl. It was at GPL a few years back, maybe you can even find it online...
update actually you can! ...as a radio broadcast! Fantastic. But they changed the story quite a bit. It sounds a lot more dated (and cheesy) than the story reads.
posted by ben at 10:49 PM
1 Comments:
I had a stretch in college where I read a lot of sci if. My favorite PKDick book was The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. I liked that the heroes of his books were often bumbling dorks.
Pete was a big sci fi head.
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