Originality in Science Fiction

February 14th, 2009

First, what does it mean to be original?   Well, I guess it means to be first with something.

But what does that mean?

Well, maybe nothing, really.   Over at Techdirt there’s an article suggesting that nothing is original.   It’s the old idea that nothing is created in a vacuum, and specifically applied to our current technology and copyright in the sense that everything in our culture is a product of other things in our culture.

Or as Newton put it, “If I have seen further it is only by having stood on the shoulders of giants.”

It is certainly true in science that nothing is totally original, that every idea is built on the foundations of our knowledge that has been long established.

But what about science fiction?

A lot of science fiction is specifically about novelty.   New ideas.   New reactions to ideas.   Asking and answering “what if?” questions never before posed.

And this issue of originality reminded me of Orson Scott Card’s thought-provoking story “Unaccompanied Sonata.”   It doesn’t make a lot of sense if you think about it too hard, but it is original about this question of originality.   Card proposes a world in which artists are identified young and then kept in isolation to develop their art, free of the influences of other artists.   A musician, for instance, is prevented from hearing anyone else’s music.

Weird, huh?   But cool to think about.   A science fiction idea.   Original.

One of the ways to be original in science, relatively speaking, is to cross fertilize from one field to another.   You learn a new statistical technique, or image processing algorithm, commonly applied in one area and apply it to a new one.   And extreme example of this was when astronomers took some of their source detecting algorithms and applied them detecting breast cancer in medical images.   Practical and life saving, if not totally original.

This is the sort of thing Asimov and Niven used to do a lot, taking new science results and bringing them to life in science fiction.   It’s the kind of thing I do with my novels, too.   I always want someone picking up one of my books to see something there they’ve never seen before.   For Star Dragon, I wanted to set a story in a realistic accretion disk rather than an alien planet, and have plot elements that depended on how catalcysmic variable stars work.   I also wanted some really interesting future tech that played to themes of the story, and so the chairbeasts and Biolathe were born.   For Spider Star, I wanted to set a story in a dark matter planet, again realistically based on real astrophysics of what such an object would be like.   This world was so strange that my editor encouraged me to keep the future world building more familiar against the conceptually challenging backdrop.   I still had to push the aliens though.

Science fiction readers are looking for novelty and originality consistently in a way no one else is from other genres.   Even fantasy, which might be thought to be open to more originality since you can cast off the rules of our scientific understanding entirely, seems to have very familiar ideas dominating the best sellers.   Tolkien may have seemed original to many back in the 1950s, but he borrowed a lot of his ideas from mythology.   William Gibson didn’t even own a computer when he invented cyberspace while writing Neuromancer.

All the trops of science fiction, from rocket ships to teleporters, from invisibility to time travel, were totally original ideas for someone at some point.

Personally I read science fiction for the ideas.   I appreciate very much good writing, good characters, good plotting, etc., but I can get those from any kind of book.   When I read a science fiction novel I want to think about things I’ve never thought about before.

I remember a good story by Kate Wilhelm called “I Know What You’re Thinking,” from back in the 1990s.   I think it was nominated for some awards.   It was basically a character story of what one woman did with the ability to read minds.   Stephen Gould wrote a good book called Jumper (made into a mediocre movie) about someone with the ability to teleport.

I can barely consider either of those, and many others, science fiction.

To me, those ideas have been done many times before, so why do them again?   Reader of all types stopped to think already what they would do if they could teleport or read minds, and the joining of the concept with a new setting or character may be interesting in revealing more about what it means to be human (a teenage American boy, a middle-aged American woman, a Tibetan monk, an Indian girl, etc.), but it isn’t original.   I can get things about people from other types of fiction.   I mean, imagine an issue of Asimov’s that was filled with nothing but good stories about people with the ability to read minds or teleport.   Or, wait, originality coming…someone who could do both?   Or maybe an entire planet of people who could read minds and teleport?   Now at least we’re getting somewhere.

I want to learn something new, to think new thoughts, when I pick up a science fiction story.   It should show me a future I haven’t seen, a novel wonder of the universe, people reacting to something that has never happened before and that I hadn’t already spent hours speculating about.

The best science fiction has totally original elements, and when I don’t see them I get cranky and complain.   I want to see them more often.   They’re why I love science fiction and why I write it.   I want us all to be thinking about new things, things relevant to our world of accelerating changes and technology, and to share them.

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