Why Science Fiction is Hard to Read

September 23rd, 2009

I admit it.   Sometimes I find science fiction challenging to read, and I pass on it and pick up a light fantasy or a horror novel, which I prefer for escapism.   If I do this, I don’t have to wonder why science fiction has so much trouble penetrating into the general public.

I took an advanced upper-level creative writing class in college at Rice Univeristy.   We had a visiting professor that semester, Robert Cohen, a literary novelist among other things.   He was a good writer and I learned things from him.   As is often the case, I may have learned more from my fellow students.

One of the other students critiqued one of my stories in class.   It was a story titled “Behave Like a Grandmaster” about aliens coming to Earth to compete in chess, and needing to apply psychology to really learn how to play the game the right way.   Well, this other student, she couldn’t even critique the story.   She could only go on about how every paragraph was a total surprise to her and just made her head explode.

I didn’t suck as a writer then, but I wasn’t writing at a professional level.   Science fiction in its basics is harder to writer than most other genres.   The opening of a story, as in a news article, needs to establish or imply most of the “five Ws”:   who, what, where, when, why, and how.   In mainstream stories, you can often assume human protagonists in the present, with our world today, and there are short cuts available in the writing.   In science fiction, all of these opening questions are potentially uncertain and need to be established, and it’s often hard to do the stranger the answers are.   Doing this well is the mark of a pro writer.

One of my Clarion classmates did a critique of a story where the opening was problematic this way.   “My shelf got full,” he explained.   He proposed a metaphor in which each new idea in a story goes onto a shelf, until it fills up.   When the ideas keep coming, other ideas get pushed off the shelf.   And, here’s the real issue, everyone’s shelf is a different length.   (Try RAM for a computer metaphor.)

This is one reason why series are popular, and science fiction has a mess of them.   Star Trek, and its spin offs, for instance.   The who, where, when, why, and how are fixed or similar.   Only the what typically changes.   Series leave more space on the shelf (as some things have been stored in the ROM).

Still, in science fiction there is a tradition of celebrating new ideas and originality.   Some writers get praised for how many ideas they can pack into every page, or even every line.   And they tend not to acquire large audiences.   Not many people have long shelves, but getting to use the full length of the shelf can be pleasing when you don’t get a lot of opportunities to do it.

Now, fantasy and horror can be challenging in the same way as science fiction, too, but they seem to rely on the contemporary world or certain tropes a lot more than science fiction as a general rule and are thus more accessible.     There are variations of dragons and vampires, but they’re recognizable as such.   Alien, Predator, the Terminator, these are unique creations.   Sure, there are generic sf rip-offs, but few of them become popular.   Rip-offs of Lord of the Rings (*cough* Shanara*) or other generic fantasy (*cough* Eragon* cough*) have certainly become very popular.

I do get bored with the light fantasy after a while and do want the intellectual challenge of idea-packed science fiction.   Sometimes my shelf gets dusty and it’s good to use it.

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