Originally published on Facebook 26 June 2016.
Look. Science fiction is one of the things I write. I publish some in ANALOG, a magazine where some of the stories hinge on the finer points of engineering. I understand that some of the folks plying this trade pride themselves on accuracy to multiple decimal points.
But as someone who writes in multiple genres, perhaps I see something that a few of you, including a couple of multiple award-winners in the field, completely miss when you attack certain slipstream works which never pretended to be nuts-and-bolts sf.
To wit: there is such a thing as poetic license.
Sometimes people write stories with outrageous opening premises and have absolutely no intention of including a concordance with the text.
Now, I am going to use some examples, that I know a few of you hate; and what I want you to know is that it doesn’t matter if you hate them, or, honestly, even if you’re right in hating them. Because this is not about whether they’re good or bad. This is about throwing a fit about accuracy when accuracy is not what being’s aimed for.
Zombies, for instance. A very well-known and very respected sf author has written a blog post about how contemptible the genre is, and how there is absolutely no medical justification for the dead ever getting up and walking. He went so far as to say that anybody who writes in that genre is a talentless hack, which I – the author of about half a dozen zombie stories – took pretty personally.
How do you explain to this guy that some horror fiction is not about explanations? It’s about the rules of the observable universe turning upside down, following a logic more dreamlike than actual, and how our lives would be up-ended if ever that happened? And how do you explain to that guy that not everybody who uses a trope, wants to do the same thing with that trope?
This has affected reaction, from some parties, to stories of mine.
I wrote a story called “The Thing About Shapes To Come,” in which for some time, all human offspring come out looking like geometrical shapes: cubes, spheres, pyramids, what have you. There is never any explanation for why this happens; the story comes out and says, at one point, don’t worry about the explanation. The story is about the fierce devotion one mother shows her child, a cube who for much of the tale does not seem to reciprocate her love. Would you believe I received correspondence from a writer who demanded to know the explanation? I said, “Aliens, experimenting from space. Happy now?”
I wrote another story called “Sunday Night Yams At Minnie and Earl’s,” in which a lunar astronaut is driven to distraction by the existence of a nice suburban couple living on a plain on the moon, in their clapboard house surrounded by a lawn and a white picket fence that somehow keeps in a breathable atmosphere: again, the story goes on at significant length exploring possible explanations and ultimately tells you, in about as many words, “It doesn’t matter; that’s not what this story is about.” And again, some representatives of the engineering-and-slide-rule crowd demanded to know what was up.
Dudes. Neither one was about explanations.
And no, I’m not gonna tell you how the transplant technology in “Her Husband’s Hands” works, or how the society in “Of A Sweet Slow Dance in the Wake of Temporary Dogs” manages to clear its slate every ten days.
They weren’t about explanations.
If Ernest Hemingway can write a story about two killers coming to execute some poor schmuck and not tell you why he has been targeted for murder, because it’s incidental, then I can leave out the explanation for something fantastic, if it’s incidental.
You may hate THE TRUMAN SHOW, and you’re free to, but the noted sf author, many-time Hugo winner, who complained at length that there was no way the world would sit still for a corporation holding a child prisoner on a stage set, lying to him about the nature of his life; and going on to write reams of aghast disbelief about the infrastructure of this fraud, was missing the goddamned point. The story was never intended to be a prognostication of future events. It was an appeal to dream-logic, illustrating the nightmarish suspicion some of us have, that our loved ones are only pretending to like us and that society is a conspiracy aimed at us. Again, love it or hate it, “realism” was not what was being aimed for. Not even close. Realize what was being aimed for and then criticize whether or not it achieved those goals.
In the same way that a box has height, width and breadth, a story has dimensions that include the level of intended reality. You cannot slam a story for being fanciful, even whimsical, if that is a deliberate choice. You have to understand that in the same way spy dramas can include John Le Carre and Ian Fleming, that crime stories can include James Ellroy and the various creative minds behind versions of Batman.
Don’t read Shirley Jackson’s “One Ordinary Day, With Peanuts,” and start nitpicking about how such a situation ever came to be.
It’s not about backstory.
If you tell me zombie stories are stupid, well, many are; maybe even most are. But if you spend five hundred words working out why they’re medically improbable, you have missed whatever point any individual incarnation has. (And the confident statement that they’re only written by hacks, in 100% of all cases, presents a doglike understanding of the genre, amounting to a pooch thinking that if he is not personally appetized by a chunk of salami, it is not food.)
You will not get the point of Franz Kafka’s METAMORPHOSIS if you bring up the square-cube law and wonder why the apartment of that poor schmuck is not under constant observation by fascinated entomologists, not to mention how he can breathe when a cockroach that size would suffocate under its own weight. That’s not what the goddamned story is about.
Poetic license, dudes.
Seriously.
Comment By: B.J. Thrower
June 26th, 2017 at 9:18 am
Since I can’t read your blog posts on my phone, was that a remark about showing-not-telling in our fiction?
Comment By: Adam-Troy Castro
June 26th, 2017 at 9:18 am
No, about being shackled by the need for explanations. Do you read them later?
Comment By: B.J. Thrower
June 26th, 2017 at 9:18 am
I was joking, of course. I do read them occasionally. The print is too small on ye olde smartphone.
Comment By: Adam-Troy Castro
June 26th, 2017 at 9:18 am
On no site I read is the text adjustable for size.
Comment By: Elena Gaillard
June 26th, 2017 at 9:18 am
I do love that essay. It was worth re-reading it.
Comment By: Steve Smith
June 26th, 2017 at 10:17 am
There is a trope in Gernsback-era SF where, at some point, the Captain takes the First Engineer on a tour of the starship and “explains” how everything works. It’s gibberish, of course (as John W. Campbell put it, if we knew how it worked, we’d be writing patent applications instead of stories). The most recent example that I remember is James Hogan’s otherwise excellent “Voyage from Yesteryear”, which has a whole chapter of “explanation” gibberish. As the narrator in Philip Francis Nowlan’s “Armageddon 2419 AD” put it, “The reader not interested in technical details may skip this chapter.”
It’s as jarring as a present-day story where one character explains to another how an internal combustion engine or a microwave oven works.
Comment By: Adam-Troy Castro
June 26th, 2017 at 10:17 am
At one point I had Andrea Cort grumble that the functioning of starships bores her. Work accomplished!
(This is pretty much what J.K. Rowling pulled off with The History of Magic and Professor Binns, whose lectures are clearly full of SOMETHING but who puts everybody to sleep. A rather brilliant shortcut.)
Comment By: Dave Creek
June 26th, 2017 at 10:17 am
Or in STAR TREK FIRST CONTACT where Data explains that “somehow” the Enterprise being in the Borg ship’s temporal wake kept it from being assimilated. The word “somehow” carried a lot of freight there and kept the story from bogging down in technobabble (for once).
Comment By: Adam-Troy Castro
June 26th, 2017 at 11:17 am
From THE TOWERING INFERNO:
STEVE MCQUEEN: “Why didn’t the sprinkler system turn on?”
PAUL NEWMAN: “I don’t know.”
Done! Plot hole plugged!
Comment By: Dave Creek
June 26th, 2017 at 11:17 am
Further proof that the best (and often cheaper) fixes to a movie happen at the script stage.
Comment By: Adam-Troy Castro
June 26th, 2017 at 11:17 am
I have absolutely no problem with that fix at all. It works.
Comment By: Aaron Pound
June 26th, 2017 at 11:17 am
Best plot hole plugging ever takes place in Big Trouble in Little China when a character the heroes had last seen several levels below where they are appears on the level above them:
Heroes: How did you get up there?
Improbably Appearing Character: It wasn’t easy!
Comment By: Adam-Troy Castro
June 26th, 2017 at 11:17 am
From NATIONAL LAMPOON’S VACATION:
“How did you get here?”
“We got a ride from two nice indians and a guy on a camel.”
Comment By: Dave Creek
June 26th, 2017 at 11:17 am
Perhaps the classic never-addressed plot hole: in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, where did Indy go after he climbed onto the outside of the Nazi submarine?
Parenthetically, I first typed RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARC, which I guess could be a story about mathematicians (maybe the sequel to A BEAUTIFUL MIND) or about a writer stealing a storyline for a character he created.
Comment By: Elena Gaillard
June 26th, 2017 at 12:17 pm
The Goon Show:
SEAGOON:
Listen thou good spearman Eccles, we’re about to embark upon a plot. You see yon treasure chest I’m holding?
ECCLES:
Yep.
SEAGOON:
Get hold of the other end.
ECCLES:
Ok. (Distant) Huh ooooauh! This is heavy.
SEAGOON:
Now grab hold of this end.
ECCLES:
(Distant) Ok.
SEAGOON:
Right. Now you’re got both ends.
ECCLES:
I’ve only got this end.
SEAGOON:
Nonsense. (Shouts) Who’s got the other end?
ECCLES:
Oh, it is me. I’m holding both ends.
SEAGOON:
There you are folks. Let’s see ’em do that on television!
Comment By: Greg Cox
June 26th, 2017 at 2:18 pm
Halloween: Michael Myers can drive a car despite being locked up in an asylum since childhood. Dialogue goes something like this:
Guard: But he shouldn’t know how to drive!
Loomis: Well, he’s doing a pretty good job of it!
End of issue.
Comment By: Greg Cox
June 26th, 2017 at 2:18 pm
Deep Space Nine: Somebody asks Worf why he doesn’t look like the old-school Klingons from Kirk’s era:
“We do not speak of it to others.”
Works for me.
Comment By: Dave Creek
June 26th, 2017 at 3:17 pm
Those of us who saw ST: TMP in theaters knew the reason: bigger budget.
Comment By: Todd Austin Hunt
June 26th, 2017 at 1:18 pm
Great essay. People may want to slap me, but even hard science fiction is a branch of fantasy. While situations may be explained by real science, many of those situations are still beyond our present reach. So I find reactions like this to zombies and Truman funny.
Comment By: Russell Handelman
June 26th, 2017 at 2:18 pm
I know one SF and comics fan who absolutely abhors any and all time-travel stories because time-travel is “an impossibility under the laws of physics.” However, he doesn’t have any problems reading stories with FTL spaceships or superheroes.
Comment By: Wyman Cooke
June 26th, 2017 at 4:18 pm
Growing up, I was told FTL drives are impossible and against Einsteinian physics. Now with the Alcubierre drive thats not necessarily so. Still incredibly difficult, and nobody has figured out how to do it, but not impossible.
Comment By: Jan Baer
June 26th, 2017 at 6:19 pm
If someone only wants the everyday, they should stick to news reports.
Comment By: Craven Sean
June 26th, 2017 at 9:17 pm
I recently had a conversation about this with another writer. My position was if you’re going to start talking about a field of science in which I have some knowledge and then go all oofty-McGoofty on me it’s going to yank me out of the story. But if you admit it’s fantasy up front I don’t care.
Comment By: Jan Baer
June 26th, 2017 at 10:17 pm
Jurassic Park wasn’t a scholarly article on genetic engineering. There were many, many flaws in the science. No one cares. No one cares when the spaceship traveling at 0.1% of light speed turns around without the g-forces involved killing all aboard. No one cares that the USS Enterprise has running lights.
Comment By: Zoe
June 28th, 2017 at 8:07 pm
The Thing About Shapes to Come is the best story I have read in years – competing only with some of your other stories. I found it so deeply moving I’ve actually downloaded it from the Lightspeed podcast multiple times over the last month. I’ve never done that before. I read it the first time in a state of sort of frozen. awed, grateful wonder. For all the people who “don’t get” stories like that there are those of us for which stories like this are more real than anything else ever could be. Thank you Captain Castro!
Comment By: Writing related links (#SFWApro) | Fraser Sherman's Blog
January 18th, 2018 at 5:22 am
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