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.