“I never know what’s going on. Even when I’m in the middle of some secret, like a surprise anniversary party, or when I was at the scene of the event people talk about years later, I missed stuff and other people drew different conclusions than I did. I can’t imagine that other people really know how the government works. And if our government is beyond understanding, surely the Galactic Empire is beyond understanding. And I can’t believe that one evil genius has a clear understanding because I’ve been a peon in a big company and lord knows we were never doing what the brass thought we were doing.”
(Maureen F. McHugh ‘The Anti SF Novel’)
In considering the nature and essence of science fiction, there is one conundrum I return to more than any other: what is it that defines science fiction as a literary form, and how does it differ from other literary forms, if at all?
I remember when I was looking back over the experience of chairing the Clarke shadow jury in 2018, I made a personal resolution to try and avoid using the terms ‘literary SF’ and ‘genre SF’ as a way of distinguishing between science fiction published and reviewed as genre fiction and science fiction that happened to be put out by a mainstream literary imprint. I felt at the time and still feel that such distinctions tend to be arbitrary, a convenient way of pigeonholing books and authors without contributing anything substantive to the discussion.
But I’ve been looking at this question again in recent weeks, wondering whether this decades-long obsession within SF circles with how a book is published and presented might not be a clumsy but nonetheless valid attempt to grapple with more interesting questions. I have often had the feeling myself, without being able to properly quantify it, that the most dynamic and satisfying science fiction of all is the work of writers who pay attention to literary values yes, but who come from within the genre, who write science fiction because they believe it is a unique mode of literary expression and one they are committed to as a project. Writers who read science fiction and whose science fictional sensibility – that slippery concept – is on a par with their literary ambitions.
Of course, any attempt to name names is going to vary from reader to reader, and is likely to be as contentious as the accompanying insinuation that science fiction written from outside the genre is ‘not real SF’, which leaves us back where we started. Far more useful to try and identify the specifics of what makes the best science fiction so powerful, so galvanising and so resonant. This week and with this blog post in mind, I reread Joanna Russ’s 1975 essay ‘Towards an Aesthetic of Science Fiction‘. I found it fascinating, provocative and, like all the best essays, a challenge to any preconceived notions I might have had.
“Science fiction, like medieval painting, addresses itself to the mind, not the eye. We are not presented with a representation of what we know to be true through direct experience; rather we are given what we know to be true through other means—or in the case of science fiction, what we know to be at least possible. Thus the science fiction writer can portray Jupiter as easily as the medieval painter can portray Heaven; neither of them has been there, but that doesn’t matter. To turn from other modern fiction to science fiction is oddly like turning from Renaissance painting with all the flesh and foreshortening to the clarity and luminousness of painters who paint ideas. For this reason, science fiction, like much medieval art, can deal with transcendental events.“
Russ’s thesis, that science fiction is by its nature a didactic form of literature that concerns itself with objective phenomena rather than subjective states, is one that immediately recalls that Ted Chiang quote about sense of wonder and conceptual breakthrough I alluded to the other week. It is a contention I have always resisted up until now, tending instead towards the conviction that if science fiction is to be successful as literature, it must adhere to the same standards as literary fiction – a thought-trap Russ identifies immediately in her ironic and mischievous way. I find Russ’s comparison of science fiction with Mediaeval painting an illuminating and pertinent one. As a writer and critic in sympathy with the Ballardian precept of allying science fiction with modernism, I also find it easier to get on board with as the parallels between Mediaeval art and Modernist art, the way they have more in common with each other than with the Enlightenment, Romantic and Social-Realist schools that are sandwiched between them, are self evident and fascinating.
Moreover, there is no doubt that I too have often felt that vague frustration on being confronted with a work that should, according to my own precepts and by virtue of its standard of achievement at the sentence level, be successful as science fiction, and yet feels somehow muffled and devoid of substance, lacking not only in conceptual breakthrough but unable or unwilling to commit to the very concept of conceptual breakthrough as a necessary element.
I have found trouble in defining what is wrong with it, and of course there is nothing wrong with it, except to say that it is not really science fiction. Rather, it is using the materials of science fiction in pursuit of a different goal. There is nothing wrong with that, either – but it is interesting, at least to me, to try and get to grips with these distinctions.
Reading Russ’s essay again (and admiring it tremendously) I am bound to admit that the works of science fiction that best succeed and best endure do fulfil her strictures, as they do Chiang’s – Russ and Chiang are saying the same thing using different words. But is it also true, as Russ suggests, that science fiction literature requires a different form of criticism from mainstream literature? That the tools and assumptions we bring to the analysis of a work by Philip Roth are simply not suited to the task of interpreting a novel by John Crowley, or John Wyndham? (The American critic Harold Bloom famously argued that science fiction was ‘not literature’ and therefore could not be criticised according to literary precepts. He was forced to reconsider his position when confronted by the works of Ursula Le Guin and Crowley himself, whose novel Little, Big, he later named as a masterpiece.)
Drawing this loop even tighter, do I as a critic need to rethink my approach? Have I been missing the point up till now, judging texts according to parameters that should not be applied to them, whilst failing to address the work on its own terms?
Thinking intensively about these matters over several days, I have come to the conclusion that the most valid approach for me in writing about science fiction is one that unites the opposed positions of Russ and Bloom, that looks at the work as text, whilst acknowledging the aims of science fiction in terms of underlying conceit and conceptual breakthrough. Look at it harder, in other words. Ask what a book is doing as well as how it does it. It is true that the best works of science fiction are as satisfying as any in the whole of literature. But is it at least possible – and yes, I think it is – that they satisfy differently?
*
Maureen McHugh’s 1992 novel China Mountain Zhang won the Tiptree Award and the Locus Award, and was shortlisted for both the Hugo and the Nebula.. With themes of empire and colonialism still fresh in my mind, I thought now would be a good time to read this book finally, that it might serve as an interesting point of comparison with A Memory Called Empire, both in and of itself and in the matter of its overall approach to science fiction. How right I was.
Surname: Zhang. Given name: Zhong Shan. China Mountain Zhang. My foolish mother. It’s so clearly a huaqiao name, like naming someone Vladimir Lenin Smith or Karl Marx Johnson. Zhong Shan, better known in the West as Sun Yat-sen, one of the early leaders of the great revolution in China, back in the first days, the days of virtue. The man who held up the sky like a mountain. Irony.
But better that than Rafael Luis.
Zhang is an engineer, living in a New York that is now the capital of a revolutionary socialist United States. China has become the dominant power, both politically and economically, with a standard of living and scientific outlook years in advance of the rest of the world. For an American-Born Chinese engineer like Zhang, the ultimate goal is to study in China, a sought-after privilege that would enable him to take his pick of jobs and effectively be set up for life. Zhang is talented and, when he wants to be, hard working, but he faces several obstacles. Firstly, he is mixed-race, his Chinese appearance effected through a gene-splicing technique that is now illegal. Secondly, Zhang is gay – in a time and place where homosexuality is illegal and punishable with the death penalty. Thirdly, through no direct fault of his own, he has managed to insult his boss and get fired from his job. With the career path he was set on suddenly closed off to him, Zhang finds himself back at the bottom of the pile, with a mountain to climb.
Zhang would not describe himself as a political animal, yet neither would he describe himself as a dissident. His aim in life is simply to live, to slip between the cracks of a state machine that views difference less as opportunity than as a problem to be solved. With his own innate talent for problem-solving, Zhang loves the theoretical and mechanical structures of engineering, but he is not sure yet what he should do with this passion, what kind of life he wants to lead. The novel follows Zhang through the next ten years and through a variety of settings as he works his way back up the professional ladder and finds ways of coming to terms with his personal predicament. Interspersed with Zhang’s chapters, we spend time in the company of others who come into contact with him, some without knowing anything about him other than his name: a kite-flier named Angel, a young woman who encounters prejudice because of her looks, an ex-army officer who is now part of a commune on Mars. a refugee from the resettlement camps of the American desert corridor:
I never pictured Mars like this – I grew up in a frontier town on the edge of the corridor, my daddy was a scrap prospector, not a farmer but there were a lot of farmers and so I had an idea of what frontier farming was like. Some years they got crops, some years the People’s Volunteers brought drinking water into town in trucks and when I was in senior middle school I used to go get water for my mother. We had two big fifty-liter containers that we put in the back of an old three-wheel bike. I’d get them filled and then have to stand on the pedals to get the bike to go anywhere. I wanted to join the PV, but after I finished school and married Geri there were too many applicants. Then the party said the drive to reduce carbon dioxide was working. That the global temperature was falling, and it would be possible to resettle the corridor… Three degrees, and they’ll get back to temperature levels in the 1900s and it’ll rain in Idaho and across north central Africa and who knows, maybe it’ll rain carp in Beijing, and flowers will bloom in the Antarctic, but Geri still died and Theresa spent half of her childhood in resettlement camps.
There have been readers who argue that China Mountain Zhang does not really have a plot. For me, that is part of the beauty of it. If science fiction satisfies differently, then mosaic novels, also, satisfy differently, allowing the author to reveal a world, and a set of characters as they relate to one another within that world, at a speed and with a logic more congruent with lived reality. The ‘plot’ of China Mountain Zhang is the story arc of ten years in Zhang’s lived reality, with all the setbacks and revelations and unexpected sub plots that result when characters and situations interact. It is easy to imagine China Mountain Zhang as a TV series, with individual episodes spent with different characters living their own stories, the connections between them only becoming apparent over time.
And it does not stop there. One of my chief complaints about A Memory Called Empire is that the world – the empire – it is set in is so lacking in physical texture it never feels real. With the forward-thrust of the plot allowed to dominate, the lived reality of Teixcalaan remains out of reach. The empire of China Mountain Zhang, by contrast, feels fascinatingly, disconcertingly real, the characters, scenarios and technological advances so convincing the novel reads almost as if it were mimetic fiction. McHugh’s novel is a masterclass in worldbuilding, because that worldbuilding is so thoroughly a part of the narrative it is pretty much invisible.
But what lifts this book beyond the realm of the well imagined, alternate-world ‘slice of life’ novel and properly into the realm of science fiction is its preoccupation with systems of engineering – mechanical, social and political. ‘Science fiction is the only modern literature to take work as its central and characteristic concern’, Russ says in ‘Towards an Aesthetic of Science Fiction’. This position is reiterated by McHugh herself in her own essay ‘The Anti SF Novel’, in which she describes how aspects of the novel that are commonly viewed as background through being so familiar – technology, politics, society, philosophy – in the case of the science fiction novel can and often must step forward into the foreground to become the novel’s true subject. Thus we follow Zhang to Baffin Island and then to China, where he studies Daoist engineering, a discipline that is almost as much an art form as it is a science.
Once again, McHugh’s skill in imagining and clarity in explaining are such that Zhang’s struggles to gain mastery over his talent prove even more compelling than the colourful and occasionally tragic vacillations of his private life. Where else but in a work of science fiction could a discourse on engineering and Marxist dialectics be described as the climax of the novel? And yet, we have by this time become so invested in this character and his world, so attuned to McHugh’s skill as a storyteller that Zhang’s lecture on history and chaos has both power and structural significance, drawing the threads of the novel together to form an exquisitely executed argument that – in just half a dozen pages – both describes the work’s narrative structure and tells us, with beautiful clarity, what the book is about:
“History is also a complex system. It is not random, but it is non-linear. Marx’s predictions were based on the assumption that history is a linear system, and using those assumptions he predicted the future. But if weather is a complex system, it seems reasonable to assume that history is also a complex system. History is sensitive dependent on initial conditions. You cannot predict the future.”
There is a sigh in the classroom. I have said what everybody knows but no one says. It is in the room, hanging.
Marx was wrong.
Just as Zhang himself is a mass of contradictions and ambiguities, so China Mountain Zhang as a novel is politically pragmatic, preferring to imagine, describe, extrapolate and posit rather than propagandise in any direction, a quality, I need hardly add, that is vastly to its credit. The language of the novel is detailed and descriptive – the chapter set on Baffin Island is a highlight in this regard – whilst remaining clear, declarative, and never self-indulgent. In this it mirrors McHugh’s own apparent fascination with language as system, with the novel’s exploration of the differences between different language systems boldly in accordance with the science fictional conceit of conceptual breakthrough. For someone such as myself, with a pronounced fondness for linguistics in fiction, this aspect of the novel forms a particular highlight.
Put simply, China Mountain Zhang is a science fiction masterpiece and a joy to read. Moreover, it demonstrates perfectly how the language of science fiction does not need to ape the language or preoccupations of mainstream literary fiction to maintain equality with it in terms of – again, a slippery concept – literary worth. Science fiction has its own preoccupations; science fiction that fully succeeds will be adept in the use of language that best explores them. Good writing is itself a skill, a tool, a conceptual breakthrough. Paying attention to how that skill is employed is itself an inseparable part of writing good science fiction.