Clive Thompson on Why Sci-Fi Is the Last Bastion of Philosophical Writing

[Dave Monroe]

WIRED MAGAZINE: ISSUE 16.02
Tech Biz  :  People
Clive Thompson on Why Sci-Fi Is the Last Bastion of Philosophical Writing
By Clive Thompson  01.18.08 | 6:00 PM


Recently I read a novella that posed a really deep question: What
would happen if physical property could be duplicated like an MP3
file? What if a poor society could prosper simply by making pirated
copies of cars, clothes, or drugs that cure fatal illnesses?

The answer Cory Doctorow offers in his novella After the Siege is that
you'd get a brutal war. The wealthy countries that invented the
original objects would freak out, demand royalties from the developing
ones, and, when they didn't get them, invade. Told from the
perspective of a young girl trying to survive in a poor country being
bombed by well-off adversaries, After the Siege is an absolute
delight, by turns horrifying, witty, and touching.

Technically, After the Siege is a work of science fiction. But as with
so many sci-fi stories, it works on two levels, exploring real-world
issues like the plight of African countries that can't afford AIDS
drugs. The upshot is that Doctorow's fiction got me thinking — on a
Lockean level — about the nature of international law, justice, and
property.

Which brings me to my point. If you want to read books that tackle
profound philosophical questions, then the best — and perhaps only —
place to turn these days is sci-fi. Science fiction is the last great
literature of ideas.

>From where I sit, traditional "literary fiction" has dropped the ball.
I studied literature in college, and throughout my twenties I
voraciously read contemporary fiction. Then, eight or nine years ago,
I found myself getting — well — bored.

Why? I think it's because I was reading novel after novel about the
real world. And there are, at the risk of sounding superweird, only so
many ways to describe reality. After I'd read my 189th novel about
someone living in a city, working in a basically realistic job and
having a realistic relationship and a realistically fraught family, I
was like, "OK. Cool. I see how today's world works." I also started to
feel like I'd been reading the same book over and over again.

Here's my overly reductive, incredibly nerdy way of thinking about the
novel: Consider it a simulation, kind of like The Sims. If you run a
realistic simulation enough times — writing tens of thousands of
novels about contemporary life — eventually you're going to explore
almost every outcome. So what do you do then?

You change the physics in the sim. Alter reality — and see what new
results you get. Which is precisely what sci-fi does. Its authors
rewrite one or two basic rules about society and then examine how
humanity responds — so we can learn more about ourselves. How would
love change if we lived to be 500? If you could travel back in time
and revise decisions, would you? What if you could confront, talk to,
or kill God?

Teenagers love to ponder such massive, brain-shaking concepts, which
is precisely why they devour novels like Philip Pullman's His Dark
Materials, the Narnia series, the Harry Potter books, and Ender's
Game. They know that big-idea novels are more likely to have an
embossed foil dragon on the cover than a Booker Prize badge.

Adults and serious intellectuals used to love ruminating over this
stuff, too. Thought experiments formed the foundation of Western
philosophy — from Socrates to Thomas Hobbes to Simone de Beauvoir.

So, then, why does sci-fi, the inheritor of this intellectual
tradition, get short shrift among serious adult readers? Probably
because the genre tolerates execrable prose stylists. Plus, many of
sci-fi's most famous authors — like Robert Heinlein and Philip K. Dick
— have positively deranged notions about the inner lives of women.

But the worm is turning. For whatever reasons — maybe the reality
fatigue I've felt — a lot of literary writers are trying their hand at
speculative fiction. Philip Roth used a "counterfactual" history —
what if Nazi sympathizers in the US won the 1940 election? — to
explore anti-Semitism in The Plot Against America. Cormac McCarthy
muses on the nature of morality in the Hobbesian anarchy of his novel
The Road. Then there's the genre-bending likes of Michael Chabon,
Jonathan Lethem, Susanna Clarke, and Margaret Atwood (whom I like to
think of as a sci-fi novelist trapped inside a literary author).

Those aren't writers whose books are adorned with embossed dragons.
But that doesn't mean they don't owe that dragon a large debt.

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