Speculative fiction and the Other
I'm just about recovered from Odyssey 2010, the UK's national science fiction convention, and my first “proper” con of any kind.
I took a lot away from the convention, including a lot of notes and half-sketched ideas, a lack of sleep, and happiness from spending time among such a number of talented and lovely people.
I was fascinated by Oliver Morton's talk on Geo-engineering, which discussed the varying concepts in treatment of the sublime [1] in science fiction - where the vast unknowable of the universe is encompassed by human conception and often bridged by technology so puissant that it, too, is sublime. The technological sublime is an increasing feature in art and in life, with such examples as the Trans-Siberian railway being overwhelming both in the vastness of the landscape but in the reality of the human engineering that encompasses such vastness and brings it within the scale of human understanding.
He also briefly touched on the sense of the sublime in fantasy as opposed to science-fiction: a sense that comes from things remote in space, time, and substance; a sense of things that are older and wiser and at once incomparably greater and more deadly than man; a sense of a Nature eternally beyond reach of not only human power, but human conception.
I greatly enjoyed the panels on feminism, gender, and LGBT and SF&F, of which there were several.
I noted, not for the first time, that the vast preponderance of works which were mentioned as recommended reading - works by Butler, Delaney, Le Guinn, and so on - were in the genre of Science Fiction, rather than Fantasy. I was also fascinated to realise that Sci-Fi has succeeded in centering “the other” on a number of occasions and that there are a significant number of stories from the point of view of, for instance, the alien, whereas Fantasy treatments from the point of view of the non-humans tend to be comic - Mary Gentle's Grunts springs to mind as the key example.
It struck me that one reason that fantasy inherently handles “the Other” more poorly than sci-fi is their differing senses of the sublime. There is a reason that the standard trope in fantasy begins with a bewildered peasant boy thrust into the world, clutching his father's sword. There is a reason that the trope of the “tavern” exists - as the one place perhaps not always safe, but at least known, where the world is reduced to that which exists between four solid walls of timber and stone.
This causes immediate difficulties when there's no familiar tavern, when a Western audience finds much that is unknown in things both large and small, when you didn't dream of dragons.[2]
I would also contend that a lot of the retro- appeal of steampunk is that, in a world of mad genius scientists and intrepid explorers, both the universe and the nature of technology are unknowable, unbridgeable, terrifying and delightful in equal measure. It is not just, as Bruce Sterling says, that Steampunk is “a pretty way of coping with the truth”,[3] but a way of re-imagining it as well.
I'd also hold very strongly that what we need right now is an awful lot more “punk” and perhaps slightly less “steam” - where are our grubby female mechanics, our sky pirate queens? - but that, I feel, is another article.
[1] “Sublime Philosophy”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sublime_%28philosophy%29[2] “I Didn't Dream of Dragons” - Deepa D.
http://deepad.dreamwidth.org/29371.html[3] “The User's Guide to Steampunk” - Bruce Sterling
http://2008.gogbot.nl/thema/