‘The future in science fiction is just a metaphor for now’

Cory Doctorow, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Amitav Ghosh on why science fiction still struggles to be taken seriously.

“where I can get prickly and combative is if I’m just called a sci-fi writer. I’m not. I’m a novelist and poet. Don’t shove me into your damn pigeonhole, where I don’t fit, because I’m all over. My tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions.”

– Ursula K. Le Guin

In an interview in 2015, the great science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin was asked about what the term ‘science fiction’ means to her:

Interviewer: “How do you feel about the term science fiction, as connected to your work?”

Le Guin: “Well, that’s very complicated…I don’t think science fiction is a very good name for it, but it’s the name that we’ve got. It is different from other kinds of writing, I suppose, so it deserves a name of its own. But where I can get prickly and combative is if I’m just called a sci-fi writer. I’m not. I’m a novelist and poet. Don’t shove me into your damn pigeonhole, where I don’t fit, because I’m all over. My tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions.”

In 1818, a 19-year old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley published Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus. It was panned by critics at the time but struck a deep nerve in the public imagination. Eventually, literary scholars would hail it as the first science fiction novel ever written in the English language.

The history of science fiction is the history of a genre struggling to be taken seriously.

The writer Amitav Ghosh suggests it’s because science fiction, at its core, is an attempt to answer a generally shunned question in the literary mainstream: “What is the place of the nonhuman in the modern novel?”

In part, what Ghosh means when he talks about ‘the nonhuman’ are all the other-worldly, fantastical characters and places that compose the universes of the science fiction and fantasy genres: from the Na’vi of Pandora and Ortolans in Star Wars, to dragons and werewolves.

But by ‘nonhuman,’ Ghosh also is talking about the nonhuman natural world too: plants, animals, ecosystems, climate, and the planet itself.

There’s plenty of mainstream fiction set in nature, of course. But when the nonhuman appears in the literary mainstream, Ghosh argues, it tends to be more background, prop, or stage for human dramas to unfold, rather than a protagonist in the story.

As the science historian Donna Haraway puts it, in most mainstream fiction, the natural world appears as mostly “props, ground, plot space, or prey. They don’t matter; their job is to be in the way, to be overcome, to be the road, the conduit, but not the traveler, not the begetter.”

When Frankenstein was published, everyday life in Europe was being radically transformed by technological innovation in the Industrial Revolution. But the earth itself was also being radically transformed too. Surprisingly, Ghosh notes, “it was in exactly the period in which human activity was changing the earth’s atmosphere that the literary imagination became radically centered on the human.”

In reviewing the past couple of centuries of modern literature, Ghosh concludes, “Inasmuch as the nonhuman was written about at all, it was not within the mansion of serious fiction but rather in the outhouses to which science fiction and fantasy had been banished.”

The most damning evidence for this inferior status attributed to science fiction, Ghosh points out, can be found in the lack of mainstream fiction about climate change (only non-fiction) in mainstream literary journals, such as the London Review of Books or the New York Review of Books.

“The mere mention of [climate change],” writes Ghosh, “is often enough to relegate a novel or a short story to the genre of science fiction. It is as though in the literary imagination climate change were somehow akin to extraterrestrials or interplanetary travel.”

We might ask ourselves, why are novels about climate change categorized as science fiction?

Here is one possible reason…We’ve divided off and purified literature into two separate realms: serious fiction to talk about the human, and serious non-fiction to talk about the non-human. This divide maps neatly onto – and likely springs form – another ‘great divide’ in Western thinking: the divide between human society and nonhuman nature. A powerful and destructive idea that didn’t just say: “Humans are different from the natural world” but sought to convince us that “humans are superior to the natural world.”

Luckily, it is mostly in science fiction where this artificial divide we’ve inherited in modernity breaks down, and we are able to inhabit stories where human beings and the more-than-human beings are actually able to engage with one another, not as foreground and background to the story, but as mutual interlocutors.

Recognizing how fiction about the climate crisis never appears in mainstream literary journals, Gosh asks: “What is it about climate change that the mention of it should lead to banishment from the preserves of serious fiction? And what does this tell us about culture writ large and its patterns of evasion?”

The strange thing is the climate crisis is not science fiction, it is not happening in the future, or in an alternate reality. It is happening now. Margaret Atwood defines science fiction as stories about “those imagined other worlds located somewhere apart from our everyday one: in another time, in another dimension, through a doorway into the spirit world.”

This suggests the reason climate change fiction continues to be stigmatized in the literary mainstream may be because of a deeper, culturally pervasive refusal to recognize the severity of our current interwoven ecological and social crises. These crises aren’t happening on another planet, and in another time. There happening on this one. And they’re unfolding as we speak.

In his commentary in the bi-centennial edition of Frankenstein, the science fiction author Cory Doctorow succinctly says, “Science fiction does something better than predict the future: it influences it.”

This rings true to me, in the science fiction I’ve read that brings the nonhuman world as active characters into the storytelling universe, such as N.K. Jemesin’s Hugo-award-winning Broken Earth series.

But maybe science fiction does something in addition to just influencing the future. As the great science fiction author, Ursula K. Le Guin, said off-the-cuff in an interview, when asked about how science fiction contends with imagining the future, she laughed and said in a matter of fact way, as if we should all know this already:

“The future in science fiction is just a metaphor for now”