I finished reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Martians, on my Kindle the other day (the short review: It was great, I don’t know how I felt about the poetry at the end, but I liked the collection.) and promptly began reading this month’s Asimov’s. The first story is an alternate history/fantastic history/I-think-there’s-science-fiction-coming-but-it’s-not-here-yet, piece and I can’t bring myself to really read get into it. It’s well written, and I even find myself delighting at the text (in a technical sense.) I think the issue that I’m running into is that I don’t really get the alternate history thing.
Which is, you know, weird. I should break out and say that my fiction tends to be very historically concerned. I’m fascinated by history and there are a lot of historiographical themes and ideas in the stories I write. But they’re all set in the future, and try as I might, I don’t really have much interest in writing stories set in the past of our world. Alternate or otherwise.
Maybe it has something to do with my view of history. I tend to take a big picture approach to history and I tend to think that single events and single individuals rarely really affect history. If you called me a determinist I’d probably gnash my teeth for a few moments and then agree. Which makes constructing alternate histories sort of difficult. Add to that the fact that quasi-deterministic big pictures, though probably accurate and helpful, don’t lend themselves to good stories. When you don’t feel like your characters–any of them–have agency, it doesn’t make for terribly interesting story telling.
At least for me. I think other people can pull it off.
This whole “I want my science fiction to be set in the future,” thing isn’t something I can rationalize or support very well. Clearly I don’t find the past to be a very good “escape.” The future is fun, vast, and full of possibilities and enables the sorts of things that I enjoy most in science fiction: the ability to engage in a critique of the present, high energy stories with adventure, and for lack of a better term, stories that impart a “sense of wonder.” There’s more out there, I just can’t seem to muster the interest.
This isn’t to say that I don’t sometimes find myself enchanted by non-futuristic stories, it’s just not a terribly frequent or predictable sort of experience. I should also be clear, I’m not of the opinion that when science fiction stories talk about the future and are set in a future, that they are about anything except the present at all.
And I’m not terribly proud of this. I suppose we all have our things.
I worry that my tastes aren’t sophisticated enough, that I enjoy stories for the wrong reasons, or that I get too caught up in the scenery and forget to pay attention to what really matters. Despite this whole “writer thing,” that I have going on these days I don’t have very much formal training in literature. It’s sort of awkward to say “I feel like I’m not a very good reader,” that’s definitely something that I battle with.
For those of you who are part of the larger community of science fiction/fantasy/genre fiction readers (which I think necessarily includes writers,) I’d be very interested to learn your thoughts on this subject: how do you relate to the future in the stories that you write and read? The past? Alternate histories? Is there some connection that I’ve mostly failed to see? Am I not alone in this?
Thank you (preemptively) for your feedback.
tycho garen 12 February 2010