Sheila's LiveJournal

 Maybe this sounds like a rather dumb question.  Haven't numerous people already taken a crack at it, such as critics Darko Suvin and Leslie Fiedler? And writers from Hugo Gernsback to Isaac Asimov to Kim Stanley Robinson have tried to pin it down. Norman Spinrad seemed to throw his hands up in despair, claiming, “Science Fiction is anything published as Science Fiction.”

I've been thinking about this lately because I read two books that weren't published as science fiction yet seem to me to fit the bill. I have to admit that I'm usually not a big fan of the works produced by mainstream writers when they wander into our genre. Theodore Sturgeon said, “Ask the next question;” I find most mainstream incursions into science fiction fail to do that, adopting our tropes but failing to go much further.

But recently I read two novels that I think are worthy of high praise, if not Hugos and Nebulas: Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union (still eligible!) And Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (unfortunately past its shelf date).

Chabon's work is obviously speculative from the very first chapter. We are introduced to a colony of Jewish refugees in Alaska, re-settled there after something unspecified but obviously dire happened to the state of Israel. It's sixty years later, we're told, and the colony is about to revert to Alaskan control. The main character is a hard-boiled detective type –  in the Raymond Chandler mode but klutzier – named Meyer Landsmann, and the case he is called upon to investigate leads him very far afield indeed. Yet Chabon doesn't lose sight of the way the characters' lives would be affected if the situation he describes were real. I won't spoil the story for those of you who want to read the book, but you'll find that it is by turns hilariously funny and thought-provoking, especially if you're interested in the big themes of good and evil. The presence of Yiddishisms in this arctic landscape alone makes the book a fun read, alternate history if not exactly what purists think of as science fiction.

I'd read Ishiguro's earlier work such as The Remains Of The Day. I think I'd vaguely heard that he'd strayed into our genre recently but when I picked this one up I'd forgotten that possibility. Consequently, I came to the novel with no preconceived ideas about how to read it. This is a first-person narrative from a character named “Kathy H.” (Nobody has last names in this book which at first annoyed me as a possible affectation on the author's part, but later added to the ominous tone that develops.) Kathy tell us that she is something called a “carer,” never defined but gradually coming into focus as the book progresses. Her time as a carer is about to run out, and there's something odd about that because she's still young and good at her job. At first we're treated to beautifully detailed vignettes about children growing up at a boarding school somewhere in the English countryside, juxtaposed with rather vague pictures of Kathy's work that we sense is somehow dark and possibly sinister. What prevented me from putting the book down in frustration was that it becomes increasingly clear that the reason Kathy spends no time agonizing over her situation is that she finds it absolutely normal. As the parameters of her world and her expected role in it emerge for the reader over the course of the book, the central story becomes horrifyingly clear. Yet while the reader is shuddering, Kathy takes her fate for granted. And that is the scariest part of the novel – and the most science fictional. The fact that what Kathy accepts as normal turns out to be the unthinkable is all the more compelling. Ursula Le Guin once described expository lumps in fiction this way: The captain of the starship turns to his men, in the middle of a huge battle, and says, “As you know, men, this starship runs on the X method.....” No such lumps in this wonderful science fiction novel!

So, what's the answer to the question we started with? Not just stories about the future, or even about future technology, obviously. It's the exploration – comic or tragic – of the way the lives of ordinary people would be changed, by technology or societal upheaval, from what we consider the norm that makes a story memorable. I want a book to ask the next question...and the next. It should go beyond sensational into meaningful.

But of course that's true about genre stories as well, isn't it?