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The Little Big Idea
I think Dr. Willis McNelly at the California State Univesity at Fullerton put it best when he said that the true protagonist of a SF story or novel is an idea and not a person. If it is good SF the idea is new, it is stimulating, and probably most important of all, it sets off a chain-reaction of ramification-ideas in the mind of the reader; it so-to-speak unlocks the reader's mind so that the mind, like the author's, begins to create. Thus SF is creative and it inspires creativity, which mainstream fiction by-and-large does not do. We who read SF (I am speaking as a reader now, not a writer) read it because we love to experience this chain-reaction of ideas being set off in our minds by something we read, something with a new idea in it; hence the very best science fiction ultimately winds up being a collaboration between author and reader, in which both create -- and enjoy doing it: joy is the essential and final ingredient of science fiction, the joy of discovery of newness.
Philip K. Dick (in a letter)
May 14, 1981
As reprinted in the Preface to Vol. 1 of The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick
So there you have it: PK Dick considers science fiction "creative" and most everything else old hat.
I don't buy it.
Here's my take on The Great SF Debate: SF is just another means by which to achieve the same ends as other genres -- the illustration of the myriad facets of human nature. SF consists of a different set of emotive and intellectual triggers, tricks and gimmicks and plot devices, than, say, Dickens or Shakespeare, but the goal of both types of literature (actually, all three types) remains the same: to reveal us to ourselves. To the extent that we as a species remain fundamentally unchanged, the stories we tell remain basically the same.
So Blade Runner may use killer robots and off-planet colonization and a long, drawn-out bounty hunt as dramatic devices to get us thinking about the human tendencies to enslave others, construct false us-versus-them dichotomies, and commit stupid reflexive acts of violence. But you don't need all the future technobabble to illustrate these demons of humanity or to trigger the question: "what does it mean to be human?"; you just need a bag of really good dramatic metaphors and speeches, I don't care from what time zone or technological age. 22nd century or 15th, what difference does it make?
Personally, I find SF generally less desirable than other genres because, by its nature, it is philosophical Art created in very, very broad strokes that tend to rudely drown out the finer points of human existence. It rigs a scenario so absolute in its technological and scientific departure from our own world as to come across as obvious gimmickry. Yeah, man versus robot literally begs the question "what does it mean to be human," but the setup seems heavy-handed in comparison to man versus implicitly-discriminated-against man. The more delicate the metaphor, the better, and SF seems set on giving us Big Metaphors through tacky and bogus setups.
Most SF is front-loaded via the silver-bullet "idea," that prize of literary construction that Mr. Dick seems to value above all else. The power of the Big Idea is that you can explain a PK Dick novella with a few lines of prose. This is why discussing SF novels makes for great coffeeshop chatter or across-the-table Hollywood pitches. Just the set-up floors you with a conundrum of some sort. The flip-side, however, is this: why do you need 2 hours of motion picture (or 150 pages of text) to get everyone on board? With most SF, I usually know what the point is before I've even turned the first page or seen the first frame; it's all downhill from the Idea.
One of Chekov's characters says in Uncle Vanya: "Ideas by themselves are nothing. It's you who should have been using them, doing real work!" Exactly. In its insistence of the idea as the pivot point of existence, Science Fiction defines itself out of a job. "What it's about" is all that SF is about and that leaves little room for how it's about it, including all the random rhythms and jangles, screw-ups, and empty spaces in which everything happens to a characer in a plain vanilla world with no Apparent Plan. I don’t' know about you, but I'd much rather read a book about an off-kilter person stumbling across an idea than about an idea itself. People just make more interesting protagonists. Off-kilter is more fun.
In SF, the environment as rigged to espouse the Idea is often the whole point of the affair, the people mere pawns in the plot's chess game. More traditional drama -- the really good stuff, I think -- shows how and why people build their environments up, finding themselves trapped or liberated by them. A Chekhov play requires 2 hours and lots of subtle character development to build up to a point. And then he only arrives at epiphany not via some exploding planet or melting android, but rather through some miraculous emergence of theme from pseudo-white-noise, an idea cleverly appearing through seemingly-random conversation and happenings. To me, the Chekhovian method is more instructive as to human nature because it's all about HOW you get from "slice of life" to epiphany, not how a Grand Theorem imposes itself on a group of characters via Kafkaesque alternate reality machine.
Coming back around to the "so fucking typical" question, though... Stylistically and conceptually, you must admit that Blade Runner borrows pretty heavily from those genres before it. There's the private detective film noir genre, with the typically unscrupulous bounty-hunter Deckard (molded after Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe) on the prowl in a typically dressed-down, grittified, and gloomy Los Angeles that looks little more than an update of Taxi Driver's mid-70's Manhattan or Polanski's Chinatown. And what about Shakespeare? Doesn't the "What does it mean to be human?" question find equal soliloquy time in Shylock's "If you prick us" speech as the "I've seen things" finale to Blade Runner?
Minority Report -- that's new inninit? Uh, no. The whole theme of one man pre-judging another or just plain judging (wrongly) at all is old, old, old. The idea of Golden Boy falling prey to jealous detractors is also ancient. (Read the Bible and weep, folks). The danger of blindly following the voice of the muses is surely dealt with in more than one Greek play. And the overarching Kafkaesque atmosphere is, well, derived right out of The Trial.
If all this sounds like an overly-reductive analysis, it is. That's my point. If you're set on judging a work of art purely (or primarily) on its ideas rather than its overall effectiveness in emotively moving us, then we might as well all give up on the whole Artistic Endeavor and resign ourselves to putting on productions of Oedipus Rex and reading our leather-bound King James.
I propose, instead, as many have before me, that we judge a work based on how well it engages us emotionally and intellectually on some holistic level -- how successfully the Artist invokes dramatic and situational metaphors to present us to ourselves. The Big Idea or the Rigged Environment are only two of many factors in a very complex narrative or visual equation -- why celebrate the SF components above all else? Why make a bigger deal out of what something is about than how it is about it? The more reductive the criteria for judging a work of Art, the less interesting art ultimately becomes. So if you're gonna dog something, don't attack the Idea, attack the execution. Attack how it failed to present you to yourself, the whole point of the enterprise.
Anyway. I'll keep on watchin' film noir, be it set in Nebuchadnezzar's hanging garden or 3019. And stories about love saving people's lives. "What's New? Nothing's New. Everything's Old," groans Vanya in "Uncle Vanya" -- but each instantiation of old ideas always brings new joys and pleasures and insights. There are, after all, a lot of detailed facets to the human condition; things that are perhaps inarticulate in Big Idea speak. We could keep on writing for thousands of years and still not completely describe it. There's more to life than Big Ideas. If there wasn't, what would there be to man outside of Logic? What would we need from emotions -- those bizarre and mysterious things that strangely seem to be the whole point of everything? And what of God?
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