#167 The thing itself: science fiction and its aesthetic

Science fiction is famously difficult to define. In 1952, the writer and editor Damon Knight famously wrote that "science fiction is what we point to when we say it." But what if what we point to is just the surface, just an aesthetic, and what really matters is what is underneath?

This episode is a brief exploration of what I see as the important gap between two linked, but different things: the living, breathing genre of SF, and the host of images that it has spawned and carried with it through the years - its aesthetic.

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Transcript

In the century since the term was coined, science fiction has generated a torrent of images. The robot, the alien, the mutant, the starship, the time machine: these are components of an aesthetic immediately recognisable even to those who have never read a science fiction story. Partly because those people are many, and partly because we live in an intensely and increasingly image-oriented culture, this SF aesthetic has arguably outgrown the genre which generated it.

This matters because the primacy of the science fiction aesthetic can lead to it being mistaken for, or used as a substitute for, the actual genre of science fiction. One result of this is that some people believe they dislike SF, without having read much - or any. Potential readers and lovers of the genre are missing out, because they are exposed only to the science fiction aesthetic, and not the thing itself. We can think of all this as another angle on the notoriously difficult question as to how to define science fiction. One thing that SF isn’t is its tangle of indelible images.

The aesthetic is not the genre

Alfred Korzybski famously stated that “the map is not the territory”; it could also be said that the aesthetic is not the genre. They are different, but connected things. This is in part a question of appearance versus effect. The deployment in a work of familiar images or tropes associated with SF does not automatically qualify that work as SF - certainly not SF of quality. To use a crude example, a TV advertisement featuring a robot is most unlikely to use any of the techniques of SF; nor is it likely to produce any of the effects which SF has tended to strive for. There are novels which are suffused with these images but scarcely deal in ideas at any depth at all.

Conversely, good science fiction does not necessarily need to deploy any familiar image, trope, or setting traditionally associated with it. J. G. Ballard's Crash (1973) is a good example. Set in contemporary west London, it achieves alienation without aliens, and dislocation without space travel. Ballard advocated strongly for “inner space”, not outer space, as the new zone for the use of SF’s toolbox of techniques and effects.

It is these techniques and effects, not images and tropes, which are most fundamental to science fiction. It is these elements, too, which mark SF out as a unique territory with its own traditions and potentials, distinct from other genres. This is not to say that SF can not be fused and hybridised with other styles of writing - but to do this with success in science fiction terms demands a good grounding in the genre's fundamentals. A murder mystery set on a starship may satisfy as crime fiction, but disappoint as SF.

Science fiction and its aesthetic over time

While SF has many antecedents, often tracked laboriously back to the epic of Gilgamesh or even earlier, it emerged as a commercial publishing category in the 1920s (in book publishing terms it is even younger, beginning to mature only in the 1950s). SF, then, has developed within and alongside every mass media form for a century - magazines, books, radio, film, television, and now the Internet. 

Throughout all of these developments, SF has been accompanied by its host of images - its aesthetic. These have evolved over time in response to changing tastes and advancements in scientific knowledge. Today’s depictions of aliens, for example, are a far cry from the slavering, bug-eyed monsters that were a fixture of pulp magazine covers in the 1930s. 

It is not only the images that have shifted, but also the way in which SF is consumed. It is here that some perhaps difficult points need to be made. The first is that SF in print is no longer the dominant form, and likely has not been since the 1980s. The few SF magazines that remain have a very low circulation and poor financial stability - in the UK, the number of operational print SF magazines is now zero. SF in book form is a strictly niche interest, and it often appears that much of the publishing investment once directed towards it has flowed instead towards fantasy.

While interest in print SF has shrunk - partly as a reflection of a wider decline in reading fiction, particularly among men - a form of SF is more prominent than ever on our screens. Superhero movies are often inextricable from the SF aesthetic. The time travel and alternate universes on which big-budget franchise storytelling increasingly relies are the long-established stuff of SF in print. Streaming services consistently produce films and shows which also deploy familiar images from SF - but these seldom explore science fictional ideas in new or interesting ways. To do this, it is not enough to draw only from SF’s treasury of images - its fundamentals must also be explored.

Mission statement: 1950

In 1950, the back cover of the first issue of Galaxy magazine carried a memorable feature. It had two story snippets side by side, which were essentially the same - except that one was written with an SF aesthetic, and the other was styled as a Western. It has been suggested that this was a condemnation of the so-called “space Western” sub-genre, but it is arguably better understood as a mission statement. Galaxy would focus on stories that genuinely explored SF concepts, rather than merely pasting its aesthetic over bland, boilerplate narratives that could work in other genres entirely.

This mission statement is still relevant 75 years later. Science fiction is at its best when it aims to do things that only science fiction can do. Galaxy promised stories “by people who know and love science fiction… for people who also know and love it.” Much has changed since 1950, but it remains true that if we love SF - and want to share that affection with others - we owe it to ourselves to truly know it, also. That means going deeper than SF’s aesthetics, and learning to explore and enjoy the uniqueness of its powerful techniques and effects, with all their potential to disturb, intrigue, and inspire us.