I’ve recently been badgering nearly everyone I know with this quandary I’ve landed myself in: how does science fiction work, and what does that mean for my study of anime? (go all the way to the end, it has a happy conclusion)
An actual attempt to describe what SF is or how it works would keep us here forever, and I would be the only one to get anything useful from it (I am automatically suspicious of any attempt to identify where SF comes from or what it is). However, I can examine here one part of that process, in context. For me, SF is an essentially textual process. I’m reading a lot of literary methodology, as you might have already noticed. One of those books is Starboard Wine, by Samuel R. Delany. I’ve already talked about Delany, too. Delany’s SF methodology, in short, is wicked-cool. In several essays, through two books, he goes through the compiling process a reader of SF must go through to make sense of the text, and claims (fairly well) that SF is actually different from mundane fiction.
That’s great and all, but it left me with a problem. How, then, accepting this methodology as I do, can I deal with SF in visual media — movies and anime, in particular?
I’ve been banging my head against this intermittently for the past few weeks, now. I kept trying to think of SF movies and anime that would work for me in the same way as my favorite SF books and short stories. Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell, Real Drive, Rideback, Mazinger, I thought of an awful lot, and none of them sparked for me in the same way as even a mediocre SF novel might.
For instance, I love cyberpunk, and will devour novels in the genre in a few days. Despite enjoying it almost as much, it took me years to finish Stand Alone Complex, and I still haven’t finished Real Drive. They don’t appeal as strongly as Neuromancer or Snow Crash (or even the not-nearly-as-good Eastern Standard Tribe, which I still read in two and a half days). Why shouldn’t cyberpunk in one medium affect me as much as another? Even when some of them have delicious amalgams of concepts that placate me in outstanding ways? It seems to come back to precisely what Delany was describing, except in a negative: they function on a visual level, not a textual level, and thus do not offer to me the same satisfactions I derive from the SF genre generally.
Pontifus had an interesting development when I talked to him about it: what does appeal about them, then? I couldn’t answer him then, but usually visual SF seems to appeal to action-movie aesthetics. Why, for instance, did they add in the silly CGI monsters to I Am Legend when the whole point is that they’re people, but turned to vampires (great book, by the way)? Because probably the transference wouldn’t happen.
Now, here’s the happy ending I promised: I have indeed finally come up with some examples of SF, most of them anime, that satisfy me, or might.
- Gundam
- Galaxy Express (and all related bits and pieces)
- Crest of the Stars (and, again, all the other odds and ends)
- Haruhi Suzumiya
- Farscape
- Firefly
Yes, I used a bullet-point list. I felt like it.
What do all those shows have in common? They don’t tell us everything about the setting. They use particular hints and elisions to imply a great deal of information about how the settings are not zero world, but they don’t spend time showing us all the different places like a set of vacation slides (this could, perhaps, explain some of why the prequel Star Wars trilogy falls flat as well). Text works by building an experience between the audience and the text; it’s impossible to deliver everything (and stuff that tries, like the fantasy-setting of The Wheel of Time, just comes across as tedious), so it uses flourishes and conceits to show us things are different without telling us exactly how.
Eventually, of course, a lot of information will get across to us anyway. John does get to Earth in Farscape, but not for long. But these examples all use an economy of setting details to do, in a visual form, what a book does with words: tell us things by leaving things out. Heinlein was deservedly famous for this. The best-known example is from Beyond this Horizon when, in the middle of perfectly normal descriptions, the third-person narrator calmly says “the door dilated.” No more detail is given, but it completely restructures the reader’s thought processes about the setting. And the fact that the description is so non-chalant tells us even more, that dilating doors, the thing that just blew our minds and our views of the setting, aren’t even all that important. Wittgenstein, in the Tractatus, claims it “consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part which is the important one” (qtd. in Margolis, Selves and Other Texts, xi).
Let me kill the two figurative birds with one stone, because it’s possible you’d like to see an explanation that actually uses an anime as an example; also, it will allow me to explain the choice that might be puzzling you — Haruhi.
Haruhi was actually the first example of an anime SF I thought of that satisfied my desires for SF and not just for anime. It is, like all the other examples, a world that is not our own, and through that allows us to examine both the subject (the typical focus of mundane fiction, like the high-school-drama/comedy Haruhi masquerades as) and the object (one of the foci of SF). It deals with both the impact of a differed world on people and people’s impact on a differed world. And it does it all, to use the cinema/television term, behind the scenes. If the show were to, for instance, show us Haruhi going home after talking to Kyon, getting angry, and, with a split-screen, showing one of the giants getting bigger and angrier, it would lose its place on this list.
The point of SF, then (at least for me, though I’m paraphrasing Delany again here), is to provide a frission between our different audience experiences, for things to appear both familiar and strange at the same time. Haruhi, like all the anime on my little bullet-point list, does that. It may be easier to accomplish that in writing, given the fill-in-the-blank nature of prose itself, but it turns out it’s not impossible for TV to do it after all.
It may also finally explain my ambivalent (that is, both like and dislike, that’s what that word means) reaction to Blade Runner. It’s delicious in its visuals and acting, but spends too much time explaining the Replicants.
Pontifus
kaiserpingvin
cuchlann
Shance
TheKittymeister
Kaiserpingvin
/ 22 May 2009First things first, watch Legend of the Galactic Heroes. Even if it’s not SF like you’d like it at all, it’s the God of SF in my eyes. Well God of Fiction, perhaps. /annoying fanboy
What I extract from this is that science fiction should be decidedly non-scientific? Then whence “science”? Of course, most science fiction is anything but scientific. I can just take any random 70s-SF book from my shelves and hop to a random page, and science will be DELIGHTFULLY trashed in one of the paragraphs, most of the time at least. Still, “science fiction” is such made into a word-in-itself instead of a compound, where the constituent parts say little of . So what, then, divorces it from other genera? Because the description given here, I can probably use on a lot of things. Joyce’s work provides a strong frission between Dublin and his textual representation of Dublin, or indeed between text and text. Ayn Rands work provides a good deal of frission between rationality used by her protagonists, and actual rationality (it really looks familiar, but we know it’s utterly alien and strange).
So I am kind of uncertain what, per se, you’re saying SF is. Except that it is awesome. Which it is.
Moar fanboy ravings skip them for heaven’s sake: Also, reference to Wittgenstein is perilous, though you used it well! I frothed a bit at the linked book and the interpretation done regarding Wittgenstein’s views. Not only intentional fallacy, but misguided such. (As far as we know, Wittgenstein did not find the restraint being the Tractatus itself, and by the time of Philosophical Investigations he found most of the Tractatus false, and indeed does not talk much about transcendental matters either. One’d think Margolis would have read the damn book before referencing it. Also RAEGLOL at realist metaphysics, but I shall stop there, before I turn red and pop a vein and look like the idiot I am).
Cuchlann
/ 22 May 2009Regarding the Wittgenstein link, that was just the first place I could find it online. Sorry it made you seethe. Also, the Wittgenstein reference is through Delany as well, I just couldn’t find it in Starboard Wine. He is the origination of the association of this methodology with the Wittgenstein quotation.
If I’m understanding these methodologies correctly — and if I’m not, then this is my answer from my own synthesis, I suppose: SF is frission plus an emphasis on the object. The texts you cite are focused on the subject, that is, the subjective experience of the world. SF also provides a route to explore the object, which most (modern) mundane fiction doesn’t allow.
And SF can be as scientific, or not, as the author wants. The name comes from Gernsback, who insisted all the science be directly drawn from then-accepted “real” science. Finally a lot of authors realized that, well, that meant it was made up, too. But what *some* people have said differentiates the “science” of SF from the analogous unreal elements of “fantasy” is that the SF audience wants, in some way, to believe the unreal elements could be real, whereas in fantasy it’s understood they’re all totally unreal — to the point of which if something that some people accept as real, such as ghosts, appears in a fantasy, it is relegated to the unreal just as though it had been a dragon instead. Which might explain why a lot of people don’t consider ghost stories (that is, a story in which the only novum is a ghost) to be fantasy, even though they don’t necessarily believe ghosts are realistic.
Kaiserpingvin
/ 22 May 2009Ahah, don’t worry about the seething, I like seething now and then, helps against my inferiority complex. You used it well enough, and that is what matters.
Thanks for clearing it up. I’ll keep insisting “SF” is merely the name for a certain set rather than a way to tell a story, but that is a matter of taste. Your definition makes it easier to define the domain of the set, anyway.
The “science” part came, mainly, from how science is: it is about a clear, complete understanding of the world. Ellision, allusion, vagueness and so on are not to be preferred. What can be said at all, can be said clearly, says Wittgenstein, and to him, science is all that can be said.
Cuchlann
/ 22 May 2009Not really — the science comes from precisely how science isn’t. SF distorts our world in some way. The use of the term science in the way it is used now is to designate that it is not a mystical, but a rational distortion. Most science in SF is wrong or, at best, inaccurate. Good SF of every kind has, at some point, needed to put a curtain up over part of the “science” and say, “No, don’t look behind this.” But it behaves as though the distortions are true, and that’s the important part. If you want to look at it that way, after the initial distortion and elision, it then proceeds with clarity. This is on the gross level, not the fine — at the fine level, tricks with language (like Heinlein’s, above) are de rigor.
ghostlightning
/ 22 May 2009Hmmm.
I don’t read a lot of SF. Most of my experience with it are of the ‘classsic’ ones: Asimov, Herbert, some Le Guin, some Heinlein; and less ‘classic’ (but I love a great deal) would be Kim Stanley-Robinson.
Otherwise, it’s mostly movies and anime.
I would suggest Pluto, or even 20th Century Boys both by Naoki Urasawa. These manga are teh shitz (one is borderline utopian, the other is near-comletely dystopian (both are top-tier favorites of mine).
Ghost in the Shell is another manga that I like, talking about life and AI and permutations of such. There’s some of it in the first movie and I’m told that there’s a lot of it in the Stand Alone Complex franchise, but I’ve read the manga and vouch for it.
Kaiserpingvin
/ 22 May 2009Seconding 20th Century Boys, even if I find it more magical realism-horror. Urasawa is genius.
coburn
/ 22 May 2009I’m sure there’s an anecdote somewhere about a sci-fi director agonising over how to depict futuristic saltshakers without just winding up with some random device on the table which the audience wouldn’t connect with our own more mundane cruets. I was recently enjoying some of that kind of stuff in Banner of the Stars.
The sense that things “appear both familiar and strange” is definitely what I enjoy in sci-fi, when I enjoy sci-fi. I could probably say the same for much fantasy though, in that those techniques promote immersion. I suppose that often fantasies deal in a familiar humanity within an inhuman environment, but I can generally connect that environment to something I’ve seen before in stylistic terms. Maybe that’s just ‘pure’ fantasy getting debased, but there’s also a sense in which I enjoy empathising with the interests/obsessions/fears of a, er, fantasist. Although, come to think of it, I don’t really read many fantasy books…
I think that the point you make in response to Kaiserpingvin about the audience thinking of the world as a potential reality is what I’d personally use as the definition of sci-fi. That even an essentially science-less story should make the reader consider the potential direction of the human race. Hard science can play that role in connecting our mind to the real-ness of the story. So I’d say the technique of implication of a broader reality as a means to involve the audience is a literary alternative to hard science in fulfilling what I’d see as the social function of sci-fi, which would be fundamentally about exploring the relationship between humanity and the constructed environment (so GITS: SAC is an ideal example).
vendredi
/ 22 May 2009I’ve heard that SF can also be thought of as “Speculative Fiction” – which I think in a sense captures the idea you’re getting at here: good SF gets the audience thinking about the different possibilities that result from the setting – these possibilities might never be shown or explicitly explored in the course of the story, but the reader/viewer derives some entertainment from thinking about possibilities that go beyond the story as presented itself.
Actually, when put that way I suppose SF engages the viewer/reader in a manner that is not very different from say, a mystery novel…
Pontifus
/ 22 May 2009You did my big question in the post. I, too, think that film can balance exposition apparent and absent/implied…or it can just go all balls-to-the-wall action, and then it doesn’t really matter in light of all the OMGAWESOME, I guess. I wonder, though, if any film — anything with a story, really — can not offer some appeal on a textual level. I’ll file that away for further pondering when I’m less ridiculously tired.
The line between science fiction and fantasy still seems flimsy to me. I suppose I think of sci-fi (which I call it out of habit, despite that being a bastard contraction of it, or so I hear) as more methodical, or systemic, as has been mentioned already — things happen because they fit in the natural order of the fictional universe, not because some gifted character wills them so, or what have you. But then, where do highly structured systems of magic fit in? Do those still count as fantasy because there aren’t enough steps detailed between, say, the witch’s burning of the herbs and the subsequent effect on the world? What of super robots, powered (sometimes literally, in whole or part) by vague things like guts and effort and fighting spirit? There has to be some sort of breakdown somewhere in the vicinity of Clarke’s third law. As much as I dislike the term “speculative fiction” for being a bit of a cop-out, I like using it because it doesn’t make me differentiate between science fiction and fantasy, and I like things that skirt that line enough to be marginally debatable anyway.
Pontifus
/ 23 May 2009Also, what do you think of the new Haruhi episode? It kept reminding me of your post.
Cuchlann
/ 24 May 2009I haven’t seen it yet. I have it, but thekittymeister’s here and I wouldn’t want to A: watch it with her as she hasn’t seen the series yet or B: kick her out for half an hour.
Samuel R. Delany
/ 23 May 2009Chuchlan–Thanks for the good words anent Starboard Wine. A revised edition of The Jewel-Hinged Jaw started moving into bookstores last week, from Wesleyan University Press. In six or so month, a revised edition of Starboard Wine will follow it. (Then, after that, will come The American Shore.) Hope you find that of equal interest. I’ve always suspected that the particular side of my early theorizing you talk about could be applied to film and comics, but current movie makers are so afraid that the audience will get up and leave the theater in raging mob if they catch the director trying to teach them something (it’s called “no ideas”), even it’s only something about the world of the narrative, that it’s hard to find examples.
Owen S
/ 23 May 2009Whatever happened to your watching of Darker than Black? I thought it met your reasonable requirements perfectly, if anything.
Cuchlann
/ 24 May 2009It does, I think. And what happens is just what often happens. I got swamped and couldn’t keep up with the two/day schedule, then just didn’t get to any more episodes while I was writing my thesis and term paper. Not watching much anime back home right now, as Dad’s here and I don’t wanna be locked up in the back room all day. Will try to finish up soon.
Owen S
/ 24 May 2009Oh, don’t sweat it. I dropped out towards the end due to finals, but will be picking it up again once I get my monitor back. Totally understandable, was just curious is all. Glad to hear!
TheBigN
/ 23 May 2009For some reason, I’m not reminded of your watching of Haibane Renmei. :P
TheBigN
/ 23 May 2009Wow. I mean that I am reminded. Nice brain fart there. >_<
Cuchlann
/ 24 May 2009Why’s that? I hated HR, and I like all the stuff I mention here.
OGT
/ 24 May 2009Because Haibane Renmei (and plenty of other series you “hate”) does exactly what you say “science fiction” does here, or, at least, how I read and interpreted it?
Cuchlann
/ 24 May 2009HR didn’t strike me as doing it — first, because it’s fantasy, which deals in a different dialogic with the audience, second because several of the plots attempt to maneuver into subject-oriented storytelling, but the subjects (the characters) aren’t that interesting. When it finally got around to the object-oriented story — the question of passing on — it got pretty good, and I cop to that: the last quarter was pretty good. It’s just that the first half was kinda terrible.
But good point, I *can* see how it does some of the things anyway. I just couldn’t get over the problems I’ve already clearly defined elsewhere. Just a personal problem, I guess.
OGT
/ 25 May 2009I think you have an aversion to things not blowing up and/or things not being exciting, because you seem to hate/dislike anything that mostly involves characters milling around living their lives with no underlying plot and/or explicit thematic element and/or characters being WHACKY. Which is exactly what I like about anime–it feels, perhaps mistakenly on my part, more inclined to use indirection/”negative space” for plot/theme, in part or in whole. I may be making that bit up, as I never have gotten around to analyzing this, but that’s how I see it right now.
I almost want to see you watch Tokyo Story and see what happens when you get the full brunt of Yasujiro Ozu in two and a half hours of milling around 1950s Tokyo.
Cuchlann
/ 25 May 2009If something’s actually happening, I have no problem with it — however, a lot of stories attempt to appropriate the “milling around” you’re talking about because they don’t really have a sense of narrative focus or direction. Remember, I love Jane Austen, and that really doesn’t seem to be anything other than people wandering around in their (and others’) drawing rooms, discussing actions that took place off-stage.
Also, Samuel Beckett. : )