From Notting Hill Editions (www.nottinghilleditions.com)
A few days ago, a writer called Adam Roberts took part in the book club section of Radio 2's drivetime programme, which must surely rank as about the most solidly mainstream forum available for promoting a novel. Happily for the author, those on the panel all seemed to like his book, but several of them admitted that they had been dreading the prospect of reading it, for one reason. Adam Roberts writes science fiction.
No other literary genre, except perhaps its cousin, fantasy, seems to meet with quite as much antipathy from otherwise voracious and catholic readers. There are plenty of people who will tell you that they don't read, for example, crime fiction, or romantic fiction. But they do not, on the whole, rule out reading The Name of the Rose or Les Gommes on the basis that they are kinds of detective story, or veto North and South and Love in the Time of Cholera because of the love interest.
In fact, since Wilkie Collins and Edgar Allan Poe established the conventions of the form, crime has frequently been taken seriously as a literary genre, while love affairs - as long as they are conducted unhappily in north London - are practically a sine qua non of "serious" literature.
Of course, lots of crime fiction and most romantic novels are tripe, and so too is an enormous amount of sf (the aficionados' preferred abbreviation). Sturgeon's Law, formulated by the sf writer Theodore Sturgeon, summed this up in the declaration: "Ninety per cent of science fiction is crap, but using the same standards, 90 per cent of everything is crap."
Before one even comes to a judgment on its merit, of course, there is the problem of establishing what science fiction is. By definition, all fiction is invention; Anna Karenina is as much a fantasy as John Wyndham's triffids. Yet the invention in science fiction is of a sort which alters the world in a way which, ideally, is the justification for the novel. Most sf buffs immediately know this when they see it - indeed, the best the critic Damon Knight could do by way of definition was to say that science fiction was what he could point at and say "this is science fiction". That may not seem helpful, but it is true that there is a common quality in examples of the genre which is immediately recognisable, and usually it is a kind of "what if?" device. Science fiction is about technologies or situations which don't exist yet. It differs from other fantastic literature, such as fairy stories or fantasy, in that its inventions, however improbable, are usually possible.
Even when they can spot it, and even if they accept Sturgeon's point, many readers who have no difficulty accepting the work of, say, John Le Carré or Georges Simenon as literary fiction refuse to countenance the notion of reading a book which features a spaceship, or a robot. While spaceships and robots - and for that matter, clones, virtual environments, lasers and many of the other fixtures of science fiction - are every bit as much a part of the real world as secret agents or adultery in Hampstead, there remains a persistent belief that sf as a form of literature is intrinsically, irredeemably, tosh.
Indeed, there is a marked reluctance among some readers to acknowledge that the few inescapable books in the form which undoubtedly have entered the literary canon - such as Gulliver's Travels, Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-Four and A Clockwork Orange - are science fiction at all, as if they had managed to avoid the taint of the label by dint of being, well, good.
Nor is it just readers. Publishers often go to considerable lengths to disguise books which are self-evidently science fiction as literary novels, as if it were impossible to be both at the same time. On Wikipedia, the entry for Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Never Let Me Go used to state sniffily: "While it contains many tropes generally associated with science fiction, it is nevertheless mainstream literature." In 2008, the judges for the Arthur C. Clarke award, Britain's leading prize for sf novels, apparently requested The Stone Gods, by Jeanette Winterson, for consideration, but the publishers declined to submit it.
Even writers who produce science fiction sometimes often seem cagey about the genre. Margaret Atwood, who won the inaugural prize for The Handmaid's Tale in 1987, has been notoriously ambiguous about whether or not she writes science fiction, despite the fact that several of her books clearly fit that description. Others, such as J.G. Ballard or Doris Lessing, seem somehow to avoid confinement in the genre ghetto, while Iain Banks - despite the frequent incursion of fantastic elements in his "literary" novels, and though he now says he regrets the decision - quarantines his splendidly entertaining science fiction from the rest of his output by writing them as Iain M. Banks (the M stands for sf).
It may well be that there is a commercial logic to this stance. The popular and critical success of books such as David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan or, the outstanding example of recent years, The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, all of which have science-fictional elements, would, one suspects, have been much less likely had they been marketed as science fiction.
This summer, the British Library made an attempt to confer respectability on the genre with an excellent exhibition entitled "Out of This World". For it, the co-curator Andy Sawyer, who runs the University of Liverpool's Masters course in Science Fiction Studies, put on show Lucian of Samosata's writings from the 2nd Century AD, a first edition of Thomas More's political polemic Utopia, and maps of the imaginary lands created by the Brontë family as children, as well as more predictable literary antecedents, such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
The exhibition was accompanied by a series of talks and panel discussions and, at the first of those, the same Adam Roberts later to be plugging his new book on the radio made an interesting point. Professor Roberts (he has a day job teaching 19th-Century literature at Royal Holloway in the University of London) thinks that science fiction already dominates other media and, in support of that view, pointed out that Doctor Who is one of the country's most popular television programmes and that, of the top ten box office films of all time, only one (Titanic) is without any element of the fantastic, though Shrek 2 and Toy Story 3 are clearly not science fiction.
I will not attempt to argue with those who make the obvious point that Avatar, which occupies the top slot, is drivel, except to point out that it is drivel not because it is science fiction but because, like the equally dire Titanic, it is the work of James Cameron. And adaptations such as Solaris (the Tarkovsky version), 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner provide plenty of evidence that science fiction can produce exciting, intelligent films.
One reason for the current dominance of sf in popular cinema, of course, is the advance in special effects technology, which allows directors the opportunity to present the genre's grand sweeping narratives (the quality sf critics usually identify as "sense of wonder") utterly realistically. Noticing that it is CGI which has given science fiction a central place in film, however, also prompts the realisation that it is not only cinema, but every aspect of our lives, which is being transformed by technology.
William Gibson, whose first novel Neuromancer was responsible for defining and popularising the concepts of cyberspace and virtual reality, famously declared: "The future is already here - it just isn't evenly distributed." It is probably a vindication of that view that Gibson's most recent novels, Pattern Recognition, Spook Country and Zero History, hardly seem science-fictional at all. The world has accelerated to accommodate the phenomena which he anticipated in that trilogy, from YouTube to Twitter.
Indeed, the delay between the publication of his books and the arrival of technological applications very similar to those they describe seems to be shrinking, to the point where Gibson makes me think of Philip K. Dick's short story The Golden Man, whose gift was that he could see a few moments into the future. (Like so much of Dick's wonderful, prescient fiction, it was changed out of all recognition in order to make a terrible film.)
The world in which we live is a science-fictional one. The fact that Apple has more in ready funds than the government of the United States of America is indication enough, if you need it, that the geeks have conquered the world. The centrality of technology in changing the way we live is also the reason why one of the principal objections to science fiction no longer holds true.
The objection, which I suspect is a large part of the resistance to science fiction in literary circles, is that as a form, sf is fundamentally adolescent. There is a long-standing joke that the Golden Age of science fiction is 14. During what most critics see as the Golden Age, the 1950s, when John W. Campbell was at the helm of the magazine Astounding Science Fiction and H.L. Gold was editing Galaxy, the jibe had some merit.
The set-dressing of sleek chrome fins, ray guns and all the other paraphernalia of rocketships did very little to disguise the fact that most of the stories which appeared were merely Westerns or other adventure yarns transplanted into Outer Space. Moreover, those stories which did hinge on hard scientific facts, like Isaac Asimov's Marooned Off Vesta (first published in 1939), were, to put it mildly, of extremely limited literary value.
By the end of that decade, however, some critics - notably Kingsley Amis in his survey of the field, New Maps of Hell - had begun to argue that good science fiction was not about predicting the future, but about elucidating the present. Amis singled out for particular praise The Space Merchants, a satire on consumerism by Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth. During the 1960s, writers like them, and Dick, Robert A. Heinlein and Robert Silverberg, increasingly found in science fiction an ideal vehicle for social commentary.
The adventure-story aspect of most sf novels and the fact that they were produced in serial form in pulp magazines or as cheap paperbacks (often, as in the Ace Doubles, with two novels in one volume), however, meant that few - with the honourable exception of Amis and C.S. Lewis - realised that these works were firmly in the tradition of More's Utopia or Samuel Butler's Erewhon.
But the thing which has done most to challenge the charge of childishness is that the technology around us is no longer merely the promise of glamorous gadgets, which might allow us to travel in a flying car, or live on the Moon, but which make no fundamental difference to human characteristics. The revolution in information brought about by networked computers and the prospect of tinkering with our very genetic make-up are no longer the stuff of fantasy, but something which shapes the daily lives of everyone on the planet.
Death and love, the central concerns of crime and romantic fiction, are likely to remain "grown-up" topics in literary fiction for a while yet. But science fiction is uniquely well-placed to examine one other universal humanity concern - the future. Indeed, according to some science fiction writers and even some scientists, the last may be of more abiding concern than either of the others or, if it comes to that, what we currently understand as being human.
Vernor Vinge, whose vision of an entirely networked future in the novel Rainbows End seems not only plausible, but highly probable, has also popularised the notion of a technological "singularity". By its very nature, this concept is tricky to define, but it is based on the premise that, so far, every advance in human technology could, with sufficient explanation, be made comprehensible to our ancestors. In other words, Archimedes would be able to understand how the space shuttle works if he were talked through the mathematics and the physics of the discoveries and inventions which brought it about.
The possible advent of technologies such as quantum computing, which would create almost infinite processing power, and of genetic alterations which we may soon be able to make in our own DNA, however, may alter our lives so dramatically that - as Vinge puts it - our descendents would be no more able to explain them to us than we can explain the Second Law of Thermodynamics to a flatworm.
Arthur C. Clarke's dictum that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" is no longer just a snappy line about how far mankind's inventiveness has brought it and the possibilities still in store, but a central, urgent concern about the world we live in now.
Science fiction is the only literary genre which is perfectly equipped to tackle that concern. The priorities and techniques of science fiction are increasingly evident in mainstream literature because the world in which we live has been shaped by science fiction. As evolution has taught us, literary fiction and literary critics can either adapt to that reality, or perish.