Hot Take: The Abstraction of Science Fiction

Hot Take (noun): a deliberately provocative heterodox opinion

article that seems intended to attract detractors and invite debate.

In 1921 at Max Ernst’s first Dadaist exhibition, the poet André Breton proclaimed that photography had dealt a mortal blow to traditional modes of technology-enabled expression.

André Breton was often
referred to as the Pope
of Surrealism.
(Image via Wikipedia)

Breton theorized that since cameras could accurately capture the world as it is, they had transformed visual art. The artist’s role of striving for realistic expression was no longer as necessary. In order to remain relevant, painters and illustrators would need to explore abstraction and metaphor.

Over the subsequent decades, Breton’s prognostications have been borne out, as painters have been freed from the need to imitate reality. Painting evolved into a medium for personal expression and conceptual ideas rather than rote documentation.

There was — of course — a backlash against these more abstract and expressive forms of art, including from such conservative critics as Max Nordau and Paul Schultze-Naumburg. Nordeau’s book Degeneration (1892) in which he coined the term “Degenerate Art,” tied Impressionism and other less detail-oriented forms of visual expression to what he perceived as the moral decay of society. The pseudo-intellectual works of such critics were often used by fascist movements to justify their cultural conservatism.

While we are no poets, we would observe that, similarly, the advent of photorealistic special effects in the late 1990s and early 2000s has fundamentally changed speculative fiction literature in many of the same ways — and with many of the same consequences.

The comparison between the effect of photography on painting and the impact of special-effects laden movies on prose speculative fiction is an imprecise one. For example, the advent of photography was far more sudden than the evolution of special effects. Also, literary speculative fiction that is difficult for some readers to comprehend has existed throughout the genre’s history. But in our opinion, the similarities between the two technological shifts are worth discussing.

It should not be lost on
us that among the artists
who rejected abstraction
in the 1920s was a
painter in his 20s
named Adolph.
(Image via Wikipedia)

Photorealistic special effects in live action film transformed speculative fiction by visually realizing imaginative worlds once limited to prose. In the 1980s, if you wanted to experience a story about small, hairy-footed country folk befriending talking trees and fighting dragons the primary way to do so was to read a book and imagine much of the associated world-building.

If you’re looking for a cinematic turning point, you could name Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs in 1993 or the seamless use of digital compositing in 1997’s Titanic. But Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings should be seen as the watershed moment; the moment at which filmic reality became virtually indistinguishable from documentary footage for the viewer. Film and television are the primary access points for viewing and engaging with The Lord Of The Rings. Although approximately 40 million copies of the first volume of the trilogy have been sold across the globe with a readership of likely triple that number, somewhat in excess of 200 million documented viewers have seen Peter Jackson’s movie. The work has been flattened out in its filmic form, the poetry stripped from the page, and Tom Bombadil relegated to a footnote. While this might offend militaristic bibliophiles, there’s no question that the story found a wider audience through film.

It has often been observed that speculative fiction won the culture war, becoming the ascendant genre and providing most of the popular culture touchpoints in current society, but what’s left unsaid is that it is filmic speculative fiction and fantasy that was the victor, not works of prose. Speculative fiction film and television are the lingua franca of North American culture in the new millennium, but speculative fiction literature is not. As movies took over spectacle and futuristic imagery, written speculative fiction — which is still a relatively niche pursuit — was freed from the need to describe elaborate visuals.

Much of the heft of worldbuilding was suddenly provided to the consumer, in a more passive visual format. We would posit that this shift provided authors with the freedom to delve deeper into complex ideas, philosophical questions, and experimental narratives. Rather than focusing on detailed scene-setting, prose speculative fiction seems now to focus more on literary styling, metaphor, and ambiguity, perhaps redefining itself in response to cinema’s dominance over visual storytelling. It is also possible that there are writers who would have turned to prose in the past, who are now writing for the screen because the medium is in demand, supports the stories they want to tell, and arguably provides more reliable remuneration.

We wonder if speculative fiction authors have had to become more poetic to compete with the hard-edged realism of screen special effects and more demanding readers. The classic work There Will Come Soft Rains — praised in its day for Bradbury’s elegiac style — seems hard-nosed and unambiguous when compared to John Chu’s Hugo-winning magical realist fable The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere.

It should not be lost on anyone that there is an ongoing backlash against abstract (and dare we say more literary) work. Those who preferred the prose style that Heinlein and Asimov had popularized have taken aim at a style of writing that is more metaphorical. 

Anti-Nazi art critic Hermann Broch summed up the
fascist tendency of aesthetic conservatism: “The
maker of kitsch does not create inferior art, he is
not an incompetent or a bungler, he cannot be
evaluated by aesthetic standards; rather he
is ethically depraved, a criminal willing radical evil.”
(Image via Wikipedia)

It is also worth talking about similarities between the Sad Puppies and the turn-of-the-century fascist artists who saw surrealism and abstraction as overly chaotic and even degenerate. In the 1920s, reactionaries embraced classical forms as symbols of order, purity, and heritage — and became enraged by the conceptual work of artists like Marcel Duchamp. Fascist scholars such as Margherita Sarfatti called for art based on rigid cultural norms that elevated ‘high culture’ of the past as an ideal. Sarafatti excoriated Cubism, Dadaism, and expressionism and called such art disrespectful to the shared aesthetic values she saw as underpinning “Western Civilization” (it is not lost on us that many of Sarafatti’s arguments are today repurposed by TradFash Twitter accounts that use Greco-Roman statues as their profile pictures). In the eyes of those who hew to conservative interpretations of art, the move away from strictly representational forms threatened traditional values by undermining normative conceptions of beauty.

Today, there is also a cottage industry of those who lash out at the Hugo Awards and mainstream publishers, and argue that the genre should return to “old-school science fiction.” Public appeals for a return to traditional “pulp” aesthetics, and “Campbellian” science fiction could be understood as being essentially similar in nature to the calls from the 1930s-era German Reichskulturkammer for visual arts to return to easily understood forms with heroic themes in styles modeled on classical Greek and Roman works.

It is often presumed that the rejection of modernity by some figures in speculative fiction is a rejection of diversity, that what these figures are objecting to is the inclusion of authors who are non-white or non-male. That is, of course, part of the phenomenon. But we would suggest the “pulp revolution,” and “make science fiction fun again” mantras expressed by this conservative wing of fandom suggest that the aesthetics of fascism exert a significant pull on many. Within speculative fiction, the idea of “pulp” hearkens back to the so-called “Golden Age of Science Fiction,” a mythical era in which the genre was supposedly free of “mundane” influences — this is at its heart an aesthetic argument.

The increasing literary flair of speculative fiction has not entirely driven out the prosaic plot-forward storytelling that used to be the staple of the genre. Without casting aspersions, we can think of several progressive and forward thinking mainstream authors who have embraced a traditional “classic” speculative fiction style without being a part of the reactionary movement.

McLuhan predicted the Global Village, but
neglected to mention that the village in question
is Salem, Massachusetts in 1692.
(Portrait by Yousuf Karsh)

When discussing the 2015 Hugo Awards, the balkanization of fandom, and the emergence of an overtly right-wing movement within the genre, critics of the speculative fiction genre have often focused their analysis on polarization within broader society. The culture of speculative fiction has changed in the past 25 years, and as McLuhan once wrote, “a theory of cultural change is impossible without knowledge of the changing sense ratio effected by various externalizations of our senses.”

The impact of technological changes on the consumption of speculative fiction should not be understated. We think its impacts have brought a broader public under the wing of fandom, prompting inevitable and uncomfortable splits within the subculture. Much as technological advances in the early 20th Century inspired a reactionary movement among painters and labour writ large, similar technological advances in the past 30 years have been at play in the formation of a reactionary movement amongst some groups of speculative fiction creators.

The Closing Of The Lunar Frontier

Hot Take (noun): a deliberately provocative heterodox opinion 

article that seems intended to attract detractors and invite debate.

The most important year in the history of science fiction is 1973, because that’s when science fiction ended.

All fiction is political, and science fiction was the literature of technological triumphalism as a political idea. Like the Western pulps that it largely supplanted, it was primarily an American phenomenon from its inception as a defined genre in the late 1920s. And, like all literature, it was steeped in assumptions about societal and economic progress. The 1970s witnessed determinative changes in these assumptions, shifting the genre’s trajectory beyond recognition.

(Image via MyComicShop.com)

First, a bit of context. While individual stories that we would now class as science fiction existed prior to the 1920s, the genre became codified and defined through the early pulp era. This meant that genre traditions, tropes, and conventions were formed at a time when more new technologies were entering common use in the Western world than at any time before or since (automobiles, telecommunication, washing machines, etc.).

During the five decades of science fiction’s ascendancy as a defined genre, income inequality in the US was on the decline; between 1929 and 1941, the share of total GDP taken as income by the top one per cent of America’s richest people declined from about 20 per cent to 15 per cent. By 1952, that had declined to just eight per cent of the total GDP going to the top one per cent. Combined with the simultaneous doubling of per-worker productivity, this meant a radical improvement in the lives of working Americans.

Three parallel trends of technological, social, and economic progress made it a fecund era for imagining pollyannaish interplanetary monocultural futures clad in chrome and plastic. In just a 30-year span, Jack Williamson went from traveling by covered wagon to traveling by airplane, so one could understand why he might assume that in an additional 100 years people would be going to the stars.

And this is why the year 1973 is so important: it’s the year that shattered the fundamental assumptions that guided science fiction over the previous five decades. This happened in several important ways.

After Apollo 17 left the moon on December 17, 1972, vonbraunian dreams of a rocket-powered conquest of space began to look naïve. Though clearly technology continued to advance, this progress was less and less about raw power, and more about subtlety and efficiency. As the space race ended, the idea of a final frontier was relegated to increasingly fantastical fiction.

It was the same year in which inequality in the US began to increase after almost 50 years of decline. Since then, inequality has gone from eight per cent of income going to the top one per cent in 1973 to almost 30 per cent going to the top one per cent today.

Likewise, the unionization rate among American workers began its steep decline in 1973, from 26.7 per cent of workers belonging to a union to just 13 per cent in 2011.

In 1893, then 33-year-old historian Frederick Jackson Turner addressed the American Historical

They left, much as they had
come: In peace, for all mankind.
(Image via NASA.gov)

Association and presented his theory on the closing of the American frontier: "The frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history." Part of his thesis was that this closure had a profound impact on the national imagination of the United States, and it’s difficult to disagree with this assessment.

Likewise, it seems clear that the closing of the lunar frontier had a drastic impact on the imagination of the citizens of science fiction fandom.

When coupled with the fact that 1973 was a turning point in Western economies, the result is even more drastic.

When people imagine the future, they usually imagine one in which they have a part. So the exclusion of the working class from economic progress effectively limited the imaginations of many.

Many of these economic shifts have been attributed after the fact to the 1973 oil crash that marked the end of the era of cheap oil, and ushered in an era of greater control of prices by oil producers. It is possibly the most important economic shift that America has faced since the 1929 stock market crash.

It has often been observed that the secret weapon of science fiction authors is economics; in essence, that insights from economics are crucial to building believable fictional models of the future. So it should be no surprise that these shifts in long-term economic trends had an impact on the types of technologies that science fiction predicts.

Space adventure stories fundamentally shifted from being a near-future genre to being closer to fantasy. It became more and more difficult to suggest that futures depicted in works like A Fall Of Moondust, Farmer in the Sky, or The Caves Of Steel were based on any serious extrapolation of current trends. Also, declining economic fortunes became more of a focus of the genre. Although the term wouldn’t be coined for several more years, we could argue that cyberpunk’s birth was 1973 when John Brunner began writing The Shockwave Rider, and when James Tiptree Jr. published The Girl Who Was Plugged In.

The time it takes to write, edit, and publish a novel means that the distinction between pre- and post-1973 speculative fiction is fuzzy — but evident once you start looking for it.

We would argue that (without privileging one or the other) this shift from technological-triumphalist

In this interpretation of history,
Ursula K. Le Guin could be the
progenitor of  modern
speculative fiction.
(Image via NYTimes.com)

new-frontiers speculative fiction to economic anxiety-driven social speculation is a significant enough change of focus that they are distinct genres. Science fiction as it had been understood ended, and something else took its place. We might argue that post-1973, the genre split into speculative fiction (cyberpunk, mundane SF, cli-fi) and science fantasy (space opera, time travel).

This new chapter in the history of speculative fiction has been increasingly diverse, less in thrall to destructive hegemonic ideas peddled by an influential early editor of a major magazine, and certainly less centered on the United States. As a result, the intellectual descendants of science fiction have been able to connect with the larger culture in ways that their predecessors were never able to. It is hard to imagine the ascendancy of pop cultural phenomenons like Star Wars and Guardians Of The Galaxy in a genre that was still tied to positivist (and occasionally objectivist) outlooks.

Arguably, the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic is as significant an economic event as the Great Depression and the 1973 Energy Crisis. Perhaps it will be the event that moves speculative fiction into the next era.