Relativity

by Robert J. Sawyer

  I have shown that science fiction deals with social issues, but does science fiction serve only as commentator, or does it also function as an engine of societal change? I passionately believe the latter was once true. Those images from Star Trek had a real impact; they changed the world. But is what we do significant today? Sadly, although many of my colleagues fool themselves into thinking otherwise, I don’t believe so.

  I was taken aback about five years ago when Ian Wilmut and his crew cloned the sheep named Dolly. The outcry was “Oh my God! What are we going to do about cloning?” But we had already had the dialogue in the pages of science fiction: we knew this was going to happen. It was an obvious extrapolation once we’d discovered DNA, and we’d thoroughly discussed all the attendant issues. When cloning really happened, though, the world was in a panic; the sensationalist press went wild. Fifty years of serious dialogue had fallen only on the ears of SF fans; it had no other impact. We SF readers had been exposed to hundreds of works about cloning, but the rest of the world—the vast majority of humanity that does not read science fiction—had not. That was a sobering moment for me.

  In 1972, Alvin Toffler wrote Future Shock, which argued that the only preventive medicine against the disorientation rapid technological changes were going to cause was to read science fiction. We took great pride in that: reading science fiction wasn’t just entertainment, it was important. It was necessary. But the cloning fiasco drove home that we serve only as commentators, not as an engine of social change. The public was running around spouting garbage about whether human clones were really people, and fearing that they might have psychic abilities. Our enlightened SF dialogue had utterly failed to impact human conscious.

  This got me thinking about the history of science fiction, and whether the cloning example was an aberration. Now, I was young in the sixties, but obviously one of the greatest single accomplishments in human history was the manned moon missions. We science fiction readers and writers had talked about the implications of going to the moon for decades prior to that. Well, I vividly remember July 20th, 1969, and the culmination of the biggest engineering project ever—bigger than the pyramids! We SF readers and writers thought of this moment just as Neil Armstrong had thought about it, as a small step in an on-going journey. There was not a science-fiction writer in the world, not even the most cynical, like Barry Malzberg, who said that this journey was going to be over in three years, that the novelty of this was going to wear off and that the public would totally lose interest. But it did end, and there’s a tombstone somewhere for manned lunar exploration with the dates 1969-1972 carved into it.

  We science fiction people had thought we had changed the world, but we had not. In the sixties, we had everyone hyped up about space, from the President of the United States on down. We had really communicated science fiction ideas to the whole world—or so we told ourselves. But it was a delusion. The President of the United States and the rest of the world were very happy to give up on the manned exploration of space three years after we began it. Since then, no human being has gone more than five hundred miles from Earth—five hundred miles in the last thirty-two years! Not a single science-fiction writer predicted that sort of failed dream.

  Sam Moskowitz, a science fiction historian, has one of my favorite quotes about science fiction, but I worry about the validity of it. He says, “Anyone could have predicted the automobile, but only a science-fiction writer could have predicted the traffic jam.” He is right: we do a really good job of predicting; if it is possible today then it is going to be probable for tomorrow. Marshall McLuhan in his own weird-ass way was a science fictional thinker when he remarked that any new technology starts off as a boon and ends up as an irritant. Traffic is an irritant in our lives. Henry Ford did not predict road rage, but science fiction did.

  But even with those predictions, are we having a societal impact? Again, I’m not sure, and that concerns me because I like to think in the same lofty terms as Moskowitz, believing that this art form I love so much is in fact important. I was talking earlier today to my friend Kaye Mason, here in the audience, about George W. Bush. The thing about George W. Bush is, for once, there is a president talking about going back into space, although for probably all the wrong reasons and with not enough money. Obviously it is a political football since if the Democrats get in they will say it was a silly Republican plan and that we are going to spend all of our money on people here on Earth instead. I am disposed to the left, politically, but this guy is our only hope of going back into space.

  Which brings me to my last point. Candas Jane Dorsey, who is also speaking at this conference, is the current president of SF Canada, an association of Canadian writers of what Candas likes to call “speculative fiction.” Well, when Candas and the late, great Judith Merril got together in 1989 to start SF Canada, one of the statements that they put in their founding document was that SF Canada would work towards “positive social change.” But what constitutes “positive social change?” You and I might agree on some points, and disagree on others. It is quite possible to get intelligent people of good character to sit down and say that positive change is a woman’s absolute right to have control over her body. But, for many Americans today, positive social change would instead be the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Guy Gavriel Kay, a fantasy writer, chose not to join SF Canada because that phrase was in its constitution; he felt, probably correctly, that a groupthink definition of positive social change was antithetical to what good extrapolative writing was supposed to be about.

  Interestingly, the corresponding US-based professional association, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, has never had anything like that phrase in their constitution. But their members, like all people of conscience, have opinions, and so some got involved in debate about the war in Iraq; I think I made my own opinion clear a moment ago, but many of my colleagues disagree with me, and we ended up with some science-fiction writers advocating “A,” and others advocating “B.” Well, as we know from physics class, when you have opposite and opposing forces, they cancel each other out. I believe we may have reached the stage where science fiction is such a varied and convoluted genre, such a multi-headed beast, that this hydra never goes anywhere anymore in terms of social impact because the movements in opposing directions cancel each other out.

  Samuel J. Lundwall, a science-fiction writer and critic in Sweden, was the Overseas Regional Director of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Sam resigned from the organization because the Board of Directors of SFWA would not take a stand on what he thought was clearly a major social issue that science-fiction writers should take a stand on, the then-impending invasion of Iraq. Michael Swanwick, who is well-known for his short fiction, wrote a letter in support of Sam, got some other SFWA members to sign it, and submitted it to the website of Locus, the trade journal of the SF field:

  We, as independent members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA), despite the official neutrality of our organization, hereby register our opposition to the impending invasion of Iraq. Some of us are opposed because it is a violation of international law. Some are opposed because it is contrary to the ideals that America strives to uphold. Some think this war is simply wrong. We all call on those in power to prevent it.

  Well, that’s the “A” position, but, of course, there was immediately a countervailing “B.” Arlan Andrews, a writer for Analog, the largest circulation SF magazine, famed for skewing to the right, replied:

  Wishing that we would all keep our public opinions limited to literary matters, nevertheless, some of us other independent SFWA members, mindful of the excruciating conditions under which the Iraqi people exist, and recalling the massacres of our fellow Americans on 9/11/2001—as well as of Kurds and Iranians and Iraqis and Ugandans and Israelis and others over the decades—express a wish for our President to follow through quickly on his promise to liberate the nation of Iraq, and to continue to hunt down and destroy the
other terrorists who would kill all of us Westerners, even those among us who for whatever reasons oppose the coming campaign against the fascist, terrorist regime of Saddam Hussein.

  Two opposing views, canceling each other out. In the end, science fiction had no role in changing social perceptions of this signal event of the new millennium. I wish I could take a more optimistic view, and so, when we talk over the next couple of days about science fiction and social change, I want you guys who are giving the academic papers to arm me with stuff so that when people ask me what I do for a living I don’t have to fall back on “I write escapist stories.” Instead, I want to be able to say, “I am part of a literary movement that actually has influenced the social agenda of the human race”—and not a literary movement that has made a lot of opposing noises in different directions that end up canceling each other out. For it is up to those of you who study the literature, not we who write it, to sift through it all and see if we really do have a societal impact as we all move together into the future.

  Articles

  A Tale of Two Stories

  Here’s a little piece I wrote for the Ottawa Science Fiction Society Statement in 1997. Just something I wanted to get off my chest…

  Is Canadian science fiction really different from American SF? As a way of answering that, let me tell you about two short stories I wrote.

  The first was for the American marketplace: Mike Resnick e-mailed me, asking me to do a story for an anthology he and Marty Greenberg were editing for DAW called Dinosaur Fantastic. This book was to be completely and unabashedly commercial: DAW was timing its release to coincide with the premiere of the movie Jurassic Park in a blatant attempt to cash in on dinomania.

  I agreed and wrote a story. Not only did it fit Mike’s parameters, it so neatly exemplified what he and Marty wanted for their anthology that they chose to use it as the lead story in the book.

  The same story has since been reprinted in other equally commercial anthologies, including Ace’s Dinosaurs II, edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois, the latter of course, being the single most-honored American SF editor of the last decade. In addition, the story garnered honorable mentions in both Dozois’s Year’s Best Science Fiction and Datlow and Windling’s Year’s Best Fantasy And Horror, both published in New York.

  Clearly, this story succeeded at precisely what it was created to do: fulfilling the needs of the American marketplace.

  I wrote another story for the Canadian marketplace. I set it in Alberta, and had it deal with such things as the erosion of the Canadian social-safety net and the Canadian aversion to capital punishment. I submitted this one to On Spec: The Canadian Magazine of Speculative Writing, Canada’s leading English-language SF magazine. And, of course, I submitted it without my name on the manuscript, as On Spec required at that time. It went through blind judging, but nonetheless was selected for the magazine.

  And, indeed, when it came time for On Spec to put together its “best of” anthology, On Spec: The First Five Years (published by Canada’s leading small-press literary-SF publisher, Tesseract Books), my story was included. Meanwhile, when Tor was putting together its Northern Stars: The Canadian Science Fiction Anthology, editors David G. Hartwell and Glenn Grant (the latter of Montreal) chose to use this typically Canadian story, as well. More: this story went on to win both the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Award (“the Aurora” for Best Short-Form Work in English and the Crime Writers of Canada’s Arthur Ellis Award for Best Short Story of the Year.

  Clearly, then, just as the earlier story had succeeded precisely and specifically at catering to the American market, so had this later story succeeded precisely and specifically at catering to the Canadian market.

  Except…

  Except that there aren’t two stories. There’s only one: “Just Like Old Times.” It appeared in Dinosaur Fantastic published by DAW in July 1993, and it appeared in the Summer 1993 issue of On Spec.

  This story didn’t just sneak into the U.S. market. Rather, it perfectly fit what the American editors needed for a very commercial project; otherwise, it wouldn’t have been their lead story. And this story didn’t just sneak into the Canadian market (and, with blind judging, there’s no way it was selected for whatever marketing value my name has); rather, it perfectly fit what the Canadian editors needed for their literary magazine.

  What’s that, you say? One data point does not a case make? Well, I did pretty much the same thing again this year: I won the short-fiction Aurora Award for “Peking Man,” a story written for—and, again, chosen as the lead story in—the very commercial U.S. anthology Dark Destiny III: Children of Dracula, published by White Wolf.

  Then, of course, there’s the fact that Canadian Jack Whyte handily sells the exact same books to both Penguin Canada and Tor USA; that Toronto’s Guy Gavriel Kay manages to sell the exact same books to Penguin Canada and HarperCollins USA; that both Doubleday Canada and HarperCollins Canada each offered me (although I turned them both down) five-figure advances for Canadian rights to the exact same book I was selling to Tor; that Nova Scotia’s Pottersfield—one of Canada’s oldest literary presses—just bought a short-story collection from Toronto’s Andrew Weiner, gathering together stories first published in American magazines such as Asimov’s and Amazing, that Quarry Press, another leading Canadian literary publisher, is about to release a collection of Ontarian Edo van Belkom’s SF/F stories, all originally published in U.S. magazines; that Edmonton’s Tesseract Books reissued Dreams of an Unseen Planet by B.C.’s Teresa Plowright, originally published by Arbor House USA; that Vancouver’s Sean Stewart sold the exact same manuscript for Passion Play to Ace USA and Tesseract Books Canada; that Chicoutimi’s Elisabeth Vonarburg managed a similar feat with books for Bantam USA and Tesseracts. That…

  Is Canadian SF really different from American SF? Not in any gross sense. Remember, in the 1990s, Canadian SF encompassed everything from the cyberpunk of William Gibson to the space opera of Phyllis Gotlieb to the literary tales of Terence M. Green to the Sturgeonesque writings of Robert Charles Wilson to the hard SF of Robert J. Sawyer to the humorous SF of Spider Robinson to the Heinleinesque work of Donald Kingsbury to the lyrical work of Heather Spears to the philosophical work of Sean Stewart to the military SF of S. M. Stirling…(And, of course, there’s the fantasy work of Charles de Lint and Tanya Huff and Guy Gavriel Kay and Michelle Sagara West and…). Yes, some of the writers mentioned above have since moved out of Canada, but the work they did while living in Canada is presumably considered to be Canadian. I wouldn’t begin to know how to categorize all of the above under a single rubric, let alone be able to say that this complex, variegated array of work somehow is qualitatively different from the complex, variegated array of work done by those south of the border.

  Of course, Canadians may write about different things, or take a different view on an issue than an American might. My novel End of an Era told of a decidedly Canadian attempt to do big science on a shoestring budget; my Far-Seer clearly fits neatly into Margaret Atwood’s view that the central Canadian literary motif is the struggle against a harsh landscape that is trying to kill you; Far-Seer’s sequel, Fossil Hunter, takes a decidedly Canadian approach to politics, as does Starplex; and, of course, Frameshift is at least partially a paean to socialized medicine. But do those things have any impact on whether the books will sell in the States? Of course not.

  Still, one does hear the claim that Canadian SF is so different from American SF that it can only be published in Canada; the claim is often followed by a disdainful sniff implying indeed that Canadian SF is in fact better than the American brand. The assertion is that there’s some ineffable Canadian voice that doesn’t go down well internationally (the experiences of Pulitzer Prize-winner Carol Shields, New York Times bestseller Margaret Atwood, or all the Canadian writers whose books have been adapted by Hollywood notwithstanding).

  But the only people who earnestly make this claim seem to be the ones who can’t sell to well-payi
ng markets. Surely the truth is that these particular Canadian SF writers don’t write well enough to command higher rates; Canada, after all, has no SF short-fiction markets that meet SFWA’s standards of professional pay.

  The “Canadian SF is different” excuse is really just another form of the sometimes-heard “all the really inventive work in the SF field appears in the semiprozines” excuse put forth by American writers who’ve managed penny-a-word sales but can’t seem to crack any major market. It’s just a comfortable way of avoiding having to face up to their own artistic shortcomings.

  Good stories are good stories. Period.

  Pros and Cons

  The Ottawa Citizen, the largest-circulation newspaper in Canada’s capital city, has always been fond of me—perhaps because I was born there in 1960. That paper was the first to dub me “the dean of Canadian science fiction,” and it was the first to ever include me on a mainstream top-ten list, citing Factoring Humanity on their 1998 list of best novels by authors of any nationality.

  More: to my absolute astonishment, when I won the Hugo in 2003, the news of my win, with a wonderful full-color photo of me, was their front-page, above-the-fold, lead story.

  Well, every once in a while, the Citizen asks me to write a little something for them, and I’m always delighted. This piece, about why professional writers attend SF conventions, appeared in the Sunday, November 14, 1999, edition.

  So I’m in a hotel in Los Angeles, being Guest of Honor at a science-fiction convention. It’s the middle of January, and Toronto, where I live, is buried under snow, and so who wouldn’t want to be in sunny LaLa land? And this kid comes up to me—he’s just sixteen or seventeen—and he looks at my name badge, and he says, with all the attitude he can muster, “So, you’re an author. Are you any good?”