Social Justice Sci-Fi Warrior!
So for those of you who've been living under a rock these past few years, the world of sci-fi literature has experienced a good deal of upheaval lately. There're these whining assholes called the Sad Puppies (or something about Puppies I'm sure), and they disrupted some big, old-timey 'lefty' sci-fi award, or whatever.
You can tell I'm really invested in the whole thing, right?
Sci-fi has always been a progressive genre, both in readership and authorship. Even the most conservative audiences are progressive enough at least to imagine some future where humanity bands together and overcomes the odds (whether that's an alien invasion, or imminent meteor apocalypse, or environmental disaster or what the hell ever). Lately there's perhaps been a shift towards some overt, ahem, editorial intentions shall we say.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for saving the earth, but I didn't need Avatar to give me the cinema-length moron's version of the message.
I came up into sci-fi through the gateway drug for many of my generation, the Star Wars Expanded Universe. They're a gaggle of pulpy adventure serials (dozens of them, some more than just a few books long) riffing off about a gajillion disasters which occur in the thirty years following the original Star Wars films. Outside some watered-down, quasi-Buddhist "Force philosophy," you wouldn't exactly call them provacative sci-fi.
There's a whole other post in here on the definition of sci-fi into which I won't delve. If it includes dystopian, then The Giver was actually my first exposure to sci-fi at a tender age indeed. But that's all diversion.
The point is it took me a while - longer than I'd like to admit - to graduate to more nutritious fare. Eventually I found and read Le Guin. First I was like "Oh man, I hate her," because her writing is flawless lyrical beauty whose perfection makes the writer in me want to curl up under the porch and die.
It took a few days for the intentions behind that novel to sink in. Because of course Le Guin is more than awesome prose and flowing dialogue. Her writing is more than story, even. It's a message.
The literary quality and mastery of craft in Le Guin's work is a happy supplement to the thematic meat, but there's no causation dynamic between the two. Her work didn't need to be some of the most notable writing of the century -- from a stylistic and mechanical perspective -- to resound with audiences (though of course I for one am relieved to be living in this reality, and not some alternate dimension in which Le Guin's messages were as pure as ever, but the writing purely pedestrian).
I'm not sure I'll ever wield my native tongue half so dangerously as Le Guin. I like to believe the pen is mightier than the sword, but the fact remains that not all pens were created equal.
And in the end, I'm not sure I have anything to say.
One cannot distill The Left Hand Of Darkness into any convenient sound bite. It's an entire novel of fuck-me brilliance building to a single moment of clarity, and I won't disservice the genius by trying to put into a single sentence what Le Guin took an entire book to impress upon me in that first, awe-struck reading.
Ignore the mechanics, style, craft. I'm still not sure I have any moment to build to.
Le Guin and her work has message. Statement. Myself and my personal philosophies provide -- at best -- only questions and uncertainties, blended with vague resentments.
My gut reactions when I write the rough drafts of an episode of Daisy's Next Dimension is to hide behind it: to turn everything into one dark joke. So I have cops serving as mook cannon-fodder, or merciless alien-slug-parasites ripping through Center City Philadelphia, the government is definitely out to get you, and all of a sudden Jess Rudolph is robbing an abortion clinic, fishing for a politically correct way to demand the fetal stem tissues resultant from said services, and I'm thinking Crap, this might be getting a little out of hand, somebody's about to get WICKED triggered.
Sidenote: I don't believe in safe spaces.
If Le Guin is the Michelangelo of this sphere, breaking barriers with every facet of her art, than I'm some kid with a can of spray-paint who's gotten kinda decent enough to impress his neighborhood buddies.
I know I'm dissatisfied with my country's leadership and governance. I became a legal adult the year the Great Recession began; me being pissed at the government is nothing new. I know I see the wealthy shot-callers getting more money and more power, while all the rest of us get "meh." I know I see them tightening the chains on all of us, and half the time we're happily signing the contract.
I know I see cops who look like military shooting unarmed civilians what feels like every other day. Jackboot thugs kicking down doors and shooting your dog or destroying your property or outright killing a man for no damn reason. I know I cannot envision any near future in which I can afford health insurance, regardless of how many hours I work, because some crooks are too busy smoking their cigars and laughing maniacally as they sip their brandy and bleed the whole lot of us dry.
When I wrote the first few books of Daisy's Next Dimension -- what became the first half of Season 1 -- I cast aside any literary aspirations (or, if I'm perfectly blunt, pretension). My goal was to get a decent pool of people -- say, a thousand -- to pick up the first book, flip to the first page, and proceed to flip all other pages until completion, and do the same damn thing with all the other Daisy books.
I figured I might need to giveaway tens of thousands of copies of the first book to hook those loyal thousand, my fanatic army if you will. So I needed stories which (superficially at least) appealed to a decent-sized audience, were paced quick enough to hold interest in the short term, and varied enough to hold interest long-term.
Off the back of this first, loyal thousand, I figured I could build a nice little kingdom. And that was all I cared about.
I wasn't writing for my old professors or peers. I didn't write this for Terry Gross (though of course I fantasize on a daily basis about her interviewing me on Fresh Air regardless). I didn't write it for the NPR reviewer dude.
I wrote it for people who like to read sci-fi, The End.
Maybe that's part of an artist's own maturation plot. Maybe the flavors of anarchy I've woven throughout Daisy are message enough. Perhaps vague sentiments of Fuck The Man are new ideas to some (though to my own generation it is already a tired trope). There are a dozen other novels I've written and countless other novels I intend to write: all the time in the world to be 'literary' and hone my 'message'.
For now, I'm just going to ruthlessly slaughter celebrity cameos in the name of parody.
For now, it's just aliens, ray-guns, and teleporters.
For now, I'll have to hope that a copper's head exploding for comedic effect only pisses off some of you.
