Definition of Science Fiction

Science Fiction

A Definition of Science Fiction -- a Frightening realistic glimpse into a probable future

"Oh Brave New World! O. Wonder! That Has Such People in it!" This is the poetic exclamation that John the Savage of Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World utters, upon seeing individuals from 'the future' (really, the present day) in his so-called primitive, native society. When the future individuals seem bemused by John's highfalutin poetic utterance, John explains that he is merely quoting Shakespeare's "The Tempest," a fantastic play about wizards and enchanted islands and airy spirits. Yet while Brave New World is conventionally defined as a science fiction novel, "The Tempest" is never defined as a science fiction play, merely a poetic fantasy. When attempting to come to a convincing definition of the novelistic genre science fiction, it is perhaps thought proving to first look at this striking comparison between these two fictions and two apparently similar genres -- the fantastic and the scientific.

While both fantastic and scientific fictions can show the reader the distinction between different types of human moral behaviors, through the use of fictionally contrived plot devices and artfully created strange situations, wondrous settings, and author-constructed rules of law (such as making magic govern an island, rather than the police, for instance, or genetically programmed happiness rather than judges), science fiction, unlike any other form of fantastical fiction attempts to give human beings a vision of the future that is probable, rather than merely imaginative. The genre of science fiction hopes to not simply hold up a distorted mirror to the present day, by which present day people can better see their true selves. It instead hopes to show a vision of what the technical future may really be like -- unless people act differently today, towards the technological capacities they do possess. Thus, while Shakespeare's fantastic island might have been a cautionary tale about human behavior and wonderment, it was not a warning that someday wizards might govern all of humanity. But Huxley's vision of a eugenically governed future, where people seek nothing but pleasure, not truth, and soma rather than lasting satisfaction in hard work, was meant to scare his readers into looking more critically at their attitudes and technology. Science fiction often takes the tone of moral imperative and a call to action for human morality to act more responsibility in the present day, not simply a reflection upon human morality in strange situations.

Yet despite this sober use of science fiction, even perhaps more so than other forms of fiction, science fiction often has a humorous, even satirical tone to it. This may be seen in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, which, although set in the present, portrays an absurd view of modern, mechanized conflict. In Vonnegut's parallel universe his characters frequently have ridiculous names and rationales for their behavior in a dehumanized, technical environment of war. However, this is not because the setting is not realistic but because Vonnegut's novel acts as a kind of parody of present-day reality and wartime rhetoric. It people do not behave differently towards wartime conflict, he suggests, then the absurd reality of World War II's incarnation of Slaughterhouse Five will become a true reality of the next World War.

Thus, rather than creating a purely alternative world, like a fantasy, with no connection to modern life, a science fiction novel usually creates a kind of parody or exaggerated 'take' on modern life, usually of dehumanizing or technical elements, using satire and exaggeration to drive its point home. The surreal atmosphere of Slaughterhouse Five is further created by the novel's methodology of storytelling, as it moves backwards and forwards in time. The main character is Billy Pilgrim, a World War II veteran who was captured by the Germans in the Ardennes offensive in 1944. Although this is a real-life event, the absurd attitudes of the commanding officers and soldiers towards heroism makes the supposedly 'true' world of these sections of the novel seem just as strange as Huxley's. Conflict and the dehumanized, mechanical nature of conflict, suggests Vonnegut, is the end product of modern, distanced warfare where bombs rather than people matter most.

This coolness of tone is one reason why readers seldom feel the same emotional investiture in the characters of science fiction as they do in characters of other genres. Bernard Marx of Brave New World is as close to a hero as Huxley's novel is willing to have, and Marx is callous, clever, and mainly interested in bedding the main female protagonist, even though he occasionally questions his society's values. In Slaughterhouse Five, the novel's initial setting depicts the main protagonist in 1968, where he is married and has two children. Although it gradually becomes clear that he is injured, and that his wife is dead, the reader does not care so much as merely appreciate the irony that, despite all that Billy has gone through, he may die by accident, even after having survived Dresden. Billy is also a highly unreliable narrator, but unlike a fantasy, his unreliable dreams and visions do have real world connections and parallels that make the warnings of the dangers of war have implications beyond the created universe of the novel's framework.

One of the most horrific and funny scenes in Huxley, is when John's mother Linda dies, and children dance around her bed, as they are taught in Brave New World, not to fear death, or even respect it, despite Linda's son's John's evident grief. Science fiction often causes the reader to think, rather than to feel emotionally moved or connected to the characters. But if it were not so satirical, perhaps the genre would seem unbearable, given the tragedies that often ensue -- unlike the children, the reader is affected, but on an intellectual rather than on a feeling level -- he or she appreciates the author's point.

Of course, there are exceptions to the emotional disconnection that is usually true of the parallel universe or possible reality created by the science fiction genre. One of these exceptions is undoubtedly found in the example of the difficult plot Solaris, although the intensity of the novel could cause the reader to argue that the book is best classified as philosophical or fantastical rather than scientific in its orientation. However, Solaris does contain elements of science fiction, such as the projected use of present day technology into a probable future, and a wrestling with its possible moral implications for humanity. Solaris' world is set longer into the imagined future than Vonnegut or even Huxley's assumed and created worlds. In the novel, people from the planet earth, including a man called Kelvin, come to a space station that appears to be deserted. Then, Kelvin a woman who looks like the man's dead wife visits him in the middle of the night. The novel attempts to suggest that conventional notions of identity, past, and present are false. Its vision of the future questions our present way of viewing the terminality of life, but not so much to question technical advances, but to question the way we assume that death is the end and that life proceeds on a linear path, despite the presence of memory and the persistent influence of the dead.