Science fiction is the last great literature of ideas.
From where I sit, traditional “literary fiction” has dropped the ball. I studied literature in college, and throughout my twenties I voraciously read contemporary fiction. Then, eight or nine years ago, I found myself getting — well — bored.
Why? I think it’s because I was reading novel after novel about the real world. And there are, at the risk of sounding superweird, only so many ways to describe reality. After I’d read my 189th novel about someone living in a city, working in a basically realistic job and having a realistic relationship and a realistically fraught family, I was like, “OK. Cool. I see how today’s world works.” I also started to feel like I’d been reading the same book over and over again. ^
Clive makes a juicy point here: literature that attempts to be realistic spends all of its time describing what we have today, which is observable by just about anyone. Its only way to make itself compelling is to show us details we haven’t seen already, but the question is really how informative are those details? The answer is not much, even if read in large doses.
Literature today, like music today, struggles with its own productification. There are people to buy it, so they’ve found a way to mass produce it, which is the realistic novel. In it, people write about the personal drama of individuals adapting to the current lifestyle. The problem is that there’s no struggle, journey or learning in that other than the most shallow questions of acceptance and social status.
With that in mind, we do not need realistic literature. Life will always be more real than literature. What we need is literature that re-invests language with meaning by showing us struggle, journey and learning. It needs to show characters have transformative, not cathartic, experiences that change the way they look at life itself in some fundamental way.
Another world for realistic literature is mundane literature. The stores are crammed with it. Each book tells basically the same story, so the authors dress them up the absurd and outlandish in order to make the book distinctive. This is why you can never read a book about normal people, only people with bunches of problems and awkward personal circumstances.
Very few people write about ideas.
If you run a realistic simulation enough times — writing tens of thousands of novels about contemporary life — eventually you’re going to explore almost every outcome. So what do you do then?
You change the physics in the sim. Alter reality — and see what new results you get.
Unfortunately, Clive makes the same mistake. He thinks we should write about alternative realities, or more external dressing up of the same character play, instead of doing what great literature does. Great literature goes inward. It writes about the struggle for the soul of individuals as they find their balance of adaptation with society, and with their own moral knowledge of the right path, even if the people around them do not acknowledge it.
The greatest novels have rejected the cathartic, or the idea that we can tackle a whole load of personal drama and release it somehow, then after our catharsis return to life as it is. The greatest novels are about people who struggle against things as they are and strive to make life conform to a vision only they can see. Even the Bible fits this description. The realistic novel has no such aspirations, and if it bores Clive, I’m sure it will bore you and me.