Why SF?

Since I’ve already confessed that I don’t always successfully pull off science fiction, I’m going to take this question quite seriously.

There are answers that I’ve given when asked by people who are interviewing me for mainstream newspapers or for genre trade magazines, which are kind of the answer I feel I’m supposed to give. You know the one: science fiction allows me to write about politics and religion subversively, under the radar, as well as affords me the medium in which to explore the ramifications of current societal trends. Not that that’s not true (in fact I made the argument that that is the purpose of SF/F earlier), but sometimes I wonder if I’m not just regurgitating that answer because I don’t want to say what actually pops into my mind first: because it’s _cool_, dude. Wicked cool.

I think I also write SF/F because it’s what imprinted on my brain first. Nearly every story read to me as a child falls into the camp of fantasy, IMHO. Talking animals? Fantasy. Then, of course, came that monumental day in 1978, when I saw the vastness of space for what it really was – big, I mean, really big.

Talking about this on Sunday at the Second Foundation Speculative Fiction Reading Group, I confessed that I didn’t know what genre I’d written when I sold Archangel Protocol. If you’d have asked me at the time, I would have said that AP was fantasy – maybe “future fantasy” even. Why? Because the plot turns on a fantasy element (angels). However, my agent and my editor told me it was science fiction, and that’s what they put on the spine. Then, of course, came the critics who complained that the science fiction elements weren’t strong enough, that what I’d written was just science fiction window dressing.

Ya can’t win for losin’.

But, so the question remains. Why is my writing pulled toward the black hole of SF? Is it just the background pictures I prefer? Or is there something innate about SF that I feel I need in order to tell a story?

I think part of it is probably simple. SF/F stories hold my attention. A space ship on the cover will still make me pick a book off the shelf and read the back cover copy. Thus, when I think about investing in the time commitment to write a 100,000 word story, I go for SF/F ideas because I know they’ll have staying power in my brain. Yet, I also tend to write in some kind of mystery. I believe most books I’ve written are a mystery of one kind or another. And romance. Even my SF novels tend to have heavy romantic elements.

I do like to write about things that don’t otherwise make for particularly sellable novels: religion and politics, and I like to write about them in a way that isn’t terribly suited to mainstream fiction. Which is to say, you can’t usually get away with asking the questions -- what if there really was a God? What would he think of the religious right? -- in traditional fiction formats. I do think that science fiction readers tend to be more open to ideas that other readers find difficult. Religion has been a part of SF since the beginning (or nearly so) – Who can forget Jesus on Mars? Politics, too. Theodore Sturgeon is partly responsible for my coming out because I read “World Well Lost” (1953) in collection at a tender pre-teen age.

Plus, space ships are cool.