The new Bujold book is coming out soon.

[catsittingstill]

The Sharing Knife: Passage  is coming out soon.  I have already ordered my copy from Amazon.  8 days and counting :-)

There's a review here, along with an interview of Lois McMaster Bujold.  She brings up a very interesting point--I think I'll just use her words for it:

I have come to believe that if romances are fantasies of love, and mysteries are fantasies of justice, F&SF are fantasies of political agency. (Of which the stereotypical “male teen power fantasy” is again merely an especially gaudy and visible subset.)

I'm not sure I'm understanding it right.  But I'm interested in trying.  Are science fiction and fantasy stories "fantasies of political agency"?  I would take that to mean that the political results of the characters' actions are sort of the point of the story--the way in a romance the development of the relationship is the point of the story, and in a mystery, the discovery of the truth is the point of the story.

I'd always thought of science fiction as being stories about inventions or discoveries of scientific principles.  Some of these stories are about how they play out in a social arena (like part of the whole story of Wildside is how the government reacts to discovering that the main character has a Gate To Elsewhere, and how the characters deal with that).  I hadn't really thought about this being the point of the story, and certainly not about the political subset of the social being the point of the story, exactly, but I'm having trouble making a case that it's not, either.

Or take another book I'm reading because it was free: Lord of the Isles.  It's about several characters who are magical in one way or another.  And their magic certainly gives them a lot of potential to change events around them.  And some of that has political implications.  I'm not done with the book yet so it's premature to state that the political changes (or the potential for them) are the point of the story.  But they certainly add to the sense that the characters are important, and that their choices and achievements matter.  (Also parenthetically I had expected to not like it, but started reading because what the heck, I got it free.  It turns out to not be great--as one person pointed out, pretty much any baddie has short legs and long arms; why is that?--but it's not lousy.  I might like that author's military fiction a lot less, but the straight out fantasy isn't so bad.)

Whereas if I think of a non F&SF book--say Pride and Prejudice, the point of the story is the relationships between the characters.  Yes, they live within a social world that is not entirely apolitical, but I don't get the impression that the character's choices will change the political landscape.

Hmm.  Interesting.  Anybody want to help me think about this, for example with examples of books that support or fail to support the proposition that F&SF are fantasies of political agency?

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I think she may be getting at Campbell's notion that a good science fiction story was not so much about the invention of gadget X, but dealt with how gadget X impacts the society around it. Things that have siregnificant effects on society usually also have political effects.

I agree that is a subset of science fiction and that there can be SF that doesn't involve political consequences, but I think it is a pretty large subset.

Donald Clarke

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I think that holds as regards science fiction (which is part of why I was so bitterly disappointed in the Ringo book--marvelous gadget affects only frivolous parties) but I had never thought about it with respect to fantasy before.