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

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Some of them are definitely fantasies of political agency. Much of Heinlein supports this premise. Dave Weber's stuff is so full of politics it drips all over the floor. Eric Flint. Dean Ing. Niven and Pournelle.

Spider Robinson isn't. Spider's work is much more about personal journeys, not ones of nations.

Clarke... walks a fine line. 2001 is pretty personal. 2010 is definitely political, the whole US vs. Russia thing and the impact the Monolith has on it. The later books, 2061 and 3001, definitely more personal.

Bujold herself is definitely totally intertwined in politics.

Bradley is (was) definitely about politics.

What makes fantasy fantasy, and SF SF, is they are about worlds which have not existed. Fantasy is fantasy because it is about a world that *cannot* exist. SF is about a world that *could* exist. (Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan books branch into the world of speculative fiction, which borders on SF... Ryan's world takes a hard left from reality somewhere in the late 1980's, and Jack ends up on the hot seat thanks to an event scarily similar to what happened in New York.) *Much* of SF is more about the characters than it is about the tech, and a heck of a lot of that is about political impacts, not personal. But there do exist SF and fantasy stories that aren't about politics, but about individuals.

IMNASHO, YMMV, EIEIO.

(Ah. My icon reminds me that my favorite TV-based SF, Babylon 5, was about *both*. JMS drew a broad arc describing the struggle between major powers and their systems of government... but also included a heck of a lot of individual character development. I think almost everybody that was anybody in that show underwent an intense personal transformation, not all of which had to do with political pressure. So. I think the answer is, "a large subset of SF/F is politics... but not all." Again, worth what you paid for it. :)

[smallship1.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure the definition fails by being too narrow. The definition of "agency" employed here is one I'm fairly fuzzy on anyway; I think it means something like "ability to do stuff." "Political," as we are often reminded, goes far beyond governments and parties. But still...*goes to shelf and looks* Hmm. It's not as "too-narrow" as I thought; most of the sf novels up there do seem to revolve around either effecting or preventing change, either to a human or to an alien society. I think I'd have to go with technoshaman: a large subset but not all.

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

I think the criteria that cause a book to be identified as SF or fantasy are far shallower than that, and capture such a wide range of stories that such a generalization can't be universal. If it has a dragon in it it's automatically fantasy, and if it has a spaceship in it it's automatically SF. There are F/SF romances, and F/SF mysteries, for example, that in terms of the above classification are as completely "about" love or justice as any example of the mundane genres could be.

I'm not entirely sure what "political agency" means, but I'm sure it can't be found in every F/SF book.

[andpuff.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, my Quarters books are definitely fantasies of political agency (they're the highest fantasy too -- I wonder if that makes a difference). Turns out the Blood books and the Smoke books are actually mysteries as they're definitely fantasies of justice but since the Blood books have always been sold in mystery stores that's not really surprising. I suppose you could call the Valor books fantasies of political agency given that the background story is what moves the foreground forward. Child and Fire's Stone fits but I'm not sure about either Wizard or Gate and the Summoning books have talking cats so we'll just ignore them. *g*

My backlist seems to broadly agree with Lois' theory although I think she's speaking in a VERY general thematic way.

[smoooom.livejournal.com]

Soon? Could you please define Soon? Chapters isn't listing it.

[(Anonymous)]

Amazon says Apr 22 for Passage (The Sharing Knife 3). Soon enough :)

Donald Clarke

[(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

TSK and fantasies of political agency -- or not

[(Anonymous)]

Hi Cat!

To answer some of the other comments below, my observation (which should perhaps be read in its more complete context) is not based so much on a perusal of my bookshelves, but on a perusal of my readers. If you pop over to Amazon.com and read the 87 reviews of _Beguilement_ one after another, you'll see for yourself the pattern start to emerge pretty quickly. One skiffy-minded reviewer after another says, "And in the second half of the book, nothing happens."(*) Romance or character/social-study-minded readers see it almost the other way around. All are reading the same text, mind you. The bifurcation of perception is very marked.

Another way of phrasing the same thing might be, "F&SF readers tend to favor books that supply fantasies of political agency." (The term "political agency" being chosen for being the broadest way I can express what I'm trying to get at.) In other words, the remark is is not so much about the books, as it is about the book-reader relationship. You can see it in also in reviewers who extol books which tackle topical-politics-du-jour, as though the highest function of fiction were social engineering -- tales as a tool to adjust readers' thinking to match, and presumably support, the writers' political agendas: books as arguments. But it exists at all levels of discourse when readers decide what is or is not "important" or "interesting" (or the reverse) about what the characters in any given story are doing.

Certainly there are F&SF books that escape this political bent -- the set includes many of my favorites. But the overall trend, especially when all the mil-SF and mil-fantasy is included, is kind of overwhelming, once one starts to notice it.


Ta, Lois. (Here through the magic of Google-search and book-launch-week distraction.)


(* -- Grant you, in the original plan of the book that section was the mid-book breather before the next big push, but still. World-weaving. Fate. I keep harking back in my mind to a blithe quote from that feckless young male character in Heyer's _The Reluctant Widow_ -- "I really don't know what those women can be finding to do about the house all day." From my point of view I would say, "In _Beguilement_ Chapter 18, the world is changed," but then, my point of view is from the privileged vantage of the end of Vol. 4. I really did think more folks would have twigged to the "One spins the thread, one measures it, and one cuts it off", though.)

[(Anonymous)]

It was not a definition, but an observation: descriptive, not prescriptive. More in my other post.

Ta, L.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

I think the the first word on this subject, and one of the best, comes from none other than George Orwell:

And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.

Political relations, in the broad sense, surround and motivate the characters, readers, and writers in much sf+f. Heinlein and Asimov, certainly. Heinlein was explicitly political and the early "Foundation" books were, as Asimov himself said, based in Roman history. The third of that trinity, of course, is Clarke, and here we find something equally interesting: Childhood's End, The City and the Stars, and 2001 are built around images of transcendence based in scientific philosophy; a mysticism acceptable to a scientifically-inclined readership, in other words. I think if you measure politics and transcendence, you've "got" much of the genre.

BTW, class is a huge motivator in Austen's books: the duties and difficulties of class relations are much of the characters motivations; if you add family politics, those are most of (all of?) their external motivators. (Personality, of course, being the internal motivatior.)

Yawawawn. Wish I could sleep better tonight... Might write more but am Too Tired.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

To some extent, SF and Fantasy can be just backgrounds; settings for a mystery story, or a horror story, or a romance--and I can see that such books might not have a lot of political stuff in them.

But given that F&SF is a wildly diverse field, I do think that a lot of the books in the field involve people (or inventions, or powers) affecting the political landscape.

Even (Cat holds nose) the Ringo book I read earlier is heavily political (not improved thereby, I'm afraid); if we took the politics--the World Council and its war, plus the politics of setting up a "colonyoid" of low-tech society in a post-Fall world--away, the framework of the plot would pretty much collapse.

This is kind of a revelation to me as I'd never thought about books this way. I always thought "Fantasy is defined by the presence of working magic; science fiction is as much a background as anything else." But these are both arguably characteristics of the setting. If "the plot will have to do with how the major characters affect and are affected by the politics around them" turns out to be generally applicable (or even widely but not totally applicable), that gives me another way to think about it.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Spider Robinson isn't. Spider's work is much more about personal journeys, not ones of nations.
I agree with you mostly, but would point out that the Stardance books (which I think were among his most popular) were arguably also about the political.

.) *Much* of SF is more about the characters than it is about the tech,
And in my opinion, improved by that. I mean I like new tech--but what really matters to me is how it affects people's lives.

my favorite TV-based SF, Babylon 5, was about *both*
I think that most stories that deal with the political also deal with the personal--otherwise, how is the author going to make the political interesting? Though I haven't really laid this idea alongside a lot of books to check yet. But I can't at the moment think of a F&SF book that explores the political effects of something without dealing with personal effects also.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I'm not entirely sure what "agency" means in this context either, which complicates the discussion. And in larger contexts the personal shades into the political--one can have "family politics" as in, for instance, deciding who to invite to a wedding (or even something so mundane as who gets stuck with what chores). And one can have "political families" like the Kennedys or the Bushes or the Clintons.

Okay, now I've gotten myself even more mixed up.

But if "fantasies of political agency" (maybe roughly translated as "stories in which the character's actions have the potential to change the society in which they live") describes only a large subset of F&SF, rather than all of it, I still think that's interesting.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the analysis of more data points :-). The Summoning books strike me as fitting broadly into that category, though the society the characters might change is not so much mundane human society (in which their abilities must remain hidden) but more the sort of meta-society of Good and Evil in which they must move while using their magical abilities. On the other hand one could argue that they are comparatively junior members of that meta-society and their actions are unlikely to change its pattern or the basic conflict *much* and therefore they don't count.

I think the Valor books count, as the characters are positioned by political forces (we have to prove something to the aliens), and their success or failure affects the political scene.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

As Donald says. I have pre-ordered and have hopes the book will be in my hands April 22nd, but that may be too optimistic. :-)

[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.

[mrgoodwraith.livejournal.com]

I really don't think SF boils down to "political agency." A lot of good SF is political, sure, because that's a sure way to work up the nice meaty conflicts that drive plots. But a lot of SF -- stories of individual survival like Campbell's "The Moon Is Hell," stories of exploration and discovery like Clarke's "Rendezvous with Rama," and eye-opening adventures like Bradbury's "Runaway Robot," to name a few -- have little or nothing to do with politics.
I like Asimov's essay that, basically, defines The Known Universe as a set of points or surfaces ("topoi") made up of the physical laws, biological factors, societal norms, historic events, and other facets of the day-to-day existence we all live. Mundane literature accepts the topoi as its "axioms"; mundane stories, as weird or silly as they might be, are theorems about Real Life As We Think We Understand It. Science fiction stories *extend* the topoi -- bending or deforming them into Unknown Universes in ways that might not be possible but are at least plausible. "Fantasy" stories (referring to the fantasy genre) *break* the topoi, adding points or surfaces that do not correspond to anything that could happen in Real Life. To use an analogy, mundane literature is like Euclidean geometry, SF is like elliptic or hyperbolic geometry, and fantasy is like some kind of weird projective geometry with bits that can't be mapped.

[(Anonymous)]

I repeat, my remark was an observation, not a reduction. (But your reductive reasoning, and that of one of the other posters, is very skiffy-minded.) And again, I was not discussing the books, as if they existed as a thing in their own right, but the book-reader interface. On the whole, *both* SF and fantasy readers valorize the political and reject the personal and domestic as fit activities for central characters.

Ta, L. (Who wishes we could get back to more science fiction with actual science in it, in place of this endless barrage of war and politics, but science is as hard to sell as art, as an activity for tale.)

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

You could successfully argue that you can't have politics without it being personal too.... but the whole point of the original premise was that SF/F was *all* politics, which I think we've successfully deconstructed.

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

Because politics is so deeply woven through every aspect of everyone's life, I think you can find elements of politics, and of trying to change things connected with politics, in pretty much any story if you look.

Lois's comment that fantasy and science fiction (which for the remainder of this post I will just call "SF") readers are more interested in political agency than other themes is interesting. Assuming that it's true, that implies that SF books should have more of it than non-SF books, because only books that people are interested in are valued, and in general writers whose books aren't valued move on to selling shoes, waiting tables, or occasionally literary criticism.

I enjoy reading stories where the characters have power to change the world around them in large part because I feel powerless to change my own world. And I enjoy reading SF because I like imagining worlds where things are, or at least could be, better. I think trying to imagine how fictional people's lives are different based on the premises of an SF world is a good start for trying to figure out how real people's lives would be different based on things that might change.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

In troubled times, people turn to the arts for navigation. I suppose it's natural enough, but I wish there was more space for writing about science and art, too--more space for artistry, period.

"I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls, / And woke to find it true; / I wasn't born for an age like this; / Was Smith? Was Jones? Were you?"--Orwell

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Most of Robinson's fiction, like his idol Heinlein's, contains a lot of political preaching; it's less obvious in his earlier stories. Robinson, however, is more-or-less an anarchist, which most USers don't recognize as a political position. (There's a whole separate rant on the stunning political naivete of the average USer, here. We have a very narrow idea of the range of political ideas in this country.)

[(Anonymous)]

No, it wasn't. The point of the original premise was that F&SF readers and reviewers (and, of course, many writers), on the whole, prefer politics to other subjects for story. And I think that's interestingly weird.

You may be misreading the comment by attributing the "fantasies of..." to the books and not the readers, perhaps, or to the books in the absence of readers. (There are no books in the absence of readers, actually.) I may clarify this in future discussions, if the topic ever comes up again, by rephrasing that as, "If romances supply fantasies of love, and mysteries supply fantasies of justice... etc." Would that work to keep the linear thinkers from haring off after their favorite prey, d'you think?

Romance being a strong case-in-point as a non-preferred, personal/domestic subject, and the one that first drew my attention to the observation. It would also be interesting to come up with a list of other non-preferred subjects in F&SF, and then try to decide if that's mapping anything other than the genre boundaries themselves. A curious element of scramble-for-status-by-reading-choice seems to be involved, but that's not the whole of it by any means.


Ta, L.

[(Anonymous)]

Observation, not premise. Got carried away by the alliteration there, sorry.

Ta, L.

Fantasy vs. SF, film at 11

[(Anonymous)]

Another curious thought that was triggered by this discussion -- one can derail any convention panel for the rest of its hour by asking the question, "What's the difference between SF and fantasy?" and then just letting the audience go.

But I don't think I've ever been on a panel that asks, "What is/are the *same* between SF and fantasy?" (Implied: that is not just an element of all fiction generally like "words in a row" or "characters with problems".)

Why does no one try to answer that one? Even more, why does no one ever ask it?

My original observation was only one such item-of-similarity. Can anyone think of more?

Ta, L.