Social science fiction
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Social science fiction is a term used to describe a subgenre of science fiction concerned less with technology and space opera and more with sociological speculation about human society.
Exploration of fictional societies is one of the most interesting aspects of science fiction, allowing it to perform predictive (H.G. Wells, The Final Circle of Paradise) and precautionary (Fahrenheit 451) functions, to criticize the contemporary world (Antarctica-online) and to present solutions (Walden Two), to portray alternative societies (World of the Noon) and to examine the implications of ethical principles (Lukyanenko).
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[edit] Social science fiction in English
Some roots of the genre may lie in such social speculations as utopian and dystopian fiction, which could be considered as extreme special cases of the genre.
One of the first writers who used science fiction to explore sociological topics was H.G. Wells, with his classic The Time Machine (1895) revealing the human race diverging into separate branches of Elois and Morlocks as a consequence of class inequality: a happy pastoral society of Elois preyed upon by the Morlocks but yet needing them to keep their world functioning. The Sleeper Awakes (1899, 1910) predicted the spirit of the XX century, technically advanced, undemocratic and bloody.
In the U.S. the new trend of science fiction away from gadgets and space opera and toward speculation about the human condition was championed in pulp magazines of the 1940s by authors such as Robert A. Heinlein and by Isaac Asimov, who coined the term social science fiction [1] to describe his own work. The term is not often used today except in the context of referring specifically to the changes that took place in the 1940s, but the subgenre it defines is still a mainstay of science fiction.
Many of the best known dystopias were inspired by reality: Aldous Huxley's "negative utopia" Brave New World (1932) and, alluding to the Soviet Union, Animal farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) by George Orwell. In 1921 Yevgeny Zamyatin wrote his bitter novel We, forecasting the "victory of forces of reason over forces of kindness" in Soviet Russia; prior to perestroika it was known only in the West and influenced both Orwell and Huxley. "The thought-destroying force" of McCarthyism influenced Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953).
The Chrysalids (1955) by John Wyndham explored the society of several telepathic children in a world hostile to such differences. Robert Sheckley studied polar civilizations of criminal and stability in his 1960 novel The Status Civilization.
The modern era of social science fiction began with the 1960's, when authors such as Harlan Ellison, Brian Aldiss, and Ursula K. Le Guin wrote novels and stories that reflected real-world political developments. Ellison's main theme was the protest against increasing militarism. LeGuin in The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) explored non-traditional sexual relations. Kurt Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), which used the science fiction theme of time-travel to explore anti-war, moral, and sociological themes. Frederik Pohl's series Gateway (1977 — 2004) combined social science fiction with hard science fiction. Among the finest modern exponent of social science fiction in the Campbellian/Heinlein tradition is L. Neil Smith, who is considered the heir to Robert A. Heinlein's individualism and libertarianism in science fiction, and who wrote both The Probability Broach (1981) and Pallas, which dealt with alternative "sideways in time" futures and what a libertarian society would look like.
Kim S. Robinson explored different models of the future in Three Californias Trilogy (1984, 1988, 1990).
Joss Whedon's Firefly (a 2002 television series) and its 2005 sequel Serenity (a feature film) conjured up a world where freedom, rebellion against centralized authority, and western as well as Chinese cultural influences shape a society 500 years in the future. The hardware (space ships, space travel) is secondary (except for the widespread use of guns for self-defense, which shapes the society's social customs. As Heinlein himself said, "An armed society is a polite society.")
The Saga of Recluce (1991 — now), by L. E. Modesitt, Jr. represents a fusion of science fiction and fantasy that can be described as social science fiction. The 13 books of the series describe the changing relationships between two technologically advanced cultures and the cultures of a primitive world to which each is involuntarily transported. Themes of gender stereotyping, sexism, ethics, economics, environmentalism and politics are explored in the course of the series, which examines the world through the eyes of all its protagonists.
[edit] The genre in the Eastern Bloc
All science fiction of the Soviet era had to subscribe to communist ideology, or else the author could face serious consequences — from a ban against being published to death under Stalin, imprisonment or psychiatric treatment under Brezhnev. There were poor and opportunistic works, there were works of talent touched by ideology (e.g. 1923 Aelita or 1926 The Garin Death Ray by Alexei Tolstoy), there were non-ideological works describing the happy future of humankind (some works of Kir Bulychev and Ivan Efremov), but also such writers as Bulgakov, Shvarts and Strugatsky who chose the hard way of "balancing" on the edge, struggling not to betray their views while avoiding punishment for expressing them.
The 1920s brought Platonov and Zamyatin, but it was not until the time of Perestroika that their works were published in the Soviet Union.
An "exception which proves the rule" is an example of critique under Stalin — Evgeny Shvarts play The Dragon (1944), showing how totalitarianism thrusts its roots into the hearts of the people.
The next period of science fiction in the Soviet Union was shaped by the greater liberalization of the Khrushchev regime, advances of science, and the beginning of the space age.
In 1957 Ivan Efremov wrote the utopic Andromeda, revealing a harmonious space-exploring civilization of the distant future, whose culture took much from antique art. His further works included Razor's Edge (1963) emphasizing narrowness of the way of successful development of a civilization, and the dystopian The Bull's Hour (1968).
Amongst the best known social science fiction is the Noon Universe of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, designed to be a future world of "communism", where creative work is considered the highest purpose, but unlike utopian worlds, Noon Universe is settled by real people. The rise of reaction, initiated by Khrushchev's public criticism of modern art and literature in 1963, showed to Strugatsky that "while for us communism was a world of freedom and creativity, for them it was the society, in which the population fulfulled immediately and with pleasure all precepts of the Party and the government"[2]. This largely affected their Hard to be a God (1963).
Suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968 ultimately ruined Strugatsky's dreams about the Soviet rule. Another Noon Universe novel, Prisoners of Power (1969), somehow alluding to Soviet Union describes Maxim Kammerer, crashed on an unknown planet in the wrecked Land of Fathers, and his attempt to destroy the system of transmission which deprived his new friends of ability of critical thinking.
Social science fiction turned out to be a powerful means to respond to real situation in communist countries. While communist rules didn't allow any critique, one of possibilities was to veil it as that some science fiction-ish world. In the 1980s the genre called 'sociological fantasy' (fantastyka sociologiczna) arose in the People's Republic of Poland. It focused on the development of societies, generally dominated by totalitarian governments. This genre was represented by writers like Janusz A. Zajdel (Limes Inferior, Paradyzja), Edmund Wnuk-Lipiński (Apostezjon trilogy), Adam Wiśniewski-Snerg or Marek Oramus. Books from that genre were based in different times (usually in future), and usually were pretext for analysing structures of the described societies, having been full of allusions to reality. After the fall of the communism, when using real world examples became as safe in former Eastern Bloc countries as in their Western counterparts, this genre mostly transformed itself into a political fiction, represented by writers such as Rafał A. Ziemkiewicz.
[edit] Post-Soviet social science fiction
While the major course of the post-Soviet society is democracy (anti-communism was a sort of a national idea only for several years), the idea isn't really topical — usually you can find only little bits of e.g. anticommunism:
- An unusual work is The Worm by Alexander Lazarevich (1992), "programmers" science fiction with slight nostalgie for Soviet scientific and technological past.
- Arrows of Perun with separable warheads, a 1994 novella by Braider and Chadovich depicts a small typically totalitarian state, founded by personnel of a Soviet missile shaft.
- Search for designation or Twenty seventh theorem of ethics (1994) and Devil amongst people (1991) are late novels of Strugatsky, exploring the tragical way of living in the Soviet Union.
- Evgeny Lukin's [1] 2000 satirical novel Scarlet aura of a protopartorg is set in a "horisontal" world of little countries-peers on the post-Russian space. Information and truth lost their sense, but leaders can use magics, scale of which depends on their popularity. The action concerns intrigues between two states, one ruled by democratic League of Wizards, another by Christian Orthodox Communists.
- Vyacheslav Rybakov in 2003 novel In the adjacent year in Moscow explores a dying world of Russia torn apart into poor tiny countries, ruled from the West and having no own sincere desires. Rybakov lais an emphasis on comparative culture studies and a trial to regain national unity...
Changing of the whole way of living in the country have also resulted in rethinking the role of Security Services: Lukyanenko's Spectrum (2002), Gromov's Step to the Left, Step to the Right (1999), etc. Widely known is a 1999 novel Wybrakovka ("Rejection") by Oleg Divov, describing hirrid consequences of giving guns to a plenty of people with the right to shoot anyone that seems a criminal.
However the main body of modern Russian social science fiction doesn't lay in the plain of "capitalism-socialism" — but explores common human values and is influenced by both Western and Soviet science fiction.
The duology of Sergey Lukyanenko The Stars Are Cold Toys — Star Shadow (1997) is one of the best modern Russian works of the genre. In the series of short stories Beautiful away (1990 — 1999?) he pictured a future world of high standards of living, where all people have a guaranteed minimum of services but most suffer from not being engaged in any occupation. In his early novel Knights of Forty Islands (1992), Lukyanenko dealt with a society of kidnapped children who had to fight with each other to get a ticket to home.
Alexander Gromov is a known writer of the genre, who is interested in evolution of societies in harsh environments and people's psychology. Somehow jokingly, you take a socium (limited number of people is better — easier to work) and do some ugly thing to it, and then you sit and look at the consequences. His duology Soft landing (1995) and Year of the Lemming (1997) considers people in a dying world. Power and freedom, leadership, oppression and individualism, and love are probably the "central" themes... The hero of his Saint Vitus Minuet (1997) has to be a harsh ruler of a small isolated society of kids to let them survive... "Soft" struggle for freedom in a matriarchal world is depicted in the duology A Thousand and One Day — The first of the Mohicans (2001, 2004). In Antarctica-online (2004) the author criticises politics of the modern world.
Marina and Sergey Dyachenko [2] wrote several books which may be considered as social science fiction with some emphasis on psychology. Armaged-Home (Armaged-Dom, 2000, awarded with "Bronze Snail" and "Sigma-F" in 2001) is set in a world where apocalypses happen every 20 years. Prior to each, people have several hours to get salvation in randomly opened Gates... and "tickets" to get there ahead of others become the highest and basest privilege. Prize-winning The Cave (Peschera, 1998) is set in the society, where "natural" human aggression was replaced from day life to a sort of dreams, in which people realize themselves as beasts in the Cave and kill to feed... There are no "crimes" (although the authorities are as base as always, forming a kind of soft totalitarianism), but have people the right to know who they have killed and to be responsible for that? In the 2003 novel Pandem the writers depicted an attempt of a superbeing with half-god abilities to help people on the Earth to evolve... Despite huge technical and social achievements, Pandem faced the principal contradiction: removing pain from a person's life it removed one's incentives to evolve. Either to love, either to let to evolve... On realizing this, Pandem left the Earth.
Eurochinese humanist and writer Holm van Zaichik (pen name of Vyacheslav Rybakov and Igor Alimov) is known for the world of Orduss, a fictionary country unifying China, Russia, Near East... a humane society with a rich culture.
[edit] Examples of social science fiction from the 1940s
- Isaac Asimov, Nightfall, 1941
- Isaac Asimov, The Foundation Series, 1942-
- Robert A. Heinlein, "If This Goes On—", 1940
- Robert A. Heinlein, Beyond This Horizon, 1942
[edit] Further reading
- Modern Science Fiction: Its Meaning and Its Future, eds. Reginald Bretnor and John Wood Campbell, 2nd edition, 1979, ISBN 0-911682-23-6.
[edit] Notes
- ^ In his essay appearing in Modern Science Fiction: Its Meaning and Its Future (ed. Reginald Bretnor, 1953).
- ^ (Russian) Boris Strugatsky, Comments to the traversed, 1961-1963
