Geoff Ryman's guest of honor speech
These are the notes I took March 15 during Geoff Ryman's guest of honor speech at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. Titled "In Praise of Science Fiction," Ryman's speech touches hardly at all on fantasy, but he does wind up praising -- who else? -- Kelly Link.
Ryman is a Canadian citizen living in the United Kingdom, where he teaches at the University of Manchester. He led the team that designed the first No. 10 Downing Street website and the first British monarchy website, which required him to personally brief the Queen. Ryman's story "The Last Days in the Life of Hero Kai" -- in the latest Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, and on our syllabus -- is only one of his several Cambodian-themed fictions, which include the World Fantasy Award-winning "The Unconquered Country" (1985), the new novel The King's Last Song (2006) and the new story "Pol Pot's Beautiful Daughter" (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, 2006).
===
In his introduction, Gary Wolfe of Roosevelt University in Chicago says the question of what happened to Dorothy Gale’s parents has been a theme of all Geoff Ryman’s fiction, not just the clearly Wizard of Oz-inspired Was – including “The Last Days in the Life of Hero Kai.” Wolfe quotes Ryman: “It is necessary to distinguish history from fantasy whenever possible, and then use them against each other.”
===
At Oxford, an interviewer asked Ryman how he reconciled the writing of science fiction with the teaching of literature.
Ryman loves the TV series Battlestar Galactica – the music, the camera work, the special effects, the acting. He thinks Mary McDonnell’s performance, for example, very well depicts what a female U.S. president might be like. But note that everything he loves about Battlestar Galactica never would be, never could be, contained in a novel. Novels don’t have music, camera work, special effects and acting. In fact, a novel built of the same materials as Battlestar Galactica would bore him utterly. For one thing, he’s allergic to faster-than-light travel, especially when it’s seemingly cost-free. He’s allergic to fiction about the urgencies of wartime, because this is a good way to avoid writing about everyday life and about women’s issues. He’s also unimpressed with the stereotyped black characters on Battlestar Galactica, who are the same stereotyped black characters found on Firefly. You’ll never see three black characters conversing on any supposedly multiracial show, because three blacks conversing (or three Asians conversing, or three Native Americans conversing, etc.) is seen by white audiences as a conspiracy, a sign the minorities haven’t been properly assimilated.
“Science fiction’s response to the Other is really straightforward: You either shoot it or assimilate it.”
In “big-surface sf,” including most Hollywood sf, we see a turning away from the future as a land of possibility. For example, in his novel The Carpet Makers, the very popular German writer Andreas Eschbach, an expert storyteller “who can’t extrapolate his way out of a paper bag,” just cobbles the past onto the future. Firefly is just a Western in space, a future Gunsmoke. Battlestar Galactica does a better trick, the Star Wars trick of cobbling the future onto the past: Such science fiction isn’t set in the future at all, but “a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away,” so that any question of prediction is swept aside.
Battlestar Galactica also teems with “female hate figures”: all the Cylons, all the cyborgs, Admiral Cain (“the series’ Pol Pot”), the commander’s wife, the terrorist who takes over the pleasure dome, etc. Moreover, “The female hate figures all are killed by other women,” or more specifically by “assimilated women,” women who act just like men. “It’s a simple trick, and it’s extraordinarily easy. I could do it in my sleep. You just take a character gendered as a woman and have her do everything a man does. You can spot her because she does men’s dirty work.” This simple trick long predates feminism and post-feminism; such female characters appear in the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Ripley in Aliens is such a character. What would we think if a male character had snarled, “Get away from her, you bitch”? Ripley is there to do men’s dirty work.
The famous exchange in Aliens – a man asks a strong woman, “Have you ever been mistaken for a man?” and she replies, “No, have you?” – would make no sense in a truly genderless future, a future in which maleness and power weren’t equated.
Of the Cylons, he wonders, as so often, “Why would a machine want to be mired in gender?” He wonders the same thing when Maria in Metropolis becomes a cyborg and promptly does an erotic dance.
Hannah Arendt attempts to explain the failure of 20th-century politics as a refusal to acknowledge the advances of science. In discussing Sputnik, she says society has never paid sufficient attention to science fiction as a vehicle for mass sentiments. And indeed, science fiction has endured remarkably well. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein predates the theory of evolution, and it has outlived such later innovations as Marx, Freud, modernism and postmodernism. Arendt provides an answer for such durability: Science fiction satisfies deep-seated mass desires, some of which we perhaps should be afraid of.
In many species, the mother drives the child out of the nest. Among humans, however, the child tends to make the break of her own volition, against the parents’ wishes. The science fiction dream is “a dream of escaping the realities of life” – escaping mother, escaping the culture – often expressed, alas, in terms of genocide.
Cultural and familial legacies are remarkably enduring. Present-day Cambodians happily will tell you everything in Cambodia is great now, back to normal, even though gang-rapists commonly deliver a broken victim to the police station, where the police then gang-rape the victim in turn.
When you write science fiction, you don’t need to create a fresh future. The elements of the science-fiction dream are all there already, waiting to be used. And only the science that fuels the dream gets used in science fiction. One of his favorite science fiction novels is Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War. Its very interesting use of relativistic effects allows the writer and the reader to see the personal effect of change over a time span much longer than the human lifespan. Very few other writers have done this in the 35 years since that novel was published; one critic says the trope quickly “got boring.” “Boredom is the sound of the dream being frustrated by not getting what it wants.”
“The dream is a dream. It’s not logical. It’s not consistent. It doesn’t debate. It simply wants. … You do not have the dream. It has you.”
Literature is “the use of words to put new thoughts in readers’ heads.” If science fiction is to be literature, it must have new thoughts. We need a new continuity; we need a new mass dream.
Locus recently covered the science-fiction scenes in Brazil and India. Some of these writers, surely, will escape the science-fiction dream they inherited from their colonizers. Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel about cloning, Never Let Me Go, never touches on the science-fiction dream. Ryman’s Cambodian writing students often hark back to their own traditions, the 19th-century Cambodian verse novels about fabulous creatures and mythic heroes. “There is hope, too, when you read Kelly Link and realize, at 55 years old, that you’re just now figuring out what she’s doing.” Surely it’s an encouraging sign that Link can sell 20,000 copies of a self-published story collection that challenging, that juxtaposed to the science-fiction dream.
Ryman is a Canadian citizen living in the United Kingdom, where he teaches at the University of Manchester. He led the team that designed the first No. 10 Downing Street website and the first British monarchy website, which required him to personally brief the Queen. Ryman's story "The Last Days in the Life of Hero Kai" -- in the latest Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, and on our syllabus -- is only one of his several Cambodian-themed fictions, which include the World Fantasy Award-winning "The Unconquered Country" (1985), the new novel The King's Last Song (2006) and the new story "Pol Pot's Beautiful Daughter" (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, 2006).
===
In his introduction, Gary Wolfe of Roosevelt University in Chicago says the question of what happened to Dorothy Gale’s parents has been a theme of all Geoff Ryman’s fiction, not just the clearly Wizard of Oz-inspired Was – including “The Last Days in the Life of Hero Kai.” Wolfe quotes Ryman: “It is necessary to distinguish history from fantasy whenever possible, and then use them against each other.”
===
At Oxford, an interviewer asked Ryman how he reconciled the writing of science fiction with the teaching of literature.
Ryman loves the TV series Battlestar Galactica – the music, the camera work, the special effects, the acting. He thinks Mary McDonnell’s performance, for example, very well depicts what a female U.S. president might be like. But note that everything he loves about Battlestar Galactica never would be, never could be, contained in a novel. Novels don’t have music, camera work, special effects and acting. In fact, a novel built of the same materials as Battlestar Galactica would bore him utterly. For one thing, he’s allergic to faster-than-light travel, especially when it’s seemingly cost-free. He’s allergic to fiction about the urgencies of wartime, because this is a good way to avoid writing about everyday life and about women’s issues. He’s also unimpressed with the stereotyped black characters on Battlestar Galactica, who are the same stereotyped black characters found on Firefly. You’ll never see three black characters conversing on any supposedly multiracial show, because three blacks conversing (or three Asians conversing, or three Native Americans conversing, etc.) is seen by white audiences as a conspiracy, a sign the minorities haven’t been properly assimilated.
“Science fiction’s response to the Other is really straightforward: You either shoot it or assimilate it.”
In “big-surface sf,” including most Hollywood sf, we see a turning away from the future as a land of possibility. For example, in his novel The Carpet Makers, the very popular German writer Andreas Eschbach, an expert storyteller “who can’t extrapolate his way out of a paper bag,” just cobbles the past onto the future. Firefly is just a Western in space, a future Gunsmoke. Battlestar Galactica does a better trick, the Star Wars trick of cobbling the future onto the past: Such science fiction isn’t set in the future at all, but “a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away,” so that any question of prediction is swept aside.
Battlestar Galactica also teems with “female hate figures”: all the Cylons, all the cyborgs, Admiral Cain (“the series’ Pol Pot”), the commander’s wife, the terrorist who takes over the pleasure dome, etc. Moreover, “The female hate figures all are killed by other women,” or more specifically by “assimilated women,” women who act just like men. “It’s a simple trick, and it’s extraordinarily easy. I could do it in my sleep. You just take a character gendered as a woman and have her do everything a man does. You can spot her because she does men’s dirty work.” This simple trick long predates feminism and post-feminism; such female characters appear in the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Ripley in Aliens is such a character. What would we think if a male character had snarled, “Get away from her, you bitch”? Ripley is there to do men’s dirty work.
The famous exchange in Aliens – a man asks a strong woman, “Have you ever been mistaken for a man?” and she replies, “No, have you?” – would make no sense in a truly genderless future, a future in which maleness and power weren’t equated.
Of the Cylons, he wonders, as so often, “Why would a machine want to be mired in gender?” He wonders the same thing when Maria in Metropolis becomes a cyborg and promptly does an erotic dance.
Hannah Arendt attempts to explain the failure of 20th-century politics as a refusal to acknowledge the advances of science. In discussing Sputnik, she says society has never paid sufficient attention to science fiction as a vehicle for mass sentiments. And indeed, science fiction has endured remarkably well. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein predates the theory of evolution, and it has outlived such later innovations as Marx, Freud, modernism and postmodernism. Arendt provides an answer for such durability: Science fiction satisfies deep-seated mass desires, some of which we perhaps should be afraid of.
In many species, the mother drives the child out of the nest. Among humans, however, the child tends to make the break of her own volition, against the parents’ wishes. The science fiction dream is “a dream of escaping the realities of life” – escaping mother, escaping the culture – often expressed, alas, in terms of genocide.
Cultural and familial legacies are remarkably enduring. Present-day Cambodians happily will tell you everything in Cambodia is great now, back to normal, even though gang-rapists commonly deliver a broken victim to the police station, where the police then gang-rape the victim in turn.
When you write science fiction, you don’t need to create a fresh future. The elements of the science-fiction dream are all there already, waiting to be used. And only the science that fuels the dream gets used in science fiction. One of his favorite science fiction novels is Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War. Its very interesting use of relativistic effects allows the writer and the reader to see the personal effect of change over a time span much longer than the human lifespan. Very few other writers have done this in the 35 years since that novel was published; one critic says the trope quickly “got boring.” “Boredom is the sound of the dream being frustrated by not getting what it wants.”
“The dream is a dream. It’s not logical. It’s not consistent. It doesn’t debate. It simply wants. … You do not have the dream. It has you.”
Literature is “the use of words to put new thoughts in readers’ heads.” If science fiction is to be literature, it must have new thoughts. We need a new continuity; we need a new mass dream.
Locus recently covered the science-fiction scenes in Brazil and India. Some of these writers, surely, will escape the science-fiction dream they inherited from their colonizers. Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel about cloning, Never Let Me Go, never touches on the science-fiction dream. Ryman’s Cambodian writing students often hark back to their own traditions, the 19th-century Cambodian verse novels about fabulous creatures and mythic heroes. “There is hope, too, when you read Kelly Link and realize, at 55 years old, that you’re just now figuring out what she’s doing.” Surely it’s an encouraging sign that Link can sell 20,000 copies of a self-published story collection that challenging, that juxtaposed to the science-fiction dream.
posted by Andy Duncan at 3:16 PM
1 Comments:
Interesting comments about Galactica. I have seen very little of it, but picked up on a lot of his observations about sex and race -- particularly with Number Six, the hot SF show female of, um, now.
Slate had an interesting take on her a bit back, saying she was the "bright spot" in all the gloom and doom of Galactica's apocalyptic core.
But she is also another Eve-style tempting female betrayer character. As cliche as it sounds, it makes me wonder about the appeal of being burned by an evil robotic blonde has to the show's fanbase.
Post a Comment
<< Home