...do they weaken a message?
This blog post mostly consists of me musing and asking you all for answers. Just warning you.
Today in class we questioned whether Vonnegut can tackle issues like war and and the meaning of life while including flying saucers, toilet plungers, and two-bit sci-fi writers. Does the silliness detract from the seriousness?
Just to get that out of the way, I'll just say that I am of the belief that if you can't take a joke about something, you can't take it seriously, either. Vonnegut's writing style panders perfectly to me. This blog post will not focus on the use of humor to discuss serious topics.
Instead, I'm musing about the inclusion of science fiction, or rather why that might set off some peoples' alarm bells for anti-seriousness.
Maybe it's just because I've been raised in a pro-sci-fi household, but I've never really understood why it's sometimes not considered a "serious" genre (example: while researching education issues and methods for a paper sophomore year, I found out that many educators discourage children from reading adventure, fantasy, and sci-fi). I've often found science fiction to be a much more approachable way to tackle tough philosophical issues than through "literary fiction" (poorly defined term... refers to fiction which has nothing outstanding to identify it by except the fact that it is written?) Vonnegut's characters' use of science fiction for reinventing themselves and their world is something I see as entirely valid: science fiction can look at a potential future to try to make sense of the present.
Most of the time, I'm not complaining about sci-fi not being serious--instead, I'm complaining about certain incredibly-non-serious-and-non-sci-fi things being labeled as sci-fi and thus giving it a bad image (John Carter of Mars, James Cameron's Avatar, The Fifth Wave by Rick Yancey, The Host by Stephanie Meyer... the list goes on and on). Are these kinds of works the reason for people disregarding the genre? Too much sex, explosions, Pocahontas, and White Man's Burden in Space obscuring the public's view? I suppose the definition of sci-fi is up for grabs. Here's the one I'll provide: works of fiction that focus on the impact of scientific discoveries and technological developments on society and the human condition. This can be anything from the invention of time travel to newfound political relations with aliens.
Is "real" sci-fi just too weird to appeal to a broader audience? Do the more extrapolated or fantastical elements distance the story too much from the real world? Is it a matter of, "Well, that's someone's imagined future, and they're probably wrong about a bunch of stuff"?
If anyone would like to comment with some reasons why sci-fi is unrelatable or lessens the seriousness of a work's central message, I'd love to hear them. And I promise that I won't give you terrifyingly rabid backlash. I'll give you mild-mannered, constructive backlash.
While I'm not a major consumer of sci-fi (SF, science fiction, speculative fiction, etc.), I do respect the genre, and I don't think it's inherently "silly" at all. The very useful social-critical/philosophical genre of dystopia obviously overlaps with SF in all kinds of ways, and it's beyond dispute that some of the most rigorous contemplations of the world we're living in and soon to be living in (virtual reality, cloning, social networking, surveillance states, etc., etc.) have taken place in the pages of writers like PK Dick and William Gibson.
ReplyDeleteBut when I call aspects of Vonnegut's deployment of SF elements "silly," I mean that he uses these elements in an especially Bugs-Bunny/cartoon style of stuff that puts it all in implicit quotation marks. Like, no self-respecting dystopian SF writer will actually use the term "flying saucer," "little green man," or "zap gun." It's hard to know how seriously we are to take this stuff *within* the world of the novel. (Whereas it's entirely clear to me from page 1 of _Kindred_ that we *must* take it seriously.) I could certainly imagine a novel that treats WW2 and time travel in a way that doesn't call attention to its own cartoonishness--but this novel, instead, flaunts the cartoonishness, and it's this silliness (Tralfamadorians look like toilet plungers with hands for heads?!) that makes the tone seem so (intriguingly) uneven.