Guest writer: Anne Currie, author of the Panopticon Series
This month, the Manchester Science Fiction book club reviewed Utopia Five and invited me to their online meetup to chat about it. Their first question was a particularly interesting one: is Utopia Five science fiction at all?
There are no robots, killer AIs, time travel or spaceships in the novel. And although Utopia Five has a lot of fancy new tech, none of us doubted those gadgets will exist in 2053 when the book is set. The later installments of the Panopticon series have all the killer machines you could ask for and do take place in space. Definitely SF! However, again the tech is all plausible, so perhaps Utopia Five is merely speculative fiction.
Maybe there is no merely about that. Margaret Atwood caused controversy a few years ago by claiming scifi was just “talking squids in outer space” and only speculative fiction (presumably like “Handmaid’s Tale”) was true literature. Was she right?
Isaac Asimov reckoned science fiction could be defined as any “literature which deals with the reaction of human beings to changes in science and technology." Notice the father of robots and space and time-spanning empires didn’t mention them - the content of the story wasn’t part of his definition. All he reckoned you needed was people and tech-driven change.
Since Utopia Five is entirely about the effect on society of mass surveillance, human emulating chatbots, exoskeletons, VR, and AR, it sounds like Asimov would definitely class it as SF. That’s not surprising since I wrote it as a tribute to 40’s and 50’s science fiction like his.
Other scifi definitions are available. Heinlein had a subtly different, and far stricter, criterion: "realistic speculation about possible future events, based solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world, past and present, and on a thorough understanding of the nature and significance of the scientific method." Utopia Five could practically have featured that quote on the back cover and I suspect he would have judged it met his rule. One of the book’s main characters is even obsessed with never breaking the laws of physics. Heinlein would approve.
Heinlein’s rule is a tough one. Presumably, no faster-than-light travel would be admitted by him, which would mean most space-based stuff would get an SF thumbs down. However, it might be noted that on multiple occasions he himself featured God and time travel in his own work, although in “All You Zombies” (1958) he did illustrate the essentially anti-science paradoxes involved in messing with the timeline.
Whether or not Heinlein was consistent, in the 1960s the definition of SF moved on. Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965) and Anne Mccaffrey's Dragonflight (1967) - Hugo award winners and novels I enjoyed very much - diverge from Heinlein’s definition. The plots of both books involve mental powers and there’s nothing in the scientific method about those. Arguably both are fantasy.
Meanwhile, in a separate evolutionary branch, HG Wells and Ursula Le Guin (another serial Hugo and Nebula award winner) wrote novels like “The Time Machine” that cheerfully ignored the scientific method in order to create handy societies that would provide insight into current social issues. Heinlein would probably not have approved (possibly in any sense), but who died and put him in charge?
Le Guin herself said that science fiction is speculative fiction when what is written about could really happen, whereas narratives that cannot, under any circumstances, happen in our world classify separately as fantasy. Le Guin wasn’t sniffy about fantasy, so why should anyone else be? The Earthsea trilogy is some of her best work. Under her regiment, I reckon Star Trek counts as fantasy with its warp technology at least as much as Games of Thrones with its dragons.
The difference between science fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, and social SF was already blurry more than a hundred years ago, before the terms were even coined. According to US author and editor Lester del Rey, "Even the devoted aficionado has a hard time trying to explain what science fiction is," and Damon Knight claimed "science fiction is what we point to when we say it," which echoes the famous US Supreme Court definition of pornography as, “I know it when I see it.” Ironically (given that similarity to porn) SciFi is a broad church. Many novels can fall within the term, with or without the presence of spaceships.
So is Utopia Five science fiction? Of course it is. If for no other reason than that I define it so. As Juvenal might say, “Let my will stand for the reason.” It’s as good as any.
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Anne’s series is available on Amazon from 99p
Image by @jdhancock