As I mentioned back in February, I’ve had two speculative fiction writing careers: a fairly awful one as a boy, and a somewhat better one as a girl.
Around the time I started flexing my girl-muscles, I stopped writing so much science fiction and switched to literary fiction.* This was a good move, because my speculative fiction mostly really sucked.
I spent a few years in a writing group, where the guys mostly wrote science fiction (Space battles!) and the women mostly wrote fantasy (Bards! Anti-abortion vampires!). As a guy, I wrote science fiction too, but my efforts were never quite nerdy enough.
“The science should be the main character in your story,” one guy in the group told me a few times. “Your actual human characters should have, like, conflicts and stuff. But the science is the star.”
I tried really hard to make the science the star of my stories. My first dozen or so science fiction stories were pretty “plot oriented” in any case.
I was very proud of myself when I first learned how to write endings. I’d gotten pretty good at beginnings, and okay at middles, but I had an ending issue. My early stories had a pretty pat formula: the protagonist faces a problem involving science (usually in the first sentence) and struggles with it for about 2,000 words. And then the protagonist resolves the conflict (usually in the final sentence.) Eat your heart out, Raymond Carver!
So it was super helpful to start writing literary fiction instead. Not just because science couldn’t be the star of a story about roccoco design. I also needed to make sense of my bizarre new habitat. Moving to San Francisco and changing from a polite boy to a foul-mouthed girl, I found identities latching onto me like barnacles. I needed to model the world I’d come from and the world I’d found myself in, and figure out how humans operated in both places. I needed a field guide for the alien creature I’d become.
In many of my “literary” stories, weird things still happened. People still had conflicts, albeit without any pat resolution. The universe remained a ludicrous enemy to people. I tried to map not just the sharp edges of our alleged reality — but also the contortions people take on to avoid those edges.
One major benefit of literary writing: people assumed everything I wrote was autobiographical. And yet they also felt free to psychoanalyze the “me” in my stories, in a bracing way. One literary-magazine editor called me up and talked for an hour about a story he was publishing. He felt my trans protagonist suffered from “phallic access” problems. He had some great ideas for how to make the story more emotionally real and intense, but he also wanted to get to the root of my character’s penis envy. It sort of reminded me of the way my old writing group would nitpick my science and assorted plot devices. Plus, it was like free therapy!
As my stories got stranger and more tangled, I started reaching for metaphors that would let me probe into the heart of their emotional chaos. If only there was some way I could work in some story elements that were both surreal and yet concrete! I groped for a way to reify the strangeness of “real” life and take my characters beyond normal experience. And little by little, I found myself writing speculative fiction again.
Soon enough, I was thinking about going to conventions and rejoining the ranks of the science fiction nerds. The only question in my mind was, would they accept me as a girl? Especially a strange girl whose stories were a bit betwixt and between?
* Yes, I know genre dividers are really imaginary and meaningless. And the genre lines are never as tidy as people like to pretend. Lots of literary writers dabble in speculative fiction, and people like Kelly Link and Jonathan Lethem have won mainstream literary cache. At the same time, the death of genre boudnaries is greatly exaggerated. The New Yorker and Analog haven’t merged yet. For the most part, speculative fiction and literature target different groups. Most speculative fiction remains noticeably nerdier, and dorkier, than most literary fiction. And both literary fiction and speculative fiction each still has its own set of unexamined assumptions and tropes.
There has been some very good character-driven SF lately – Lois McMaster Bujold, Ellen Kushner, Sharon Shinn – so perhaps the boys in your writers’ group were just dreaming of the Buck Rogers days? And, uh, there seems to be room for women writers too.
Hi Anne… Not sure what point you’re making. But yes, there are plenty of amazing women SF writers out there, and both women and men are writing some great character-driven SF. At the same time, the “science should be the star” thing does seem to predominate in some quarters.
I don’t really think of Ellen Kushner as SF, more fantasy.
I suppose my point was that “science should be the star” applies only to a small subset of SF – for Robert L. Forward, okay, sure, but even Greg Egan has a different focus. It’s perfectly reasonable, if you want to write a story about identity and its transformation (say), to set it in a science-fictional world. This lets you have (say) Iain M. Banks’ incredibly plastic Culture humans, for whom changing physical sex is just a question of wanting to. Lois McMaster Bujold does this; in fact she avoids giving the science too much of a role by sticking to a very standard space-opera setting.
If you *want* to write a story about science, well, that’s fine, but that’s the only time science should be the star of the story.