Wideawake worlds by Sarah Tanburn

Everyone claims to know what science fiction is. It's feminist fabulation or speculative fiction reclaimed in the twenty-first century. Or geeky, incomprehensible, violent cyber-punk. Others put forward the rich detail of children's fantasy in J K Rowling and the Professor Shanku stories of Satyajit Ray. Duchamp suggests it is the genre where the 'broadest concern is the realm of human possibility.¹' I like that, but perhaps it is too wide. In much literature 'a hero ... test[s] and demonstrate[s] the limits of what it is to be human.'² To take one example, Brick Lane is about the possibilities open to a Bangladeshi village girl married to a Tower Hamlets council worker. But it is exquisitely, painfully real and rooted in the now.

Perhaps it's one of those things; you know it when you see it. But beware of dragons masquerading as rare iguanas; often science fiction ceases to 'count' when it's really good. Ursula Le Guin or David Mitchell, say. Pratchett says 'magical realism is science fiction written by someone who went to the same university as you.'³ That strikes home. For now, let us say that scifi and fantasy explore the edges of the possible and impossible. Whether fabulist or space opera, Bengali or American, utopian or apocalyptic, scifi tests the 'what if?'. The genre demands that we awaken to the non-mundane, the opportunity, the difference.

More important than taxonomy is the rationale. Does it matter? Some of you may be saying that this meandering is all very well but scifi isn't your thing. You might watch Buffy occasionally and of course you love Angela Carter, but the rest of it is way too geeky and bizarre. I encourage you to broaden your reading and writing, to browse second-hand stores⁴, Amazon and Waterstones, and see what you find. Others, of course, are way ahead of me; after all more than half of the SciFi Channel's audience is women⁵. Wherever you are on this spectrum, I suggest that as readers and writers we are stimulated and enlivened by engaging with the genre. This seems especially relevant to women writing, as we do on this site, to reclaim and re-engage women's stories. In good list tradition, I give you five reasons for getting your head around speculative fiction

First, and most obvious, is the science. We are in the midst of (another) extraordinary scientific revolution. Most newsworthy are the 'life sciences', often considered the soft preserve of women in scifi and now at the cutting edge of painful debate. What does the new genetics mean for us, and what are the risks of working in the field? Gwynneth Jones explores this in Life⁶. In other ways, linked to body politics and appearance, so did Storm Constantine in Hermetech and there are many more. What does it mean to be human, if we can modify ourselves to live underwater, or in space? What does it mean to be female, or male, if all children are conceived and gestated outside the body?⁷

The 'harder sciences' offer challenge and opportunity as well. We know so little about the bottom of the ocean that nearly every deep dive reveals new species and behaviours to inspire us. Bertrand Russell, in 1912, described modern science as 'hardly less miraculous'⁸ than religious explanations for how things are. Today, quantum uncertainty and unimaginable size bring the eerie, the apocalyptic, the spiritual into the centre of our existence: the new physics suggests 'the kingdom of heaven is within us.'⁹

The scientific tradition imposes a strong paradigm of the nature of 'knowledge'. What is known, what it is acceptable to know, are based on the scientific model of empiricism, replicability, hypothesis-busting and controllable variables. Yet the scientific method is itself struggling with these constraints. In some sciences, the act of looking, the experiment itself, changes the outcomes in unknowable ways. In others, it is impossible to measure the variables; place and speed and time cannot all be ascertained. And how do you conduct replicable experiments with the global climate? How does this relate to, how does it differ from, a knowedge that is based on religious faith, on revealed truth? Or a shamanistic understanding gained in supernatural wanderings? The nature of knowledge is itself a contested arena, full of conflict, ripe for narrative.

Besides the science, the genre has always been intensely political. The Asimovs and Heinleins of the so-called Golden Age peddled a specific paradigm of libertarianism. In another way, the liberalism and rectitude of the command deck of the Enterprise was a powerful influence; it is geeky scifi which gave TV its first inter-racial kiss.¹⁰ Feminist writers of scifi through a long tradition have used it as a way to investigate social structures and provide different, often subversive readings.¹¹ Octavia Butler explored foreigness, invasion, cultural cleansing in the Imago series; Ursula Le Guin has often examined different political strategies¹².

We are writing and reading at a time of great political change and upheaval. Of course, all times seem like that to those who live them, but the power to imagine complex and subtle futures seems particularly important in the early years of the twenty first century. The prevailing political climate in the UK and the USA is determined acceptance of the unacceptable, disempowerment of those who object to 'might makes right' solutions, who question both the efficacy of the means and the desirability of the ends. Across Europe and the Americas, a limited and prejudicial understanding of Islam leads to a demonisation and caricaturing that stunts the minds and imaginations of us all. What would a genuinely faith-respecting society look like?

At the same time, what would a Muslim science fiction be? Shahrnush Parsipur is the (exiled) author of probably the only Iranian scifi novel¹³. She says it is impossible to write scifi in Iran, because science itself is so limited and constrained. This is on a continuum with the ideas of Zia Sardar, who has for some years been exploring the nature of a modern and Muslim approach to science.¹⁴

The questions of political choice, freedom and faith are not only for writers of the anglicised 'western' tradition; one of the pitfalls of the groupthink afflicting the western democracies is the belief that no-one else has anything to say on the nature of the future. It is more than an opportunity for writers, particularly writers of fantasy, fable and science fiction. These uncertainties demand exploration within a multitude of traditions to create alternative modes of debate about the future we will all share.

Another set of political questions with a long pedigree is scifi's concern with the ethics of planetary exploitation. Kim Stanley Robinson's trilogy about the colonisation of Mars¹⁵ imagines terraforming as the battleground in the fight by Earth's megacorporations to take the planet's enormous resources, how the people of Mars themselves, shaped by the low gravity, size and airlessness of their home, win independence. But Robinson (a man, if you hadn't guessed) never seriously challenges the imperative to get out there and colonise, the utopia of endless growth, the search for resources and energy. This is too often the only model available. Nicola Griffith's Ammonite may offer an alternative, but her women's planet is a small anomaly in a more standard rock-hopping star-based federation. (Or union, or empire; the name is not the point.) If it is the nature of humanity to push at the limits, to always seek more and better, to change, then what is our future in a finite universe?

As writers there are further reasons to explore the genre's opportunities. Not the least relates to the nature of experimentation within literature, within narrative. Fantasy, fabulation, speculation have always been a rich ground for experimentation with language and story. Angela Carter was a prolific, exuberant player; witness her sinister doll and bemused, blasphemous puppeteer of The Loves of Lady Purple¹⁶. Her playfulness with language, the exploration of what is alive, the upending of technology are not limited to the western tradition. Bengali scifi, particularly in children's literature, has a long history of rich writing. Amardeep Singh¹⁷ comments that 'the effects of the industrial revolution were being felt in urban India in the 19th century just as keenly as they were in Europe and the US, and at least some Indian writing reflected that.' He goes on to cite several writers of great bi or trilingual dexterity, fully engaged with the scientific changes of the time.

Another tradition of experimentation has concerned utopias and dystopias, heaven and hell. Ursula Le Guin's extended evocation of a hasn't-yet-happened utopia in Always Coming Home is one of the most fully realised yearnings yet written. Some twenty years old now, it stands unmatched as an effort to show what a feminist, feminised future might be like. It may be of course, that, in the years since, we have come to the bitter view that utopia is a pointless and unachievable dream. Joan Haran has argued 'utopia is about struggle forever [and] hope, hope is about ... being able to take action.'¹⁸ I take this as a call to experiment and innovate, to take the work of writing as itself an action, a move towards or away from where we want or fear to be.

 My fourth reason speaks directly to the nature of this site. hagsharlotsheroines is a trial, a way of exploring different narratives, new perspectives. The site offers a wealth of rewritten stories, reimaginings of women's histories. This reclaiming, telling of how-it-was gives us all strength and belief, somewhere to stand, a renewed identity. Such a project overlaps with the work of scifi, the exercise of re-weaving what might-have-been into what-is, or what-is-not, our present reality, our probable future. Jonathan Goldberg sums it up: '[t]o look forward to the history that will be, one must look at and retell the history that has been told.'¹⁹ Not only can we ask what the worm saw, but what the worm would have seen if the early bird had chosen a different field.

Mary Gentle has spent four volumes exploring the possibilities of gender in a different, Visigoth-run Europe in her stories of Ash. In addition to giving us a wonderful heroine, Gentle creates a vivid alternative history. She 'enriches her story with a sensual, tactile, masterfully-detailed setting; the story's a stimulating blend of history and fantasy the reader can practically smell'.²⁰ Such verisimilitude is achieved not only by meticulous historical detail but by vivid world building.

And this is my fifth reason for encouraging your engagement with the genre. World-building is the very stuff of speculative fiction, a sustained imaginative exercise encompassing everything from underclothes and washing lines to energy management or how to make a satellite on a planet with no mining. To make a new world that will live and breathe under your fingers, and will waken the appetite of your readers to know more about your imagination, is a unique pleasure. The detailed understanding of your imaginary world, nearly all of which will never make it onto the published page, underlies fine writing. In much contemporary writing, authors, caught in assumptions about the gender, ethnicity, class, age and knowledge of their readers, posit a shared reality. When we write beyond this consensual reality (as in scifi or historical writing), our researches and our imaginings must pay close attention to the fine-grained detail of our portrayal. Sustained world-building makes you a stronger writer in every field.

Science fiction, then, is not a sleeping giant, rather a busy, swarming place of opportunity. 'By ...being unknowable, [the future] offer[s] infinite possibilities for character and plot.'²¹ The science and the politics give us a context, real-world challenges, give us questions and conflict, potential dramas and plots. The work of experimentation, world-building, re-imagining makes us stronger writers. Creating credible characters, making satisfying endings, writing good prose are important in any text; in scifi there are additional subtle, meaty challenges to be had along the way.

Sarah Tanburn lives on Roaring Girl with her partner, and is currently working on her suntan in Western Spain. Next year: North Africa and the Med. She writes scifi and historical fiction and gathers ideas from the waves and the wind.

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My thanks to Dr Joan Haran, Research Associate in Media, Culture and Genomics at Cardiff University for her assistance in researching and preparing this essay. Dr Haran is also Academic Coordinator for Wiscon, the leading feminist science fiction convention.

1. L Timmel Duchamp in 'What makes fiction hopeful?'. These and other references to Duchamp are on her website at http://ltimmel.home.mindspring.com.
2. Jan Parker on Achilles in Introduction to the Iliad, in the Wordsworth Classics edition of Chapman's Homer. 3. Quoted in Interzone 2005.
4. It sad but true that a lot of science fiction, particularly by women, has a fairly short print run, but there are many sites and shops in which to find the books mentioned here, and more.
5. Elizabeth Day in The Telegraph 29 October 2005, says that 1.4m women now watch the channel.
6. Joan Haran is currently working on a collection of essays on this theme due out Spring 2007; see www.acqueductpress.com.
7. There are many books which could be referenced on these topics, including Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, and the novels of Vonda McIntyre.
8. Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy
9. Gwyneth Jones in Kairos: the enchanted loom. Also see Mary Doria Russell two volume series The Sparrow and Children of God
10. When Uhura kissed Kirk. In her autobiography Beyond Uhura, Nichols relates how Martin Luther King told her that the role was crucial in the civil rights struggle, and encouraged her to remain with the series.
11. The fantastic has a long history in women's writing, from Christine de Pisan's City of Ladies, through Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to the present day. For a comprehensive listing see A Brief History of Feminist SF/F and Women in SF/F at http://www.feministsf.org/ by Laura Quilter
12. See The Dispossessed, The Lathe of Heaven, or Four Ways to Forgiveness. Le Guin traces her own political evolution in several essays, some of which are in Dancing on the Edge of the World.
13. On the wings of wind. Not yet translated to English. This section is based on a seminar with Parsipur and a conversation with the author in June 2006.
14. Ziauddin Sardar, many publications eg Desperately Seeking Paradise
15. Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars
16. In Wayward Girls & Wicked Women
17. See his blog at www.lehigh.edu/~amsp/2006/05/eary-bengali-sci-fiction.html, and the article he cites, Sadhanbabu's Friends, by Debjana Sengupta of Indraprastha College, Delhi
18. During Is reading feminist SF a theory building activity?, a panel discussion at the feminist SF convention Wiscon the full text of which is at http://wiki.feministsf.net/index.php?title=Is_Reading_Feminist_SF_a_Theory_Building_Activity%3F_%28WisCon_30_Panel%29 The comment is a near quote from Robinson's book The Gold Coast
19. The History That Will Be in Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero, eds., Premodern Sexualities, quoted by L Timmel Duchamp in That Only a Feminist: Reflections on Women, Feminism and Science Fiction, 1818-1960
20. Robert KJ Killheffer in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Despite his eulogising, I cannot agree with his contention that we live in a post-feminist world (or that Gentle's portrayal of Ash illustrates this.) As the old saying has it, I'll be a post-feminist in post-patriarchy. And we ain't there yet.
21. Nichelle Nicholls (ibid) reflecting on Rodenberry's use of scifi in Star Trek.