Ian McEwan’s new novel What We Can Know isn’t even out yet, and already someone has spotted a goof. In response to an early review in a Sunday paper – which reports that McEwan’s novel is set in a world where a Russian hydrogen bomb has missed its target in the United States, exploded in the Atlantic and “flooded three continents” – the science fiction writer Charles Stross pointed out drily on social media that “if you can flood three continents with a single H-bomb in the Atlantic, that bomb is rather more powerful than all the nuclear weapons we, as a species, ever manufactured, multiplied by some factor with too many zeroes appended”.
When you write “big boom, giant tsunami”, most readers will buy it and go along for the ride
This is a good and rather a funny point – assuming the review quoted is a fair representation of the novel. I expect, for a novelist as ostentatiously science-curious as McEwan, that it will sting a bit. (Likewise a corollary, that McEwan’s book has humans “living off protein extracted from carbon dioxide”, which describes the already-existing technology of photosynthesis.) But I’d like to add a little Anthisan to that sting. If McEwan has got the physics of nuclear bombs even wildly wrong, it is highly unlikely to matter a toss to whether his novel works. The point is to create a mise en scene: a world in which sea-levels have risen dramatically, and in which McEwan wants to set his story. JG Ballard started from such a premise in The Drowned World, as did Will Self in The Book of Dave. Can we remember – and does it matter – how plausible the mechanisms for creating such a world were in those other books? Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend – vampires, but it’s some sort of disease – is still best assessed by readers and critics rather than epidemiologists.
Of course, the willing suspension of disbelief is harder to maintain if one of your McGuffins defies common sense or creates an internal inconsistency in the rules of your fictional universe. But there is very wide latitude.
When you write “big boom, giant tsunami”, most readers will buy it and go along for the ride rather than falling to their logarithm tables in dismay. Arthur C Clarke’s famous nostrum that any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic is a boon to the storyteller. Technology in science fiction has the role magic does in fantasy and in its ancestor the folktale, where stories of a world we don’t recognise cast light on the ones we do. Baba Yaga’s chicken-legged hut has always been immune to the scepticism of the structural engineer.
I make out in Stross’s reaction a shade of the righteous irkedness that writers who make their home in a genre sometimes feel at incomers; particularly the so-called “literary writers” presumed to look down on genre fiction. As he went on to say, “Sounds to me like McEwan *badly* needed to hire a competent SF writer as a ghost-world-builder, at least…Literary writers who paddle in the genre waters all unaware of the shark infestation.”
Well, maybe. I should say that as a multiple award-winning sf writer, Stross has a great deal of authority in this matter. But I nevertheless respectfully submit a counter point: it’s the job of science fiction to sound sciency, not to tell us about science. We have scientists for the latter job. When William Gibson was writing his breakthrough novel Neuromancer – an acknowledged classic of the genre – he spent his time eavesdropping on computer guys at tech conferences, not because he needed to understand how tech works, but to get a linguistic flavour of the future. He said a few years ago, of that novel: “When the going gets really tough in cyberspace, what does [the protagonist] do? He sends out for a modem. He does! He says: ‘Get me a modem! I’m in deep shit!’ I didn’t know what one was, but I had just heard the word. And I thought: man, it’s sexy.”
Of course there’s a huge amount to be enjoyed, if that’s your thing, in so-called “hard SF”, where the author really wants to get the science right – or appear to. Fiction is (among many other things) a fantastic engine for dramatising ideas. My own teenage years were bewitched by Larry Niven’s Known Space novels, with their disquisitions on what near-light travel would mean for the physics of spaceships, or on hoop-shaped artificial planets, neutron stars and helium-based lifeforms. But hard SF is a vibe thing too. It doesn’t make the stories less compelling if subsequent experimental data dings one of their premises.
If by common consensus the laws of thermodynamics – not to mention a bunch of thought experiments involving butterflies and Hitler’s dear old mum – make time-travel an impossibility, that doesn’t mean the entire SF subgenre of time-travel stories needs to disappear. You take the premise, and you run with it. Gatekeeping seems to me a bit futile whether you’re gatekeeping science fiction or fantasy against snobby literary writers or gatekeeping literary fiction against incomers with suspiciously populist credentials.
And yet, it’s one of our favourite things to do. Ursula K LeGuin was, at least initially, pretty salty when Kazuo Ishiguro strayed onto her turf with The Buried Giant. When Garrison Keillor had the temerity to publish an anthology of verse, the poet August Kleinzhaler declared that Keillor had “wandered into the realm of fire, and for his trespass must be burned”. Jinkies, as Velma on Scooby Doo might say, can’t we all get along?
I think this is a bit unfair on McEwan, too. He may be, in publishing terms – i.e. they put his new stuff in hardback on the front tables at Waterstones and people feel a bit clever for reading him – a “literary novelist”. But he’s a novelist who has always taken a fierce and as I read it non-condescending interest in so-called genre fiction. Sweet Tooth and The Innocent are spy novels; Solar is a farce; Machines like Me is SF; Atonement has strong romance elements and there’s a ton of gothic in his back-catalogue.
Nevertheless, just for laughs perhaps he should be encouraged by his publisher to take on a “science fiction sensitivity reader”. I nominate Charles Stross. And an extra treat would be to see transcripts of their conversations turned into a play by Alan Bennett and filmed by Alex Garland.
Comments