I am currently reading a big fat space opera which was published last year. It has received a number of positive reviews – George RR Martin himself even describes it as “kickass space opera” on the front-cover.

Part of the story is set in the Asteroid Belt. In the future of the novel, a number of asteroids have been settled – there are, in fact, some 150 million people living in the Belt – and the largest such settlement is the hollowed-out dwarf planet Ceres (approximately 480 km in diameter, six million population). The society in Ceres, and by implication in other colonised asteroids, is essentially US, capitalist, corporatist, with a few touches of foreign colour. This is neither especially convincing nor especially unusual in space opera – even one set in the relatively near-future as this one is. Ceres also has organised crime, gangsters, protection rackets, corruption, bent cops, poverty, drugs… And prostitution.

So, basically, the author is saying that he wants one half of the human race to exist for the gratification of the other half. He can’t claim “realism” because this is an invented world. He made it up. This is an artistic decision he made. He has put the women in his universe in that position. He includes a few named female characters – with and without agency – and thinks he’s covered his bases. His detective, for example, has a female captain – there, that must be good enough. But. Prostitution. Underage prostitution. Human trafficking. All three are mentioned. All three are taken as givens in this future universe.

FFS.

Is that the best an intelligent person living in the twenty-first century can do? Create some sort of Randian frontier-town society and think the presence of spaceships and AIs and some big melodramatic space-hopping plot makes it alright? It doesn’t. If you have prostitutes in your sf story, you’d better think damn hard why they’re there. If you have a rape in your fantasy story, you’d better think even harder why it’s there. Neither are acceptable. They are not genre tropes. You have no excuse for creating universes in which women are treated in this way.

Science fiction was created by (mostly) inadequate teenagers who grew up to become (mostly) dirty old men. But the bulk of sf writers these days fit neither of those descriptions. And yet those pioneers set the tone of the genre. After eighty-five bloody years, isn’t it long past time we got rid of that? Isn’t it about time we started treating half of the human race like, well, like human beings in our science fictions? Isn’t it about time we started giving them respect on the page? (Respect in the real world is a given.) It’s not like it’s difficult, it’s not going to hurt, it’s not going to cost you money. You have no excuse for not doing it.

But you know what’s worse than that? The fact this is only one of many battles that need to be fought.

I think it was Orson Scott Card who wrote in an essay in Asimov’s back in the 1990s that any future of consequence would be American. That assertion was debatable then – if not offensively arrogant – but the world has changed a great deal in the past twenty years, making’s Card’s boast even less likely. And yet still I see contemporary sf novels in which Planet Earth seems to be either monoculturally US-ian, or contains worlds extrapolated from present US society.

Science fiction is chiefly a white, male, middle-class genre and is dominated by the USA, and so its sensibilities and concerns are typically those which confirm the prejudices of that demographic. But not always, of course – back in 1991, William Barton and Michael Capobianco’s Fellow Traveler was set in a future Soviet space programme; in 2012, Alastair Reynolds’ Blue Remembered Earth opens in a future where “Africa is the dominant technological and economic power” and follows the fortunes of an African family. (There is no mention in the blurb, however, of which African nation the family are from – Africa is, after all, as monocultural as Europe: ie, not at all; and since we’d say French or German or Polish or Swedish, we shouldn’t be saying “African”.)

Photo taken by Columbia Space Shuttle

In reference to the near-future, sf has maintained some degree – though it could be greatly improved – of diversity of setting and cast. But anything set further hence usually devolves to the white, Western, Anglophone, vaguely US, vaguely right-wing default world carried over from the genre’s early beginnings. There’s no good reason for this. True, the US still performs much of the tentpole science, but not exclusively. The LHC is in Switzerland; the Soviets had a space station before the Americans; the Chinese may well be the first to set foot on Mars. Many nations have space agencies – indeed, out of the twenty-two past and present ESA astronauts, only one speaks English as a first language.

Even looking at the cyclical nature of empires suggests that US hegemony will no longer exist in any recognisable form by the middle of this century. Then there’s everyday technology and its uses. Such as surveillance. The US provides no good model for any future society in this regard. If anything, looking at the UK would be more useful. Twenty-five percent of the world’s CCTV cameras are in the UK. It is the most-surveillanced nation on the planet. Yet we don’t especially much care about the fact we’re always being watched. US ideas of privacy exist only in the US, and the US attitude to video surveillance does not map onto British sensibilities. It is likely that, as surveillance becomes more pervasive and ubiquitous, it is the UK attitude to it which will prevail.

Europe is also, of course, defiantly not monocultural. Its twenty-seven member states speak twenty-three official languages. Back in the day, Harry Harrison may have thought Earth, and hence any subsequent interstellar polity, might uniformly adopt an artificial language, but even the language he chose, Esperanto, has never been used routinely by more than an estimated one million people. India, a single nation, has no national language but recognises twenty-two regional languages (although the SIL Ethnologue lists 415 spoken throughout the country). History has shown that languages come to dominate areas as a result of conquest, religion, trade, or cultural imperialism; and often from a combination of all four. But that, obviously, does not mean that their dominance remains eternal: Arabic is no longer spoken in Spain, for example.

All of which suggests that science fiction has changed very little from the days of Amazing Stories, especially in regards to its in-built attitudes and sensibilities. The tropes it has developed over the generations have become shortcuts and defaults. It’s not just those galactic empires of whitebread worlds, but the technology and science and their uses. Can’t be bothered to figure out how spaceflight really works? Bung in some “thrusters” and “inertial compensators”. Can’t be bothered to design a plausible future? Just make it like the US, but with neat toys. It’s authorial laziness. Writing stories that not only cater to the prejudices of a perceived market but actively reinforce those prejudices is not something a genre which boasts of its inventiveness and transgressive achievements should be doing.

Mundane SF was seen by many genre fans as throwing the baby out with the bathwater – it’s the wildly improbably stuff like aliens and time travel which can be the most fun. But at least Mundane SF required its adherents to focus on the basics. You couldn’t just make shit up, you couldn’t just slot in those neat ideas from Tropes  R Us, you couldn’t just pretend that interstellar travel was like air travel of today or sea travel of earlier decades. You had to think about the world of your story, not just pin a few baubles on the default setting. Sadly, Mundane SF is little more than a Wikipedia entry these days, but let’s hope it had some effect on the genre.

And let’s hope that Blue Remembered Earth, the first of a trilogy, is the start of a new movement in science fiction to break away from white middle-class Anglophone futures, a move towards more plausible and more representative world-building. Let’s hope Alastair Reynold’s new novel helps pave the way to a more adult and thoughtful genre. After all, if we want to take be taken seriously by non-genre writers, we shouldn’t bitch and moan about being ill-treated, we should show them that we can be as good as they are. We’ll only ever be taken seriously if we up our game.

And we need to start doing that right now.

Last night, I read The Old Funny Stuff by George Alec Effinger, a collection of four short stories and a poem published as the first volume of Author’s Choice Monthly back in 1989. I have no great liking for humourous science fiction – possibly because most of it is so bad. And the stories in The Old Funny Stuff are a case in point. But that wasn’t my only problem with them. According to the copyright page, the contents were originally published in magazines during the first half of the 1980s. Yet they read like they were written decades earlier.

The opening story, ‘The Thing from the Slush’, first appeared in Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine in April 1982. It is about an editor at a science fiction magazine. There’s nothing in the story which specifically ties its setting to a particular year, but it reads like it is set in the 1930s or 1940s. And I suspect that’s not deliberate.

The second story, ‘White Hats’, first appeared in Asimov’s in April 1984. In it, a man and his wife are mugged while walking home from a restaurant. Unsatisfied with the police’s response, the man complains there’s no justice left in the world. And is promptly visited by a number of fictional detectives and vigilantes who offer to retrieve his wallet and his wife’s purse. But all the fictional characters are from much earlier decades: the Lone Ranger, Sam Spade, The Shadow, Captain Midnight… There’s no mention of Magnum PI, Columbo, Automan, the A-Team, or any other television character from the 1970s or 1980s. Why? Wouldn’t contemporary television characters be more familiar to readers of Asimov’s? Not all of them will have grown up during the 1930s and 1940s (though perhaps most of the contributors did).

I can understand a story written during the 1980s reading as though it were set during the 1980s. For example, one of my favourite science fiction novels is The House That Stood Still (AKA The Undercover Aliens) by AE van Vogt, first published in 1950. It is your typical Van Vogtian bonkers nonsense about a group of immortals who run a small town in California. But it possesses an excellent sense of time and place, and for the first half reads like late 1940s California noir. So for Effinger to write a story that evokes its place so badly it reads like it was written forty years earlier is a complete failure of craft.

I can also understand a story written during the 1980s but set during the 1940s. ‘White Hats’ clearly isn’t, by the way, as it later mentions a “computerised bank teller” (which I think means an ATM). But I do have a problem with stories ostensibly set at the time of writing – or at some nebulous Now – that feel tied to a much earlier decade. Time is as important a part of setting as place. Even those crap sf stories of yesteryear, with their slide-rules and skyscraper-sized mainframe computers, many of them at least felt as though they were set in the future. Admittedly, it now reads like some weird retro-future, but that too can have its charm (see my jetpunk posts on this blog, for example).

Of course, science fiction is not necessarily about the future – either the one we have to look forward to, however grim, or the futures of past decades. And, it has to be said, the settings of some sf stories and novels seemingly have no link whatsoever with the real world and their settings might as well be fantasy. Again, this is no bad thing. Dune has aged so well because its setting shares no common ground with the real world. This may be why space opera remains a popular subgenre of sf.

But, as John Clute has said, every sf story has three times: the time it was written, the time it is set, and the time it is about. When the latter two are not explicit, then by implication they are the same as the first. And is not unreasonable for a reader to expect that. On the other hand, science fiction is genre is notorious for its rose-tinted view of its own past. That sharp gaze forward in time gets distinctly blurry when looking backwards. Which may well explain the prevalence of nostalgia in genre stories and novels. It’s all very well science fiction being in conversation with itself, but that doesn’t mean mindlessly and uncritically repeating the insights of yesteryear, it doesn’t mean presenting the arguments of the past as if they were the arguments of today. Just because you’ve polished an antique until it’s shiny, that doesn’t make it brand new. And stories which appear to be set in some never-never land of the author’s salad days are never going to pass as current. If you don’t know when your story is set, and you cannot get that date across to the reader – either explicitly or implicitly – then you have failed.

Time to try again, then.

Over on Pornokitsch they’re doing V Days of Rome, and some excellent content has been posted so far. I was invited to contribute and wrote one of my customary rants on the over-use, and mis-use, of the Roman Empire as inspiration in space operas. It’s all Isaac Asimov’s fault, of course. See my piece here.

While reading Marianne de Pierries’ Dark Space last week (see here), it struck me that sf writers are all too keen to extrapolate or invent science and technology in their fictions – FTL, AI, anti-gravity, etc. – but they then insist on imagining socially regressive societies. The world of Araldis in Dark Space is markedly sexist – the women are either wives or mistresses, and have no say in Araldisian society. Why would a writer do that? After the decades of struggle for gender equality, to then write about a society in which women are once again second-class citizens just seems stupid. It’s not even a failure of the imagination because it was plainly a deliberate artistic choice.

But this is not unusual in space opera. Writers invent galaxy-spanning empires with magical technology… and then populate them with tyrants, slave traders, mass-murderers, pirates and all manner of scum and villainy, design them with systemic inequality, inequity, injustice and unfairness. True, scum and villainy exists in modern-day society, and even the twenty-first century has its share of inequality and inequity. But they don’t define it.

Space opera is an inherently right-wing subgenre. As is military science fiction. There are exceptions but, as a general trend, both subgenres tend to the right of centre. It is, I suspect, a consequence of the form, since not all writers of space opera or military sf cleave to the political right. But the vast majority of those writers – Anglophone ones, as that’s the bulk of my reading, and the area about which I know most – live in developed nations, where slavery is illegal, where everyone has the vote, where fairness in many areas of life is either legally or constitutionally protected. And yet these same authors can happily invent a future universe in which sentient beings are treated worse than animals, the first solution to any problem is unregulated violence, and inequality is institutionalised… And that inequality is all too often ignored by the protagonists, because typically they’re among the privileged. (This latter is especially true of secondary-world fantasy, with its penchant for adventuring princes; but that’s an argument for another day.)

There are, I noted above, exceptions. Iain M Banks, Alastair Reynolds, Ken MacLeod, for example. These exceptions are usually British. Having said that, while Banks’s Culture is famously a post-scarcity utopia, he still populates his novels with plutocratic shits (possibly a tautology) and the like – if only to give Special Circumstances something to do…

I’ve been wondering why space opera / mil sf needs to be so socially regressive / right wing. Is it a consequence of science fiction’s history? Military science fiction often appears to be little more than fancied-up Horatio Hornblower in Space, and so copies 17th Century British society – in all respects but the technology. It could be that Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, famously based on Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, led to the Roman Empire as a model for galactic empires in space operas. Personally, I suspect US science fiction owes an unconscious debt to Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. The similarities are striking.

And why are the exceptions mostly from the UK? Is it just a consequence of domestic politics? I’d like to think British sf owes an equal debt to HG Wells, but it was plainly dominated by the US mode – at least until the advent of the New Wave. Admittedly, the last couple of decades has seen more Wellsian sf creeping into British sf, though his influence continues to be ignored by US science fiction. Which is odd, historically, as HG Wells – and Jules Verne – were both extensively reprinted in magazines during the early days of the genre in the USA.

Some have argued that space opera and military sf require conflict, that without it there’d be no story. But conflict is not the only delivery mechanism for drama. There are others – exploration and puzzle-solving are two alternatives, for example. Literary fiction does not require rapes, murders, slavery, genocide or global wars to provide drama. Further, science fiction is, above all else, about the present. And present-day society – for the majority of those who read and write Anglophone sf – is mostly fair, and has become increasingly so over the centuries. (Bar current Tory policies designed to profit the few at the expense of the many.) That fairness is not universal, true; but even those who do not currently experience it are generally better off than they would have been in earlier decades and centuries.

Perhaps it’s simply that space opera / mil sf are predominantly escapist subgenres. Perhaps they can’t aspire to anything higher. If they were to comment on unfairness, if they were to justify their regressive societies as story qua story, you’d expect to see some discussion of those it effects most in the real world. But the Other is also noticeably absent from both subgenres. Both are still characterised by the privileged expressing their privilege – mostly using awesome weaponry.

The history of space opera and military science fiction, from EE ‘Doc’ Smith through Poul Anderson and John Brunner to CJ Cherryh and now Peter F Hamilton, is almost entirely populated with examples which demonstrate the above. It has become axiomatic. That needs to be questioned. A regressive society is not, in and of itself, implicit in space opera, and should not be treated as such. Space opera need not primarily be escapist; and escapist fiction need not be defined by unfairness in its invented universe.

It’s time to think a little more intelligently about the universes we create for our fictions. It’s time our fictions reflected our ambitions and didn’t simply parrot the assumptions of past decades.

It’s time we dragged space opera, and military science fiction, into the twenty-first century.

Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/CIW

I look at the above photograph and I feel the sense of wonder I should be getting from science fiction. That picture is the surface of Mercury, as taken by MESSENGER, a space probe. That’s about ninety-two million kilometres from Earth (averaging out the distance between the two). A robotic spacecraft slightly smaller than a Mini, and weighing less than half a tonne, has spent the last six and a half years travelling from Earth to Mercury, and on 18 March will go into orbit about the planet nearest to the Sun.

Too much sf seems to treat the universe like a giant backyard. Characters hop into spaceships and zip off to some other star. But those distances are vast. MESSENGER took six and a half years to reach Mercury (admittedly it didn’t take a direct route). Even less than a century ago, other parts of this world were great distances away. In the 1930s, flying to Australia would take a fortnight. In the decades since, the world, as they say, has grown smaller. And science fiction has, in a manner of speaking, applied the same transformation to the universe – but more perhaps in terms of time and history rather than distance. Early space operas had starships flitting about the galaxy, without giving any real indication of scale. But it’s only with the advent of new space opera (it’s not worth capitalising it anymore, I think) that history has been folded into this shortening – near-immortal characters, or alien races who first came to prominence billions of years ago… Perhaps in the genre’s early days the distances involved were mostly unknown, and so unimaginable, that the minds of writers and readers simply skipped across their surface. Now we have a better understanding and so have compressed the lightyears and megaparsecs into something conceptually manageable, and have in turn colonised the millions and billions of years stretching back to the Big Bang and forward to the heat death of the universe…

And yet there’s little need to. There are wonders a-plenty in the universe, some of them so mind-boggling your mind ends up doing that skipping-across-the-surface thing. This morning, for example, I learnt that the red hypergiant VY Canis Majoris “could swallow our sun eight billion times over”. That’s absolutely enormous. Then there are the galactic filaments, which are simply so huge your mind core-dumps at the numbers concerned. But. Scale is not sense of wonder, and a lot of sf confuses the two. VY Canis Major may be enormously huge – but it’s also a star. Like the one up in the sky. Just much bigger. Or, to choose an example from a seventy-year-old space opera (see here): using planets as mobile fortresses is sense of wonder; a fleet of over a million starships is not. A photograph of the surface of Mercury, a planet in our Solar system, is sense of wonder; a galactic empire where planets are no more than a day or two of travel apart is not.

You might well think from what I’ve written in the past on this blog – and from the fact that I also have a blog dedicated to books about space – that my subgenre of choice is hard sf. But it isn’t. Chiefly because most hard sf is appallingly written. By “hard sf”, I don’t mean science fiction that is true to known science, but rather sf that features the “hard” sciences – physics, chemistry, cosmology, etc. Unfortunately, it’s a subgenre mostly written by scientists. And it shows. For instance, I really like the idea of Ben Bova’s Grand Tour novels – a series of novels set during the exploration and colonisation the Solar system – but I find them unreadable. Which is not to say all hard sf exhibits clanking prose, cardboard characters and an anal-retentive focus on science and technology. There are a number of hard sf writers whose stories and novels I appreciate and enjoy: Stephen Baxter, Paul J McAuley, Geoffrey A Landis, G David Nordley, immediately spring to mind. I also have David G Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer’s The Hard SF Renaissance on the TBR, but I’m expecting it to infuriate more than it entertains.

Of all the subgenres of sf, I probably read space opera more than any other. Some of my favourite sf authors write new space opera, and as a mode of genre writing I suspect it offers the largest canvas and has the biggest toolbox. But it also occupies a well-worn rut, and few books or authors seem capable of breaking, or willing to break, out of it. Its politics are often juvenile, its psychology rudimentary, and its plots little more than privilege wet dreams or revenge fantasies. Science and technology is replaced with toys festooned with flashing lights. It makes few concessions to reality and less to plausibility. It has confused scale with sense of wonder. The universe has become merely a backdrop of stars and not a source of wonder. It tells thrilling wonder tales, but they might as well take place anywhere – in Fantasyland, or some period from human history, or some corner of the world hidden from progress… What’s the point in making the stories space opera? What’s the point in using the universe and all its wonders as a setting? That’s confusing the furniture with the genre’s characteristics.

Perhaps space opera needs to take a long hard look at Mercury.

I may have just destroyed my credibility by borrowing the title for this post from The Carpenters, but it does seem to fit the topic perfectly. To be fair, the song was written and originally recorded by Klaatu… and you can’t get more science-fictional a band-name than that. But, onwards…

There’s an excellent article on the New Scientist website Why space is the impossible frontier, which makes clear quite how hostile an environment outer space is. Space travellers can expect to suffer from atrophy of the heart (one week in space is quivalent to six weeks bed-ridden), loss of muscle volumne (six months in space leads to a loss of 32 percent of leg muscle power), and bone loss (about 1 to 2 percent per month). About one in ten space travellers can expect to develop cancer.

There are other hazards: micrometeroid strikes, solar flares, the fact that humans can only survive in a manufactured environment… And, to make matters worse, getting out of a gravity well is expensive, which means those environments must be as light as possible. The walls of the Apollo LM were famously thin – an engineer dropped a pencil in one while it was still at the Grumman factory; the pencil went straight through the wall. The entire craft weighed only 30,000 lb. That’s about as much as three African elephants. And two of those elephants were left behind on the Moon.

Charlie Stross has written in the past (see here; as have I here) how this shows the inappropriatness of the pioneer mentality when applied to outer space. Space is a new frontier; but it bears no resemblance to the old New Frontier of the Wild West. At present, the only means we have of colonising it is with our imaginations.

And sometimes those imaginations run a little too free. A lot of science fiction is set in outer space, or on worlds which orbit other stars. Or, indeed, other types of celestial objects, both natural and artificial. In these stories, much of the difficulties associated with space travel are blithely ignored. Spaceships magically travel out of gravity wells. Spaceships magically provide interior gravity. Spaceship hulls magically protect occupants from all manner of spaceborne hazards. And, of course, spaceships magically travel unimaginable distances within days or weeks.

Yet look here. It seems Panspermia as a theory has a serious hole in it. While life in some form, such as hardy microbes,  may be able to survive months or years in space, they’re not going to get very far in such timeframes. To travel between star systems could take millions of years. Not even a kevlar-coated microbe with an atomic pile for a nucleus is going to survive that journey. But its corpse might. And, providing radiation, etc, has not garbled too much of the information embedded in it, the microbe could be used as a template for life. So… zombie microbes. Zombie space travellers.

Some sf novels have suggested that only information – carefully safeguarded, of course – may be the only way to colonise the stars. The Orphans of Earth trilogy by Sean Williams and Shane Dix springs to mind. In it, AI constructs based on real people are sent to various stars with exoplanets, and they then use robot bodies on arrival. Then there’s William Barton’s Dark Sky Legion, in which the protagonist travels dead from star to star, and is resurrected at each destination.

These are ways of dealing with the distances. Because the distances are vast. Sf writers and readers often lose sight of that. Take, for example, the heliopause, the point where the solar wind is too weak to push against the stellar winds of others stars. It’s approximately 100 AU from the Sun. That’s nearly fifteen billion kilometres. Voyager 1 is not expected to reach the heliopause until 2015, and it’s been travelling at around 67,000 km/h since 1977. Interstellar distances are orders of magnitude greater. Intergalactic distances are simply mind-boggling. There is a wall-shaped structure of galaxies some 400 million light-years from Earth called the Sculptor Wall. It is 370 million light years long, 230 million light years wide and 45 million light years deep. Try and picture that. It can’t be done. It’s impossible to imagine how long it would take just to travel its length. Yes, space is big, as Douglas Adams famously wrote. Human beings cannot travel to other planetary systems – space is too big. It’s also lethal. Human beings cannot survive in it unaided. At least, living human beings cannot survive. Perhaps the only well-travelled human is a dead human.

But, however humanity makes it to the stars, imagination will lead the way, and I think there’s plenty of room in the noosphere for stories which explore such futures with a more-realistic bent. Not Mundane science fiction; just “less magical” science fiction. I can’t think of a single sf novel which does not trivialise that first difficult step out of a gravity well. Perhaps the rocket, the brute force approach, is the most effective means of throwing something into orbit. Perhaps weight will be the most important limiting factor in interplanetary or interstellar travel – assuming all journeys start and end at the bottoms of gravity wells, of course… Well, living in space is untenable over the long term.

Instead of fighting aliens, or other interstellar empires of humans, it’s a battle for survival. The only enemy is the universe. And it’s a common enemy. If there are aliens out there, then they too will be fighting the same war. Why can’t we have more science fiction that reflects this? As Sir Arthur Eddington, an astronomer, said, “Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine”. And yet sf writers seem content to refight historical wars in some sanitised and romanticised and safe imaginery place which is supposed to resemble the universe around us. They’re ignoring the unimaginable strangeness and the mind-boggling vastness of it all. They turned the Orion Arm into a shopping mall, and the Milky Way into Smallville. They’ve taken the wonder out of the real universe.

It’s time to put it back. Please.