As if Real, Rebecca Ore

One of my colleagues in the adjunct basement office, who runs a small press and one of the literary web sites at the college where I work, told a colleague that what I was writing was “almost literature.”  He has since taken a chapter from another time travel novel I’m working on now for a web magazine.  After that, I asked him what I should do to make it real literature.  “Get rid of the explanations.  Leave the technology symbolic.”

             But what makes science fiction interesting to write and read is that we read it as if the projected science, the gubbish and baloneum, were real, even though we know it’s not real (the sensawonder is the measure of the largest suspension of disbelief known).  Science fiction clashes with certain aleaturory tricks and can’t be the sort of literature that’s self-referential because it’s so obviously a piece of fiction that breaking the frame would be criminal.

            I grew up reading everything--Kim,  Have Space Suit, Will Travel,  Peyton Place,  We, Too, Won’t Last,  Hamlet, Trojan Women,  Uncle Tom’s Cabin,  “The Metamorphosis,” Main Street,  everything that Reader’s Digest condensed that my mom bought,  Howard Fast, James Baldwin, T.S. Eliot,  Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, until I ended up in New York City at a time when the poets were talking to the science fiction writers, and in some cases, were or became the science fiction writers.

            While I’d dropped reading science fiction in my late teens, I ended up sharing an apartment with a woman who was reading Angelique and science fiction.  I was working for a children’s book publisher and read my way through the better of their list: Rosemary Sutcliff, Alan Gardner, and began again reading science fiction since everyone then was reading science fiction by Ballard, Disch, Delany, Russ, just as they were going to performances of  The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and to Kaddish at the Circle in the Square in the Village.  We heard Patti Smith sing for the first time in public at St. Marks Church and read Dangerous Visions and Frank O’Hara, who told us that it was fine if we didn’t like poetry because the movies were even better.

           Everything was okay.  We even read and liked some academic poets.   Stanley Kunitz and Robert Lowell read at St. Marks Poetry Project, too.

           Then, we could live on part-time jobs and have small apartments five flights over Houston Street.  Most of the people I knew then aren't in NYC anymore...and many of them are teaching poetry to glossy young rich people at private universities.

           What was wonderful about those seven years in NYC was the sense that in the community I was living in then, all work could be good and all work could have bad examples.  Writing poetry didn’t save you; writing s.f. didn’t damn you. 

           And SF has its special fictional tricks, the business of constructing an imaginary world out of words and speculations.  If a Viking teenager could time travel to a place where all his people and social code had changed dramatically, what would he do?  How does time collapse on us?  Past?  The past is always invading the present and maybe is the present.

-- Rebecca Ore

Comments

[Henry]

Well, Rebecca, this the colleague next door, and I feel I need to clarify two points. First off, I had said that what you are writing is almost "literary fiction." What you are writing is clearly literature. Secondly, the difference between science fiction literature and literary fiction is not that literary fiction is metaphoric, but that literary fiction isn't geared to readers who want technical explanations for the scientific phenomena. I'm not espousing self-referentiality or a metaphorizing of all things unrealistic, only letting the emphasis fall on the human drama that is already central to your work.