SF and the human condition
janni was talking this morning about how when you read a mainstream book sometimes you want to say "Get over it and go and save the world instead", and other times the real world problems of the mainstream book are sufficiently interesting that you don't wish the place would suddenly be infested with a plague of dragons. (I am reminded of perkinwarbeck2's review of Mill on the Floss that suggested it would be a much better book with an added alien invasion plot.)

This connects up with something I was thinking.

When one reads something, anything, the characters have problems. Maybe the problems are boring and have been seen before -- and this applies just as much to the space cadet who keeps getting bullied because he's the only human in the starship school -- but in SF there's always the interesting possibility of the world surprising you. Even when it doesn't, even if the answers all turn out to be predictable, the SF reader has still had a good experience because there was always the possibility of being surprised... and if the worst comes to the worst, at least they saved the world.

Everything, really, is about the human condition. SF lets you talk about the human condition more widely and from different angles by contrasting it with the alien condition and the AI condition and the android condition, but really, the readers and writers are human. In SF, you get books like Spin and Cyteen where new and interesting problems (aliens speeding up the rotation of the Earth, cloning and life extension tech) ask new and interesting questions about the human condition. Most of the things mainstream books hbave to say about it have been said before, and even encountered before in real life. They havve limited options to examine. In mainstream to get new questions that haven't been asked before about the human condition you have to get masterpieces like Ian McEwan's Atonement, but SF gives you constant new angles for getting at things.

But the problem with recommending SF to the non-SF reader is that they have no filters. If you give them Spin and they are knocked over by it, they're likely to grab Into the Slave Nebula (a book I'm actually very fond of) and they're not going to have the experience an SF reader has of expecting to be surprised, they're going to conclude it's crap and likely dismiss the whole genre. Or they're going to think you mean that SF predicts tomorrows problems and try to read it as futurology, where SF is terrible at that considered individually, but not bad considered as an experience. But that's why they latch onto SF by non-SF writers, I think, the ideas are genuinely new, and the style is OK, and the pacing isn't scary, (SF pacing is a rant for another day) and the book is by damn saying something new about the human condition. Shikasta is a truly terrible book in all sorts of ways, but even so.

Yesterday, when I had no brain, I entered the first 108 books on my shelf (alpha by author) into LibraryThing. I wasn't surprised that of that first 108 books, the one most other people owned was Pride and Prejudice. I was surprised that the one that came second, above all the other Austen (I have all of Austen, worse luck), above everything I own starting with A, was The Handmaid's Tale. I own all Atwood's novels and some of her short story collections (some of her poetry too, but that's on a different shelf) and none of them were anywhere near The Handmaid's Tale.

The Handmaid's Tale is a good book. I like it. I don't think it's brilliantly original, but then when I read it I'd read Suzette Hayden Elgin's Native Tongue and Sherri Tepper's The Gate to Women's Country and various other things within SF that were playing with feminism and dystopia. It isn't clunky the way a lot of SF written by non SF-readers is, largely because utopic/dystopic is a mode that arose outside SF and isn't so challenging to write, and also because Atwood's a pretty good SF writer. (I'd have nominated Oryx and Crake for the John W. Campbell Memorial Hard SF or Solidly SF Anyway, Really We Mean It Award.)

But in any case, among people who have entered their A books into Library Thing, it is outstandingly more popular than all her other books, and that may be because it was made into a film, but I think it's because it's saying something about the human condition they can't say because they're confining themselves to quotidian and thus limiting their options, and they need an alien invasion, or to go out and save the world.