An author among my mutuals recently made a comment on Twitter with which I disagreed, and only too late, after expressing my disagreement, I realized I was diving back into the endless debate over what defines a genre.
So, here is the original comment from Misha Burnett:
Setting is not story.
I love SF/F Mysteries. Unfortunately, too many times the Mystery part revolves around the SF/F part.
That’s not necessary, and it makes for predictable and dull mysteries.
— Misha Burnett is wising up the rubes. (@MishaBurnett) February 19, 2021
And this was my reply:
Hard disagree. If your sf setting is not important to your story, why do you have an sf setting?
This is the opposite of C.S. Lewis’s complaint that science fiction was degenerating into mere gangster stories set in space. https://t.co/BHSnPaxbSf
— Deus ex Magical Girl (@DGDDavidson) February 20, 2021
My further discussion on this subject follows after the break:
Lewis, Bradbury, and Gangsters
You see that I here appealed to C. S. Lewis, someone who ought to know something about the subject, but we need to dig a little into Lewis’s perspective. He clearly wanted science fiction that was more fantastical and speculative in nature; this is evident in his own sf trilogy, which blends into fantasy despite some (poor) attempts to incorporate real scientific knowledge in its first volume, Out of the Silent Planet. The second volume, Perelandra, which is also the best in the series, becomes pure fantasy, a twist on the Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost with some quality action sequences and vivid descriptions of a surreal setting thrown in for good measure.
Although it has been years, I do recall that, somewhere in his interviews or correspondence, Lewis late in life indicated that he had lost much of his interest in science fiction for exactly the reason I cite above: Because the various pulp genres were bleeding together so that sf had turned into gangster stories in space. He also commented that one author he thought was doing the real work of sf was Ray Bradbury.
Now, that is notable because it is not hard to find other authors who would argue that Ray Bradbury is not a science-fiction author at all, but a kind of prose-poet, a man who writes about feelings and impressions and only uses science-fiction elements as props. Bradbury himself appears to confirm this: Years ago, when possible bacterial remains were found in a Mars rock, some newsmen thought interviewing Bradbury was a good idea. In these interviews, Bradbury was surprisingly dogmatic in his insistence that alien life does not and cannot exist, and he explained that the “Martians” of his Martian Chronicles were metaphors; that is, the book was not about aliens but about us.
The View of Card
During the Twitter conversation, Daniel J. Davis chimed in and, as I had, appealed to authority. But in this case, the authority was Orson Scott Card:
OSC made a similar point once about a student’s story, a standard murder mystery set on a train. The train was on Mars. He went around the room asking the other students if it was “really” SF or not. Most said no, because the setting didn’t affect the final outcome of the plot.
— Daniel J Davis (@DanielJWrites) February 20, 2021
And furthermore:
Card disagreed. He said the story was automatically more interesting from an SF perspective by virtue of the train being on Mars, the setting introduced new challenges that didn’t exist on earth, and the publishers and readers would consider it SF anyway.
— Daniel J Davis (@DanielJWrites) February 20, 2021
Burnett reinforced this point by noting that certain core plot points are going to exist in a story regardless of setting:
The setting is important to the story–but it is not the story.
Suppose you have a story set in an SF undersea city. The fact that the characters live there will greatly impact their lives.
— Misha Burnett is wising up the rubes. (@MishaBurnett) February 20, 2021
And:
But the story isn’t “people standing around and being in an undersea city”, the story is a love story, or a mystery, or a crime caper, or whatever.
The challanges they face from their environment should be challanges that they encounter in their striving to do something.
— Misha Burnett is wising up the rubes. (@MishaBurnett) February 20, 2021
Discussion
I surrendered the field because Twitter is too limited a medium to allow me to get my thoughts in order, but after further reflection, I’ve concluded that I think the esteemed Mr. Burnett is half right—but only half. You can see it in the concessions that both he (and Card) make: “…the setting introduced new challenges that didn’t exist on earth…,” “The fact that the characters live there will greatly impact their lives,” and “The challenges they face from their environment should be challenges that they encounter in their striving to do something.”
He is correct that plots may be boiled down to their essentials, independent of setting: Boy meets girl, hero saves the day, the mystery is solved, etc. But the way this story is told, its particular elements, cannot be independent of the setting.
When I said that a murder mystery in an sf setting should incorporate sf elements, à la Caves of Steel, Burnett challenged me by asking if a murder mystery set in Chicago should in some way incorporate Chicago elements and be different from a mystery in another setting. My answer is yes. The murder mystery set in Chicago should be a Chicago story.
Now, it may be possible to use the name Chicago as a mere excuse or placeholder, much as Jorge Luis Borges uses Buenos Aires in his murder mystery “Death and the Compass,” which actually takes place in a fantastical, surreal city Borges constructed out of several locations. This might appear to contradict my argument, but it does not: “Death and the Compass” is not a Buenos Aires story at all, but a surreal Borges story. The fact that it takes place in the psychological landscape unique to Borges is integral to the plot, just as the real Buenos Aires might have been if Borges had chosen to write a story that was more grounded.
In the same way, we can see how plot is inextricable from setting in some recent, prominent examples of science fiction. The Martian might be summarized as a rehash of Robinson Crusoe, but that does not do the novel or the movie justice: The setting on Mars is key to the plot, very nearly is the plot, because the story is about a man dealing with the environment of Mars.
Similarly, we might call Interstellar a rehash of The Odyssey because it is about a man taking a long journey and struggling to get home to his family. But such a summary leaves out time dilation, FTL travel, and black holes, which are integral to the particular tale that Interstellar tells. “Man tries to get home” is an accurate summary of the movie, but it is also a deceptive (or at least incomplete) one because it leaves out key elements.
For that matter, even Star Wars, which is often cited as an example of science fiction that isn’t really science fiction because it has no science in it, could only be a very different story if it had a different setting. Yes, a tale of a farmer who becomes a knight and rescues a princess could certainly be told in a fantasy setting or even a historical one, but neither of those settings would allow for the movie’s climax, which pulls its ideas from the World War II movie The Dam Busters. The threat represented by the Death Star, a science-fictional object that makes up part of the setting, is key to the plot.
Conclusion
As regards Orson Scott Card, I can also appeal to him to erode this notion that setting and plot are unrelated elements. In his influential How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy, Card describes what he calls a “millieu story,” which is a tale in which the setting basically is the plot. Card names 2000 Leagues under the Sea as an example: The story is primarily about fantastic places and things. But, of course, 2000 Leagues still has a story arc and characters just as stories that are not milieu stories will still have setting. These elements can be distinguished, but they always intertwine. Where the story takes place necessarily informs what happens there.
So, getting back to the original point made, I stand by what I said: A murder mystery in an sf setting needs to incorporate sf elements. Otherwise, there is simply no point to the sf setting.
