Tricia Sullivan at the British Library
May. 25th, 2011 07:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceIt's typical, I tell you: I slide across the pond to California, and suddenly all the smart stuff is happening in the UK.
The British Library has an SF exhibition, "Out of This World" (watch that opening animation, it's fun), on until late September. Last weekend they launched it with the help of some SF luminaries: China was there, and Adam Roberts, and Tricia Sullivan who never goes anywhere that I am and I'm really sorry I missed her. Again.
But! She had the sense to write down what she said! It's here, and it's one of the most cogent nuggets I've read on the nature of SF and the way we talk about it. This, eg:
Science fiction is a literature whose scope includes the entire nature of reality--or realities--from the universe (or multiverse) right on down to the smallest individual action. The breadth of possibility in science fiction is no less than what is available to us philosphically and empirically in the totality of our senses and their extrapolation. In a Venn diagram, all other literatures would be a subset of SF.
And this:
The tensions in the paradox of science fiction have the potential to create a complex, seething idea-space that is pluralistic in viewpoint and outcome. Instead, we often end up with a definitional discussion based on dichotomies and the axe of binary: Zero or one? Is it or isn't it? Yes or no? In or out?
(If you have a cat you know what it's like trying to get the cat to decide whether it wants to be in or out. Shroedinger's problem would have been so much easier for me to grasp if instead of being neither alive nor dead til observed, the cat had been neither in nor out because it couldn't make up its mind.)
And this:
Just as breathing in and breathing out is not the actual purpose of respiration, so arguing about genre definitions is beside the point of science fiction.
Oh, just go and read the whole thing. It's not long, and it is absolutely to the point.
The British Library has an SF exhibition, "Out of This World" (watch that opening animation, it's fun), on until late September. Last weekend they launched it with the help of some SF luminaries: China was there, and Adam Roberts, and Tricia Sullivan who never goes anywhere that I am and I'm really sorry I missed her. Again.
But! She had the sense to write down what she said! It's here, and it's one of the most cogent nuggets I've read on the nature of SF and the way we talk about it. This, eg:
Science fiction is a literature whose scope includes the entire nature of reality--or realities--from the universe (or multiverse) right on down to the smallest individual action. The breadth of possibility in science fiction is no less than what is available to us philosphically and empirically in the totality of our senses and their extrapolation. In a Venn diagram, all other literatures would be a subset of SF.
And this:
The tensions in the paradox of science fiction have the potential to create a complex, seething idea-space that is pluralistic in viewpoint and outcome. Instead, we often end up with a definitional discussion based on dichotomies and the axe of binary: Zero or one? Is it or isn't it? Yes or no? In or out?
(If you have a cat you know what it's like trying to get the cat to decide whether it wants to be in or out. Shroedinger's problem would have been so much easier for me to grasp if instead of being neither alive nor dead til observed, the cat had been neither in nor out because it couldn't make up its mind.)
And this:
Just as breathing in and breathing out is not the actual purpose of respiration, so arguing about genre definitions is beside the point of science fiction.
Oh, just go and read the whole thing. It's not long, and it is absolutely to the point.