Here’s an interesting thought I found in an interview on the SciFi Channel’s web site with prolific sci-fi writer Robert Charles Wilson (The Harvest, 1992, Mysterium, 1994, Darwinia, 1998, Bios 1999, The Chronoliths, 2001.)
Although originally from the USA, you’ve lived in Canada for decades. What do you see as the defining characteristics of Canadian SF, as opposed to the American and British versions of the genre?
Wilson: I’ve been asked this before, and I don’t really have a solid answer. If I stand back and squint … well, it’s obvious there’s been a considerable surge in Canadian SF and fantasy over the past three decades. But the Canadians are a wildly heterogeneous group of writers. You can draw a line connecting, say, Peter Watts and William Gibson, but it hardly intersects with Rob Sawyer or Michelle West.
It’s also tempting to say something political here. Science fiction, whatever the persuasion of its individual authors, has always been a blue-state phenomenon–urban, broadly progressive, religiously skeptical. It thrives alongside liberalism and what used to be called “free thinking,” and it will always be viewed with suspicion by dogmatists and conservatives. It is H.G. Wells in one of our founding works, The Time Machine, who says, “You must follow me carefully. I shall have to controvert one or two ideas that are almost universally accepted.” Such as the idea that human history is divinely ordained or that the human species is fixed and immutable.
This kind of thinking doesn’t go down too well at Focus on the Family or the Heritage Foundation, and the occasional quasi-SF that emerges from that contingent–say, Tim LaHaye or Newt Gingrich–is laughable.
It also is telling that in most (not all) science fiction, from Star Trek to Return of the Jedi, there’s an optimism that things will get better.
I just saw Revenge of the Sith. Others have made the point about it being an anti-Bush movie even if George Lucas doesn’t quite understand democracy either.
With all the darkness we see in Sith, we know how it ends. And the seeds for the better future are planted there.
That’s one of the reasons why the Focus on the Family crew and the Bush cult don’t like science fiction.
They’re not only anti-science. They thrive on promoting fear, be it nuclear annihilation from the Soviet Union, the Book of Revelations or terrorist attacks. The extreme right which currently controls the GOP are against hopeful, brighter tomorrows.
