Flying saucers, talking sheep and burning bushes – Part 1

Part I: Flying saucers

This oddly titled article is about literature, pure and simple.

It’s so much more than just the summer reading list, the required class, the classics. At literature’s core is the Story. I capitalize it here to emphasize the archetypal force deep inside humankind’s collective consciousness that has expressed itself in all kinds of different stories (lowercase) through all ages, all languages and all forms – oral history, books, scripts, screenplays – and ultimately the human story. So what does the Story have to do with flying saucers (or talking sheep or burning bushes for that matter)?

These elements concern a particular genre of literature, which I believe is incorrectly and unfairly understood: science fiction. Too often, science fiction is treated as separate and inferior to mainstream fiction, which eschews imaginary and fantastical story elements. Instead, it is diminutively relegated to comic book status (emphasis on “comic” rather than “book”), which is both an enormous loss for literature and an unfortunate misreading of comic books.

The reason is that science fiction is widely perceived to be a recent invention, its inception synonymous with the dawn of science (emphasis on “science” rather than “fiction”), and it is therefore regarded as adolescent and taken less seriously than other forms of fiction.

In fact, science fiction is not a new invention, just as science is not a new creation. With the Scientific Revolution starting with Galileo in circa 1600 A.D. came terminology, categories and definitions. Physics is the study of the forces of nature. Biology is the study of living things. Chemistry is the study of elemental building blocks. But they did not come into existence when someone finally coined the term “science,” no more than gravity came into existence when an apple hit Newton’s head. And some would argue that a distinction should never have been made between these fields of science.

How we define things – where we draw the line between various categories, species or genres – is integral to how we interpret them … and how we allow them to interpret us. Throughout time, new categorization systems have come along, replacing old ways of understanding the universe. For example, when telescopes replaced horoscopes, the stars moved from the realm of religion into the field of science, greatly affecting our ambitions on the heavens.

In the same way storytelling has changed forms, from circling around campfires to leaping between pages to jumping off the screen. If we confine the Story to one form of storytelling, limiting the definition of literature to that which people held a hundred years ago or a thousand years ago, then many essential stories would go untold. Like pouring new wine in old wineskins.

…which leads us back to the topic of science fiction. There’s always been a mechanism for dealing with the unknown, for telling allegories, for capturing people’s imagination. But it is important that we understand it correctly and give this genre its proper place in the library of literature so that the Story is heard.

To be continued…