Babel Clash

So, my wife (the poet Carolyn Clink) and I are at the Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop in Laramie, Wyoming, and we’re going to spend one evening watching an SF movie with bad astronomy. We’ve got dozens to choose from, and the front-runner suggestion is Armageddon.

Any other suggestions, folks? (I suggested Disney’s The Black Hole. We can’t get the current Star Trek yet, of course, but it might qualify, too!)

My friend and inspiration Phyllis Gotlieb, the only Canadian to be in SFWA at its founding, the mother of Canadian science fiction, passed away yesterday at the age of 83 from complications related to a ruptured appendix.

Phyllis was proof of concept that you could live in Toronto and still be a science-fiction writer for major American publishing houses; if I hadn’t had her as a role model, I’m not sure I ever would have embarked on the career path I took.

We’d been friends for 30 years — I met her in 1979 when my high-school science-fiction club had her as guest of honour at a little convention we put on at Northview Heights Secondary School. She was feisty and opinionated and passionate then, and she was still all those things the last time I saw her, not that long ago. One of my greatest professional thrills was getting to publish her final novel, Birthstones, in 2007, under my Robert J. Sawyer Books imprint for Markham’s Fitzhenry & Whiteside.

From a profile of Phyllis by Brian Bethune in Maclean’s in 2002:

“That’s when she became the grandmother of us all,” says Robert Sawyer, the most prominent author in a now-flourishing national scene. “She was the one — till the ’80s, the only one — who proved you could sit in Toronto and write major science fiction and sell it to major American publishers.” Sunburst, which has given its name to an award for the best Canadian sci-fi book of the year, marked a final change of course for Gotlieb, who eventually no longer had “poem-shaped ideas.” (Since then, she says, “my aliens write poetry.”)

Morgan from Borders just asked what is the cutting edge of science fiction. And I just came back from Readercon, where, as always, the question of what overall theme there is to Canadian science fiction came up.

For me, the answer is the same thing: a scientific exploration of consciousness.

When I took psychology courses at university starting in 1979, the word “consciousness” was never mentioned, and that’s because it really didn’t have a scientific meaning; we were coming of the end of B.F. Skinner and Behaviorism, and the brain was being treated like a black box — input when in, behavior came out.

But numerous fields — medical imaging, quantum physics, philosophy of mind — have made real progress in the last thirty year, and now we’re finally grappling with the question of why it’s like anything to be alive and why we have internal self-reflection. I’ve certainly explored that in a lot of my novels, starting with my 1995 Nebula Award-winner The Terminal Experiment right through to my current novel WWW: Wake (and FlashForward, the one everyone’s buzzing about because a TV adaptation of it is forthcoming, is very much about the nature of consciousness).

I’m not alone in this: Greg Egan has written a lot of interesting stuff about consciousness. Greg’s Australian, true, but here in the Great White North we think of them as just inverted Canadians.

Peter Watts, Karl Schroeder, R. Scott Bakker, James Alan Gardner and other Canadians besides me have also dug into the questions arising from the study of consciousness (and the English-lit majors might opine that it’s a natural obsession for a country whose literature is all about defining national identity).

Faster-than-light travel? A pipe dream. Time travel? Even more so. Aliens? Not likely to ever get here. But consciousness — ah, now, there’s a topic worth exploring! And of all branches of literature, I think science fiction is doing the best job of doing just that.

Thoughts, anyone?

Here’s an updating of something I first wrote in 2001; even though my novel FlashForward has indeed sold to Hollywood, and will be a TV series on ABC this fall (and I’m delighted with the adaptation), and even though several of my other properties are currently under option, I find I still mostly agree with it:

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It happens all the time: I meet someone, they inquire about what I do for a living, I tell them I write science-fiction novels, and they ask whether any of them have been made into movies.

Two misconceptions underlie that question, one naive and the other galling.

The naive misconception is that most novels, or at least a goodly fraction of them, get made into films. The truth is that hardly any actually do. Indeed, even most major novels don’t get produced for the silver screen. Consider the winners of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s Nebula Award, the “Academy Award” of the science-fiction field. Forty-five novels have received that trophy (including my own The Terminal Experiment, which won the 1995 award). Of those 45, how many do you think have been flickified?

Only two — and, as it happens, the first two: Frank Herbert’s Dune (which won the 1965 Nebula), and Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon (which won the 1966 award, and was filmed as Charly). All the others — including such classics as Isaac Asimov’s The Gods Themselves, Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama, William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, Larry Niven’s Ringworld, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars — remain unfilmed.

And if books of that stature don’t get made into movies, consider just how unlikely it is that an average novel by a midlist writer is ever going to be filmed. In fact, only a handful of SF novels have ever been made into movies, and in many cases the resulting products were atrocious. David Brin’s The Postman and Robert A. Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters are great books, but the film adaptations stank. (Probably the best film ever made from an SF novel was 1968’s very liberal adaptation of Pierre Boulle’s La Planète des singes, which came out 41 years ago as the original Planet of the Apes.)

Indeed, I had dinner recently with friends, and, as it often does for us newly middle-aged folk, the topic of eventual retirement came up. One of my buddies opined that I had nothing to worry about: all I needed was for a couple of my books to be made into movies, and I’d be all set. I told her that was precisely like planning to win the lottery — the odds are about the same.

In fact, most authors don’t get rich even when a movie is made of one of their books. Option fees (the amount producers pay to have you agree not to license the movie rights to anyone else) start at about US$5,000 for a year — a nice windfall, sure, but not life-changing. And an author’s compensation if a movie is made from his or her book is typically between US$150,000 and US$500,000 — all of which comes as a lump payment, letting the tax people carve almost half right off the top. Now, yes, even after the government has siphoned off its share, that’s certainly a pile of money — but it’s only a small fraction of what the average person needs in order to retire with a middle-class income.

Now, what about the galling misconception? It’s the belief that a book is a second-rate form of expression. Unless the story is committed to film, we’re led to believe that the book is a failure.

Poppycock. Despite the pernicious auteur school of filmmaking (which promulgates the lie that the director is the sole creator of the film), movies are enormously collaborative, and therefore are exercises in compromise. A novel, on the other hand, is one person’s pure, unadulterated vision: it’s exactly what the artist intended, without concession or budgetary constraints.

People do understand this as related to other kinds of art. No one said to Michelangelo after he finished sculpting David that, well, gee, it’s a nice enough statue, but, you know, unless they make an action figure out of it, what good is it? And yet the same principle should obviously apply to books versus movies: the definitive version of Dune is Frank Herbert’s novel, not the theatrical film or the Sci-Fi Channel miniseries. And my all-time favourite SF novel, Frederik Pohl’s Gateway, won’t become one whit better than it already is if someone someday makes a movie out of it. Books are an end unto themselves, not proposals aimed at Hollywood; whether the book is a success or failure has nothing to do with whether Tinsel Town takes an interest.

So next time you’re chatting with an author, don’t ask if there have been any movies made from his or her books. Instead, ask where you can buy a copy of the actual, complete, finished work of art: the original dreamer’s words on the printed page.

After all, as everybody knows, the book is always better than the movie.

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Thoughts, people?

Readercon — one of the very best, and one of the most literate science-fiction conventions — takes place near Boston this coming weekend. I’m on the panel described below, which is certainly a provocative topic. I’ll be citing my own Calculating God and Robert Charles Wilson’s Darwinia, both of which were Hugo Award finalists, during the discussion; what other books bear mentioning on this theme?

Is Darwinism Too Good For SF?
Jeff Hecht (Leader), Caitlin R. Kiernan, Anil Menon, James Morrow, Steven Popkes, Robert J. Sawyer:

This year marks the sesquicentennial of the publication of The Origin of Species and the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth. Considering the importance of the scientific idea, there has been surprisingly little great sf inspired by it. We wonder whether, in fact, if the theory has been too good, too unassailable and too full of explanatory power, to leave the wiggle room where speculative minds can play in. After all, physics not only has FTL and time travel, but mechanisms like wormholes that might conceivably make them possible. What are their equivalents in evolutionary theory, if any?

Okay, I confess: tonight I’m off to see the new Star Trek movie for the fifth time.

But the science in the movie is just plain whacko. A supernova that threatens the entire universe? Creating singularities out of red matter, whatever the heck that is? Being able to look at a planet in another star system with the naked eye (Spock looking up at Vulcan looming in the sky of Delta Vega)? Come on!

Yes, we can all play the game of trying to come up with rational explanations for any of these howlers (that is, we can all try to do the work now that the scriptwriters should have done but didn’t). But let’s not do that here; there are plenty of other online places for that particular exercise.

Instead, let’s ask: Does the science actually matter in science fiction? As a novelist, I work enormously hard to try to get things right in my books. I found it funny that for the Star Trek, precisely one science consultant was listed for this hundred-million-dollar movie, whereas my latest novel, WWW: Wake, created, I assure you, on a much more modest budget ;), has more than a dozen science consultants listed in the acknowledgments.

But, if in the end, the only thing that matters — witness Star Trek or Star Wars — is whether we laughed or cried, cheered or booed, in the right places, does it really matter if the science is accurate in SF?

Certainly the general media thinks our science is all made up, anyway — “crazy science fiction,” “the stuff of sci-fi,” “not science fiction, but real science” are terms we’ve all cringed at often enough.

(I will say, in my consultations with David Goyer, who is heading up the adaptation of my novel FlashForward for ABC this fall, I’ve been enormously impressed by how scientifically literate, and how curious about science, he is. But, that said, he also is, in my experience with film and TV makers, very much in the minority.)

So, yeah, it’s called SF, but if the F is good, we demonstrably give a free ride on the S when it comes to movies. What about books? Do we hold them to a higher standard, and, if so, why?

Rob

Time has a way of catching up with you. My novel FlashForward was first published in 1999, and was set in the then-distant year of 2009 — starting in April, to be precise.

Well, now the future is here: reality has caught up with what I had to say. Some things I got right (the new pope did take the name Benedict XVI!) and some things I got wrong. Was it gutsy, or foolhardy, to set a book so close to the present day?

What about my current novel, WWW: Wake? That one is set only three years from now — surely I’m courting disaster with such a near-future setting? (And other books, such as my Hugo Award-winning Hominids, were set in the year they were published — 2002, in that case.)

I’ve heard some other writers say it’s impossible to write near-future SF anymore — because science and technology (not to mention the political and social landscape) change so quickly, you’re bound to be proven wrong. Those writers seem to prefer the far-future.

But I find that most modern far-future SF doesn’t interest me. When you wave nanotech like a magic wand, when you invoke the technological singularity as an excuse for anything-goes, when it’s all just a simulation (or a dream), I find I just don’t care.

I think science fiction’s greatest strength is its ability to comment on the here-and-now, and, well, for that, there’s no time — or setting! — like the present.

Okay, that’s where I’m coming from on this. What do you all think? Would you rather read about A.D. 2010 or A.D. 2100 — or maybe A.D. 21,000?

Rob