Ventriloquy of the Mid-Century Man [019W]

Moments before leaving for a meeting in Barbados with my colleagues Anil Madhavapeddy and Mark Elvers, I hastily loaded Arthur C. Clarke’s The Fountains of Paradise onto my Kindle for airplane reading. I really want to love “hard science fiction” — I spent months with Asimov’s Foundation in 2022 — but I must admit that I am struggling with the limitations of this genre.

In her 2013 interview with The Paris Review, Ursula Le Guin questioned the hard/soft divide in science fiction, pointing out that the distinction seems to be based on authors and readers of sci-fi arbitrarily deciding which of the sciences are “Science” and which aren’t.

The “hard”–science fiction writers dismiss everything except, well, physics, astronomy, and maybe chemistry. Biology, sociology, anthropology—that’s not science to them, that’s soft stuff. They’re not that interested in what human beings do, really. But I am. I draw on the social sciences a great deal. I get a lot of ideas from them, particularly from anthropology. When I create another planet, another world, with a society on it, I try to hint at the complexity of the society I’m creating, instead of just referring to an empire or something like that.

There is a good point here, and Le Guin’s attention to social sciences and anthropology and history was indeed a strength, but Asimov was also preoccupied with the same throughout Foundation. So what is the difference, aside from the fact that Foundation was written by a man? Well, it cannot be unrelated to Asimov being a man, but perhaps we will get to the point sooner by referring to a specific type of man — the Mid-Century Man.

The Mid-Century Man has no time for the usual literary rules governing the development of characters and their arc of growth. He is interested in science and humanity, yes, but through the lens of his own avatar whom he transplants directly from our world of his time into the futuristic world of his story. This hapless transplant finds himself, with no volition, speaking the author’s words through his own lips… He hears his own voice prattle on about “the last refuge of the incompetent” and can do absolutely nothing about it.

The inclination of the Mid-Century Man to spill no ink that might distract from his speculations (flavoured with thematic orientalism, as in the case of Fountains) is not limited to hard science fiction — Herbert falls prey to the same tendancy in Dune, which I adore, but he is saved by his mastery of the tragedy-form: indeed, we are already weeping with Paul over Chani’s fate a quarter of the way through Dune Messiah.

In contrast, there is little that is compelling about the characters of The Fountains of Paradise, nor those of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the same holds for Asimov’s Foundation. The mostly one-dimensional characters of these works are foils for the authors’ speculative ideas about technology or “future history”, and a shorter work could have been written that omits the ventriloquy act entirely and just directly makes the point the author so strongly wished to make.

Will Fountains be the last “hard science fiction” book I read? Surely not… There is still much to enjoy and marvel over — and there is a true sense in which Clarke’s elevator to Heaven is compelling enough to outweigh even the worst of his flimsy characterisation.