I had coffee a couple weeks back with a fellow Denver writer named Warren Hammond. Unlike me, he's a bona fide author whose first novel, KOP, came out in June of 2007. I read KOP and interviewed Warren last year for my city section of The A.V. Club, and I was surprised by how much I loved the book. It's a science fiction/crime noir hybrid–and while I'm a big fan of the former and a passing fan of the latter, I didn't realize how entertainingly the two genres could be blended. (Before you start yelling, "What about Philip K. Dick," please keep in mind that Warren's book is much more rooted in pure, unapologetic pulp.) Don't get me wrong; KOP isn't some life-changing, genre-shattering read. But it did exactly what Warren wanted it to do: plunk a hardboiled detective story into the steamy streets of an alien planet far in the future, a backwater world that's rundown and gritty in a way that Firefly fans would surely find familiar.
A fiction writer of the wannabe variety, I asked Warren to meet me at my neighborhood café so I could pick his brain about his creative process. The conversation, though, quickly turned toward our personal preferences when it comes to sci-fi. We started talking about hard science fiction–the rockets and rayguns stuff–versus the more fantastic and/or crossbred end of the genre (call it "slipstream" or "interstitial," if you must). For years now–save for stunning authors like Iain M. Banks and Alastair Reynolds–I've pretty much shunned hard sci-fi. I can't say exactly why. Maybe it's just not escapist enough. My favorite novel in recent years, China Miéville's Perdido Street Station, takes place on an utterly otherly world with absolutely no reference to our own. It's not just another planet somewhere in our universe's past, present, or future; it exists as if our universe never did, and operates according to its own laws of physics and biology. Hard sci-fi, as far-flung as it can get, still stays somehow tethered to Earth and technology and humanity as we know it. Lately I've just been craving weirder stuff, stories that probe conflicts and philosophies that resound on a more subliminal or metaphorical (or whatever) level.
About ten minutes into this profound discussion I realized, of course, that I had been unwittingly debating Star Trek versus Star Wars.
Yeah, I'm that bad of a geek. My whole literary worldview can be reduced to the sissiest point-counterpoint human culture will ever know. Star Trek, obviously, embodies hard science fiction in all its Earth-centric glory. Star Wars, on the other hand, doesn't even imagine the existence of Earth. (A long time ago? A galaxy far, far away? I don't buy it.) Granted, Star Wars has plenty of rockets and rayguns (of sorts), and it's a far cry from Miéville's steam-and-socialism-fueled Bas-Lag. But strip away the sci-fi veneer of Star Wars–as writer Ligia Luckhurst has so convincingly argued–and what you have left is a straight-up, sword-and-sorcery fantasy of the wholly archetypal sort. (Of course, Luckhurst is a Joseph Campbell disciple. What self-respecting blog post about Star Wars would be complete without mentioning Joseph Campbell?)
In any case, I certainly don't want to veer into the Internet's eight-billionth Worf versus Chewbacca argument. But since talking with Warren recently, I haven't been able to shake this gnawing question: What exactly is it about speculative fiction that I like, and why have my tastes changed as I've grown older? It doesn't help that I've been muddying the waters of my mind even more lately with books like M. John Harrison's unfuckingbelievable The Course Of The Heart.
Harrison's 1992 novel–reissued in 2006 with complimentary quotes from both Miéville and Banks; how conveniently insular!–is its own beast entirely. On the surface it appears to be the type of contemporary or urban fantasy done to death by Neil Gaiman, Charles De Lint, and the like: that is, stories set in "the real world" that reveal a secret, magic realm just beyond (or within) our own. But the hidden demesne of The Pleroma in Harrison's book isn't quite so pat. Nor do its characters–a group of former college students trying to sort out their marriages and minds years after following a magic-practicing professor into another plane of existence–live exactly in our world or the other. Without spoiling anything, let me say that I walked away from The Course Of The Heart as ontologically disoriented as I did when I was a 16-year-old finishing J.G. Ballard's The Crystal World for the first time. Again I was left wondering: How and why does a book full of the most minute, mundane human observations snowball into a poetic meditation on the unreal? When did divorcees bitching about the past and treading the thin line between memory and history gain the power to transport me faster and farther away than–sorry–a warp-capable starship? As a teenager I felt I had somehow outgrown Star Wars and its silly simplicity in favor of the more complex, "realistic" Star Trek. (Please bear in mind that my adolescence took place post-The Original Series and pre-Episode I.) Halfway through my 30s, though, I'm finding more resonance–and even truth–in subtle subversions or outright rejections of that elusive realm known as "the real world."