Alexander Jablokov

At Boskone I was on a panel about long SF series (despite the fact that I have never written one). Fellow panelists were John Douglas (once an editor of mine), Rosemary Kirstein, and Alastair Reynolds.

To succeed, a long SF series has to keep showing you new facets of the world. Sure, people like to settle in with familiar characters, and, to some extent, relive past adventures. Still, a good SF series is more like a work of architecture, rather than a painting (I wish I'd thought of this while on the panel). You can't see it all from one vantage point. You have to move through it, and while you are seeing it from one angle, there are things you can't see, though you might remember them.

The totality of that integration is a genuine aesthetic pleasure, one that gets shared on a narrative basis with an integrated multivolume work like Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet.  The first three books of the quartet show you the same time and place from different points of view, all of which are to some extent incompatible. You read them in order, so each one denounces and corrects the previous version.  It's all about love, one says. No, you got it all wrong, Balthazar says in his "great interlinear". No, it was actually all about politics says the third. Then the fourth book goes on, accepting all that but never resolving the various strands. It is that last element that is not like a work of science fiction.

Science fiction books provide the basic equation that moving through plot means acquiring knowledge, and that the knowledge translates into the power to move to another level, where you may well acquire more knowledge. SF narratives tend to have that open-ended structure, as each answer entails further questions.  That is one reason some personalities find it so compelling.

This penchant for systematic investigation does have its downsides. Systematizing science fiction authors often reach a state of hypersystematization, where, like conspiracy cranks, everything needs to be explained in terms of everything else. Isaac Asimov, for example, reached this phase late in his career, when he felt the need for a unified field theory of Isaac Asimov:  he tried to make out that every single one of his novels was actually a facet of a single universe.

Larry Niven seemed to get trapped inside his own creation of Known Space, and has long depended on collaborators to help him find a way out.  So science fiction is also the home of shared worlds, where collections of writers play in a single universe, sometimes created collaboratively, sometimes leased from a single writer, like Niven, who has grown tired of pushing narrative through the increasingly narrow holes left in his own creation.

And you do get clubs, cults, collections of obsessive fans. That's just the nature of the root psychology of our field. The prototype is probably fans of Sherlock Holmes, with their finicky attention to the Canon, and the contradictions in it. The commentary on Star Trek, Tolkein, etc., dwarf all other commentaries in literature. You could establish entire civilizations based on them.

So, in SF, long series are not just a lazy way of reusing a background that took a lot of work. They are a different literary experience, one that seems long, but is actually thick.  I don't think I have the stamina for doing one, but admire those who can manage it. It is a different type of work.

Several people have written cogent comments on my posts on science fictional cities (The city in science fiction and Charter cities).  I am intrigued by the concept of Charter Cities, or maybe Challenge Cities: the equivalent of "stadtluft macht frei" (city air makes you free) of the European Middle Ages, where you could escape bound status by fleeing to a city.

Of course, in that era, rulers had to do that to make sure cities were inhabited at all, because their death rates were so much higher than that of the surrounding countryside.  If there wasn't in-migration, their populations would have dropped.

So I really am thinking about the possibility of being able to escape to a jurisdiction with another economic system without having to migrate to some other continent.  It's the ultimate in diversity.  But, of course, cities are never purely economic entitities.  And, despite what some extreme libertarians would like to think, you can't build a public life on purely economic relations. Politics--power--always raises its head.  Coalitions form.  People regulate each other.  Each group tries to zone for the lifestyle it considers ideal. A successful city without significant political power seems unlikely.

And this is all to ignore the notion of the city as aesthetic object, which is an significant omission.  We have forgotten, since cities were always objects of power and of wealth, but are now seldom objects of beauty, save in fugitive and chance ways.  Beauty involves making a set of consistent choices, and that implies that other choices are not made.  There are many diverse beautiful objects, but each beautiful object is jealously non-diverse.  Just as, in the pre-modern era, tyrannies tended to permit women more freedom than democracies, so beauty depends, at least in part, in a constriction of freedom.

Of course, that might imply that there have been, somewhere, unfree cities that were beautiful.  I can't think of any.  Kim Jong-il's Pyongyang?  Ceaucescu's Bucharest? Stalin's Moscow?  Not promising notions.  Still, I think there is something to a constriction that requires a theme-and-variations approach to structure.  But it can't be imposed by some external force.  It may be a choice that can no longer be made.

Or is it just the need to deal with cars?  If so, that's another choice we're stuck with.  No one's building any cities that can't accommodate cars.  That would be like building a beautiful house without indoor plumbing.  And I say this as someone who seldom drives.

So, cities of wealth, cities of power, cities of culture.  A lot to play with here.