OK, I promise I’ll shut up about The Wire soon but just kind of following on from the post the other day… This post is also partly an excuse to post the lovely maps from Jan Morris’s Hav.
From Ursula Le Guin’s review of Hav:
This lack of plot and characters is common in the conventional Utopia, and I expect academics and other pigeonholers may stick Hav in with Thomas More and co. That is a respectable slot, but not where the book belongs. Probably Morris, certainly her publisher, will not thank me for saying that Hav is in fact science fiction, of a perfectly recognisable type and superb quality. The “sciences” or areas of expertise involved are social – ethnology, sociology, political science, and above all, history. Hav exists as a mirror held up to several millennia of pan-Mediterranean history, customs and politics. It is a focusing mirror; its intensified reflection sharply concentrates both observation and speculation.
(Also it’s got maps and books with maps = sci-fi /fantasy)
This seems to me to correlate closely with some of what Jason Mitell is saying about the wire in his The Wire and the Serial Procedural essay; i.e. taht The Wire’s about observation and speculation, about urban planning, about law, about organisational structures, basically its science is human geography. Geo-fi.
Maybe the idea that things like video games and other procedural simulations are, on some level, doing the same thing as science fiction, explains why there’s such a strong intersection between sci-fi fans and computer programmers/gamers.
And then Neil said:
I picked up a cheap copy of Hav the other day, and am looking forward to reading it again some time.
Interesting post! I suppose that, in a sense, all works of art are in some sense simulations of different facets of reality. Sci fi is interesting in that it’s deliberately skewed to emphasise one or more particular aspect of reality. Police procedurals and the like instead aim to mimic reality “realistically”, and to some extent stand and fall on whether that succeeds. One of the ways in which the Wire works is by feeling extremely realistic and believable, while at the same time being brilliantly entertaining narrative fiction.
And then tom said:yeah definately, but more specifically It’s the kind of “change one variable” thing about sci-fi that I’m thinking of I guess. Everything else is controlled but there’s this one new piece of technology, what are the ripples? Which is I guess what Mittel describes as the “ludic joy of the third season … the ability to replay the first season’s narrative through the imagination of new rules and ways to play the game.”
It’s interesting how aspects of genre are kind of highlighted by edge cases like Hav and Neal Stevensons historical books, which are recognisably of the sci-fi genre if you’re an afficionado – scientific/ engineering solutions as the primary driver of social progress (and plot) – but I suspect many non-fans would place them more firmly in the genral historical fiction camp.
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