Science fiction and psychological realism are uneasy partners

Once upon a time, in a kingdom marked by very fine architecture—I'm talking colorful onion domes and frescoes, jewel-inlaid marble, lots of gold obviously, just really soaring, colorful architecture—anyway, in this kingdom there existed (what else?) a King.

And I know the tendency in tales like this is to get all democratic and say being a king ain't shit, and the King was just a human being like anyone else. But in this Kingdom, that wasn't true—in this Kingdom the King literally was the most important person, not just politically, but spiritually as well. We're talking absolute monarchy here: the King represented the soul of the people. He derived his power from them, and he ruled in their interest, but in a way that was unchecked by exterior authority. His interests and their interests were one. And this King believed that his job was to guide the development of the volk, the race, the people, the nation. He believed, in other words, that his role in life was to guide his nation to greatness.

Nor did his people disagree! The bourgeois—educated at his academies according to his ideas—tended to ignore politics and social science, in favor of meaty, technocratic shit—economics and civil engineering. They wanted to fan across the vast forests and tundras and bring them to a peak of development. Meanwhile, the nobility were a service nobility: their held their land provisionally, and it could be revoked if they proved unable to protect and hold their territory against the the depredations of the Kingdom’s neighbors. Everything and everyone in this kingdom was devoted to the task of ceaselessly acquiring and holding new territory.

This Kingdom had for years been under threat by the adherents of an insurgent, universalizing religion: one that knit lots of small ethnic groups together into a big, well, let's call them a Horde. This religion taught these ethnic groups that it was their destiny to rule over the people who lived in stone houses, etc. You know the drill! For centuries, the Horde had been ascendant, but over the last hundred years the Kingdom had slowly gained ground.

So we're talking a clash of civilizations here. A King with a destiny, preparing a large army, ready to reconquer all this territory lost to the insurgent horde.

I know in a story you're supposed to let all this information be deep background: just let it come out in dribs and drabs, so the reader intuits a lot of it. But the thing is, those typical short-story conventions are themselves very individualistic, they're something created by liberal, bourgeois society, with its emphasis on the individual. With this story we're not dealing with those kinds of societies, unfortunately. We're dealing with imagined communities—larger than the individual, where the individual has subsumed itself to these (in my opinion) very ugly clash of civilization style goals.

You'd be justified in saying "Okay, but that's just words. We're still dealing with human beings. Individual people who walk around shitting and eating and kissing. What does any of this look like on the ground, on the micro level?"

And the thing is: you've just said it. They’re just people. Like, for instance, Toros Minu, an artillery captain in a small city on the eastern border of this Kingdom. He loves to drink, loves to play cards. His sergeants don't like him—artillery officers are supposed to be more technocratic, more educated, more interested in the nuts and bolts of military theory and maneuver—while Toros has more of a cavalry captain’s sense of dash and bravado. He's from a rich family, but his parents are out of favor, and he didn't have the political juice to join the cavalry. Anyway, he's not miserable: he's an easy-going guy. He's got a wife back at his estate, and he's picked up a mistress amongst the townspeople. He's fulfilling his social function: he's perfectly happy.

His sergeant, Danyal, on the other hand, is from a totally different social strata: he was conscripted at age fifteen. Soldiers in the Kingdom do twenty year terms of service: his village had a funeral for him when they left (because they expect never to see him again), and his patrimony was re-distributed his brothers. Toros asks his opinion during difficult maneuvers, and the ordinary soldiers often come to him for help straightening out their problems with the townsfolk. Sergeants aren't paid much, but the townspeople give him gifts because he's (sometimes) able to keep his soldiers in line. He's a very esteemed man, and he wears that esteem quite naturally, without questioning it.

What story can be told about these people? In a year they will join an army heading west, and the army will besiege a city. Their own supply lines will falter, and the army will begin to starve.

Danyal will go out into the fields with his gun and look for rabbits, and when he takes a shot and misses, he will realize his fate is sealed—several days later on he will fall sick and shit out his brains in the corner of a barn, and he will expire. Toros will be present when the city capitulates: he will engage in three days of brutal sacking, and he will send home baggage trains full of golden cups and exotic artworks.

And when they're both dead, they will be swallowed up by the world-spirit, the churning of energies, and they will see that all of this conflict was merely a shifting dance—the playing of a game, the spirit amusing itself. And they'll meet again on a distant plain, on a distant planet, in a cafe in a strange city, and they'll say, "Didn't we once used to know each other?"

And in this world they will have discovered doubt, so they will pick back over their history. And Toros will say, "Did you curse me as you died?"

Danyal will say, "Strangely enough, I didn't..."

"So what did you say? What did you think? It can't be—it can't be that you lived and died like an animal, can it? It can't be that they dispatched human beings across continents, and we went meekly, giving up our lives, can it?"

"I didn't think," Danyal said. "I was in pain. I remember being disappointed about the rabbit. I remember thinking that was the end for me. I remember crawling back and lying on my cot and feeling my belly..."

"And I was in the same camp. I had food. Not much, but enough. Did you hate me?"

"No," Danyal said. "I never thought of you. Now I would. Now I would...but back then I simply didn't...

It's their fate now, on this strange world, to try and become individuals, just as it'll someday be their fate again to become cogs, to become pieces. Human beings are not so different from stones. Sometimes we are left in sullen magnificence to lie upon the face of the earth, and other times we are carved up and fitted into marvelous onion domes. The stone lying in nature resists the stonemason's chisel. And yet once it's fitted into the dome, the stone feels equally natural, equally eternal. The difference between the two is dependent on the onlooker, and whether they value freedom and wildness or order and stability. The question is, who gets to decide? Who gets to pick which values are important? Sometimes, in some places, the universe gives that ability to Kings, and at other times it gives that ability to individuals. I obviously prefer the latter system—and I claim that my values are important and that I will fight and even die to defend them. But what does that look like in practice? It just looks like a person with a keyboard, writing words, publishing them on a blog. I enjoy the feeling of omnipotence that comes with being an author who is able to create, destroy, and determine values. But I am still embodied in my coworking space in San Francisco, in an utterly drab and unremarkable way, sitting in a chair in the sun, writing on a little tablet computer, with my daughter at school. All of my values, my humanism, my concern for individual rights, is rooted in a physical body, filled with blood and water, placed in the world at a given time and place. It's a game. I'm playing the same game that the King is playing in the beginning of the story—the game that Toros and Danyal weren't allowed to play. I've been given, for some strange reason, the ability to move pieces around on the board and say this is right and this isn't right, and this is how things should be and this is how they ought not be. But unlike the King, my pieces don't correspond to anything in reality. They're purely fictive. I've been given this strange, illusory power: the ability to dream as if I am a King.

Go outside, and find a building. Touch its cornerstone, and tell yourself that it's not the architect that matters—that it's the stone that is important. Tell yourself that without the stone, the building wouldn't exist. Tell yourself that we've heard too much about architects and not enough about stones. Tell yourself that the stone suffered when it was ripped from the quarry, and that the stone struggles every day to compose itself, to hold itself together, so that the building can stand. Tell yourself that the stone matters, that the stone has dignity and worth.

It's the truth, of course. And yet...try to make yourself believe it.

Go ahead. Try.

Afterword

I started my career as a science fiction and fantasy writer. That's essentially all I wrote for ten years. I published in all the top journals. The editor of Locus once joked to me, “We were saying we should write something about Naomi’s book, but then we realized it was filthy realism.”

The funny thing is, contemporary science fiction and fantasy usually adheres to the conventions of psychological realism. Yes there are spaceships or kings, but you generally try to imagine the characters as vividly as possible—try to imagine what it would really be like if you, a real person, lived through this scenario.

But…it's kind of difficult. Maybe some authors don't find that difficult, but I personally found it very hard to invest these scenarios with the kind of psychological reality that sci-fi readers demand. And I think the problem is…I got into sci-fi because of a sense of wonder.¹ That feeling of something bigger than myself. Because of, say, the awful span of Larry Niven’s Ringworld. Or the immense scale of time covered by Asimov’s Foundation series. Or the huge, hard-fought battles of David Weber’s Honor Harrington series. I loved the sheer scope of these science fictional worlds.

And that's really not a very human thing. Like…there's a level of abstraction needed to envision the vast scale of space and of human achievement, and this abstraction militates against a focus on individual human problems. Obviously many other writers have solved this problem, but I never quite managed to.

At this point I have written many fantasy and sci-fi novels. I wrote a draft of one just last year. But I don't know that any of them really worked, because I always kind of resisted the genre, refused to buy into it, in the same way as my story above.

Further Reading

At some point I decided to read a history book about 19th century Russia. There weren’t that many options at the level of detail that I wanted. The best I found was Russia in the Nineteenth Century. It’s priced like a weighty academic book, but it’s pretty short and very readable. Exactly the right amount of detail.

To be clear, my story is not really set in 19th-century Russia. But I did write it whilst reading this book.

1. Back when I was going to conventions and stuff, you generally never used the term “sci-fi” because I guess it was considered unserious? A lot of the sci-fi people back then liked to say they wrote “speculative fiction”. The fantasy writers used terms like “fabulism” or “slipstream” or “interstitial fiction”. I assume all these fights are very passé now, but I honestly have no idea. Keeping in touch with the sci-fi community was one of those things that fell by the wayside after I had a baby. If there are any sci-fi people writing popular substacks please let me know. I subscribe to

Ferrett Steinmetz

and

Jason Sanford

—without the latter it would be impossible for someone like me to keep up with, say, SFWA drama.