Your world doesn't make sense
Between Star Trek: Discovery, the comic series Saga, and a despondent postmortem revisiting of Ursula K. Le Guin, I've been on a huge science fiction tear lately. It's a response to living in a world that doesn't make sense, run at the whim of narcissists, tyrants and assorted petty doofuses. When order feels lacking, world-building is necessary. Successful science fiction takes away what we take for granted and reshapes our understanding of what is left. I'm stealing that thought from Le Guin, who was a genius: writing about the genderless world she established in The Left Hand of Darkness, she says:
I eliminated gender to find out what was left. Whatever was left would be, presumably, simply human. It would define the area that is shared by men and women alike.
Eliminating things taken for granted — gender, the senses, even life on earth — and finding the humanity in what is left is an area that both poetry and science fiction take as their purpose.
I'm stealing the subject line of this email from Richard Siken, who if he doesn't necessarily work in sci-fi definitely tweaks the edges of reality to find out what is left. His Crush is one of my favorite books of poetry I read last year. In a volume of brutal, heartbroken and hopeful poems, "Boot Theory" sticks in my memory. It's built around jokes and idioms: "a man walks into a bar," "walk a mile in my shoes," "waiting for the other shoe to drop." (I'm now choosing to believe that this song is a response to this poem; they're certainly thematically related.)
The central image to the poem is a sound: a heavy boot dropping, over and over, an endless series of falling boots. The "you" of the poem tries to die, but death doesn't work. So what is left? The ending opens a stark space:
A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river
but then he's still left
with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away
but then he's still left with his hands.
There's some potential in throwing your sadness away, maybe drowning it, maybe just releasing it. I like to believe that, left with his hands, the man builds a world that makes sense: knocks on the door where the boots were falling, takes the neighbor out for coffee, finds a new job, a new home. Looking for this hope, I'm doing what Siken describes in an interview:
My 20th-century intention was to make a place where I could articulate my thoughts and feelings. I thought it would be a place where the reader and I could meet. That’s no longer the way storytelling works. Now readers enlarge the places an author has made, include themselves in this larger space, and meet with each other without the author.
He's talking about fan fiction, which, although I haven't written it, I enthusiastically support as a way of connecting with culture. Why not enlarge the place you want to inhabit? Why not borrow someone else's broken rules to help you make your own?
If you've read Crush, or Saga, or written fanfic you're proud of, hit me up. I'll be out here reading comics and poems and looking for new worlds in them. (And yelling about Saga. Always yelling about Saga.)
Yours,
Erin