Ken Macleod has added to the current crop of rants on what is and isn’t science fiction. (For the S in SF below, definitely read science, not speculative.)

What I want to take issue with is the criterion of judging SF by its degree of closeness to ‘realistic’ or ‘fantastic’ literature, the literature of the campfire and the dark.

One of the most insidious ways of doing that is to privilege SF that deals imaginatively with social and political issues. Speculative political fancies have been respectable since Plato, who is more or less the Form of Respectability in the Western canon. Thomas More could write an approving speculative fiction about communism and remain respectable, not only canon but canonized. The most respectable work of recent SF is very likely Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed. . . because it’s an SF book that people with no interest in SF can read comfortably. Its sole real SF content, the theory of the ansible, can whizz right over their heads. It might as well be radio. The real focus of interest is all the cosy familiar campfire stuff about the Individual versus Society, and Society versus Society, which plugs it neatly into the Great Tradition. In short, it’s SF for people who don’t like SF.

SF isn’t fundamentally about that. Getting that right is good, don’t get me wrong. Do for heaven’s sake have some understanding of human beings before writing about them, at least to the extent that you do write about them. But what SF is fundamentally about is not the Individual versus Society, or Society versus Society, but humanity in the universe.

So my first reaction is Yeah, but that leaves out not just le Guin, but half of Iain M. Banks — and not the ‘Iain Banks’ mainstream half, either — swathes of the Strugatsky brothers, Maureen McHugh, plenty of Bradbury. . . Hell, get me a drink or two and I could probably be persuaded to try to make a case that it leaves out Hal Clement (“Mesklinites in the universe”); or, at least, that it leaves out several of MacLeod’s own Fall Revolution books. (And let’s not talk about Margaret Atwood. “Hey, Langford, it’s okay! She doesn’t write SF after all!”)

But my second reaction is to think that he’s kind of got a point. Maybe not a very useful one, and maybe one that just reduces down to the old Hard vs. Soft debate (while, meanwhile, tossing out entirely a whole lot of stuff that’s just men’s adventure fiction disguised as hard SF, or fantasy disguised as soft SF), but a point nonetheless.

If there’s one thing that makes a story unequivocally SF, to my mind, it’s this: If the story fundamentally could not have been written before the invention of science as we know it in the seventeenth or eighteenth century — before, as MacLeod says, “the sun came up,” — then it’s SF.

Whether everything that’s called SF should be judged solely, or even primarily, on the basis of how well it meets that criterion, is a different question. You’ll note that MacLeod doesn’t say that if something doesn’t meet that criterion, it’s not SF. What he’s arguing, as I understand it, is against judging SF on the basis of how badly it meets that criterion.

Which is fair enough.

I’m just not sure it happens as often as he thinks it does.