The Language of Science Fiction
A Sci-Friday conversation
The goal of this post is meant more as a conversation starter rather than a definitive statement, so feel free to add your own voice in the comments.
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
And so begins William Gibson’s monumental Neuromancer, which birthed a genre and the language through which we’ve come to understand that genre. Which, by itself, is a significant feat, even if you may not love the rest of the novel.
When I first read that sentence, I thought he meant that the sky was static. Which was an overwhelmingly strange and entrancing image.
As it turns out, he wasn’t thinking of a television tuned to a dead channel in 2005 or even in 1984, when his novel was published, but the color from his childhood, which was a bright and otherworldly blue.
Even so, the unruly poeticism of the line allows we the reader to begin crafting this world ourselves. From the very first sentence, we begin to take ownership of Gibson’s cyberpunk world.
If you’d like to listen to me go on about Neuromancer for about an hour, you can click below.
For those who want to dally a bit longer with language, meet me after the embeds.
Episode 001: Neuromancer
Welcome to the inaugural Wolf Podcast. Today I’m talking with J David Osborne, the Founder of Broken River Books. Find him at his substack The Broken River Writers' Collective and on tiktok at @brbjdo. He’s also the author of a number of books, including the cyberpunk series
Science fiction offers us a vocabulary and a metaphorical vehicle to transport the reader to new worlds, to invite them into the creation. Sometimes, the trick is to turn what would normally be understood as metaphor and turn it viscerally real.
My whole world died.
If you read that in literary fiction, the narrator would likely be talking about some emotional devastation. A metaphorical death. But in science fiction, that sentence can be a physical reality, opening you up to entire worlds of possibilities.
And this hits us differently. When Princess Leia watches her homeworld, Alderaan, erupt, we encounter an indescribable loss. Literally. We cannot know what it means to watch your entire world blow up in an instant, with everyone you knew and loved taken with it.
But because we know loss, have felt it, lived it, we can understand the foundational emotion, and so we then attach great strength to Leia because she is not broken by this shattering loss.
There’s a wide-open flexibility to the language available in science fiction. Despite the fact that many prefer to push their cart down the well worn grooves of trope and expectation, science fiction is a genre of endless possibility.
You are inventing and building new worlds! The only limit is your imagination and your will to create, and so, like I said last week, there’s no reason not to go big, get weird, and carry us all along for the ride.
A Worldbuilding Exercise
Once upon a time, long ago but not so far away, I used to teach teenagers how to write speculative fiction. I found it pretty fun and only stopped doing it because my real job got in the way. But something I enjoyed doing was collectively bringing a world together.
But beyond this flexibility and endlessness, there’s also beauty that can be found, if you’re willing to look, if you’re willing to guide us.
Gibson famously said that he knew nothing about technology when writing Neuromancer, which he did on a typewriter. This, he believed, allowed him to write in this genre-defining way. Using poetics and metaphor to extrapolate on technology as it currently was in the early 1980s and cast it forward. That much of this happened to be prophetic is, I think, a mix of accident and influence.
Influence in that people read Neuromancer and once they picked their head up off the floor, they thought they may want to make something like cyberspace real. Wondered if such a thing was possible. And then they began tinkering.
But more than technology, science fiction also offers us the rare opportunity to address the Other and bring them inside the folds of personhood. Many authors have done this, but I’ve always been attached to the way Orson Scott Card developed alien species and then forced us to reckon with their humanity.
There is much more to be said of the language of science fiction, but I’m curious to hear your own thoughts.
My novels:
Glossolalia - A Le Guinian fantasy novel about an anarchic community dealing with a disaster
Sing, Behemoth, Sing - Deadwood meets Neon Genesis Evangelion
Howl - Vampire Hunter D meets The Book of the New Sun in this lofi cyberpunk/solarpunk monster hunting adventure
Colony Collapse - Star Trek meets Firefly in the opening episode of this space opera
The Blood Dancers - The standalone sequel to Colony Collapse.
Iron Wolf - Sequel to Howl.
Sleeping Giants - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse and The Blood Dancers
Broken Katana - Sequel to Iron Wolf.
Libertatia; or, The Onion King - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse, The Blood Dancers, and Sleeping Giants
Noir: A Love Story - An oral history of a doomed romance.
Some free books for your trouble:
Man the art for this cover is absolutely killer.
Been meaning to re-read Neuromancer lately - what an epochal book!
Have always loved science fiction since a young age. It is not about the technology but the possibilities were always fascinating to me. Creating beings and worlds that we can only dream of is so much fun to write and read. When I was young my parents introduced me to Grimm's Faire Tales which as I got older read and read again and again. This was the beginning for me when I recognized novels called science fiction that brought me to other worlds in much the same way as Faire Tales. In addition to a love of reading I enjoyed learning about the solar system and other systems in the universe and all the potential and creative possibilities. So much fun!