A pause in my con preparations for a thinky post. I read this article this morning (courtesy of Jay Lake and Ken Scholes) and found it extremely interesting. It talks about how the brain tends to reject evidence to the contrary of what we already believe, no matter how compelling. I also found it refreshing because rather than taking a “People are so stupid we should stop this right now!!!1!” tone, it focused on why we got to be this way, why it might have been–and still be–helpful, and what to do about it.
The upshot of that last is that metaphorically charging someone straight on, facts blazing, not only often doesn’t work, it frequently entrenches their original opinion more deeply. The better way is to approach the subject obliquely, in an understated way. Which, I think, is where fiction comes in.
Robert Sawyer taught my Odyssey year, and he encapsulated differences in speculative fiction styles in a way I found useful. He picked someone at random, and asked them what the Terminator movie was about.
“Well, a robot comes back from the future [etc.]”
Then he turned to someone else and asked them what Gattaca was about.
“Genetics. *laughs* Um, let’s see. Okay, there’s a guy–”
And Rob stopped them there, because they’d illustrated his point. He saw a difference between things that were “about” their story and things that were “about” a larger topic. He said the latter was what he always aimed for. Personally, I find I usually aim to avoid the latter.
Why?
Because whatever people already think about a topic, they’re likely going to think that when they encounter that topic in your story. The moment you say the words, or people recognize the concept–ding! Their opinion kicks in. And you can see from the article above, even if your climate change is irrefutable in your story’s world, people will still probably believe or disbelieve climate change in the real world afterwards.
I doubt anyone will argue with me when I say that one of speculative fiction’s callings is to make people look at the world and their opinions in new ways through apparently fantastical elements. What this article illustrates, and I’ve always believed, is that you can easily shoot that calling in the foot by charging people’s opinions straight on.
Additionally, I know I get even more grumpy when someone’s concept is thinly disguised than when they’re up-front about it. You didn’t think that I’d notice that the thin layer of gas in the atmosphere caused by burning unobtanium is “changing” your world’s “climate”?
So I view my personal calling as, if I feel the need to convince someone of something with a story, to do everything humanly possible to make sure they can’t tell. It won’t always work, of course, but personally I’d have much more fun writing a story about a character deciding between the magic keeping food on her table and the treasured flowers mysteriously dying in her garden. That’s a apart from the power of therapeutic metaphor, which is an entire post or series of posts for another time. But I think the article above is something all writers might want to ponder.
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