The rest of the writers of SF, the ones obviously cribbing their science from the greatest hits of Dr. Who and Flash Gordon, were down for the count in both arenas: they had crap science and no fiction skills. Which is why they never really made it to the realm of serious glamour and fame, despite the serious work put into novels and short stories. But, that is not the best of SF writers, though it may be the majority. It is the same problem found in every genre: writers that think style makes up for lack of content. In the end, it dissolves into hackneyed ideas and a lack of readership.

The conundrum of SF is that the fiction has to take precedence over the science.  Because you are there to be entertained and/or fascinated by the scientific wonders of Planet Earth, or even instructed through the medium of a story, inevitably it means that the skills of the storyteller far outweigh the scientist. It should be pointed out that a thorough knowledge of science leads to better, more interesting and accurate stories. This can only be true, just as a thorough knowledge of war leads to a better war story. The most cliché saying any writer learns is that you write about what you know. But, that doesn’t mean a scientist will automatically write a better SF story than an experienced writer. You’d be surprised what a person can pick up from one 50 cent Goodwill text-book purchase.

Nonetheless, SF stories are almost always stories about exploration and discovery, which is the best part about them. It’s why people read them. There is always that expectation of surprise and shock, or ingenuity through innovation. At their roots, they are the resultant progeny of Viking myths of exploration; or, the colonial tales of Europeans crossing the Atlantic to the great unknown. Perhaps, we could say, Christopher Columbus and his raucously racist tales of `discovering’ the `new world’ were the first great SF stories. (They certainly were a fiction, anyway.) Either way, the outcome was unexpected.

When Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke sat down and discussed “2001:  A Space Odyssey” in the early Sixties, it was in the hopes of taking the fledgling genre of SF and making it more literary. What Kubrick and Clarke eventually came up with was a great movie and a mediocre book. Clarke is not a superb writer, though he was a very original thinker. He had the ability to conceptualize, but not verbalize great possibilities, whereas Kubrick had the liberty of film to say things without dialogue. There’s no debating that made it easier on him. Clarke wrote a great many books that are unlikely to be reprinted in the Penguin Classics series, though they all had the possibility of greatness.

Up to that point, SF was the stuff of pulp magazines and cheap paperbacks. You paid 10 cents and took a long ride into the great Beyond. The prehistory of SF is interesting as you follow the line of the fantastical through various writers such as Poe and H.G. Wells. They delved into areas that many contemporaries must have thought silly and sinful. But, for the most part, SF was the realm of writers with great ideas and little to no skills as artists. They sat down after work at the bottle factory and wrote an amazing tale of xenophobic invasion by creatures with Russian or German accents. Yet, the forum in itself was one of the artist and not the scientist. The advent of things like TV and Radio clouded their judgment, leaving them with The War if the Worlds.

Another example of this problem is the basic premise of any Star Trek episode, movie or book. While being wildly popular, its story lines are notoriously weak, and the movies rely on a fan base of Trekkies (Trekkers?) to ensure sales. Not that money is the defining element in what makes a story great, but when you make a movie you intend to sell tickets. If you have to rely on your relatives to keep the business going, you are doomed.

Star Wars, for all it’s hamminess and tradition of bad actor choices, is a far superior story in that it was researched with fury by its creator, George Lucas. He read and imitated all of the world’s greatest myths to put together a story that truly does have the flavor of epic myth, despite one’s opinion of it. The basic structure is all there: an innocent that is faced with great decisions at a young age and falls from grace, only to have his son carry on that struggle in a truly Freudian battle royal across the universe. And, wrapped around this story, is the `science’ that makes the fiction great, not to mention the first spaceships to ever sound that cool when they fly.

There are two collaborators named William Barton & Michael Capobianco that have produced some very interesting and well-written books. They each have published books by themselves, but seem to enjoy working in tandem, having written at least four books together. 1998’s “Alpha Centauri” is an innovative look at a small group’s trip to the Earth’s closest neighbor. They find a race of long dead aliens and learn about their history on the dead world with a technology that allows them to see the past through carbon elements in the air. Mostly, though, the book is about relationships. Because it is well written, the science and the setting in deep space only add to what the writers seem to strive for: an exploration of people and their prejudices, set in the realm of exploration.

Another great storyteller is Robert J. Sawyer, a Canadian writer who is the most published novelist in the country. His novels deal mostly with epistemological concepts and the possibility of the Otherworldly as a normal part of our lives. He writes with a more literary voice than most SF writers, almost mimicking Kurt Vonnegut. Sometimes his images are nearly silly, such as the alien that landed in front of the Royal Ontario Museum in “Calculating God.” His books are of the more preachy variety, but not with the heavy-handedness of Star Trek. Again, he is a good example of intelligent SF.

Then we have Vernor Vinge. He was a Mathematics and Computer Scientist at San Diego State until his recent retirement, and anticipated the Internet in his novels of the Eighties, which brought him relative fame. Obviously a unique and important thinker, he is somewhat lacking in his skill as a writer. His books have been widely read and are moderately popular. “A Fire Upon the Deep” and “A Deepness in the Sky” are the efforts of a great mind, but a bad writer, despite their great size. He tries his level best to bring out ideas, but the basic elements of his tale are that of Buck Rogers and not James Joyce. He is all bark and no bite, leaving the reader thinking, “That was a good idea, but he could have said it better.”

Is this the fitting place for SF?

It would be very interesting to see what a writer like Joyce, or Faulkner, or Hemingway would have written if given the task to create something under the SF genre. William S. Burroughs is often cited as a SF writer, but is obviously not. Though there are definite influences of that genre on his work, he is essentially a classical writer in the most formal sense, not unlike James Joyce. Chuck Palahniuk, author of “Fight Club,” falls into a similar realm of the speculative.  But, in the end, most writers if SF are not yet functioning at the level of the truly literary.

Though this topic could be expounded upon ad nauseam, it is fit to say that until SF really begins to produce writers who have serious talent beyond the lab, an eye for the literary, and a knowledge of science as a viable resource, and fewer writers that did well in their freshman chem classes, it will be relegated to the mass paperback shelves. Not that this is specifically bad, but it does relegate the genre to forgetableness. What keeps other great books of the past current is their appeal to the most basic human motivations.

Except, we are entering an age where the problems of science are far more relevant than they used to be. The issues surrounding cloning have been touched on in many tales, but what will the real-life decisions be? Perhaps, through the work of a great writer, the answers could become clearer and more coherent for us all. Kenneth Burke wrote about `literature as equipment for living.’ So, we can only hope that SF writers of the present and future pay attention to their true heritage, that of the bookish Lit classes so many shunned, in hopes that the work of the future is reflective of the great attempts made up until this point.