Social science fiction

Social science fiction is a term used to describe a subgenre of science fiction concerned less with gadgets and space opera and more with sociological speculation about human society.

Exploration of fictional societies is one of the most interesting aspects of science fiction, allowing to perform predictory (H.G. Wells, The Final Circle of Paradise) and precautionary (Fahrenheit 451) functions, to criticize the contemporary world (Antarctica-online) and to present solutions (Walden Two), to picture beautiful viable worlds (World of the Noon) and to explore depths of human psychology (Vyacheslav Rybakov), to train in behaviour of people and societies (Gromov) and to study ethical principles (Lukyanenko)...

Social science fiction in English

Some roots of the genre may lay in such social speculations as utopian and dystopian fiction, which could be considered as extreme special cases of the genre.

One of the first writers who used science fiction to explore sociological topics was H.G. Wells, with his classic The Time Machine revealing the ruman race diverged into separate branches of Elois and Morlocks as a consequence of class inequality, a happy pastoral society of Elois suffering from Morlocks but needing them.. The Sleeper Awakes predicted the spirit of the XX century, technically advanced, undemocratic and bloody.

In the U.S. the genre was championed in pulp magazines of the 1940s by authors such as Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein. The term was coined by Asimov, and used to describe his own work, in an essay appearing in Modern Science Fiction: Its Meaning and Its Future (eds. Reginald Bretnor and John Wood Campbell, 1954). The term is not often used today except in the context of referring specifically to the changes that took place in the 1940s, but continues as a theme of science fiction.

Many of the best known Western social science fiction, also classified as the utopian and dystopian fiction were inspired by the reality, especially that of the Soviet Union: Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal farm, Huxley's Brave New World, written in 1930s and 1940s, are probably the most famous examples. The 1950s boasts Fahrenheit 451.

The modern era of social science fiction coincided with the 1960's, when authors such as Harlan Ellison, Brian Aldiss, and Ursula K. Le Guin wrote about political. Ellison's main theme was the protest against increasing militarism, LeGuin (The Left Hand of Darkness) explored the non-traditional sexual relations. Kurt Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse-Five, which used the science fiction theme of time-travel to explore anti-war, moral, and sociological themes. Frederik Pohl's series Gateway combined social science fiction with hard science fiction. Among the finest modern exponent of social science fiction in the Campbellian/Heinlein tradition is L. Neil Smith. Smith, who grew up in the 1960's and is considered the heir to Robert A. Heinlein's individualism and libertarianism in science fiction, wrote both The Probability Broach and Pallas, which dealt with alternative "sideways in time" futures and what a libertarian society would look like.

Today, social science fiction has fallen largely out of favor, although Joss Whedon's Firefly (and it sequel Serenity) certainly conjured a world where freedom, rebellion against centralized authority, and western as well as Chinese cultural influences shape a society 500 years in the future. The hardware (space ships, space travel) is secondary (except for the widespread use of guns for self-defense, which shapes the society's "an armed society is a polite society" surface, a quote from Heinlein himself).

The Saga of Recluce, by L. E. Modesitt, Jr. represents a fusion of science fiction and fantasy that can be described as social science fiction. The 13 books of the series describe the changing relationship between two technologically advanced cultures and the cultures of a primitive world to which each is involuntarily transported. Themes of gender stereotyping, sexism, ethics, economics, environmentalism and politics are explored in the course of the series, which examines the world through the eyes of all its protagonists.

Genre in the Eastern Bloc

All science fiction of Soviet time had to subscribe to communist ideology, or else the author could face serious consequences — from ban to publish to death penalty under Stalin or imprisonment or psychiatrical treatment under Brezhnev. There were poor and opportunistic works, there were talanted works touched by the ideology (e.g. 1923 Aelita or 1926 The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin by Alexei Tolstoy), there were not ideologized works describing happy future of the humankind (some works of Kir Bulychev and Ivan Efremov), but also such writers as Bulgakov, Shvarts and Strugatsky who chose a hard way of "balancing" on the edge, struggling both not to betray their views and not to be punished for that.

In 1921 Yevgeny Zamyatin wrote his bitter scientific dystopia We, in which he forecasted rise of totalitarianism in the country. It wasn't published in Soviet Union until 1988, although it was well-known in the West and influenced George Orwell and Aldous Huxley.

An "exclusion which confirms the rule" is an example of critique under Stalin — the play of Evgeny Shvarts The Dragon (1944), showing how totalitarianism grows with its roots into hearts of the people.

The next "period" of social science fiction in Soviet Union was shaped by liberalization of the Khrushchev regime, advances of science and beginning of space era. In 1957 Ivan Efremov wrote the utopic Andromeda Nebula, revealing a harmonious space-exploring civilization of the distant future, whose culture took much from antique art. However, his further works, especially the antiutopic The Bull's Hour (1968) covered a range of social problems.

Amongst the best known social science fiction is the Noon Universe of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, designed to be a future world of communism, where creative work is considered the highest purpose. Boris Strugatsky describes it as the "world in which we would like to live and work", but unlike utopian worlds Noon Universe is settled by real people. The rise of reaction, initiated by Khrushchev's public criticism of modern art and literature in 1963, showed to Strugatsky that "while for us communism was a world of freedom and creativity, for them it was the society, in which the population fulfulled immediately and with pleasure all prescripts of the Party and the government"^[1]. This affected their Hard to be a God (1963), in which an alien world is shown passing the phase of Middle-Ages. But in the common greyness of that society the Church suddenly arises, crushing and murdering progressively thinking people. The main hero, observer don Rumata, struggles for their lifes, although steadily losing his humanity.

Suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968 ultimately ruined Strugatsky's dreams about the Soviet rule. Other Noon Universe novel, Inhabited Island (1969), describes Maxim Kammerer, crashed at unknown planet in a totalitarian industrial Land of Fathers. The aborigenals' ability of critical mind was suppressed by a grid of radiating towers-retransmitters. And Maxim, after his honest attempt to socialize failed severely, came to the idea of freeing the people by destructing the 'Center of Transmission'.

Social science fiction turned out to be a powerful means to respond to real situation in communist countries. While communist rules didn't allow any critique, one of possibilities was to veil it as that some science fiction-ish world.

In 1980s the genre called 'sociological fantasy' (fantastyka sociologiczna) arose in People's Republic of Poland. It focused on the development of societies, generally dominated by totalitarian governments. This genre was represented by writers like Janusz A. Zajdel (Limes Inferior, Paradyzja), Edmund Wnuk-Lipiński (Apostezjon trilogy), Adam Wiśniewski-Snerg or Marek Oramus. Books from that genre were based in different times (usually in future), and usually were pretext for analysing structures of the described societies, having been full of allusions to reality. After the fall of the communism, when using real world examples became as safe in former Eastern Bloc countries as in their Western counterparts, this genre mostly transformed itself into a political fiction, represented by writers such as Rafał A. Ziemkiewicz.

Post-Soviet social science fiction

While the major course of the post-Soviet society is democracy (anti-communism was a sort of a national idea only for several years), the idea isn't really topical — usually you can find only little bits of e.g. anticommunism:

An unusual work is The Worm by Alexander Lazarevich (1992), "programmers" science fiction with slight nostalgie for Soviet scientific and technological past.
Arrows of Perun with separable warheads, a 1994 novella by Braider and Chadovich depicts a small typically totalitarian state, founded by personnel of a Soviet missile shaft.
Search for designation or Twenty seventh theorem of ethics (1994) and Devil amongst people (1991) are late novels of Strugatsky, exploring the tragical way of living in the Soviet Union.
Evgeny Lukin [1] invented a satirical but quite a liveable "mix" of Orthodox Christian Communists, who used symbolics and "magic" of both and methods of rule of the latter.
Vyacheslav Rybakov in 2003 novel In the adjacent year in Moscow explores a dying world of Russia torn apart into poor tiny countries, ruled from the West and having no own sincere desires. Rybakov lais an emphasis on comparative culture studies and a trial to regain national unity...

However the main body of modern Russian social science fiction doesn't lay in the plain of "capitalism-socialism" — but explores common human values and is influenced by both Western and Soviet science fiction.

A space opera duology of Sergey Lukyanenko The Stars Are Cold Toys — Star Shadow (1997) describes three worlds: the Conclave (a harsh conglomerate of races, which somehow represents the current political situation), Geometers (a way gloomier view of the world of Upbringing, than the famous Noon Universe of Strugatsky brothers), the Shadow (a world of utter individualism, in which every person is treated according with an often unpleasant reality of one's subconsciousness). In Lukyanenko's series Beautiful away he pictured the future world of high standarts of living, where all people have a guaranteed minimum of services but most suffer of not being engaged in any occupation. In his early novel Knights of Forty Islands Lukyanenko dealt with a society of kidnapped children who were to fight with each other to get a ticket to home.

Alexander Gromov is a known writer of the genre, who is interested in evolution of societies in harsh environments and people's psychology. Somehow jokingly, you take a socium (limited number of people is better — easier to work) and do some ugly thing to it, and then you sit and look at the consequences. His dilogy Soft landing and Year of the Lemming considers people in the dying world. Power and freedom, leadership, oppression and individualism, love are probably the "central" themes... The hero of his Saint Vitus Minuet has to be a harsh ruler of a small isolated society of kids to let them survive... "Soft" struggle for freedom in a matriarchal world is depicted in the duology A Thousand and One Day — The first of the Mohicans. In Antarctica-online the author criticises politics of the modern world.

Marina and Sergey Dyachenko wrote several books which may be considered as social science fiction with some emphasis on psychology. Armaged-home (Armaged-dom) is set in a world where apocalypses happen every 20 years. Prior to each, people have several hours to get salvation in randomly opened Gates... and "tickets" to get there ahead of others become the highest and basest privelege. The Cave (Peschera) is set in the society, where "natural" human aggression was replaced from day life to a sort of dreams, in which people realize themselves as beasts in the Cave and kill to feed... There are no "crimes" (although the authorities are as base as always, forming a kind of soft totalitarianism), but have people the right to know who they have killed and to be responsible for that? In the novel Pandem the writers depicted an attempt of a superbeing with half-god abilities to help people on the Earth to evolve... Despite of huge technical and social achievements, Pandem faced the principal contradiction: removing pain from a person's life it removed one's incentives to evolve. Either to love, either to let to evolve... On realizing this, Pandem left the Earth.

Eurohumanist writer Holm van Zaichik (pen name of "translators and consultants" of the saga, Vyacheslav Rybakov and Igor Alimov) is known for the world of Orduss, a fictionary country unifying China, Russia, Near East... a humane society with a rich culture.

Examples of social science fiction from the 1940s

Isaac Asimov, Nightfall, 1941
Isaac Asimov, The Foundation Series, 1942-
Robert A. Heinlein, "If This Goes On—", 1940
Robert A. Heinlein, Beyond This Horizon, 1942
Nadeem F. Paracha, Acidity (Novelette), 2003
Nadeem F. Paracha, God Pulp, 2004

Social science fiction