The Life-Cycle of a Trope - Science Fiction’s Tragedy of the Commons?
Blasphemous Geometries returns, like a surly postal worker on a rainy day.
This time Jonathan McCalmont takes a look at tropes - the riffs, clichés and plot enablers that form the backbone of much genre literature. Are tropes subject to abuse and overexploitation in the same way as any other limited resource?
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This month, I am going to come over all web 2.0 and talk about the commons. In particular, I want to talk about tropes. Tropes are ideas such as FTL, aliens, robots, vampires or the Singularity which, while traceable to particular authors and thinkers, do not actually belong to any particular person and so can be used by anyone who wishes to sit down and write a piece of science fiction. Indeed, some fools even think that it’s the use of different tropes that distinguishes one genre from another, but we all know better and can laugh hearty, manly laughs at their wrong-headedness.
In 1968, the ecologist Garrett Hardin published an article called “The Tragedy of the Commons” in which he argued that it is in the nature of any common good for it to be abused. This is because while the benefits of abusing that public good (whether it’s fishery stocks, the environment, a street free of rubbish or Catholic schoolboys) only go to the individuals doing the abusing, the consequences of that abuse are felt by everyone regardless of whether they abuse or not. This cost/benefit imbalance ensures that once people start abusing the commons, it is never rational for them to stop. This is why humans are finding it so hard to stop polluting; if everyone is going to feel the benefits of global warming anyway, then there is no reason to stop making money out of it.
As with any other set of commons, the fortunes of science fiction’s tropes can wax and wane.
One of the joys of a great author is that, aside from producing great books, they can also do a lot of good for the genre. For example, Iain M. Banks is widely credited with reinvigorating space opera by putting it on a more intellectual and political footing. Banks not only produced some great individual works, he also gave other authors a lot of new ideas to play with.
Aside from the work put in by individual authors, tropes can also be affected by fashion as real-world events inspire authors to re-examine old ideas and come up with some new ones. For example, one of the most popular tropes of the moment is the Singularity. Championed early on by Vernor Vinge, the Singularity is a point in our cultural and technological development where the rate of change becomes almost infinite, making any speculation as to what society might be like on the other side of the singularity, effectively useless.
The Singularity trope pops up in works such as Stross‘ Accelerando (2005), Rucker’s Postsingular (2007), Ryman’s Air (2005) and one could argue that its popularity is partly a reflection of the fact that many science fiction authors are finding it difficult to write about the future because our culture is changing faster and faster and becoming more and more fragmented. This means that the solid mono-cultural permafrost that once supported the speculation of Golden Age SF - as well as the countercultural 1960s New Wave - is turning into thin ice. Indeed, the tropes surrounding the Singularity are fertile at the moment because authors are inspired by the sense of insecurity and malaise that Western civilisation is feeling over its own future.
However, while cultural economics can give, they can also take away.
The best authors give as much to the genre’s cultural capital as they take. Other writers are less community minded. For example, during the 1990s the epic fantasy genre suffered from an explosion in the number of books which, while adding little that was new or of value, drew heavily upon the stock of ideas built up by J.R.R. Tolkien. Each of these authors benefited from fantasy’s commons by being able to publish books without having to come up with many new ideas, and everyone suffered from the cultural impoverishment of the genre and the rapid descent into blandness and cliché that came with it.
Of course, an over-abundance of hack writers is not the only reason why a trope might wane. Just as some tropes benefit from their relevance to real world events, political, cultural and technological changes can also conspire to make tropes seem irrelevant or ridiculously old fashioned. This is an idea explored by Charlie Stross in his recent work Saturn’s Children (2008). The book deals with a post-human solar system that has been taken over by humanity’s surviving robotic servants and the absence of the humans serves as a nice reminder of the fact that robots, while once omnipresent in science fiction, are simply not that common any more.
Similarly, during the explosion in the popularity of psychoanalysis post-World War Two, and in analytical psychology in the 1960s and 70s, it was quite common for psychic powers to be included in mainstream science fiction. As time passed, however, the feeling that we were making groundbreaking discoveries about the mind started to fade, and psychic powers started to look less like the next step in the scientific study of the mind and more like pseudoscientific nonsense. Indeed, psychological attitudes have changed so drastically in fifty years that we have gone from Bester name-checking Wilhelm Reich to the likes of Watts‘ Blindsight (2006) and Bakker’s Neuropath (2008) suggesting that there’s no such thing as the self in the first place.
From birth to death, genre’s stock of ideas waxes and wanes as great authors appear and disappear and great themes emerge and evaporate. The constant churn of ideas means that genre is ever changing and evolving. However, there is one part of the life-cycle of a trope that I have yet to mention - and that is living death.
Science fiction is a popular genre, and while some tropes are more socially and politically relevant than others, this relevancy is really no indication of popularity with the public. In some cases, a set of tropes might be so popular that it creates its own little economic niche, utterly separate from the Zeitgeist. With the possible exception of Paranormal Romance’s refusal to let go of Anne Rice and Joss Whedon’s vision of the vampire, the best example of this phenomenon is MilSF.
These books deploy tropes such as inter-stellar empires, FTL drives, planetary battles and space marines that hark back to simpler times in which military values such as physical toughness or tactical astuteness lead to victory and glory rather than death and misery. To criticise MilSF for being politically naive is simply to miss the point. Those works are no more intended as treatises on modern politics than books by Laurell K. Hamilton are intended to be frightening.
The frightening part is how many books she sells. That and her obsession with spaying pets.
Jonathan McCalmont is a recovering academic with a background in philosophy and political science. He lives in London, UK where he teaches and writes about books and films for a number of different venues. Like Howard Beale in Network, he is as mad as hell and he’s not going to take this any more.
Jonathan recently launched Fruitless Recursion - “an online journal devoted to discussing works of criticism and non-fiction relating to the SF, Fantasy and Horror genres.” If you liked the column above, you’ll love it.
[ The fractal in the Blasphemous Geometries header image is a public domain image lifted from Zyzstar. ]
July 23rd, 2008 at 7:48 am
This has been an interesting thought experiment. But I’m not sure I buy that writers’ exploration of already-discovered ideaspace (tropes) imposes an external cost, somehow debasing the once-shiny ideas. My intuition is that more fictional exploration just expands and enriches the background that can be put to use in future works, which makes it more like a public good than a public bad.
The glut of derivative fantasy in the ’90s may have been bad literature (I read a bunch of this growing up, but don’t remember it too well), but I don’t think it had bad effects on the world of possible future fiction. Rather, it defined a new background context for future fantasy to build on. It wasn’t as creative as Tolkien’s work, which arguably birthed the genre, but it wasn’t destructive.
July 23rd, 2008 at 8:32 am
I rambled on about something similar on my blog, although not so much about tropes as the fact that such plot-enabling conventions have not really evolved. And yes, military sf is the worst offender in this regard. While space opera has reinvented itself, each new military sf series just features a new alien race, a new human empire, and a new way of getting one from star to the next. Everything else is just 1980s middle America…
July 23rd, 2008 at 8:39 am
Hi Dave
The exploration, as you put it, is the use of ideas to create books. Some people draw heavily on the commons (ideas created by others) without putting very much back. Others draw and either create new ideas or put new spins on old ideas. The key to a vibrant scene, is give and take. The problem is when lots of books start getting published that draw from the commons without putting anything back in the shape of new ideas. The result can be the creative stagnancy and descent into pastiche that was scene not only in 90s fantasy but also by the people who jumped on the cyberpunk bandwagon. It would be difficult to put out a cyberpunk novel now as those ideas are ‘used up’. Hence people moving onto the slightly different post-cyberpunk idiom. The Electric Church by Jeff Somers, for example, was a trad cyberpunk pastiche and while I liked what it did with the old tropes, a lot of people utterly slated it for doing just that.
As for being destructive, that creative stagnation can indeed be destructive because it creates a steeper slope for future generations of writers. Every work of genre has some new ideas and some old ideas but also ideas that aren’t entirely new but aren’t entirely old yet either. If that stock of middling ideas is all used up then new authors have to completely reinvent the wheel if they want to stand out and that’s not only creatively more difficult, it’s also professionally more difficult as not everyone wants something completely new.
There was a piece last year by Mark Chadbourn which suggested very much the same idea. He blamed RPGs for using up all of fantasy’s ideas. But this isn’t a problem limited to fantasy. I think that the Singularity is getting “full” and people are starting to get annoyed with it.
It’s all part of the life-cycle
July 23rd, 2008 at 8:46 am
Hi Ian
But that it were 1980s America! The 1980s were late Cold War. Most MilSF is either 1950s America (back when they thought the Cold War was winnable “A Big Red Dog is digging up our lawn Mr. President!”), 1940s America or Napoleonic/French Revolutionary War period.
Iain Banks’ famous re-invigoration of Space Opera was writing about th geopolitics of the 60s with the moral testing of America as the Freedom-loving superpower that would change the world and the discovery that actually, despite being a democracy and all about spreading freedom across the world, America had a hideously dark side.
Some periods are easier to understand than others. Some periods lend themselves better to space battles
July 23rd, 2008 at 3:49 pm
Hardin’s tragedy of the commons is that any _unregulated_ common good will be abused and degraded. Elinor Ostrom has devoted her career to investigating how commons are regulated and how some can last for centuries if not millennia.
July 24th, 2008 at 4:02 am
Fair enough, how would you suggest that SF’s commons are regulated?
July 24th, 2008 at 8:06 am
“Rather, it defined a new background context for future fantasy to build on. It wasn’t as creative as Tolkien’s work, which arguably birthed the genre, but it wasn’t destructive.”
Agreed. And I’d add that without the works of R.A. Salvatore inviting me through the genre doorway, I doubt I’d have stuck around to discover the likes of Gene Wolfe, Michael Moorcock, Jeff VanderMeer, etc. Count me as one who benefited from 90s Tolkienesque fantasy in terms of cultural enlightenment.