Why so sad?

On the somber tone prevalent in science fiction.

Image by etowner5, shared on DeviantArt for use with attribution.

Since Steven and I are working on a podcast episode about dark superheroes, a subspecies of superhero comics that started in the 80s and 90s and continues through to this day, I’ve been thinking about the underlying mindset of genre fiction. At the same time, I’ve been reading no small number of science fiction stories. As I said in an earlier post, I’m a fan of anthologies, so short stories always run on a parallel reading track with longer works (like our re-read of Roger Zelazny’s Amber series for another upcoming episode).

All of which leads me to the inescapable conclusion about the science fiction and fantasy I’ve been reading lately, and I’ve read in the more distant past: a kit of it is pretty sad.

That’s not true of all authors, or all of their written works. But there are some authors who are reliably melancholy. For cripe’s sake, one of the collections of Ray Bradbury’s short stories is titled A Medicine For Melancholy, which is both pretty on the nose, and presumably the author’s choice of title. When I re-read Bradbury’s story, “There Will Come Soft Rains,” for an earlier post about short fiction, the leaden sadness of that story stuck with me for days. Sure, Bradbury foresaw smart homes in that story, so kudos for that predictive aspect of his fiction. However, what the story is really about is the apocalyptic self-destructiveness of human beings.

It has been a long time since I read Bradbury, so in preparation for this post, I picked one of his other classic stories, “The Fog Horn,” to read. It’s a brisk read about two lighthouse keepers encountering the unknown. Here’s the critical quote that sets up the story:

“One day many years ago a man walked along and stood in the sound of the ocean on a cold sunless shore and said “We need a voice to call across the water, to warn ships; I’ll make one. I’ll make a voice that is like an empty bed beside you all night long, and like an empty house when you open the door, and like the trees in autumn with no leaves. A sound like the birds flying south, crying, and a sound like November wind and the sea on the hard, cold shore. I’ll make a sound that’s so alone that no one can miss it, that whoever hears it will weep in their souls, and to all who hear it in the distant towns. I’ll make me a sound and an apparatus and they’ll call it a Fog Horn and whoever hears it will know the sadness of eternity and the briefness of life.”“

The Fog Horn blew.

That’s good writing, setting the dark mood in just a few words. The story goes on from there to a heart-breaking ending that may inspire you to sink into the couch where you’re reading and not get up for a while.

If you’ve read Bradbury’s other works, you know that his melancholy tone defines his writing. His most famous work, The Martian Chronicles, is full of sadness, about the last days of a dying world, the bumbling entry of humans into that world, and the mutual destructiveness of two species who cannot understand or live with each other in the slightest.

At this point, you may be thinking, “That’s just Ray Bradbury. The rest of science fiction isn’t as sad as all that.” Except, of course, a lot of it is.

Definitely, there are writers and stories that are not. Hard SF writers like Larry Niven, for example, are more interested in exploring scientific ideas than the dark recesses of the heart. Niven’s Tales of Known Space, his most famous works, often have a jaunty tone, with energetic “competent man” protagonists making exciting discoveries and breezily resolving astronomically large problems.

Some additional examples

But the strain of sadness runs deep in many other parts of science fiction. Here are a few examples from works I’ve certainly enjoyed, or appreciated, or whatever verb correctly describes the experience of being glad you’ve read something, while being deeply saddened by it.

Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End slowly reveals itself as an epitaph for the human race.

Harlan Ellison’s “And I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream” is one of the most soul-crushing stories I’ve ever read, in large part because it’s about an AI that keeps a few humans alive just to crush their souls. “Jeffty is Five,” about a boy who mentally never grows up, is also no jamboree of joy.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe Of Heaven is about the catastrophic hubris of people who look for simple, sweeping solutions to our vast and complex problems. Her short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” poses the question, how much suffering are we willing to inflict to preserve the lives we have? There’s no happy answer to that question.

The story that nearly everyone read in middle school or high school when I was young, Daniel Keyes’ “Flowers For Algernon,” gives a mentally handicapped man an improved brain and a better life, and then yanks it all away from him.

Reading the first four Dune books in succession, Frank Herbert makes it clear that the main point he wants to make is that political power transforms ordinary people into monsters, and the people you often think are heroes really don’t deserve your adulation.

Terry Bisson’s “Bears Discover Fire” is a story is a musing on death and the literal passing of the torch.

Walter Miller Jr.’s A Canticle For Liebowitz ends on a final page that’s cosmically morose about the human condition. It’s beautiful, but in the same way that Mozart’s Requiem is.

Gene Wolfe’s The Book Of The New Sun series requires some mental effort to figure out what’s really happening, or even who some major characters really are, in his far-future world, seen through the eyes of a professional torturer, Severian. The more you solve the puzzles of these books, the less hopeful the world of the New Sun appears.

William Gibson’s Neuromancer, the Ur-novel of the cyberpunk subgenre, depicts a future populated by a few corporate oligarchs and a vast underclass, in which technology is a tool of domination…And occasionally liberation, in a far more limited way. That’s pretty much the theme of most cyberpunk stories to follow: the near future is likely to be dystopian, where technology will not be your friend.

This underlying somberness isn’t limited to science fiction. Fantasy has plenty of sadness, from the inevitable march towards Armageddon in Moorcock’s Elric series, to the recent popularity of “grimdark” fantasy writers like Joe Abercrombie. The melancholy in science fiction, however, is noteworthy. As literature of the future, not the past, it often doesn’t embrace that future with optimism.

Some unsatisfying explanations

So why is this the case? Let’s walk through several possible explanations.

I’m just attracted to sad stories. In other words, my view of science fiction is skewed because I enjoy slogging through dark literary swamps. Happily, this is the weakest hypothesis. While I do consume a lot of media that has an inherently dark view of people (film noir and hard-boiled detective fiction, for example), that’s not the only sort of content that tickles my fancy. I also don’t think I’m a sad person who wallows in personal or fictional depression.

I’m reading too much sadness into these stories. Also doubtful. Herbert went out of his way to depict history and politics as monumental tragedy. Ellison may have written the occasionally comic story like “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said The Ticktock Man,” but works like “Paingod,” “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs,” and “The Deathbird” were his overwhelmingly consistent oeuvre.

Sadness is a cheap trick of lesser writers. I think this is occasionally true of writers like George R.R. Martin, who inject “misery porn” into their writing when they run out of ideas. However, these are the writers whom I personally enjoy less, and are often the targets of criticism for this weakness in their work. In contrast, authors like Le Guin and Wolfe were definitely not hacks.

The world is inherently a sad place. Perhaps if you want to depict any world, real or imagined, with some verisimilitude, you need sad elements. While that may be true that too much happyhappyjoyjoy makes any fiction unbelievable and unengaging, it’s also true that many of the works I’ve cited steer hard into emotional desolation. I don’t think that’s necessary to make the story plausible. Instead, it’s an authorial decision about what to emphasize.

Good writers notice the inherent sadness of the world more than lesser writers. I don’t find this explanation any more convincing than the previous one. I added it to the list because it seems that, the better the author, the more likely the writing will hit sadder notes. This is as true of some of the truly wonderful writers I’ve mentioned, as well as authors like J.G. Ballard, Thomas Disch, John Brunner, and other members of the New Wave, who wanted to raise the quality of science fiction as fiction. Their works, such as Brunner’s Shockwave Rider, Stand On Zanzibar, and The Sheep Look Up, are anything but joyful.

If you stretch the boundaries of the possible, the world reveals itself as an even sadder place than we think. This explanation rings more true than the others. The central question of science fiction, “What if…” leads us to places where the weaknesses in human beings are put under even greater stress. In a previous post, I put the spotlight on C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner’s “Mimsy Were The Borogoves” as a classic science fiction short story. Kuttner and Moore drops future technology into the hands of contemporary children. The effect is to widen and accelerate the distance between children and their parents that already exists, to the point of complete incomprehensibility. The gap between parents and children is already part of family life, especially as children mature — even without educational toys from the distant future.

I confess, I’m not fully satisfied with that last thesis. It doesn’t fully account for Ray Bradbury’s perpetual melancholy, or Ellison’s angry young man worldview. But at least it’s a start. If you have better explanations, or you want to reject my entire argument, please don’t be shy in the comments.