Story #4 of 31: The Best Science Fiction of the Year 8, ed. by Neil Clarke

Part of a series: Reading Science Fiction at 75. The first essay.

“Give Me English,” by Ai Jiang, is a metaphor for understanding languages and what it means to become an immigrant. The story feels like science fiction because everyone in this future has a language database (Langbase) in their head, and words are the universal monetary unit. Poor people have to sell their words to pay rent, and some eventually become mute because they run out of words in their langbase.

Gillian lives in New York. She is an immigrant from China. Gillian came to America because she couldn’t compete in the Chinese education system. That’s a real practice today. Because Gillian needs to learn English, she sells off her Chinese words to buy English words. But to survive in expensive New York, she eventually needed to sell her newly acquired English words too. Her friend Jorry is well off because he gambles with words and wins. Jorry offers to help Gillian, but she doesn’t want his help.

For a deeper appreciation of why Ai Jiang wrote this story, read Ray Naylor’s interview with her. Naylor, a science fiction writer who works in the Foreign Service and has taught English abroad. Naylor admired Jiang’s story, and the interview is very insightful. I highly recommend reading it.

“Give Me English” is a fine story. It was nominated for the Nebula and a finalist for the Locus Award.

However, I want to use this story to discuss something else. It’s not really about “Give Me English,” but about me being 75 and trying to find the kind of science fiction I grew up reading. I feel the stories in volume 8 of Clarke’s anthology take a different approach to science fiction. However, “Give Me English” could have been published in Galaxy or F&SF in the 1950s, and maybe even New Worlds in the 1970s. Even back then, science fiction was never consistently one thing.

Is “Give Me English” really science fiction? If it were published in The New Yorker or a literary magazine, would readers call it science fiction? Humans will never use words for money or have a language database in their heads, so it can seriously be considered speculation or extrapolation.

The story is a metaphor or allegory about language. It’s not realistic, but it uses a “what if…” thought experiment to place Gillian and Jorry in a fictional setting. “Give Me English” is included in a science fiction anthology because the genre has become a catch-all for oddball stories. Mostly, this is true because science fiction and fantasy periodicals are venues open to new writers. Would-be writers think that if they write stories with weird elements, they are writing science fiction. But is that the real essence of science fiction?

I’m not saying “Give Me English” is a bad story; it’s not. It’s a good story. But it’s not the kind of fiction I want to read when I’m in the mood for science fiction. Of course, my definition of science fiction is now in the minority. I’m not sure if my definition of science fiction was ever in the majority.

When I was growing up, science fiction was a type of writing challenge: explore possible futures. Generally, it was: if we can build this kind of technology, it will allow this kind of future. Even when the technology is scientifically impossible today, we hope future discoveries will make such technology possible.

Most science fiction writers, even in the past, didn’t try very hard to play this game. They often used recycled ideas as settings for their stories. Many classic science fiction concepts are recycled for endless fictional possibilities. To me, bad science fiction was stories that had comic book-level science. You know, radiation makes mutants with superpowers.

So far, the first four stories in The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 8 don’t seem to believe in the future. They are set in the future, but not believable futures. Have writers and readers given up on the future? Science fiction has become this fantasy world where any kind of make-believe goes.

I want science fiction to seriously imagine possible futures. When 21st-century science fiction imagines the future, it most often utilizes old futures science fiction imagined in the past. I want SF in the 2020s to use the reality of the 2020s to speculate about the future.

I didn’t write about story #3, “The Ship Cat of the Suzaku Maru” by S. L. Huang. It’s obviously set in the future. It’s set in a traditional science fiction setting – a spaceship. John W. Campbell would have published that story in 1941, in Astounding Science Fiction. It would have done well in AnLab. But as nostalgic as I am for old pulp science fiction, that setting is now the past. Star Trek in 1966 is 1939 science fiction. Star Wars in 1977 is 1941 Astounding.

I want science fiction to speculate about the future, but I don’t want it to be recycled futures. In 1966, the year Star Trek came out, Samuel R. Delany published Babel-17. It redefined science fiction. Peter Watts did it in 2006 with Blindsight. Kim Stanley Robinson did it in 2015 with Aurora.

Take Mars, for example. We’ve learned a tremendous amount about Mars in recent decades. Plus, we have Elon Musk and SpaceX. And we have the reality of AI. Even in 2011, Andy Weir’s The Martian isn’t up to date. Mark Watney couldn’t have survived with what we knew even then.

Back in the 1960s, when I was in high school, my buddies and I would discuss science fiction stories. We’d argue over whether or not they could possibly happen. Even the silly stuff. We knew science fiction was far from scientific, but stories needed a certain amount of believability.

We wanted to grow up and see far-out speculation come true. Has science fiction become a kind of fantasy playground in our minds because we no longer have any hope for reality in the future?

Even if we think the future sucks, shouldn’t we still speculate about it?

Of course, I’m being naive here. Science fiction has seldom pursued the ideal I hope to find. Maybe I can’t find the kind of science fiction I want to read because I’ve changed.

JWH