Ran across an interesting interview with William Gibson this week somewhere on the web. He made mention of his view that History, or historical writing (not to be confused with alternate history fantasies), is a speculative genre of fiction much like science fiction. Seemed like an intriguing comparison.
[edit - topically this post belongs on the other side, as is doesn't have anything to do with Card aside from the SF bit.]
Posts: 351 | Registered: Jan 2006
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Considering the speculative part of speculative fiction is, essentially, the "what if" factor, you could say almost all fiction could be called speculative, but least of all historical fiction.
Posts: 1138 | Registered: Nov 2005
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It seemed like an interesting thought. Though, "speculative fiction" does seem kinda redundant. The point I took away from it is that all writing of history can be viewed as fiction. It certainly is a subjective/interpretive endeavor.
now that I think about it, maybe it's not all that interesting of an observation. "duh" on me.
Posts: 351 | Registered: Jan 2006
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I'm not sure if this is what your suggesting, but I don't think Gibson created the term "speculative fiction". I think it was either Heinlein or Ellison.
Posts: 2054 | Registered: Nov 2005
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Sounds to me like William Gibson is trying desparately to make Sci-Fi at least sound part of the intellectual world of Universities. He should take OSC's suggestion: It's not going to happen and would end up cripling the genre.
Posts: 2207 | Registered: Oct 2003
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If you take the post-modernist view, pretty much all 'history' is extrapolated from the imagined past anyway. We can't really know what it was like in the past - we can only work from a few sources which we interpret to suit our own cultural biases and preconceived notions.
So, yeah. It could be a valid argument, I guess. But then, all fiction is 'speculative'. None of it is 'real'.
Posts: 1528 | Registered: Nov 2004
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Gibson's point is true but obvious: That is, no matter how rigorously a historian consults the available information, the fact remains that causality is ALWAYS speculative.
But you see, the same is also true of science and every other storytelling genre, because ALL causal assertions are speculative. They may depend on loads of experience, information, testing, etc., but there always remains the possibility that an unthoughtof cause is a contributing, modifying, or even complete explanation of the data.
It's one of the reasons we need fiction. History, science, news, gossip - all the "fact-based" stories - are always open to revision when new data or new interpretations become available. But fiction, since it exists only in the text (or film), can never be "corrected" by new "facts." It can be contradicted in the sense that "it couldn't happen," but never in the sense that "it didn't happen that way." And therefore the causal assertions of the storyteller stand.
The odd thing is that so many postmodernists think they're saying something exciting, new, revolutionary when they assert the uncertainty of historical writing. But historians have always known this - haven't they spent centuries now poring over the same data, writing yet another history or another biography, correcting or amplifying the causal assertions of their predecessors? It's what historians DO.
It's like somebody frantically holding up a sign beside a freeway, saying in big letters: "Check your gas gauge! If you don't refill your tank in time, you might run out of gas!" Duh! Maybe some people need the reminder, but it's not like it's new information to anybody.
Posts: 2005 | Registered: Jul 1999
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Were you looking for someone to decide not only that you were correct, but to what degree you were correct?
I'm not trying to be obnoxious, (though I seem to be succeeding) but short of saying that all scholarly history is a fiction to be scrapped, I think that most people who have studied history would agree that it is impossible to view the past as a math problem to be identified, added up and quantified.
In college, my history thesis was that authors such as Disraeli gave us a better idea of life in England during the 1800's than someone like Arthur Schlesinger could. Not because Schlesinger was dishonest in his analysis, but because Disraeli didn't let facts impare his ability to also portray the feelings of the people.
It was a tough thesis to write. How does one prove that facts can't prove history?
Anyway, I look at the Constitution and realize that the present shapes history as much as history shapes the present. I don't look at this as a bad thing because I don't need the past to be static.
Goodness, if we can't even look at the present with 20/20 vision, how can we possibly expect the past to be without distortion.
Posts: 2425 | Registered: Jan 2002
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