FULL BLEED: PLEASE DON'T BE SAD IF IT WAS A STRAIGHT MIND YOU HAD

Spoilers for the Netflix adaptation of Three-Body Problem follow. So do spoilers for all of science fiction. Whoops.

A bit into the third week of the Fake Believe kickstarter campaign and we’re at fourteen hundred and sixty dollars. Not bad. I should say really good, really. I should be one of those dopes who’s been shown a little gratitude. Truth is, I’m always hunting for more readers. That’s the real nut. The money is nice and keeps skids greased, better than luck in that regard. Really though, I’d just like the work seen. I’ve even been desperate enough to have the work seen to put it up on my own site for free. Bet you can find some if you wander over to that column on the right, or hell, just scroll down some.

Fingers crossed that we hit fifty backers. Think the last one had forty-three maybe. That seems like a decent increment up. Positive growth. Hell, the economy would like to see eight percent growth, right? Yeah, I sure bet it would. Ha ha ha, fuck.

Onto other subjects. At the recommendation of a friend of mine, I started up the Netflix adaptation of Three Body Problem, coming from the novel by Cixin Liu, which got the Hugo back in 2015, a little longer ago than I’d thought. Time does indeed keep passing whether we like it or not. Anyways, I’m enjoying the show well enough, though it does suffer from sort of boilerplate Netflix series production. Benedict Wong and Liam Cunningham are fun to watch, allowed to be intentional kinds of bastards that the Scooby Gang of physicists aren’t really.

Though I do chuckle when it’s rolled out as great science fiction, plausible and etc. Now, I can’t speak to the book. I haven’t read it. Perhaps I’ll get to it sometime, but I’ve really tired of hard SF that puts the S before the F, as it were. Perhaps this isn’t the case, though what little poking around I’ve done indicates that how it’s been received by readers means problems for me.

All that said, my real problem is that the things happening in the series aren’t really science fiction. They’re fantasy. 100% magic, simply done away with because someone said “quantum entanglement.” Instantaneous communication over light-year distances, projection of images over the same distances into human minds, direct manipulation of experience via VR-type setup, a proton turned into a computer which is whoops the size of a planet, reshaping the fundamental forces at both micro/experimental and macro/worldwide perspectives, etc. This is magic. You can say “multiple dimensions” and “quantum” all you like, but storywise, this is magic. I guess the nanofibers are mostly real, though I suspect their effects would be a hell of a lot weirder than what we got onscreen.

Now, modern science has suggested, or maybe even implied that these are factual, and maybe some experimentalists are convinced that quantum entanglement means we can speak over interstellar distances as easily as two people speaking on an intercontinental phone call in 2025. That we can turn a single proton into a computer that can perform reality-altering miracles, again, over the same distances etc.

But right now, that’s magic. Or theory, I suppose. If the theories we’ve constructed actually play out and we’re not simply looking at quantum entanglement the same way that we looked at the motion of the sun before any of scientists came along and said “Yeah, that thing’s in the center and we’re revolving around it as we rotate along a second axis, which makes the whole thing look like it’s spinning around us.” Please note that I am not a physicist. Nor am I a historian of science. I’m just a guy who’s observed patterns in Western human behavior. We thought string theory had all the answers or at least told us what questions to ask. Or that every time every single decision made by any human mind (why not a dog or scarab beetle or manta ray?) branches into another actual literal universe, so that we’ve got functionally uncountable universes all in material existence alongside one another, which seems to break more than a couple rules but hey, I’m just an opinionated caveman.

Now, how can these things be described as magic? We’re supposed to be watching a science fiction television show! It’s supposed to show us what could really happen! Well, yeah, if we could viol/obviate things we regard as physical laws, sure they could be real. Just like, sure, we could colonize Mars, once we got a working magnetosphere and atmosphere and access to yummy things like water and food and the biomes needed to make agriculture function and do away with the dust storms made of billions of microscopic razorblades which would destroy the lungs and skin of anyone caught in them, or their suits, or their vehicles, etc etc etc. But yeah, we’re just one step away from Weyland-Yutani coming in with a shake and bake operation to make Mars a paradise.

Yeah, that’s magic too. In theory, it’s a set of physical problems to solve. That we have no idea to accomplish in a hundred years much less ten. But go off, kings. Interplanetary exploration machine go!

Magic.

Fantasy.

It’s not real, not a bit of it. Granted, these fantasies have been dressed up in the trappings of science, sprinkled with flavor crystals reflecting the current (and just ahead-of-current technologies, at least assuming they got evenly distributed, to mal-quote William Gibson). They seem realer because of transistors or radioactivity or computers or the Internet or nanotechnology or dark matter or quantum physics or AI or any other thing. They’re all just fantasy. This will be regarded as a mortal, humiliating insult by some and if you want to believe that’s my intent, go ahead. I can’t stop you. I’ve zero interest in it. But I’m not wrong. Science Fiction (I’ll leave it capitalized here) is just fantasy with different modifiers, different flavor crystals sprinkled on top. Sure, some science fiction is simply about our world with minimum tweaking: Rollerball and Soylent Green and say the Blue Ant trilogy by William Gibson (there’s that guy again). But Octavia Butler too. And any other number of near-future prognosticators or dreamers. They’re still writing fantasy. They’re still writing about what is not, but perhaps could be.

And people are gonna argue that fantasy is way different than science fiction because we’re never going to have dragons or elves or talking mice or civilizations on Earth a million years after the death of the sun or talking swords or lords of the Sith or anything else.

But we’re not going to Mars in my lifetime, either. Which is a bummer. As a kid, I thought we would. Then I grew up and watch the world decide that it wanted to be made smaller and smaller and hand exploration over to billionaires who actually don’t know anything other than buying into games over and over until other players tap out. Yeah, bummer.

It’s all fantasy. But at least the books that get called fantasy admit that it’s all made-up things dancing together in something that we might call a story. Maybe the things represent other things, and maybe not. Hell, it’s all a fantasy that we can read these black marks and have things happen in our heads and hearts, too. Sure, nobody’s guaranteed the same experience as anyone else, but we all have a similar shot at it.

It's all fantasy. It’s all made-up. They’re all absolutely imaginary stories. The best of them work not because of the setting or the genre or the flavor crystals or wherever they’re shelved. They work because they’re great stories and make us feel and think something, to have an experience we wouldn’t have otherwise. Granted, today, people like to jump into silos so they can have only the stuff they want over and over. Which today sounds to me like a coffin. Particularly in a time when we have access (for now) to anything in nearly any variety no matter how slim the starting point. You could decide that you only want to read fantasy labeled as horror about the cosmic and existential nature of horror. You’d be able to read that and only that for the rest of your life and never catch up with it all. I know, these are different problems (if indeed they are) and I’m wandering afield.

Point is, when we’re arguing about what book belongs in what genre, we’re really missing the point. Which is why I’ve dipped out on these sorts of arguments for a long time now, even if I did get caught up in them sitting in front of my computer not doing work when I should be doing it. Ultimately meaningless, though some folks will not ever let go of them because of identification via consumption cohort, or worse, believing that only say, Hard SF is worth reading because it represents something that could happen. Which is, yeah, something I’ve heard and can’t really forget. I know, rebroadcasting wrongheadedness is bad. Mea culpa. But perhaps the ridiculousness of the example can make this argument retain some kind of stickiness.

And, long way around the horn here, hopefully this explains some of why I went the route I did with my own work. Most everything I’ve done is recombinant, or magpie-like if you like. Cowboys and werewolves, horror and crime, fantasy and crime, even the fantasy I’ve written has generally used crime as a central axis, mostly because crime is a very human activity and if you’re not writing about humans, well, good luck. The best idea in the world being acted out by cardboard cutouts with two-dimensional thought on rails isn’t gonna stick. Sorry.

So I’ve tried not to worry about the boundaries too much. Granted, this means publishers who are only interested in market categories can’t run away from me fast enough. Ah well, I can only do what I can do. All that said, it does make things tricky when I have to tell people what kind of work this is. Particularly when I’m trying to get them to put down their hard-earned money in return for books from some guy that they’ve maybe never ever read a word of before.

It's all fantasy. They’re all imaginary stories that are completely real. That’s the aim.

Until next week when I start really thinking those numbers could be tweaked some.

Some of the preceding was sparked by an earlier conversation with Karlo Yeager Rodríguez (@kjy1066.bsky.social) on bluesky. He’s also a pretty great writer. You should check his work out, particularly “As the Shore Calls to the Tides, Blood Calls to Blood”, being offered by Weirdpunk books in the near future.