Writing Towards the Future: Searching for Realism In an Increasingly Surreal World

You shouldn’t lose sleep over abstruse literary issues, not when you can search the great literary feuds and find a writer or two who has debated the issue, lost sleep, and then friends. In his recent book, Stranger than Fiction, Edwin Frank touches on the spat between H.G. Wells and Henry James. Wells apparently thought James’s literature was self-indulgent, occupied with the cheap magic trick of conjuring reality into prose, while insisting his own work “does not reflect reality, but rather calls on us to recognize it…to question it and to change it.” Frank sheds light on Wells’ argument for utility in art: the novel must point at reality, and attempt to solve it.

Writing during the scientific leaps of the early 1900s, Wells evidently had some of the same hopes and fears for technology and society that preoccupy us today. His work evokes a sense of beautiful opportunity, but also a kind of grim inevitability to progress, where humanity burns up in the glare of its own inventions. Wells extends or allegorizes contemporary inventions in stories of space travel, time travel, vivisection…and there is an irony in that. Trying to grasp hold of the urgent, real future he saw unfolding around him—to help readers recognize and question it—Wells invented science fiction, and reality burnt up in its glare.

That’s a flowery claim, but I don’t think it’s a contentious one. Science fiction gives me many things, and it can give glimpses of reality and lessons for reality, but it doesn’t quite give me realism. It’s important to understand why not, because it feels like realism needs a new home, one with enough space for a present day whose technology is dystopia, whose intrigue is thriller, whose scandal is romance, and whose politics is fantasy. Literary fiction used to be the home of realism, but reality is so laden with plot twist, so ripe with imagination, that it threatens to burst the sides of a literary fiction novel and flood into another genre. My abstruse literary issue is this: how do you write realism when reality resembles a genre novel?

Among other things, the Wells-James feud reminds me of the tension between realism and fact. When you focus too much on fact, paradoxically you lose what is real. As the author L. Penelope puts it, “Fiction writers must contend with the difference between realism and verisimilitude…the difference between truth and…‘truthiness’.” The impressionist painting evokes more truth than the photograph.

The truthiness in sci-fi doesn’t come from its subject matter, which travels so satisfyingly far from reality. It comes rather from sci-fi’s messaging, which tends to neatly pin down the pressing hopes, and more often fears, of the day. The fictional masks of intergalactic war, aliens, and marine civilisation only slightly camouflage the real-world concerns of war, immigration, and climate change. Arguably, it’s even the distant unreality of the mask that triggers us to search for a contemporary message beneath it.

Wells and other sci-fi writers search for the terrible consequences to contemporary problems, and then paint them into fluorescent, beautiful warnings: Orwell’s 1984 remains a useful reminder of the imperative to resist surveillance. The usefulness can be more subtle as well. Laila Lalami sees dystopias as providing a kind of catharsis in a challenging age: writing about her recent novel, The Dream Hotel, she said, “I felt a surge of hope when I was finished. Imagining the worst somehow helped me to exorcise it.” The same can happen for readers.

Contemporary usefulness can make literature appear less realist because it gives it the quality of seeming time-stamped, as though the truth isn’t eternal, but it doesn’t feel right to say that realism can’t be useful; and in any case, eternal truths are found across great sci-fi. Ursula K. Le Guin might not have agreed that sci-fi can’t be realist, just that it usually isn’t, in part because of the characterisation of science as a heroic, dominating, progress-obsessed, spear-in hand undertaking. Avoid this “techno-heroic” track and “one pleasant side effect is that science fiction can be seen as a far less rigid, narrow field…less a mythological genre than a realistic one.”

It isn’t necessarily the techno-heroism, the grim lessons, or the truthy concerns that get in the way of sci-fi’s realism for me. I think it is more to do with the sense of conclusiveness that I get from sci-fi’s imaginings. The writer imagines a new or alternative track, and the act of imagining can’t help but become an act of conclusion. If you imagine a future, you also choose a future. You choose one destination, one outcome, and this is where the realism ends for me.

For me, inconclusiveness is the defining characteristic of realism. Patchy plots, vacillating characters, flip-flopping truths, open endings, unfixed worlds. And this is what makes realism useful. When reality is as dramatically inconclusive as it is today, reading realism gives us the chance to get comfortable with it.

Which brings us back to literary fiction. Literary fiction is good at inconclusiveness—even the term “literary fiction” is undefined. No genre—if you can even call it that—is better at dealing with messiness, no genre has the freedom, the flexibility, the patience, or the space for realism. But for little old literary fiction to deal with the big, grubby, technophilic, plotty present, it would have to expand and evolve when it is already battered and bruised. This is a genre that we have stripped of its romance, thrill, mystery, speculation, spinning such value propositions out into their own genres. It’s a genre that gets mistakenly connected to elitism, pretension, and glamour, to the alienation of readers. It used to claim ownership of the “truth”—the truth of love, hate, psychology, family, life—but it is losing even this claim to popular, sciencey non-fiction.

And yet, I have faith. There are realist literary novels that handle today’s futuristic topics. These books aren’t secret or niche. Samantha Harvey’s Orbital makes space touchable. Patricia Lockwood’s Nobody Is Talking About This lands the unreality of social media. Catherine Lacey’s The Answers gives emotion sensing tech the ridicule it needs. Rather than imagining the future, the difficult thing these writers do is imagine the present. Nothing is invented, everything is realist, even the unrealistic things. This doesn’t feel easy, but I’m not sure literary fiction ever was.

Literary fiction has the capacity for the present. An element of Wells’s work that Frank comments on is excitement. “Modern science had opened up an unknown world, and terrifying though that may be, it was also exciting…This is what literature had to convey, and Wells did convey it.” If not realism, literary fiction can learn other things from science fiction.

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Sike by Fred Lunzer is available from Celadon Books, an imprint of Macmillan, Inc.