The major caveat to this is that a great many science fiction books are not fictions of science, so much as they are fictions of technology, and not all technology is science. This is a very minor irritation professionally, but thus far I have been thinking of it as infiltration in terms of SF.
Now the challenge with "This book is science fiction if X is considered a science." is, of course, all the borderline cases. (Those are what make any act of categorization interesting.) Is economics a science? Is computer science a science? The further from general certainty a would-be science is, the more uncertain people are (in my very casual observation) to categorize the work as science fiction. The problem of subsuming technology under "science" for this purpose can complicate: if technology fiction is science fiction, then steampunk, clockpunk, and their ilk is all science fiction. (Note that this method says nothing about whether or not a book is also, or is instead, a work of fantasy.)
In the case of The City and The City, it is science fiction, by this method, if sociology is a science.
Ursula Le Guin's Lavinia is science fiction, by this method, if history is a science. It is, among other things, a book about historiography. It is a book which compares forecasts and hindsight to experiential reality. It is a book which explores what historical evidence lodges in our collective record, and how that record is dependent upon the subjectivities of the authors who made those records. It is a book which reminds us of the frailty of any record, and the importance of what can be gained from examining evidence in wider contexts.
There are no end of other categorization methods for science fiction which will or will not include Lavinia in the genre; they're all useful tools. This particular one boils down to what our (my) assumptions, prejudices, and definitions are of entire swathes of other kinds of knowledge categorization. I would argue that history can be a science, depending on the methods being used, and that Le Guin has treated it as such in this book.
(This post is a response to Lavinia's ranking at #8 in the polls results of the best novels by women in the last 10 years over at Torque Control.)
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owlfish- S. Worthen
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Off topic, may I steak (with credit, of course) that icon? Love it.
Mmmm....steak.
Credit doesn't go to me but to
Edit: Which is to say, yes, feel free to use it! But also credit her for her work.
Edited at 2010-12-08 01:08 pm (UTC)
Though of course, if I were to argue tha tthis is about literary contrstucts of the past, you could legitimately say, so is historiography.
But if history is a science, it isn't the science of making dying poets travel back in time and have conversations with their characters.
There could possibly be a science fiction book in which history was a science, and I think that's a very interesting idea. But that book couldn't simultaneously clearly be fantasy.
I mean I could make a good case that philology is a science and therefore The Lord of the Rings... or for that matter that if hunting whales is a science, then Moby Dick. The problem with this isn't that it isn't interesting to think about, it's that you end up having abolished useful categories and with everything in the middle of the floor in a big pile marked "stuff".
Certainly you could argue for philology and whale-hunting as sciences: but would you like to? Are you likely to find such arguments convincing? The whale-hunting one in particular will be burdened with the problem of the degree to which methodology - as opposed to physical objects - is technological and therefore, potentially, scientific.
I've heard plenty of arguments that neither computer science nor sociology are sciences either, and they are less problematic categories in the first place, at least in comparison. But I'm certainly not the first to argue for history as science: there's ample precedent for it.
You'd need Pastwatch-style history-watching machines and/or To Say Nothing of the Dog-style time travel with sims (to experiment on the past without editing yourself from the present) to achieve that, I think. (But I don't think Pastwatch really counts because you can't repeat your experiment, and in Willis's universe the data-gathering is not at all objective.)
(I have not read Lavinia.)
I would argue that historians are quite capable of doing this entire process and regularly do. They are limited by the amount of evidence which has survived, but so are paleontologists, geologers, or physicists working on the Big Bang - any historical phenomenon, really.
If you are not happy with the idea that different documents or excavation sites constitute equivalent data on which to test hypotheses, then perhaps you might also struggle to reconcile diagnoses of truly obscure diseases, or current extrapolations of the development of Homo sapiens, based on the relatively few much older skeletons which have thus far been found. (I'm not saying you do! But these are also cases with limited evidence, even when the underlying method can be used and reused each time new evidence shows up.)
But documents are written by humans, who can forget, be mistaken, be misled, or outright lie. You can be thorough, logical, and rigorous about sorting through which accounts to trust, but you still have to trust - you can't go examine the event they write about yourself, and see it with your own eyes. And neither can anybody else.
Next to Ovid, Virgil is my favorite Roman poet....and I liked Left Hand of Darkness - and therefore, need to read more LeGuin.
Have you ever heard the term "hard science fiction"? I was first introduced to the term with Larry Niven's novels (and a book based around the LHC that I read in 1999 - I am going crazy trying to remember the name/author). So, maybe if hard science fiction deals in details from physics, etc....."soft science fiction" deals in the "soft sciences" (e.g. psychology, history, etc.). Just a thought.
Unrelated: I can't seem to make LJ let me italicize titles...
Soft SF, in my experience of the label, errs on the side of more handwaviness toward its underpinnings. Star Trek is a good example. We don't know how a warp drive works, we just have to trust that it does.
I suspect there is a certain amount of effective overlap, though, between your suggestion and the use of it I've seen.