Mythmoot V is coming up, and the theme is “Fantastic Frontiers”. That’s got me looking at all kinds of boundaries, frontiers, and demarcations in speculative fiction.
Isaac Asimov once wrote this about how to write a science-fiction detective story (which his editor said couldn’t be done):
The writer must carefully explain to the reader all their boundary conditions of the imaginary society. It must be perfectly clear what can be done and what can’t be done and with those boundaries fixed, the reader must then see and hear everything the investigator sees and hears, and he must be aware of every clue the investigator comes across.
From the hundred-or-so Asimov stories I’ve read, I infer that this is a good rule for all SF stories if you replace “investigator” with “protagonist”. Readers are willing to make great leaps of faith to enjoy a story, as long as the boundaries are fixed [1] and we know how far the author wants us to jump.
There is one side, though, on which the boundary is fuzzy and permeable. That’s the side that faces the reader. Anything that’s familiar to us in our mundane world can be in a science fiction story. In fact, it’s almost essential to include a bunch of things from our world to keep from weirding the readers out.
It amused me to notice that the theater works the exact opposite way. The wall that faces the audience is the only fixed one, there. The other three walls are almost infinitely mutable. From one minute to the next they can be DUKE ORSINO’s palace, The sea-coast, OLIVIA’S house, A street, and Before OLIVIA’s house. The fourth wall can be broken, sure. When it is, the playwright is doing it consciously, in exactly the same way that a science-fiction writer might deliberately minimize the connections between the fictional world and the mundane to build a sense of alienation.
The theatrical version of boundaries seems to apply to television and movies, too. So when the subject of a movie is science-fictional, which one wins? Interestingly, it seems that all the rigid boundaries apply. A science-fiction movie is truly in a box.
[1] This is not to say the boundary is finite. Borrowing from complex analysis [2][3], I consider a boundary at infinity to be fixed.
[2] This concept is also useful in real analysis, but this is a humanities blog where the phrase “real analysis” can easily be misinterpreted, so I bumped it up a level.
[3] I’ve read so many Terry Pratchett stories that nested footnotes don’t look odd to me any more.
tom hillman
I am not even going to ask how a boundary at infinity can be fixed, let alone how one can exist at all. I have no doubt that I would not understand the answer, or if I did, the stars might begin to go out.
Joe
Interesting that you put it that way. Nuclear processes that are best explained by models using the Alexandroff Extension of the complex plane are the reason stars shine. If infinity weren’t treatable as a fixed point, they would have to find some other way than quantum mechanics to do it.