The Consciousness Plague, The Man in the High Castle
I keep reading Paul Levinson, even though I know it’s not going to be science fiction. My mother could read The Consciousness Plague and maybe even enjoy it. Like his past two novels, this is a cross between a murder mystery and a medical thriller. The sci-fi content is minimal, distinguishing Levinson’s novels from other thrillers only in the slightly more speculative nature and background of the medical emergency.
The Consciousness Plague is published by Tor. I don’t mind a good medical thriller myself, but I have to wonder why Levinson’s novels are being published by a sci-fi house. The SF on the spine is the Mark of Cain in the publishing business; I would think a good writer (which he clearly is) would want to pass himself off as mainstream just for the greater potential audience. Why wallow in the obscurity of the geek section of the bookstore along with wonderful authors like LMB (still unknown after four Hugo awards and two Nebulas) when you could be topping the bestseller lists like a new Robin Cook or Michael Crighton?
Speaking of passing yourself off as mainstream, I read a classic of the SF-in-denial genre, The Man in the High Castle. Like Kurt Vonnegut, Philip K. Dick got away with pretending he wasn’t writing SF. All it takes to be mainstream literary, apparently, is an obscure ending that leaves your readers wondering whether they’re too stupid to understand your deep literary themes.
I’d prefer a book with an ending, myself, even an anti-climactic one like Paul Levinson tends to write. But Pulitzer misfires aside, there was an SF book in The Man in the High Castle, and it wasn’t the meta-book all the characters were reading. It wasn’t even the Third Reich’s planetary colonization (though I would have appreciated more about that, and about the decimation of Africa).
The SF was in the culture. What would be the cultural impact of Japanese occupation of California? If you want to know, read this book. Or you can skip the book and read the I Ching. On the other coast the Germans are having their own effect, much of which trickles west. This was one of the best depictions of a non-existent culture (two, in fact) that I’ve ever seen; it blew me away even when the plot seemed to be going nowhere fast.
I identify SF with this ability to portray a new society. The technology is secondary, or rather, the technology is not truly described until its impact on culture has been worked out. The best fantasy also hangs on the underlying culture - The Lord of the Rings and Watership Down are good stories on the surface, but the depth that makes them classics is that of the full-scale background world.
Mainstream literature never depicts a new culture. It’s a sort of fan fiction of reality; mainstream is the derivative genre, and SF the creative one. So, for example, the mainstream writer Paul Levinson couldn’t show the full effects of memory loss on a society in The Consciousness Plague without changing our society. Like a media tie-in writer, he had to leave his characters and his world intact for the next novel. The rules of the mainstream genre kept him from fleshing out the most interesting part of the story.