Written by Stephen Thompson | 16 May 2005

In her article In the SF Ghetto (Visions, October 2003), Cat Sparks asks "Doesn't literature work via metaphor and imagery?" I don't think there is any doubt about that, but I'd like to add that speculative fiction writers use metaphor and analogy to far greater degree than even they suppose. I'm quite sure that many sf writers are aware that they write, as Cat says, "fantasy that explores human nature via a complex of historically and culturally powerful imaginative constructs". However, I wonder how consciously they do this.

In the past, I've been known to criticise speculative fiction for its lack of depth, but it is still my genre of choice; its potential appeals to me. But does it lack meaning? Is it just fancy and flimsy hung out to look like literature? I don't think so. I believe that speculative fiction is as deeply cut from social realism as any other kind of literature. It does it by encoding the real world into "dream images" and hides reality under a blanket of allegory and symbol.

Using tools that are some kind of bastard offspring of Semiology 101 and Freudian psychoanalysis, I thought I'd exercise my mind by looking behind the meanings of stories (or meta-stories, analogies, metaphors - call them what you like), at the meaning, the real-world meaning, that exists under the cloak of speculative fiction. I decided to do this by looking at some of the stories published in Glimpses to illustrate my point - because I have developed a unique familiarity with them in the course of editing and compiling the anthology (and it's a good excuse to promote it).

To the casual reader The Ferrymen by Scott Robinson is a love story, it has a kind of unusual twist to the "self-sacrifice" sub-genre at the end. The tension in the story is derived from the ferrymen, who are a group of slaves endlessly rowing from one shore to another, being under the yoke of their wizard masters. The slaves have, over time, developed a capacity to communicate mentally. Ufoo, the protagonist, eventually uses this communication, called the "mind mesh", to escape the monotony of his lifestyle and win the love of a woman. The wizards use magic to keep the ferrymen in their place, however, unexpectedly, the mist of their magic has allowed the ferrymen to evolve their own magic powers.

By taking a paradigm shift to the left and deconstructing the symbols, what can we see lurking behind the imagery?

There are two opposing forces. The wizards are the masters and the ferrymen are the workers. The wizards have control of trade and, judging by the way they man-handle the females in the story, they seem to consider women as property (and women in this world, we shall soon see, signify the medium of exchange). The ferrymen respond to their slavery by creating their own network of power - the mind-mesh. Looking at it in the context of class relationships, it doesn't require such a big leap of the imagination to view the mind-mesh as a metaphor for trade unionism. Here it is depicted as rising out of the mists of worker exploitation.

The concept reaches deeply into the story. For example, when Ufoo breaks with the solidarity of the union, the group disintegrates into nothingness - united we stand, divided we fall.

The object of desire in the love story is Marnee (surely far too close to the name we give our medium of exchange to be anything other the real thing). She is abused by wizards (at least she is a passive and disinterested part of one relationship). She is the object of desire for Ufoo, the medium of exchange, the inciting incident for worker revolution. By saving or rescuing Marnee, using their united strength to overcome the wizards when they challenge them, the ferrymen take power.

Clearly, The Ferrymen is an analogy about the nature of unionism and working class revolutionary ideas. I think it is equally clear that this background text was almost certainly not consciously planned by the author; it is more likely to be an unconscious drama that exists within the writer's own mental space that has been allowed to filter to the surface. It acts much like a dream does in Freudian psychoanalytic theory: it represents reality in symbols and, perhaps, even the fulfilment of a repressed wish given Mr Robinson's rather frustrated tone in his biographical note that he "—works part time at a full time job".

Freud says in The Interpretation of Dreams that all the material making up the content of a dream is in some way derived from experience. We cannot deny that a writer acts likewise to create a story, ie, he/she dredges up personal experience and interpretations of the world to focus his/her words in the creation of a tale. In this sense, the speculative fiction writer draws on social patterns, real lives and cultural experience, and delivers them as a codified story to the public. Speculative fiction may well be considered as dream fiction.

In Life's Little Holodeck by Karin Hannigan, the story revolves around an old revolutionary from the Moon who is visiting Prague with her granddaughter. She goes about asking a computer to delete tourists, rain, bus fares. She has a different "take" on how things should be. All this while flood waters are rising.

One cannot escape the resonances with the Prague Spring of 1968. Is there a sense that the old woman represents the flowering of democratic freedoms in Prague of 1968? And are the floodwaters a metaphor for the Soviet military that is about to engulf the city?

Like all good Freudian dreams the story has one foot in the dim dark past of our childhood and one foot in the present. In this case, the ancient fear that has been brought to the surface is the biblical flood, and, the present cause, by extension of the biblical milieu, the current debacle in and around the Middle East, perhaps even the cradle of civilisation itself, ie Sumer, aka Iraq.

As a dreamstate, the story stands on three pillars. It is simultaneously a reminder of what is at stake - art, culture and freedom; a call to remember the civilisation destroying flood of our myths; and points to our present world crises in the Middle East. Perhaps the so-called "war on terrorism" is the inciting incident of the "dream".

Freud says that a dream is the fulfillment of a wish. Life's Little Holodeck almost realises its wish in the title. It is as if the author were saying, "I wish we could stop it all by a simple command." Life on Starship Earth is never so simple.

Robert Hoge's Carnival is a more personal affair (culturally speaking). I'm sure Freud would be pleased to see this one in the collection. It's almost a textbook example of an Oedipal drama disguised as a tale of the unexpected.

It is a childhood fantasy that takes place at a carnival, with the stirrings of the id bubbling to the surface through the character of a clown. The whole plot is replete with infantile sexual imagery, where size matters (they are the Littlers, and Davey is the— littlest?). Everything is big, some things are "bigger even than his dad". Davey's mother is his protector, but she isn't here in the cavernous sideshow alley. The child gets to attempt to capture wriggling fish (sperm?), shoots at ducks (ejaculation symbols?), bashes bandicoot that pop up through holes (or is he beating beaver?). The father is an overbearing man who tests the veracity of his son's ego and manliness. Through fiendish involvement by the clown, who urges Davey on by speaking directly to the boy's brain like some inner voice, Davey gets to usurp his father's position. The boy's last thoughts are about whether his mother will accept his, ahem, little goldfish.

Even with a minuscule amount of analysis it is clear that sf stories have alternate meanings to those we immediately grasp on reading the text. To run through some of them quickly: Billy by Darren Johnson reads like a cautionary tale about the horrors of excessive advertising and kow towing to the mind and body image of the media; The Wild Colonial Boy by Kate Eltham is about access to information and the dangers of closed government; The Wall by Grace Dugan is undoubtedly a critique of literary snobishness; 'Cross the Nullarbor to the Sea by Cat Sparks is about rising house prices and affordability; and A Very Good Lawyer by Lee Battersby is about the arrogance and lack of moralty in the legal system.

I could go on and talk about the alienation and aloofness of party politics in Geoff Maloney's story, or the xenophobia rummaging around in Robert Dobson's effort, but I think you've got the gist of what I'm talking about. Besides, I'd need to write a doctoral thesis to do justice to these concepts and have to give up far more of my time on wider research than I'm prepared to pay.

Glimpses, and speculative fiction in general, is more than just a collection of fantasy, horror and sci fi stories. The genre chronicles the times we live in. Fiction doesn't just happen, it rises up from our interaction with the world, from our experience of the world, from our ideas about the world in which we live. Speculative fiction is a form of writing that codes the real world and presents it as imaginative writings unclouded by realism. It is complex and multi-tiered, not at all the puddle of schlock it is portrayed to be by the literati.

SF is dreaming. The writers act as mediums. SF acts like a human dream - it relieves our fears and orders our lives. The poet Novalis said that "dreams protect us from the monotony of life, they set the imagination free, they stir pictures from everyday life and "break into the unceasing gravity of grown men with the joyful play of a child." (The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud quoting Burdach). If dreaming really does ward off neuroses, perhaps sf writers are the most stable beings around. Maybe if the genre was allowed greater acceptance it would help heal the problems of society. Probably not, but it's a nice thought - maybe even a plot for a story.

Margaret Atwood writes speculative fiction, Jasper Fforde writes speculative fiction, Peter Carey, Haruki Murakami, Angela Carter, Franz Kafka and Italo Calvino have all done it. Lord of the Flies is speculative fiction, Brave New World is speculative fiction, as is some of the work of George Orwell. Of course none of these books is ever marketed as such, but that doesn't hide the fact that they use the techniques and conventions of the genre - and the praise they receive is because they have uncovered social truths by means of the symbolism they employ. Speculative fiction writers do this with ease; it comes naturally to them, it is made possible by the conventions of the genre. Speculative fiction, by its very nature, almost by definition, is an unconscious drive to making symbols manifest.

The difference between the literary "greats" doing sf and those who write it all the time, is the difference between conscious writing and unconscious writing. Mostly, I believe, Australian sf is written unconsciously, and maybe that is its problem in the eyes of the literary elite - it is too deeply enmeshed in metaphor and symbol and analogy. It certainly isn't because it is not "real", and the punters who say otherwise, plainly and simply, probably ain't read none and determine the whole value of the genre in the erroneous belief that it is all about special effects and latex.

To write it off as unreadable or immature provokes another psychanalytic response: are they afraid of the power sf can unleash? Is there a sense in which their conservatism is a manifestation of society's superego - the symbolic father - keeping the paternally correct order of things?

This article previously appeared in Visions magazine. Reproduced with permission from the author.