A Little Perspective on the Matter - Long Time in SF

“Time draws the shapes of stories… a story is entirely determined by what portion of time it chooses to narrate. Where the teller begins and ends his tale decides what its point is, how it gathers meaning.”
Joan Silber, The Art of Time in Fiction, pp 3-4

Friends, today’s entry began as an exploration into the idea of long time in science fiction novels. This is the idea of telling stories where the plot is revealed over the course of many years possibly many hundreds of years or even millennium. Two classic SF examples of this are Ray Bradbury’s haunting The Martian Chronicles and Isaac Asimov’s crucial Foundation.
The Martian Chronicles, which begin in January 1999 and ends October 2026, can be viewed as a series of short stories joined by a common theme of the intersection of Martian and human civilization or, much more interestingly, I think, it can be read as the story of the human race's existence on Mars.
Foundation takes the course over hundreds of years. It is more likely to be read as the story of the evolving, ever changing Foundation society as they navigate their course through the demise of the intergalactic empire. But it can also be read as a collection of short stories as each chapter introduces a new set of characters and a new plot arc.
In these books, we see the power of the vignette, the idea that time does not always need to be explicitly described and linked in a contiguous line through back story. The leaps between chapters takes us on lily pads across a greater plot arc and leaves gaps that the imagination fills all on its own.

How do we tell stories of ideas that are more complex than the events of one person’s life? How to we show the fallout of the scientific discoveries and political intrigue that shape the “foundation” of our lives? I don’t holster an automated rifle every morning before I go to work. I don’t live in a mud hut hidden away in the mountains to prevent discovery. The main thing large corporate entities want from me is my purchasing power, rather than my physical strength, my talents, or any wisdom that I might contain. We live in a social, political, and technological world, with each of these structures opening and closing a myriad of doors for opportunities and paths on the way our lives might be lived. Our hopes and dreams are intrinsically tied into the world that we live in.


Many people dream of escape to a new land. It’s the classic American dream, the spigot to the west, furthered even in a get away to Mars , a fresh start on a home planet, a zero percent interest loan for a big mansion in the suburbs. This is, perhaps, a response to feeling constricted in a world delineated by invisible rules. SF allows us to play with those rules to understand on a personal level what the effects are on our day to day lives. Some SF books that have offered us a bare glimpse into the power of these rules are Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World, Looking Backward, and We. These books are not technical manuals outlining science, psychology, and politics, they’re fiction, telling the story of people experiencing these worlds from the inside, which makes them all the more powerful.

Here’s a great quote from David Mamet describing theater, but I think it resonates with what really works in great fiction.

“It is not the theme of the plays to which we respond, but the action—the through action of the protagonist, and the attendant support of the secondary characters, this support lent through their congruent actions.” (Writing in Restaurants, Mamet, pp 8)

Good SF is not about science, per se, rather about the effect of the world on people, and great science fiction is perhaps about the effect of people’s choices and creations on the world. In Chronicles, when Bradbury describes the African American group getting on the spaceship to take them away from the oppressive racist society, he’s not describing the space ship, he’s talking about the power of escape, the freedom that was once offered by the discovery of new land, the American West, and now, what? Where can we move to get away, start fresh, free of the shackles of corrupt governments and social pressures?
When Foundation follows the story of people influenced by Hari Seldon the psychohistorian who used math and psychology to prophesize the future, Asimov doesn’t spend the bulk of the book describing Seldon’s methods. He describes the choices individual people make when they are forced to grapple with foreknowledge of the future.
A counter argument to this idea that Sci-fi is the story of people, rather than an explication of machines, might be the August 2026 entry in The Martian Chronicles, which simply tells the story of an automated house that has long outlived its occupants. Even this story of the functioning of technology, comes across more as a haunting story of the family and civilization that spawned this technology. It’s like the dry description of a car wreck where the violence has been removed but becomes only more powerful by the subtexts that appear from repeated banal description.
Stephen L. Gillett in his book World-Building: A Writer’s Guide to Constructing Star Systems and Life-Supporting Planets asks, “Why ‘World-Build’?” His answer? “A sense of wonder. How many times have we heard that advanced as the reason for science fiction? For most SF readers, that’s what drew them to the genre in the first place. And yet how many stories of books wring out that ‘gosh, wow’ reaction? One reason, no doubt, is the lack of a sense of immersion in the story. If the story doesn’t take itself seriously, why should the reader?” He adds, “If the effort is there, it lends a coherence and substance to a story that can never hurt. Although it can’t make a bad story good, it can make good stories out of fair ones, and even great stories out of good ones.” (Gillett, 1-2)
So, while good, hard science description may add to the sense of wonder a reader feels and create the space for the mind to wander, it’s truly the characters, their actions and feelings that drive the reader.

Long time in SF creates a sense of wonderment. We feel the characters are adrift in a sea of time. Their specific, unique actions and identities and decisions are part of a greater context, not that they are simply gears in a machine, and this is the beauty of Foundation, but that by understanding the machine, they can break through the societal constructs that have held them from their freedom.

Isaac Asimov, in his 1991 science book, Guide to Earth and Space, writes, “Thinking always leads to more thinking and there is no end to it. To people who enjoy thinking, that is the glory of science. People who don’t enjoy thinking about things that don’t concern them immediately, find the necessity of continuing to do so indefinitely frightening, and they turn away from science. I hope you re in the first group.”

Fiction is an exploration of problems that cannot be solved logically. Again, this quote is for plays, but I think the idea holds true:

“The play is a quest for a solution. As in dreams, the law of psychic economy operates. In dreams we do not seek answers which our conscious (rational) mind is capable of supplying, we seek answers to those questions which the conscious mind is incompetent to deal with. So with the drama, if the question posed is one which can be answered rationally, e.g.: how does one fix a car, should white people be nice to black people, are the physically handicapped entitled to our respect, our enjoyment of the drama is incomplete – we feel diverted but not fulfilled. Only if the question posed is one whose complexity and depth renders it unsusceptible to rational examination does the dramatic treatment seem to us appropriate, and the dramatic solution become enlightening.” (Writing in Restaurants, Mamet, 8-9)


Science is an open exploration of the physical world. It is a practiced curiosity just like fiction. In long time SF stories, we see the elements of fiction pushed to the edge and we are given the chance to ask questions not just about characters and how they act with each other, but also how they act in the context of the life-paths provided by the day-to-day social, political, and technological boundaries set by civilization. Long time SF provides us a perspective to step outside the social, political, and technological structures that surround us, and look in, and say, “What if?”


Further food for thought about the way technology and politics shape people, and the way that people shape them: check out the short story Committee of the Whole in Frank Herbert’s collection The Worlds of Frank Herbert.