The title of this post comes from my friend Andy. It was his wonderful response to a question I raised with him about the story I wrote the other day, I miss you. Why do you have to be such a nightmare?
I had told Andy that I’d decided, after some wavering, to tell that story as a science fiction story, rather than as an unexplained mystery of human behavior. It was a way for me to make the story’s intimations of cannibalism more, er, palatable.
Yet after posting the story, I felt that this choice had, in some important way, let my readers down. Yes, I was providing an easier way in. People could read the story, think about its ideas, and not stress out over them too much. After all, a reader could say, it’s just, you know, aliens, SciFi, X Files and Dr. Who, that sort of thing.
And that’s where it becomes a two edged sword. Yes, fantasy and SciFi give you a way to talk about things that would otherwise be out of bounds. Famously in this country, the TV show “Star Trek” was able to show an interracial kiss in 1968 — a time when such a thing was considered unsuitable for family viewing. But it got a pass because it was “just” science fiction.
Arguably that scene did a lot of good. Within a few years the taboo against interracial displays of affection on TV disappeared.
And yet, something was missing. The science fiction was serving as an excuse — a way of getting audiences off the hook.
And I think I may have done something similar with my story. As Andy so nicely put it, I was using metaphor as a prophylactic for the id. Yes, such a strategy is a way to take people to places they otherwise might not go. But in another way, it doesn’t end up taking them anywhere at all.
A story about people being devoured by sympathetic aliens who look like people may be intellectually interesting, but a story about people being devoured by sympathetic people — well, that forces you to engage much more deeply with what’s going on, and what’s at stake, and what it means to be human.
And isn’t that what literature is for?