Where does this leave the project of politically-engaged realism then? Nowhere but the past, as a comforting bu inaccurate alternative answer. (“What does it mean to be human?” “Oh, everything! Everything! Especially if you’re a white middle-class human from the developed West!”)

Kunkel took a few peeks into the future, didn’t see himself, and freaked. It is what folks from his sliver of the centrist left do.

However, to keep it short. Have to highlight Sebastian and others who point out that the “literary novels” are in fact a genre, with a set of conventions and shorthand archetypes, including ones about the psychological state, emotions and moral sentiments of the characters.

BUT! The most important question is… if the literary novel is such a great developer of introspection and the moral imagination, why are the devotees (authors and readers) generally so shallow, non-introspective and lacking in moral imagination when it comes to actual conversation, as opposed to communing with pieces of paper?

In sum, when the contemporary novelist contemplates the future—including, it seems, the future of the novel—he or she often forfeits the ability to imagine unique and irreplaceable characters,

It is a funny old article, lots of the specific observations are interesting but so much is based on such a partial selection of texts.

I wonder if he only sees illumination of personal moral problems as worthy of attention. It would be odd, as some literary novels do a good job of illuminating societal or social moral problems, but most of them are largely personal. Science fiction, and other forms of fiction, illuminate social moral problems by examining the society itslef, which sometimes cause their focus to be on the society more than the inner workings of the characters. And though many modern science fiction novels adopt the 1st person narrative which is very common in literary novels (and which lends itself to the perception of rounding of characters because we can see their thoughts) many do not, which I would argue artificially creates a sense of distance to a reader who has become used to the comprehensive interiority of the literary novel.

Now I suppose that the literary novelist might respond that all this is best handled by developing deeply rounded interior characters. But part of it is a function of time and space in books. For a realist novel, set in a modern setting, with fairly stock literary novel New England characters, you can jump straight into the interiority of the character because you don’t really have to do anything else to set the stage. For most such novels, the general societal/social/political stage is already set. For a good science fiction novel, none of that is taken for granted. You must set the stage, because the stage is not assumed.

Now bad science fiction novels just draw from the stock scenery associated with science fiction. But literary novels do that too, Kunkel just doesn’t see to realize it because for the most part they don’t even have to mention it directly in the book. It is assumed that the WASPish literary novel reader alreadyknows most of it. Bad science fiction novels have to be explicit about the stock social contexts they draw from because otherwise you wouldn’t know. The typical literary novel doesn’t because it assumes it all implicitly. But for my two cents, a good science fiction novel is often better at examining society because it already has to examine it to set the stage. Good literary novels often get caught looking awkward when they try to tackle such things because they are forced to either deal with them in very limited ways, or they are forced to set the stage in ways that aren’t normal for the genre.

Now I assume he is talking about the good examples of both genres. But there is a lot of drek in both.

As concerns PKD, I’ll allow that Dick had his problems writing fully individualized characters, and that indeed most of his protagonists are uniformly, almost interchangeably bland. I’d also say, to his credit, that Dick often turned this bug into a feature, and that in the case of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the questions “What does it mean to be human?” and “Why is it so hard?” make up the central goddamn themes of the fricking book—and not just this book either, such being a common theme to his later works, even ones that have much better, more interesting and individualized characters.

To put this another way, does Kunkel think that writing fully individualized characters is easy? Hmmm.

I’m probably being too harsh. I do find his dystopian from gothic, apocalyptic from quest derivation interesting, even useful.

It does seem odd that he didn’t discuss Minority Report. I mean, Cruise and Spielberg? Come on, is it anything other than A-List? It even dealt with politics, federal vs. state vs. individual. Or does Kunkel mean something else by “politics”? Morality and love, too, if I recall correctly, with a fair amount of subtlety. Fuck the outliers, I guess.

I do think he’s being blithe when he assumes that E. M. Forster’s
distinction between flat and round characters === a transhistorical
distinction between genre fiction and literary fiction. His
deployment of the word “withering” to help him make this case—on
one hand, something healthy, growing, and natural, and on the other
hand the same specimen, distored, denatured, and starved . . . —is
a withered form of argumentation.

As we see in some of the follow-up to Kunkel, we can produce various
examples of literary fiction—fiction that has been important in how
we self-conceive and self-represent—with no round characters.
Pilgrim’s Progress and so forth. That is to say, there most
definitely have been very good books that are nonetheless about things
other than representing compelling human personalities (just as
there have been paintings other than realistic portraits!).

However, a serious engagement with the question of how to represent a
human being, in writing, often produces really great results.

What’s common, amongst Pilgrim’s Progress, Gulliver’s Travels, Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein, Godel Escher Bach, and Nancy Drew novels, is
not to take up that question at all. They use entirely received and
derivative ways of representing human figures and their actions and
speech. Simply because they are concerned with other things.

Why people need to automatically assign moral value one way or the
other—POINT: moral value accrues to making characters round;
COUNTERPOINT: no it doesn’t—is just a dumb thing about people.
It’s a dumb thing about Kunkel, and it’s a dumb thing about the people
outraged by Kunkel.

But, in defense of people, it also has something to do with the fact
that representing round characters is really hard (as is painting
interesting realistic human figures). Cultural value often
accumulates around things that are hard. And also around human
self-picturing. Self-picturing has, and confers, power, and we invest
emotion into convincing pictures, and release it through those
pictures. We want to understand ourselves, and our place, in the
scheme of things, by seeing fragments of ourselves in those pictures.

But . . .. that’s not all we want to do, which Kunkel seems to be
deliberately forgetting. We also want to solve crimes, visit future
worlds, etc. And these are additional ways in which we (perhaps more
indirectly) self-picture.

These creatures are among us, although morphologically they do not differ from us; we must not posit a difference of essence, but a difference of behavior. In my science fiction I write about about them constantly. Sometimes they themselves do not know they are androids. Like Rachel Rosen, they can be pretty but somehow lack something; or, like Pris in We Can Build You, they can be absolutely born of a human womb and even design androids – the Abraham Lincoln one in that book – and themselves be without warmth; they then fall within the clinical entity “schizoid,” which means lacking proper feeling. I am sure we mean the same thing here, with the emphasis on the word “thing.” A human being without the proper empathy or feeling is the same as an android built so as to lack it, either by design or mistake. We mean, basically, someone who does not care about the fate which his fellow living creatures fall victim to; he stands detached, a spectator, acting out by his indifference John Donne’s theorem that “No man is an island,” but giving that theorem a twist: that which is a mental and a moral island is not a man.

And how is late-twentieth-century-middle-or-upper-middle-conflicted-individualist not a psychological, social category? Fah.

Also, re: B-movies, I’m not sure that this is a useful category with which to talk about contemporary film. Traditionally, the B-movie was a film put out by a major studio that didn’t feature a major star, but still had a cast and crew drawn from the studio’s stable. A lot of Robert Mitchum’s early work for instance. Slapdash genre stuff with no stars and no name director is more like Z-grade. Since we don’t have the studio system to kick around anymore, B-grade doesn’t make sense, since there’s no one to have a B-list.

What I do think is that Dick isn’t particularly interested in the question. Replicants and androids and cyborg space prophets are plot devices that he made up to tell the story. What Dick wants to know is: what is that spark of humanity? Do some (real) people have it while others don’t? Why?

Dark Suvin says the key difference between literary and speculative fiction is cognitive estrangement. I think the imaginary worlds of speculative fictions do act on the reader in ways character & plots do in literary fiction. The world of Androids forces moral work on the reader in the way that Faulkner’s South or the world of Kafka does. Or Lilliput.