Throwback Thursday: Suspension of Disbelief in Speculative Fiction

This article was originally published in the April 2008 issue of Illuminata, a newsletter of Tyrannosaurus Press. It has been slightly edited and updated.

Suspension of Disbelief in Speculative Fiction

by

Rachel V. Olivier

I hate to admit this as a fellow Science Fiction/Fantasy geek, but I’ve only ever been to one science fiction convention. It was August 27, 2006 and the last day of LA Con IV, the 64^th annual World Science Fiction Convention.  I was broke (what’s new) and could barely afford the $50 day pass, but I scraped it together and borrowed a car to drive down to Anaheim from Los Angeles.  I didn’t attend very many panels, but one I did attend left me this nugget of information: Readers and viewers of speculative fiction (science fiction, fantasy, cyber punk, scifantasy, etc) have a greater ability to suspend their disbelief and wait for the story to unfold than the average reader or television/movie viewer.  This is why some people enjoy fantasy and science fiction tales while others seem to not have time for them.

Recent experience has jogged that bit of information loose to make me wonder, what is it in some of us that allows the storyteller greater latitude in their stories? How come some of us have no problem seeing Mr. and Mrs. Beaver having tea and toast with the Pevensies in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, while others just roll their eyes? Why do some of us not care about whether or not all the creatures and humans in 10,000 BC would be realistically seen together in the same time and place, while others will spend their valuable time researching and writing complete essays on how these beings would never be seen together in reality?

According to Wikipedia, our mostly accurate go-to source on the web, Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined the phrase “willing suspension of disbelief” to describe the willingness of an audience to accept a premises of a work of fiction as true even if it seems impossible, and even if this means overlooking the limitations of a medium in order to accept those premises. In exchange, in a sort of quid pro quo, the storyteller promises that the reader or viewer will be entertained by that work of fiction. In other words, your friends at the bar are willing to believe the yarn you’re telling about your most recent fishing trip as long as it’s entertaining to them.

It’s that “to them” that is the key phrase.  Different people are entertained by different types of stories and are willing to give a storyteller leeway for different reasons. For example, I’m perfectly willing to believe that a black Arabian horse born on the English countryside is able to tell a story from a human point of view, or that a badger, a beaver, and a rat can all sit down to tea and toast in a nice cozy hole, whilst speaking the Queen’s English, or that robots can roam all over New York or Los Angeles or wherever, cracking sarcastic jokes and transforming into gas guzzling vehicles.  There are other people, however, who are not willing to suspend their disbelief for such stories, but they are willing to believe that a millionaire and a hooker can fall in love and get married, or that someone will take a partner back after being repeatedly hurt by them and they will both go on to live happily ever after. We all have our own ideas of the perfect tale.

The problem is in making sure that the right storytellers match up with the right audience, or no one is happy. A writer is not only always trying to write a better tale, but is also trying to find a willing audience, this is why s/he sends their work out to friends, family and then writers groups and then magazines, online zines, podcasts and publishers, or even publish it themselves. There’s a drive, when you’re telling a tale, to have others enjoy it with you.

And readers, for their part, are constantly on the lookout for storytellers that hit what I like to call their “disbelief sweet spot”. They want to find those stories where they find they’re willing to go where the storyteller says s/he is going to take them.

For my part, I’m usually willing to suspend my disbelief – let it stretch a while – in exchange for a good fantastic tale.

There’s this quote at the very end of “200”, a 10^th season episode of Stargate SG-1. It’s one of the reasons I am willing to suspend my disbelief, I think:

“Science fiction is an existential metaphor that allows us to tell stories about the human condition. Isaac Asimov once said, ‘Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinded critics and philosophers of today, but the core of science fiction, its essence, has become crucial to our salvation, if we are to be saved at all.’”