In defense of sense of wonder

There’s been a grumbling brewing about various places that seem to question one of the core attributes of science fiction. It’s a point of view that I think is crystallized nicely in a recent post on Nancy Kress’ blog:

Maybe the world has gotten too grubby and jaded for “awe.” Or I have. At any rate, a “sense of wonder” is no longer what I look for in fiction, including SF. I don’t want to be dazzled by things I never thought of before, even though often that seems to be what SF values. I want to be emotionally moved, involved at a visceral level with the characters and the situation, not with novelty or landscapes or gadgets or derring-do.

Combine that with the Mundane SF manifesto, and we seem to have what amounts to a crisis of confidence in one of the core elements of the genre. There seems to be a suspicion that old-style spectacle of Ringworlds and galaxy-spanning civilizations is— just like Mrs. Grundy kept telling us— just juvenile escapism unworthy of an adult engaged in the real world.  It all seems to be, as pointed out in Futrismic’s take on the above blog post, about “starships and rayguns.”

There’s a big issue I want to take with that idea:

While there’s nothing wrong with saying “I want to be emotionally moved, involved at a visceral level with the characters and the situation,” that’s not anything specific to ideas of sense of wonder, or even SF. It is a general requirement of fiction as a whole. All genres can short-change the characters in favor of whatever drives the genre conventions; SF, mystery, horror, thrillers (OMG thrillers). . .  It’s no more a risk in one genre than another. In fact I’ll go on to say that requiring emotional involvement with the characters and the situation is just asking for good fiction.

So this really isn’t a counter-argument to the idea that “sense of wonder” is a valid end for a SF writer to aspire to.  In fact, it is sort of beside the point.

Good or bad, “sense of wonder” bears a close analogy to horror or suspense, as it is a mood evoked by prose. In every case, that mood is heightened by having a POV character the reader can empathize with. Horror is much more horrifying when the protagonist is someone whose skin we can inhabit. A chase is much more suspenseful when we care about the person being chased. And when a star collapses into a black hole, we’re more in awe of the event when we see it through the eyes of a character we’ve come to understand.

The people who morn (or celebrate) the loss of the SFnal sense of wonder seem to think it all revolves around Lensmen and Star Wars and adolescent male power fantasies. But any deep reading in the genre will show that for every Lensmen there’s a Dune and for every Star Wars there’s a Hyperion.