Science fiction writers must battle video games with words

The megastructure is one of science fiction’s most enjoyable guilty pleasures. There is no other genre of literature that takes quite such glee in describing buildings, whether made by the hand of man or alien. Arthur C Clarke’s Rendezvous With Rama is little more than a guided tour of the titular spacecraft through the eyes of its human explorers. Only in science fiction can an entire novel be dedicated, in immense descriptive detail, to conveying the spectacle of an imaginary structure to the reader.

SFs most famous megastructure is the ringworld, a stripe of artificially-constructed land encircling a star, first envisioned by author Larry Niven in his 1970 novel Ringworld. The idea made Niven one of the most famous SF authors of his day, at a time when the novel was still the most powerful way of casting the full spectacle of sci-fi into the imaginations of the audience. Movies and television reached a far larger audience, but too often fell short of the spectacle sci-fi readers created for themselves.

“Good writers borrow, great writers steal,” said TS Eliot and given his inarguable greatness, we have to assume Scottish SF author Iain M Banks stole the ringworld from Larry Niven. His Culture novels return frequently to Orbital habitats much like Nivens ringworld. It was a Banksian orbital that presumably inspired the makers of 2001’s Halo, among the most successful video games of all time. The question now is whether detailed description and cover illustrations – however brilliant – can truly rival the computer-generated experience of plunging into a ringworld provided by Halo.

Epic fantasy novels and role-playing games were as much a part of my childhood as video games. But it was only in 2002 that a video game managed to equal the immersive experience of entering a fantasy world like Lord of the Rings or The Belgaraid. The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind was the first truly successful “first person” fantasy RPG. Such games allow players lose hundreds and even thousands of hours lost in the worlds they create, worlds that do not end when the last page of the book is turned.

It’s often said that books open a portal to other worlds. and that’s nowhere more true than in sci-fi novels, which describe worlds quite unlike our own. But the ability of computers, and hence of video games, films and TV shows, to model and project those worlds onto our screens in all their splendour, has long since outstripped books. Destiny, the new game from the creators of Halo, and one of 2014’s biggest releases, is so visually stupefying that it’s hard to imagine any kid being satisfied with a bunch of words on a page after playing it.

And it’s almost certain they won’t. Destiny made $500m (£317m) on the day of its release. In a climate where selling 5,000 copies can make a sci-fi novel a bestseller, books risk becoming a cultural irrelevance. Many sci-fi writers have responded to that risk by doubling down, writing books that aim for even greater spectacle. But prose fiction is a poor medium for the shootouts, action sequences and high-octane thrills that are cinema and video games’ stock-in-trade. The only likely outcome when books attempt to be video games is that they fail at being books.

But science fiction novels can hold their own against computer-generated spectacle. Not by being more spectacular, but by being better written. It’s at the most basic level of words and sentences that the sci-fi novel must do battle for its continued existence. Many of the greats of science fiction, like Issac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke, faced so little competition for the imagination of their audience that they could get away with the clunky writing style that SF became famous for. But the writers of science fiction that stand out in recent years, like Margaret Atwood, Jeff VanderMeer, Michael Chabon, Neil Gaiman, Audrey Niffeneger and China Miéville all share a greater respect for, and capacity with, the written word. The movement of science fiction away from the genre ghetto and into the literary mainstream isn’t simply a matter of taste or style, but of survival in an ever more intense contest for the minds of audiences.

For deep, resonant, character-driven storytelling the novel is still unparalleled, the reason why our culture’s most loved stories, from Harry Potter and The Hobbit to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones, all began life in books. Subtle and complex meaning is still prose fiction’s ultimate upper hand. Could a video game equal the profound insights of Jorge Luis Borges’s The Library of Babel? The megastructure it explores would be trivial to create within a computer, but only a creator as razor sharp as Borges could reveal such depths of meaning in his world. As yet, video games are yet to give us an imagination of Borges calibre. But, perhaps, it is only a matter of time.