Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  Two things require clarification about this in relation to SF. Firstly, it cannot be said that texts that could be nominated as “SF” at that time existed in an undifferentiated “mainstream”; the very spaces in which they found publication were products of a rapidly fragmenting concept of fiction, quickly becoming figured in terms of civilized “high” and degenerate “low.”8 Wells’s anxiety to depart from being identified solely with the “scientific romance” and his deference (at least in their letters) to Henry James mark his awareness of the emerging equation between the popular and the “degenerate.” Secondly, the very use of the term “SF” is already a retrospective extraction of texts out of a mass of “romances.” Cross-fertilizations between juvenile adventure stories, imperialist narratives, Gothic revivalism, and the supernatural, as well as pseudo-scientific adventures deriving either from simple technological advance or sociological inflections of Darwin have been traced by Patrick Brantlinger and Judith Wilt. A text like Jekyll and Hyde could be said to be premised on a scientific “novum,” but it is equally overdetermined by Gothic, melodramatic, and imperialist elements; this is no less the case for Wells. Even if this was the moment in which modern popular genres gradually emerged (in the sense of specialist sites, formulated conventions, formulated plots, and reader coteries), SF was a relatively late development in relation to the detective genre, the spy novel, or even the Western. As Andrew Ross notes, even the pulp term “science fiction” had to fight, in the 1920s, for predominance amongst other magazines publishing what were variously termed pseudo-science, weird science, off-trail, or fantascience fiction (415). What must be asserted here concerns two stages: that SF is elaborated as a distinct genre only with Gernsback’s and other subsequent specialist magazines, and that its “pre-history” is one of fundamental impurity. This impurity, however, does not mark an undifferentiated “mainstream,” but is an impurity within the emerging concept of the “popular.”

  It seems vital that this material production of spaces for the constitution of the modern “popular” be addressed; SF histories, however, either pass over it in the search for legitimate parentage or mark it as the precarious latency of ghettoization.9 Notions of impurity also contravene the operation of internal borders. Sources—a historical continuity that would embed SF in the mainstream—are sought that would manipulate an isomorphism of method between the legitimate and the generic: utopic estrangement, say, or extrapolative rigor. And yet it is plain that the attempts to claim Swift or More as SF can only be retrospective ones; they are only “SF” insofar as they intersect with generic conventions. Such histories have to arrive (and then pass over) the moment of the historical constitution of the pulps because SF as a demarcation is only comprehensible in relation to them. Even if More and Swift historically predate, in the internal temporality of the genre they can only arrive subsequently into the arms of an SF genre determined after they were written.

  The SF history strenuously seeks to elaborate a fantasy of non-origin, of being indistinguishable, identical, to the “mainstream”: in such narratives of embedding SF into a larger historical unfolding there is clearly a desire to return to an earlier state of things, before the genre divide, before the boundary of high and low. To restore an earlier stage of things: this is how Freud formulates the death instinct in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The pleasure principle operates according to an economy of stabilization: excitation causes imbalance and disturbance; this energy is bound and neutralized. Prior to this, Freud hypothesizes, are instincts which “do not belong to the type of bound nervous processes but of freely mobile processes which press towards discharge” (306). The instincts are not concerned with a homeostatic economy, but seek to entirely evacuate from the organism: “It seems, then, that an instinct is an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things” (308)—that state being the inorganic, the inanimate: death. This “first” instinct is seeking a quick return to the organic state; however, external stimuli keep arriving to disrupt this path of return to the immanent “proper” death. External influences “oblige the still surviving substance to diverge ever more widely from its original course of life and to make ever more complicated detours before reaching its aim of death” (311). Life is in fact merely the result of the detours enforced by external stimuli, and the threat of “returning to inorganic existence other than those which are immanent in the organism itself.” Freud can thus state: “the aim of all life is death” (311).

  Peter Brooks has already proposed Freud’s essay as a model for the process of reading: for the classic realist text at least, the opening of the novel causes excitation which the text then attempts to expel, to return to zero, at the close. To finish, to complete the text, is to restore an earlier state of things. Narrative is, in effect, the detour between two states of quiescence: “The desire of the text (the desire of reading) is hence desire for the end, but desire for the end reached only through the least minimally complicated detour, the intentional deviance, in tension, which is the plot or narrative” (292). But this is also the desire of SF as a genre. Placing generic SF in a historical trajectory, in which there is no origin or name or site of SF, sees the imposition of the “ghetto” as an intolerable blockage to energy which is seeking absolute discharge, the return to zero. The history of the genre is the history of the attempt to die in the proper way. This gives a new importance to the question of whether it is the “right” or “wrong” death represented in Ballard’s “disaster” novels; it also questions the more Jungian interpretations of his texts as movements towards wholeness and plenitude. That Powers constructs a huge Mandala at the center of which he finally transcends his body can be taken as a Jungian image; equally the circular mandala could be seen to draw a zero, a figure which is the precise opposite of plenitude, signalling rather emptiness, nothing, the return of the inorganic. This is the double-edged death of SF, as literal destruction and metaphorical transcendence: the return to the mainstream.

  The history of SF is a history of ambivalent deaths. The many movements within the genre—the New Wave, feminist SF, cyberpunk—are marked as both transcendent death-as-births, finally demolishing the “ghetto” walls, and as degenerescent birth-as-deaths, perverting the specificity of the genre. To be elevated above the genre is a transcendent death and the birth of Literature, but as these movements harden, coalesce, are named, they fall back as subgeneric moments of SF. They become detours on the road to the proper death of SF.

  History as the passage between two equivalent states of quiescence displays, evidently, that birth and death become interchangeable. If the projection back, as a fantasy of non-origin, is SF’s past, its complement in the future is the fantasy of non-being. This is the circular detour back into the mainstream where the fantasy of non-origin had situated it before the interregnum of the generic. The most enthusiastic claims for approaching non-being came with the New Wave. The explosion of the New Wave was the explosion of the genre itself. Aldiss senses a “rapprochement” with the mainstream, the return from the “ghetto of Retarded Boyhood” and asserts “Science Fiction per se does not exist” (306-07). Scholes and Rabkin end their history with the problematic “place” of Ballard and Vonnegut: “A writer like Vonnegut forces us to consider the impending disappearance of the category upon which a book like this depends. . . science fiction will not exist” (98-99). The introduction to Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions evokes two deaths: that of the Golden Age being superseded by science itself, and that of the New Wave, which “has been found, has been termed good by the mainstream, and is now in the process of being assimilated. . . . Science fiction is dead” (xxii).

  That death is so central to the history of SF, that death propels the genre is, I must insist again, the effect of the structure of legitimation: SF is a genre seeking to bury the generic, attempting to transcend itself so as to destroy itself as the degraded “low.” The third strategy of legitimation, however, that promoting the rigor of the scientific, apparent
ly refuses this deference to the mainstream. Nevertheless, it posits its own kind of death.

  Robert Heinlein’s definition of SF as “realistic speculation about possible future events, based solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world, past and present, and on a thorough understanding of the nature and significance of the scientific method,” allows him a “rigorous” future projection, one prediction of which is the disappearance of “the cult of the phony in art. . . . so-called ‘modern art’ will be discussed only by psychiatrists” (Worlds 22, 17). Contemporary literature is “sick, written by neurotics. . .sex maniacs. . .the degraded, the psychotic” (“Science Fiction” 42). The poles are inverted, as are imputed pathologies. One suspects, however, that this adversarial disrespect is a defensively aggressive response to illegitimacy.

  Legitimation by science continually fails by its own allegedly rigorous demands. If Heinlein places a border between SF and fantasy by declaring that fantasy is “any story based on violation of scientific fact, such as space ship stories which ignore ballistics” (“Science Fiction” 19), his point that time-travel stories are legitimate because “we know almost nothing about the nature of time” is exceedingly weak. The depressing litany of rejections and exclusions of certain texts because their science “doesn’t work” (as Aldiss chastises Ballard [“Wounded” 128]) insists on a purity that, by the very standards of the science it invokes to judge, fails. The science element of SF is of interest, in fact, exactly as it fails, as it “misses” rigor; as Andrew Ross maintains, Gernsback and Campbell’s claim to be at the “cutting edge” of science is not so much anachronistic as mediated and ideological. The adherence to a positivistic, technocratic science was scientifically outdated but politically current: the populism of technological futurism, the scientist as social engineer. Stableford is right, I think, to assert that the rhetoric of scientific rigor was a crucial palliative for early SF: “What seems to have been essential is the illusion of fidelity to science and responsibility to the principles of logical extrapolation, probably because it is this illusion that permits. . .the suspension of disbelief which allows the reader to participate in the fiction by identifying with its endeavour” (59).

  “Science” must miss its mark, because to be accurate is to risk destruction. With a ceaseless regularity in this mode of legitimation, the name of Cleve Cartmill is invoked. Cartmill’s atom-bomb story, “Deadline,” published in Astounding in 1944, was deemed to be so accurate with respect to the research program of the Manhattan Project that the FBI raided Astounding’s offices. The frequent appearance of the anecdote indicates its utility for claiming the scientific accuracy and importance of SF. This may be true, but it also marks a death. Cartmill’s fiction was overtaken within a year; it survives only as an anecdote, not as a read text. There is a sense, in the insistence on scientific rigor, that SF is fighting a limited shelf-life: “one danger threatening science fiction is that the progress of science itself answers so many questions raised by science fiction, thereby removing one idea after another” (de Camp 128-29).

  This may be banal, or trivializing of SF’s vitality in its consistent confrontations with contemporaneous technological issues. However, the scientific legitimation aims to sidestep the claims of the mainstream on the ownership of the “proper” text through another, far more important strategy: “Even if every work were on the lowest literary level. . .the form would still retain much of its significance—for the significance. . .lies more in its attitudes [the scientific method], in its intention, than in the perfection of its detail” (Bretnor 287). This retreat, this surrender of “fiction” for the claims of science, shifts the emphasis from “science fiction” to “science fiction”: one wonders how SF as such can survive this shift. In Lyotard’s model of language games invoked in The Postmodern Condition, the scientific statement is a denotative, an assertion of a truth claim on a real referent. Its conditions of acceptance are that it must be open to repetition by others, and that the language of the statement is judged relevant and “good” by the consensual community of experts. Science is, on first glance, a “pure” game in that the conditions of proof can only be established through denotatives. If the legitimation of SF emphasizes science such denotative proofs are invoked. As fiction, however, this claim is problematic; invoking the “agonistics” of language games, Lyotard says: “This does not necessarily mean that one plays in order to win. A move can be made for the sheer pleasure of its invention: what else is involved in that labour of language harassment undertaken by popular speech and by literature?” (10). The “purity” (or at least minimally determinable conditions) of scientific legitimation murders the fundamentally ludic and “impure” statements of the fictional. How could proofs ever be established for the fictional? For Roland Barthes, having no real referent is something like the “torment” of literature: that it is “without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble saying it.” However, “at this point, everything turns around, for out of its impotence to prove, which excludes it from the serene heaven of Logic, the Text draws a flexibility which is in a sense its essence” (495). The essence of the fictional is its inessence. The insistence on the rigor of the scientific, then, negates the very condition of fiction; another kind of death.

  It cannot be so, it will be objected. But, to return to Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, this objection can already be found inscribed there: “It cannot be so” (312). Beyond the Pleasure Principle is written as a complex shuffling dance—taking one step forward, withdrawing it, stepping forward again. Indeed the essay ends with the image of limping—as if this extension and retraction of “wild” speculations had made Freud footsore.10 Freud partially withdraws the sole dominance of the death instinct: “the whole path of development to natural death is not trodden by all the elementary entities” (312); there is also the question of the sexual instincts. This begins to elaborate the struggle between Eros and Thanatos, the life and death instincts. And once again this leads us to a merry dance:

  It is as though the life of the organism moved with a vacillating rhythm. One group of instincts rushes forward so as to reach the final aim of life as swiftly as possible; but when a particular stage in the advance has been reached, the other group jerks back to a certain point to make a fresh start and so prolong the journey. (313)

  It may have been a misreading, then, to have seen the history of SF as the detour between two deaths: who is to say that this continual renewal, these new movements, cycles of regeneration within SF are not a clawing back from the abyss of death rather than a passage towards it? And yet how would it be possible to tell the difference? The death instinct has not been recognized, Freud posits, because it masquerades as an apparent propulsion forward, the assertion of life.

  The “vacillating rhythm” between instincts, between death and life, recalls the structure of the fort/da game that Freud analyzes in an earlier chapter of Beyond. The child throws the bobbin out of the cot, shouting fort, then reels it back in, shouting da. Freud’s interpretation is that this stages the absenting and return of the mother: it opens the suggestion of a “beyond” to the pleasure principle because there is more investment in the unpleasurable absenting of the mother than in her pleasurable return. One can see a structurally similar game played by David Pringle with the name of Ballard. Pringle wants to assert that Ballard is a writer without that embarrassing pre-modifying “SF” attached to the title. Lists of plaudits, from Graham Greene, Kingsley Amis, Anthony Burgess, and Susan Sontag, are emphasized because “what almost all of these accolades have in common is that they do not refer to Ballard primarily as a SF writer.” Ballard has performed the fantasy desire of ecstatic death: he “transcends genre stereotyping” (Bibliog. xii). Elsewhere, however, Pringle notes that Ballard’s earliest (unpublished) attempts as fiction in the mainstream failed because “Ballard needed science fiction: the pressure of his imagination demanded a freer outlet�
�� (Alien Planet 7). Pringle’s criticism reveals an anxiety which presents itself as a kind of fort/da game, whereby SF reveals its legitimate offspring, who, in the processes of legitimation is orphaned from its parents, and so is reeled back to the hands of SF once more.

  Freud’s question, the impetus for his “extreme line of thought” (310), is why there is this constant repetition of unpleasure—in the child’s game, in traumatic neurosis constantly returning to the traumatic event, in the repetitious “acting out” in transference. And equally it might be wondered why the SF community, so often belligerent in its defense of the genre, nevertheless constantly entertains fantasies of death. For it remains a fantasy. The fatality for this death is that to push towards it is forever to defer it, to perpetuate the detour. In Freud, the detour that is life is in fact propelled by death; in a curious way death ceases to be an end, the termination of the system, and becomes inscribed within the economy. And if “life” is a transitional state between two deaths, this “ultimately subverts the very notion of beginning and end, suggesting that the idea of the beginning presupposes the end, that the end is a time before the beginning. . . . Analysis, Freud would eventually discover, is inherently interminable, since the dynamics of resistance and the transference can always generate new beginnings in relation to any possible end” (Brooks, 279). The death of SF is that which is endlessly desired and yet endlessly deferred.