Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  What, then, can be said about this death? One can either view it positively as, paradoxically, the very motor of SF. But one can also suggest that such fantasies are produced out of the structure of legitimation, SF’s perpetual deference to the criteria of worth elaborated for “mainstream” literature. The death of the genre is the only way in which SF could survive as literature. We have grown used to the language of “crisis” in relation to SF—but the term, as in so many other disciplines, has had its urgency, its punctual (and punctural) immediacy eroded. SF moves from crisis to crisis, but it is not clear that such crises come from outside to threaten a once stable and coherent entity. SF is produced from crisis, from its intense self-reflexive anxiety over its status as literature, evidenced partially here by Ballard’s re-marking of the law of genre. If the death-wish is to be avoided, we need to install a crisis in “crisis,” question the way in which strategies of legitimation induce it. The panic narrative of degeneration might then cease its tediously repetitive appearance, and its inversion, the longing for ecstatic death, might be channeled into more productive writings.

  If this is polemic, it rests on a conceit: the analogy of SF criticism’s thrust and Freud’s hypothesis of the death instinct. This is not, however, as bizarre a linkage as it may at first appear. Just as SF was the “guilty secret,” an unanalyzed and repressed element of the fictive, so the institution of psychoanalysis sought to repress Freud’s embarrassing speculations. Like the death drive itself, the disruptions caused by Beyond the Pleasure Principle had to be reduced to zero, to be excluded, expulsed. Now, for Pefanis at least, the death instinct “forms a major underlying thematic” (108) to much contemporary theory. And perhaps this has an equivalence to the growing visibility of popular literary forms in the academy. There is one more link, then: Freud wrote to Eitingon, “For the Beyond I have been punished enough; it is very popular, brings me masses of letters and encomiums. I must have made something very stupid there” (Gay 403). To be popular is somehow to be denied entry to the legitimate—for SF, for Freud. If the economy of such legitimations, the deathly equation of the “popular” and the “stupid,” is exposed, perhaps analysis can move into more constructive areas.

  Notes

  Thanks to Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. for his advice and support. I would also like to thank the anonymous readers of an earlier draft of this piece for their invigorating hostility; I have tried to meet some of their concerns—to meet them all, however, would have negated the very purpose of a polemic.

  1. The long closing section of Jaspers’s Metaphysics is called “The Reading of Ciphers.” It presents a fascinating prospect to read The Drought, a text obsessively remarking on the unreadable “ciphers” that litter the desert, against Jaspers. The “cipher-script” is the tremulous evidence of the Transcendent, but it remains only a signifier; to attempt to grasp the meaning of the cipher, to convert it into any form of knowledge, is immediately to see its destruction. In a sense, to “decipher” Ballard’s texts in a single explanatory model is to effect a violent de-cipherment. On this, see Roger Luckhurst, “‘Between two walls’: Postmodernist Theory and the ‘Problem’ of J.G. Ballard,” Ph.D. diss., University of Hull, England, 1993.

  2. Ballard has a long citation from this work in the marginal comments to the Re/Search edition of The Atrocity Exhibition, ed. Andrea Juno and Vale (Re/Search Publications, 1990), 76.

  3. Wolfe, of course, theorizes 20th-century man as “The Masochistic Man,” bent on a course of self-destruction.

  4. This is of course an overly rigid structure, which is not meant to impose a fixed topography. Passages between are always possible; the border could be determined by the elements which transgress it. However, transgression is meaningful only once an interdiction has been elaborated. The border presupposes transgression just as transgression presupposes the border.

  5. Citations from Gernsback from Andrew Ross, “Getting Out of the Gernsback Continuum,” Critical Inquiry 17:419, Winter 1991, and The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, ed. Peter Nicholls (London, 1979), 159.

  6. This is Andreas Huyssen’s thesis in “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other,” in his After the Great Divide (London, 1986), 44-62. Huyssen is perhaps too formalistic in suggesting that the “low” was constituted by the “high”; in Britain, at least, the equation of mass literacy with degenerating literature was part of the antidemocratic discourses of the time, prompted by the 1870 Education Act—some time before a determinable “modernism” could be said to have come into existence.

  7. This was in fact the project of the immediate precursor to the TLS, the Literature journal, set up in 1897. Quoted from Keating, p. 76.

  8. The specific moment of equating the “low” with the degenerate at this time is effectively established when Keating notes that both Thackeray in the 1830s and Payn in the 1850s looked upon the “Unknown Public” that read “cheap” fiction as laudable and sowing the seeds of a potential democracy of literary taste (401-03).

  9. On the latter, see the opening comments in “Introduction to Newer SF History,” Suvin’s Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (New Haven, 1979), 205-07.

  10. See Jacques Derrida, “Speculations—on ‘Freud,’” in his The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, 1987), 257-409.

  Works cited

  Aldiss, Brian. Billion Year Spree. London, 1973.

  —. “The Wounded Land: J.G. Ballard.” Clareson, ed. (q.v.). 116-29.

  Amis, Kingsley. New Maps of Hell. London, 1961.

  Ballard, J.G. The Voices of Time. London, 1974.

  Barlow, George. “Ballard.” Twentieth-Century Science-Fiction Writers. Ed. Curtis C. Smith. 1981. 2nd ed. Chicago & London, 1986.

  Blish, James. More Issues at Hand. Chicago, 1970.

  Barthes, Roland. “Deliberations.” Trans. Richard Howard. Barthes: Selected Writings. Ed. Susan Sontag. Oxford, 1983.

  Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism 1830-1914. Ithaca, NY, 1988.

  Bretnor, Reginald. “The Future of Science Fiction. Bretnor, ed. (q.v.). 265-94.

  Bretnor, Reginald, ed. Modern Science Fiction: Its Meaning and Future. 1953. Rev, ed. Chicago, 1979.

  Brigg, Peter. J.G. Ballard. Starmont Reader’s Guide 26. Mercer Island, WA, 1985.

  Brooks, Peter. “Freud’s Masterplot.” Yale French Studies 55-56:280-300, 1977.

  Clareson, Thomas, ed. SF: The Other Side of Realism. Bowling Green, OH, 1971.

  De Camp, L. Sprague. “Imaginative Fiction and Creative Imagination.” Bretnor, ed. (q.v.). 119-54.

  Derrida, Jacques. “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas.” Writing and Difference. By Derrida. Trans. Alan Bass. London, 1987.

  Ellison, Harlan, ed. Dangerous Visions. 1967. One-volume ed. London, 1979.

  Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. 1920. On Metapsychology. Trans. James Strachey. Pelican Freud Library, Vol. 11. London, 1988. 269-338.

  Gay, Peter. Freud: A Life for Our Time. London, 1988.

  Haggard, H. Rider. “About Fiction.” Contemporary Review 51:172-80. Feb 1887.

  Heinlein, Robert A. “Science Fiction: Its Nature, Faults, and Virtues.” The Science Fiction Novel: Imagination and Social Criticism. Ed. Basil Davenport. Chicago, 1959. 17-63.

  Keating, Peter. The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel 1875-1914. London, 1989.

  Luckhurst, Roger. “Border Policing: Postmodernism and Science Fiction.” SFS 18:358-56, #55, Nov 1991.

  Merril, Judith. “What Do You Mean? Science? Fiction?” SF: The Other Side of Realism. Ed. Thomas D. Clareson. Bowling Green, OH, 1971.

  Nichols, Peter. “Jerry Cornelius at the Atrocity Exhibition: Anarchy and Entropy in New Wave Science Fiction.” Foundation 9:22-44, Nov 1975.

  Pefanis, Julian. Heterology and the Postmodern. London, 1991.

  Platt, Charles. “The Rape of Science Fiction.” Science Fiction Eye 1:45-49. July 1989. />
  Pringle, David. Earth is the Only Alien Planet. Milford Series. San Bernardino, CA, 1979.

  —. J.G. Ballard: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography. Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1976.

  —. and James Goddard. Interview with Ballard. Vector 73:24-49, March 1976.

  Radway, Janice. Reading the Romance. London, 1987.

  “Requiem for the Cyberpunks.” Editorial statement. Science Fiction Eye 1:5, 1987.

  Rose, Mark, ed. Science Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood, NJ, 1976.

  Ross, Andrew. “Getting Out of the Gernsback Continuum.” Critical Inquiry 17:411-33, Winter 1991.

  Saintsbury, George. “The Present State of the Novel,” Fortnightly Review 49:410-17, Jan 1888.

  Scholes, Robert. “The Roots of Science Fiction.” Rose, ed. (q.v.). 46-560.

  —. and Eric S. Rabkin. Science Fiction: History, Science, Vision. London, 1977.

  Sedgewick, Christina. “The Fork in the Road: Can Science Fiction Survive in Postmodern, Megacorporate America?” SFS 18:11-52, #53, March 1991.

  Stableford, Brian. The Sociology of Science Fiction. San Bernardino, CA, 1987.

  Stevenson, Gregory. Out of the Night and Into the Dream. Westport, CT, 1991.

  Suvin, Darko. “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre.” Rose, ed. (q.v.). 57-71.

  Wagar, Warren. “J.G. Ballard and the Transvaluation of Utopia.” SFS 18:53-70. #53, March 1991.

  Wilt, Judith. “The Imperial Mouth: Imperialism, the Gothic and Science Fiction.” Journal of Popular Culture 14:618-28, 1981.

  8

  On defining sf, or not: Genre theory, sf, and history

  John Rieder

  In his groundbreaking 1984 essay, “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre,” Rick Altman could accurately state that “genre theory has up to now aimed almost exclusively at the elaboration of a synchronic model approximating the syntactic operation of a specific genre” (12). Only a few years later, in 1991, Ralph Cohen announced that there had been a paradigm shift in genre theory, in the course of which its dominant project had changed from identifying and classifying fixed, ahistorical entities to studying genres as historical processes (85-87). Yet the impact of that paradigm shift on sf studies, while no doubt contributing to the predominantly historical rather than formalist orientation of most scholarly projects these days, has been neither so immediate nor so overpowering as to render entirely clear its implications for conceptualizing the genre and understanding its history. In this essay I aim to help clarify and strengthen the impact of an historical genre theory on sf studies.

  I start from the problem of definition because, although constructing generic definitions is a scholarly necessity, an historical approach to genre seems to undermine any fixed definition. The fact that so many books on sf begin with a more or less extended discussion of the problem of definition testifies to its importance in establishing a framework for constructing the history of the genre, specifying its range and extent, locating its principal sites of production and reception, selecting its canon of masterpieces, and so on.1 Perhaps the scholarly task that best highlights the importance of genre definition is bibliography, where the choice of what titles to include necessarily has to be guided by clearly articulated criteria that often include such definitions.

  Yet it seems that the act of definition cannot ever be adequate to the notion of genre as historical process. Altman’s 1999 Film/Genre, one of the best and fullest elaborations of this approach to genre, argues that “genres are not inert categories shared by all … but discursive claims made by real speakers for particular purposes in specific situations” (101, qtd. Bould and Vint 50). Thus Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint argue in a recent piece, drawing on Altman’s work, that “There Is No Such Thing as Science Fiction,” by which they mean that “genres are never, as frequently perceived, objects which already exist in the world and which are subsequently studied by genre critics, but fluid and tenuous constructions made by the interaction of various claims and practices by writers, producers, distributors, marketers, readers, fans, critics and other discursive agents” (48). The critical and scholarly act of definition seems reduced, in this conception of the “claims and practices” that constitute the history of the genre, to no more than one among many other “fluid and tenuous constructions.” In fact, the only generic definition—if one can call it that—adequate to the historical paradigm would be a kind of tautology, an assertion that the genre is whatever the various discursive agents involved in its production, distribution, and reception say it is. And indeed statements of that kind consistently come up in discussions of the problem of defining sf, the best-known example being Damon Knight’s gesture of dismissal toward the very attempt at definition—“Science fiction is what we point to when we say it” (122, qtd. Clute and Nicholls 314).

  In his 2003 essay “On the Origin of Genre,” Paul Kincaid manages to turn the tautological affirmation of genre identity into a thoughtful position. Basing his argument on the notion of “family resemblance” in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, Kincaid proposes that we can neither “extract a unique, common thread” that binds together all science fiction texts, nor identify a “unique, common origin” for the genre (415). He concludes that

  science fiction is not one thing. Rather, it is any number of things—a future setting, a marvelous device, an ideal society, an alien creature, a twist in time, an interstellar journey, a satirical perspective, a particular approach to the matter of story, whatever we are looking for when we look for science fiction, here more overt, here more subtle—which are braided together in an endless variety of combinations. (416-17)

  The usefulness of Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblance for genre theory bears further discussion, and I will return to it a bit later. For now, the important theoretical point with regard to Kincaid’s argument is not only to agree that, according to an historical theory of genre, sf is “any number of things,” but also to note and emphasize that this account of genre definition, like Altman’s and Bould and Vint’s, involves subjects as well as objects. It is not just a question of the properties of the textual objects referred to as “science fiction,” then, but also of the subjects positing the category, and therefore of the motives, the contexts, and the effects of those subjects’ more or less consciously and successfully executed projects. To put it another way, the assertion that sf is “whatever we are looking for when we are looking for science fiction” does not mean anything much unless “we” know who “we” are and why “we” are looking for science fiction.

  In what follows I propose to offer an account of the current state of genre theory as it applies to the attempt to say what sf is. The first section of the essay will concentrate on conceptualizing what sort of thing a genre is, or is not. The final section will then return to the question of how to understand the collective subjects of genre construction. I am asking, throughout, what does the tautological assertion that sf is what “we” say it is mean if taken as a serious proposition about the nature, not just of sf, but of genre itself? And if the notorious diversity of definitions of the genre is not a sign of confusion, nor the result of a multiplicity of genres being mistaken for a single one, but rather, on the contrary, the identity of sf is constituted by this very web of sometimes inconsistent and competing assertions, what impact should this understanding of genre formation have on the project of writing the history of sf?

  Genre as a historical process

  I am going to make five propositions about sf, each of which could also be reformulated as a thesis about genre per se, constituting what I take to be a fairly non-controversial but, I hope, useful summary of the current paradigm of genre theory. The sequence leads from the basic position that genres are historical processes to the point where one can effectively address the questions about the uses and users of sf that occupy the final section of this essay. The five propositions are:

  1.sf is historical and mutable;


  2.sf has no essence, no single unifying characteristic, and no point of origin;

  3.sf is not a set of texts, but rather a way of using texts and of drawing relationships among them;

  4.sf’s identity is a differentially articulated position in an historical and mutable field of genres;

  5.attribution of the identity of sf to a text constitutes an active intervention in its distribution and reception.

  Let me explain and defend these propositions one at a time.

  Sf is historical and mutable

  Nearly all twentieth-century genre theorists before 1980 would have agreed that “Theory of genres is a principle of order: it classifies literature and literary history not by time or place (period or national language) but by specifically literary types of organization or structure” (Wellek and Warren 226). The newer paradigm, in contrast, considers generic organizations and structures to be just as messily bound to time and place as other literary-historical phenomena, albeit with patterns of distribution and temporalities of continuity and discontinuity that may differ quite strongly from those of national traditions or “periods” in Wellek and Warren’s sense. A newer paradigm is not necessarily a better one, however, and the choice between these two alternatives remains a matter of first principles, where the evidence seems susceptible of logically consistent explanation from either point of view. That is, if one considers sf to designate a formal organization—Darko Suvin’s “literature of cognitive estrangement” has of course been by far the most influential formal definition—then it makes just as much sense to find it in classical Greek narratives as in contemporary American ones; and, in addition, it makes sense to say, as Suvin did, that much of what is conventionally called sf is actually something else. But the newer paradigm holds that the labeling itself is crucial to constructing the genre, and would therefore consider “the literature of cognitive estrangement” a specific, late-twentieth-century, academic genre category that has to be understood partly in the context of its opposition to the commercial genre practices Suvin deplored. Suvin’s definition becomes part of the history of sf, not the key to unraveling sf’s confusion with other forms.