Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  The history of sf, then, involves the history of a signal change in the system of genres: that is, the emergence of a genre system associated with mass publication that came to include science fiction alongside the detective story, the modern romance, the Western, horror, fantasy, and other similar genres, and which collectively comprised a practice of genre categorization distinct from and in tension with the pre-existing classical and academic genre system that includes the epic, tragedy, comedy, satire, romance, the lyric, and so on. In this sense, the influence of the great innovators like Shelley, Verne, and Wells takes place within the context of “cultural and historical fluctuations in the composition of generic systems,” and close attention to the reception of any of the three authors will show that “the same texts may be subject to different generic classifications in different social and historical contexts” (Bennett 101). But the classical-academic and mass-cultural genre systems also each have a history that has entered into the production, distribution, and reception of texts, and that often forms substantial connections between the systems themselves and the history and significance of a given text. Thus, while it is certainly possible to read the Oedipus of Sophocles as a piece of detective fiction, its historical relationship to the genre of tragedy, and to the system of genres and literary values elaborated in relation to classical tragedy, is a good deal more consequential. By the same token, texts that are usually considered science fiction could be read simply as examples of satire, romance, comedy, tragedy, and so on, but doing so, rather than elevating them to the status of “serious” literature, strips them of an important aspect of their historicity.

  The way generic terms and choices signify in relation to other terms and choices is constantly in flux. Thus, as Fowler says, “It is neither possible nor even desirable to arrive at a very high degree of precision in using generic terms. The overlapping and mutability of genres means that an ‘imprecise’ terminology is more efficient” (130). Such overlapping and mutability also makes necessary the practice of retro-labeling in order to trace the lineaments of emerging genre categories (hence, “early science fiction”). Nonetheless, attention to the history of genre systems ought to foreclose the option of transposing the category of sf wholesale onto early modern or classical texts. If Shelley’s Frankenstein was not sf when it was written (see Rieder, Colonialism 19), neither, a fortiori, were Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) or Lucian’s True History. The important point is that the emergence of sf has to do, not with the first appearance of a certain formal type, nor with when the term “science fiction” was first used or by whom, but rather with the appearance of a system of generic identities that articulates the various terms that cluster around sf (scientific fiction, scientific romance, scientifiction; but also horror fiction, detective fiction, the Western). Clearly Gernsback did not initiate this system of generic identities when he published the first issue of Amazing Stories in 1926. But just as clearly, the milieu of mass-marketed periodical publications is one of the historical conditions for sf’s emergence as a distinctive genre, and that milieu carries with it its hierarchical opposition to a specific version of the realm of “high” culture.

  I propose that understanding the positions and values of sf within past and present economies of genre, or how the history of this shifting and slippery subject fits into the larger context of changes within the system of genres, is the frame in which to put the question, what difference does it make when “we” point to a text and say that it is sf?

  The answer to that question from the perspective of genre theory is that attribution of the identity of sf to a text constitutes an active intervention in its distribution and reception. Here we should speak of labeling itself as a rhetorical act. One of the most bustling areas of genre theory in recent years has been that explored by rhetoricians focused on the pedagogy of composition, rather than critics and scholars of literature (Frow, “Reproducibles” 1626-27). In an important early contribution to the new rhetorical approach to genre, Carolyn Miller wrote in 1984 that “A theoretically sound definition of genre must be centred not on the substance or the form of discourse but on the action it is used to accomplish” (24). Miller is primarily concerned with “the ‘de facto’ genres, the types we have names for in everyday language” because it is these genres that formalize “the knowledge that practice creates” (27). Although her analysis is therefore more concerned with analyzing genres such as the letter of recommendation or the inaugural speech than with drawing distinctions between different types of storytelling, Miller’s approach to genre might well lead one to ask why distinctions between types of story are drawn and insisted upon at all. How can one explain this “mutual construing of objects, events, interests, and purposes that not only links them but makes them what they are: an objectified social need” (30)? What action does it accomplish to attribute the label, sf, to a narrative?

  Whatever protocols of interpretation or formal and thematic conventions the label refers to, the labeling itself often serves to position the text within the field of choices offered by the contemporary genre system in quite material ways: how it will be printed, where it will be sold, by whom it is most likely to be read. Generic attribution therefore affects the distribution and reception of texts: that is, the ways that they are put to use. It is a way of telling someone how to read a text, and even more a kind of promise that the text can be usefully, pleasurably, read that way. The attribution does not just classify the text, it promotes its use by a certain group of readers and in certain kinds of ways (e.g., with a high level of seriousness, or a lack of it). When “we” point to a story and say it is sf, therefore, that means not only that it ought to be read using the protocols associated with sf but also that it can and should be read in conversation with other sf texts and readers.

  Such acts of labeling, by assigning texts a position and a value within a system of genres, entangle them within both a synchronic web of resemblances and a diachronic history of generic “variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots” (Deleuze and Guattari 21). A history of genre systems attentive to the power that generic attribution exercises upon distribution and reception would not be one structured primarily by the appearance of literary masterpieces, but rather one also punctuated by watersheds in the technology of publication, the distribution of reading materials, and the social production and distribution of literacy itself. Some sense of the contours of such a history might be gleaned from John Guillory’s brilliant summary of the forms of the canon from classical times to the present in Cultural Capital (55-82); for sf in particular, the list of the conditions for its emergence that Roger Luckhurst gives in his recent history are very much to the point (Science Fiction 16-17).11

  It would be well beyond the scope of the present essay to attempt a comprehensive or even partial account of the history and dynamics of the attribution of sf’s various labels to texts, much less an account of the economic and cultural transformation of the production and distribution of literature and literacy that I have been arguing should be its frame. I will turn back, rather, to the questions I raised earlier about the collective subject of sf genre formation. Those questions can now take an expanded form that should make their ramifications clearer. If sf is “whatever [in all its historical mutability and rhizomatic irregularity] we are looking for when we are looking for science fiction,” what kind of a collectivity is formed by those who recognize the genre? On what terrain—that is, what system of genres, what regime of the production and distribution of literature and literacy—does the collective endeavor of “looking for science fiction” take place? What in the economy of genres or the dynamics of distribution and reception drives that collectivity to look for sf? And what kind of intervention in that economy is their saying they have found it?

  Categorization and communities of practice

  Sf history and criticism afford two drastically different versions of the collective subject of genre formation. The list of “writers, producers,
distributors, marketers, readers, fans, critics and other discursive agents” in Bould and Vint’s “fluid and tenuous” construction of sf indicates an anonymous, disparate, and disunified set of people. The use of the pronominal “we” here would constitute a kind of grammatical mirage imputing collective intentionality to a process without a subject—or, to be more precise, a process involving so many and such disconnected subjects that they share only the nominal common ground of their participation in the production, distribution, and reception of sf. This anonymous and scattered sense of a defining collectivity stands in sharp contrast to the practice of referring the construction and definition of sf to a rather tightly knit community, a folk group who gets to say what sf is by virtue of its shared participation in the project of publishing, reading, conversing, and otherwise interacting with one another about it:

  “Modern” science fiction, generally dated as having begun in late 1937 with the ascent of [John W.] Campbell, was a literature centered around a compact group of people. . . . There could have been no more than fifty core figures who did 90 percent of the writing and editing. All of them knew one another, most knew one another well, lived together, married one another, collaborated, bought each others’ material, married each others’ wives, and so on. (Malzberg 240)

  This sort of usage has the considerable merit of making a concrete history and set of motives underlying sf refreshingly clear. Yet an excessive emphasis on the community of writers, editors, and fans in the early pulp milieu encourages an illusion of voluntary control over genre formation that is certainly exaggerated. Even during the so-called Golden Age of Campbell’s editorial influence, sf resided within a larger economy of genres whose shifting values and fluid boundaries no group, much less a single editor or publication, could control. Genre construction is intentional only in fits and starts, only as localized as the circulation of the narratives in question, and even then subject to the pressures of the entire system of publication and circulation in which it takes place.

  Even worse, the peculiar situation of the pulps can be taken as normative for genres as such, as Gary Westfahl does in The Mechanics of Wonder:

  if we define a genre as consisting of a body of texts related by a shared understanding of that genre as recorded in contemporary commentary, then a true history of science fiction as a genre must begin in 1926, at the time when Gernsback defined science fiction, offered a critical theory concerning its nature, purposes, and origins, and persuaded many others to accept and extend his ideas. . . . Literary genres appear in history for one reason: someone declares that a genre exists and persuades writers, publishers, readers and critics that she is correct. (8-12)

  If this conception of genre were correct, it could be so only with respect to modern genre practices. Certainly there is no body of contemporary commentary that illustrates a shared generic understanding of the proverb, the riddle, the ballad, or the epic. But even if one stays within the field of genres occupied by Gernsback, one cannot locate a master theorist or “announcer” for the Western, spy fiction, detective fiction, and so on. The more usual case with genres is surely the one described by Michael McKeon in The Origins of the English Novel, where he argues that the novel as a generic designation is an abstraction that only came to be formulated when the process of its emergence was complete: “‘The novel’ must be understood as what Marx calls a ‘simple abstraction,’ a deceptively monolithic category that encloses a complex historical process” (20).

  I suggest that it is possible to articulate the anonymous collectivity of the “complex historical process” of sf’s emergence and ongoing construction, maintenance, and revision with the rich particularity of an account like Malzberg’s by means of the theorization of categorization and its uses offered by Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Starr in Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences (1999). Bowker and Starr are concerned with the way classifications are constructed within communities of practice, emphasizing the ad hoc supplementation and renegotiation of official or institutional categories by those who make them work: “We need a richer vocabulary than that of standardization or formalization with which to characterize the heterogeneity and the processual nature of information ecologies” (293). They emphasize, too, the “collective forgetting” about “the contingent, messy work” of classification that unites members of a community of practice (299). Full-fledged membership in such a community involves the naturalization of its objects of practice, which “means stripping away the contingencies of an object’s creation and its situated nature. A naturalized object has lost its anthropological strangeness” (299). As a result of its naturalization, it can be pointed to as an example of X with an obviousness that derives, not from the qualities of the object itself, but rather from membership in the relevant community.

  Objects and communities of practice do not line up simply and neatly, however, because people come in and out of such communities, operate within them at various levels of familiarity with their categories, and may at the same time be members of different communities with conflicting classification practices. Bowker and Starr therefore emphasize the importance of “boundary objects” as ways of mediating the practices and motives of overlapping communities of practice:

  Boundary objects are those objects that both inhabit several communities of practice and satisfy the informational requirements of each of them. . . . The creation and management of boundary objects is a key process in developing and maintaining coherence across intersecting communities. . . . Boundary objects are the canonical forms of all objects in our built and natural environments. (297-307)

  To speak about the common ground that comprises a sense of sf shared by writers, editors, publishers, marketers, fans, general readers, critics, and scholars might mean to identify the boundary objects that these various communities of practice share. The advantage of this conceptualization of classification is that the communities of practice do not disappear into anonymity, nor do the differences and tensions between their practices fall out of view, nor does whatever consensus settles among them embody the essence of the object. Boundary objects—for example, the texts that make up the sf canon—are not by necessity the most important or definitive objects for any given community, but simply the ones that satisfy the requirements of several communities at once.

  Using the concepts of communities of practice and boundary objects to sort out the complex agencies constructing sf implies at least three distinct ways of understanding the assertion that sf is “whatever we are looking for when we are looking for science fiction.” First, the “we” who are looking for science fiction could refer to the members of the speaker’s own community of practice; this is the sense it had when Damon Knight wrote that “Science fiction is what we point to when we say it.” Second, however, “we” could be taken to refer to all the different communities of practice who use the category, and “science fiction” to all of the objects all of them collectively point to. Any expectation of coherence here is obviously doomed to disappointment, but nonetheless this encyclopedic sense of the genre has the virtue of pointing toward the broad horizon of social practices where the history of genre systems can come into view. Third, science fiction could be taken as the set of objects the relevant communities of practice point to in common—that is, the boundary objects “we” communities share.

  This third reading refers to a shared territory that is not a matter of giving up on arriving at a definition of the genre, but rather is precisely the product of the interaction among different communities of practice using different definitions of sf. The multiplicity of definitions of sf does not reflect widespread confusion about what sf is, but rather results from the variety of motives the definitions express and the many ways of intervening in the genre’s production, distribution, and reception that they pursue. A wealth of biographical and paratextual material can be brought to bear here, as in Justine Larbalestier’s decision that “letters, reviews, fanzines, and marketing blurbs are
as important as the stories themselves” in piecing together her detailed history of a riven and complex sf community in The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction (1). Brian Attebery’s description of the shape of sf in Decoding Gender in Science Fiction also attributes it to the interaction of disparate communities: