Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  Some outgrowths of the genre have so little in common that they hardly seem to constitute a single category. Yet if they share few features, all the myriad manifestations of SF may still be analyzed as products of a single process. All result from negotiated exchanges between different segments of culture. (170)

  Understanding the relations among its various communities of practice, whether of negotiation or conflict or deliberate non-interaction, is among the most important problems that genre theory poses for sf critics and scholars.

  Most genre theory has focused on the choices writers make when composing texts or that readers make, or ought to make, in interpreting them. But the practice of generic attribution also clusters heavily in two institutional locations, commercial publishing and the academy, and this pair of institutions bears no accidental resemblance to the oppositions between high and low culture referred to earlier. The practice of generic attribution in both places is concerned with constructing and regulating a text’s or a genre’s public value and significance, and comparing the different forms that publicity takes in these two locations would seem to be a good way to explore large-scale regularities in the contemporary genre system. The relation between these two institutional locations, however, is a feature of contemporary genre systems upon which much academic theory in the twentieth century simply turned its back, failing to even notice it, much less ask about its significance or implications.12 Yet in any construction of the history and fortunes of sf, the prominence of commercial sites and motives, from the pulp milieu of Gernsback to the mass market franchises of Star Wars, is hard—I would even say, foolish—to ignore.

  The contours of an analysis of genre practices in the realm of commercial publishing is suggested by Marxist cultural theory, insofar as much of its best work distinguishes itself precisely by its concern with the pressure of commodification on literary and artistic production, as in Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s arguments in The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) concerning the “culture industry” (94-136); Fredric Jameson’s thesis that the commodity form structures modern artistic production in general, no less in the anti-commodities of high art than in the commercial products of mass culture (“Reification and Utopia” 130-38); or Pierre Bourdieu’s thesis that the field of cultural production is structured by an inverse relationship between economic and cultural capital, such that restricted circulation—producing for other producers—enjoys a high level of prestige that is antithetical to, and compensatory for, the high economic rewards of general or mass circulation (312-26). As Horkheimer and Adorno first pointed out, the generic label attached to a narrative by “the culture industry” concerns strategies for identifying and targeting audiences, weighing risks, allocating resources, and capturing profits. Commercial practices, in this line of argument, tend to reify generic classifications, promoting them as instigations to engage in repetitive and predictable habits of consumption. As Bourdieu argues, however, the motives of artistic producers in general cannot be reduced to a simple drive to maximize economic profit. Instead there is a constant struggle for writers and editors to achieve autonomy from the economic imperative. They are doubly, and contradictorily, driven both by the profit motive and by what Bourdieu calls the goal of achieving “consecration” by their peers, the “recognition accorded by those who recognize no other criterion of legitimacy than recognition by those whom they recognize” (320). The different motives and trajectories that appear in the editorial careers of, for example, Hugo Gernsback, John W. Campbell, and Michael Moorcock would richly illustrate these double motives, with the added advantage of distancing the dynamics of “consecration” from an exclusive identification with the avant-garde, high-art practices that Bourdieu tends to emphasize, placing it instead within the communities of practice of sf professionals and fans.

  Genre attribution intersects with publicity in a different but perhaps complementary way in academic practices. Genre attribution in the academy has a double articulation that resembles the double motives of economic profit and consecration described by Bourdieu.13 Thus there is an outward-looking motive by which genres serve as boundary objects that help rationalize curricular regularities in relation to the bureaucratic structure of the educational apparatus. A course on the novel, drama, poetry, creative writing, or science fiction, entered upon a student’s transcript, promises his or her exposure to some standardized regime of study that can be measured in credit hours, billed for tuition, used by administrators to determine the allocation of institutional resources, and so on. But there is also an inward-looking side to genre discourse, a dialogue among scholars and critics in which generic labels merely serve as points of departure for exploration and argument. One encounters here a form of publicity that is one of the best contemporary approximations to the public sphere of “rational-critical debate” whose emergence Jürgen Habermas described in eighteenth-century England (57-67, 89-117), in spite of the fact that the demands of bureaucratization continue to exert considerable pressures on academic publishing, the organization of conferences, grant writing and grant giving, and so on. I would venture the hypothesis that the Janus face of genre practice in the academy bears a non-coincidental, structural resemblance to the split in the modern system of genres between practices aimed at aesthetic distinction and crass moneymaking that has been one of its gross features from the time of Alexander Pope’s Dunciad (1743) to the present. If it seems at all plausible that the tensions between bureaucratic heteronymy and intellectual autonomy within the academy have a structural affinity with the contradictory drives for economic profit and cultural prestige in commercial production, the history of sf is well positioned to contribute importantly to a broader cultural history because, as I argued earlier, it has to involve that second structural transformation of publicity, the emergence of mass culture, that Habermas decried as the dissolution of the promise of social rationality contained in the first (159-74, 181-210).

  Thinking of genres as categories wielded by communities of practice has one final advantage that can serve as the conclusion to this discussion. Bowker and Starr’s analysis makes all definitions of sf appear in the light of working definitions, provisional conceptualizations suited to the purposes of a particular community of practice and, within that community, to the needs and goals of a specific project. In this way, definitions may be necessary, even indispensable, and yet constructing and adhering to a definition of the genre, far from being the goal of a history of sf, is more likely to be a way to short-circuit it. Definition and classification may be useful points of departure for critical and rhetorical analysis, but, if the version of genre theory offered in this essay is valid, the project of comprehending what sf has meant and currently means is one to be accomplished through historical and comparative narrative rather than formal description. I hope to have given some sense of the capaciousness and complexity that a narrative of the formation and maintenance of sf would entail, as well as of the stakes involved in its elaboration.

  Notes

  1. Examples of this kind of discussion are Freedman (13-23); Luckhurst, Science Fiction (6-10); Rieder, Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (15-21); and Roberts (1-20).

  2. One of the most notable linguistic arguments is that of Tzvetan Todorov, who, in the opening section of his 1978 Genres in Discourse, broke with the emphasis he had earlier placed on the category and properties of “literature” (e.g., in The Fantastic 6-7) by arguing that there is no clear distinction between literary and non-literary language. The analysis of literary genres does not have to do with sentences and grammar, he now argued, but rather with discourses composed of “utterances in a given sociocultural context” (9), and therefore genre is a local phenomenon determined by social and cultural practice, not a quasi-grammatical one embedded in the deep structures of language. For a strong argument that begins by considering the problems of cultural difference that beset translation, see Owens.

  3. Luckhurst makes the same point in a differe
nt way in Science Fiction (6-10).

  4. Suvin and Scholes are quoted in Clute and Nicholls’s entry on definitions (310-14).

  5. For identification of Shelley’s Frankenstein as the grand original of sf, see Aldiss and Wingrove (25-52); on the “miraculous birth” of sf in Shelley’s Frankenstein or Wells’s War of the Worlds (1898), see Jameson, Archaeologies (1, 57); for Gernsback’s role as originator, see Westfahl (8).

  6. Cf. Altman on “genrification” (Film/Genre 49-68).

  7. For another discussion of the usefulness of Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of rhizomes to genre theory, see Dimock (74).

  8. Perhaps the most drastic attempt to sort true sf out from its neighbors is Suvin’s (nonetheless very informative) bibliography in Victorian SF in the UK, which lists several hundred texts that fail to qualify as sf (most famously, Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde [1886]). As Luckhurst comments, Suvin ignores any “sense that the categories of popular literature and notions of what scientific cognition might be were both undergoing transformation in the nineteenth century, and that SF is itself the very product of this change” (Science Fiction 8). I would say that the more inclusive and broadly-based bibliographies of Bleiler and Clareson are to be preferred. Examples of the kind of delineation of the emergence of the genre advocated here include Rieder’s treatment of the lost-race motif in chapter 2 of Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction, and chapters 2 and 3 of Luckhurst’s Science Fiction.

  9. On the way that genres construct worlds, see Frow (Genre 86-87).

  10. What is usually meant by generic hybridity is perhaps simply that the genres being mixed in a text have not conventionally been considered neighbors (like the combination of philosophical speculation and sword-and-sorcery fantasy in Delany’s Nevèrÿon stories [1979-87]), or perhaps that their neighborliness is being foregrounded and exploited in the text rather than allowed a conventionally silent co-presence (as in the explicit use of folkloric material in China Miéville’s King Rat [1998]). That is, the designation of hybridity has more to do with the way a text positions itself within a system of generic values than with the simple and more or less inevitable fact that it uses a multiplicity of generic strategies.

  11. Luckhurst’s conditions include:

  1) The extension of literacy and primary education to the majority of the population of England and America, including the working classes; 2) the displacement of the older forms of mass literature, the “penny dreadful” and the “dime novel,” with new cheap magazine formats that force formal innovation, and drive the invention of modern genre categories like detective or spy fiction as well as SF; 3) the arrival of scientific and technical institutions that provide a training for a lower-middle-class generation as scientific workers, teachers, and engineers, and that comes to confront traditional loci of cultural authority; and, in a clearly related way, 4) the context of a culture being visibly transformed by technological and scientific innovations. . . . (16)

  12. The exception that proves the rule is Altman, Film/Genre (90-96, 123-43).

  13. I am drawing here on the analysis of the double articulation of academic concepts in Rieder, “Institutional Overdetermination.”

  Works cited

  Aldiss, Brian, with David Wingrove. Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction. London: Gollancz, 1986.

  Altman, Rick. Film/Genre. London: British Film Institute, 1999.

  —. “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre.” Cinema Journal 23.3 (Spring 1984): 6-18.

  Attebery, Brian. Decoding Gender in Science Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2002.

  —. Strategies of Fantasy. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992.

  Barthes, Roland. S/Z. 1970. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1974.

  Bennett, Tony. Outside Literature. London: Routledge, 1990.

  Bleiler, Everett F., with Richard J. Bleiler. Science-Fiction: The Early Years. Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 1990.

  Bould, Mark, and Sherryl Vint. “There Is No Such Thing as Science Fiction.” Reading Science Fiction. Ed. James Gunn, Marleen Barr, and Matthew Candelaria. New York: Palgrave, 2009. 43-51.

  Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed.” Poetics 12 (1983): 311-55.

  Bowker, Geoffrey C., and Susan Leigh Starr. Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1999.

  Clareson, Thomas. Science Fiction in America, 1870s-1930s: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary Sources. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1984.

  Clute, John, and Peter Nicholls, eds. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. London: Orbit, 1993.

  Cohen, Ralph. “Genre Theory, Literary History, and Historical Change.” Theoretical Issues in Literary History. Ed. David Perkins. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1991. 85-113.

  Delany, Samuel R. “Science Fiction and ‘Literature’—or, The Conscience of the King.” 1979. Speculations on Speculation: Theories of Science Fiction. Ed. James Gunn and Matthew Candelaria. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2005. 95-117.

  Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 1980. Trans. and Foreword Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.

  Dimock, Wai Chee. Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2006.

  Fowler, Alistair. Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1982.

  Freedman, Carl. Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2000.

  Frow, John. Genre. New York: Routledge, 2006.

  —. ‘“Reproducibles, Rubrics, and Everything You Need’: Genre Theory Today.” PMLA 122.5 (Oct. 2007): 1626-34.

  Guillory, John. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993.

  Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. 1965. Trans. Thomas Burger. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1991.

  Heinlein, Robert A. “Science Fiction: Its Nature, Faults and Virtues.” 1959. Turning Points: Essays on the Art of Science Fiction. Ed. Damon Knight. New York: Harper, 1977. 3-28.

  Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. The Dialectic of Enlightenment. 1947. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002.

  Jakobson, Roman. “The Dominant.” Unpublished lecture. 1935. Trans. Herbert Eagle. Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views. Ed. Ladislav Matejka and K. Pomorska. Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1978. 82-87.

  Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso, 2005.

  —. “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture.” Social Text 1 (Winter 1979): 130-48.

  Jauss, Hans-Robert. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Trans. Timothy Bahti. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1982.

  Kincaid, Paul. “On the Origins of Genre.” Extrapolation 44 (Winter 2003): 409-19.

  Larbalestier, Justine. The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2002.

  Luckhurst, Roger. “The Many Deaths of Science Fiction: A Polemic.” SFS 21.1 (Mar. 1994): 35-50.

  —. Science Fiction. Cambridge: Polity, 2005.

  Malzberg, Barry. “Some Notes toward the True and the Terrible.” 1982. Speculations on Speculation: Theories of Science Fiction. Ed. James Gunn and Matthew Candelaria. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2005. 239-42.

  McKeon, Michael. The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987.

  Miller, Carolyn R. “Genre as Social Action.” 1984. Genre and the New Rhetoric. Ed. Aviva Friedman and Peter Medway. London: Taylor & Francis, 2000. 67-78.

  Owen, Stephen. “Genres in Motion.” PMLA 122.5 (Oct. 2007): 1389-93.

  Rieder, John. Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2008.

  —. “The Institutional Overdetermination of the Co
ncept of Romanticism.” Yale Journal of Criticism 10.1 (Spring 1997): 145-63.

  Roberts, Adam. The History of Science Fiction. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

  Scholes, Robert. Structural Fabulation: An Essay on Fiction of the Future. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame UP, 1975.

  Suvin, Darko. “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre.” College English 34.3 (Dec. 1972): 372-82.

  —. Victorian Science Fiction in the UK: The Discourses of Knowledge and of Power. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1983.

  Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. 1970. Trans. Richard Howard. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1975.

  —. Genres in Discourse. 1978. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.

  Wellek, Rene, and Austin Warren. Theory of Literature. 3rd. ed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977.

  Westfahl, Gary. The Mechanics of Wonder: The Creation of the Idea of Science Fiction. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1998.

  Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. 1953. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978.

  Recommended further reading

  Attebery, Brian, and Veronica Hollinger, eds. Parabolas of Science Fiction. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2013.

  Collection of essays that develops a model for understanding the genre using the figure or metaphor of the parabola, which describes a narrative trajectory that links texts in a larger system based upon their treatment of shared themes.

  Clarke, I. F. The Pattern of Expectation: 1644-2001. New York: Basic Books, 1979.

  Sees the genre as essentially extrapolative, emerging in the early modern period with the advent of predictive futuristic speculation.

  Clute, John. Pardon This Intrusion: Fantastika in the World Storm. Essex, UK: Beccon, 2011.

  Argues that science fiction is part of a broader genre called “fantastika,” which also encompasses fantasy and supernatural horror; all of these subgenres are responses to post-Enlightenment scientific discoveries and the emergence of secular history.