Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  Langlet, Irène. La Science-fiction: Lecture et poétique d’un genre littéraire. Paris: Armand Colin, 2006.

  Defines SF as the literature of “enigma and explanation,” highlighting the genre’s didactic qualities and its engagement with readers’ intellectual curiosity and capacity for ratiocination.

  Milner, Andrew. Locating Science Fiction. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2012.

  Argues against formalist or essentialist definitions of SF and in favor of a model of the genre as a constantly contested site, a “selective tradition” that is revised historically as competing accounts set up and challenge putative boundaries.

  Roberts, Adam. The History of Science Fiction. New York: Palgrave, 2006.

  Argues that the genre is centrally defined by the operations of technological rationality and has its roots in narratives of imaginary voyage and discovery.

  Rose, Mark. Alien Encounters: Anatomy of Science Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1981.

  Constructs the genre as a hybrid of realist fiction and fantasy, which emerged during the nineteenth century, was consolidated during the pulp era, and self-reflexively reshaped during the postwar period; key categories of analysis include “Space,” “Time,” “Machine,” and “Monster.”

  Russ, Joanna. “Toward an Aesthetic of Science Fiction.” Science Fiction Studies 1.4 (1974), pp. 255–69.

  Argues that the genre is a didactic form defined primarily by its deployment of plausible science; as a result, categories of aesthetic evaluation appropriate to “literature” fail to grasp SF’s core appeal.

  Williams, Raymond. “Science Fiction.” The Highway: Journal of the Workers’ Educational Association 48 (December 1956), pp. 41–45.

  Defines SF as a subgenre of the fantastic that consists of three basic narrative types: “Putropia” (tales that critique or lampoon the utopian romance), “Doomsday” (tales of apocalypse and post-apocalypse), and “Space Anthropology” (tales of extra-planetary adventure and exploration).

  Wolfe, Gary K. Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2011.

  Collection of essays arguing that the boundaries separating genres into distinct categories have begun to dissolve in the contemporary marketplace, while the boundaries between popular and “high” literature have also collapsed.

  Part 2

  Structure and form

  This section opens with two famous essays by SF writers—J. G. Ballard and Samuel R. Delany—outlining their respective visions of the formal qualities of science fiction writing. While Delany seeks to sketch the stylistic operations of SF narratives, Ballard polemically calls for a radical new mode of SF: his approach is not descriptive but prescriptive, a manifesto rather than an anatomy. Convinced that the pulp tradition is not only outmoded when faced with the realities of the Space Age but also “invariably juvenile” and “too narrow” in its appeal, Ballard insists that the genre needs to adopt more of the “experimental enthusiasm which has characterized painting, music and the cinema during the last four or five decades.” Specifically, he advocates a shift away from extraterrestrial locales because the “only truly alien planet is Earth” and “it is inner space, not outer, that needs to be explored.” By contrast with the linear storytelling and workmanlike prose of the early pulps, contemporary SF, according to Ballard, needs to develop narrative forms and styles adequate to postwar realities—indeed, “a complete speculative poetry and fantasy of science.” Ballard’s essay, with its pugnacious attack on old-school SF, is widely seen as the first clear statement of the aesthetic agenda of the 1960s “New Wave.”1

  While himself often identified as a New Wave writer, Delany’s approach is considerably less oppositional. The problem for him is not that SF’s narrative techniques are outdated or puerile, but rather that we do not fully appreciate the complexity of their function. Unlike Ballard, Delany sees SF as already quite radical, especially linguistically, since its prose is never straightforwardly referential, in the mode of realist fiction, but always contains a significant degree of “subjunctivity.” In other words, SF encompasses descriptions that point not toward things as they are but as they might be, in other times and places. “The particular subjunctive level of SF expands the freedom of the choice of words that can follow another group of words meaningfully”: for example, the sentence “The red sun is high, the blue low” is meaningless in a realist narrative, but in an SF text it orients the reader toward an entirely different universe of reference, a world not here or not yet. The linguistic resources of SF are thus much richer than they have usually been credited for being.

  The next selection, a hugely influential 1972 essay by Darko Suvin, implicitly expands Delany’s notion of the genre’s subjunctivity into a theory of SF as a “literature of cognitive estrangement.” An SF story, by deploying a speculative postulate—in Suvin’s term, a “novum”—such as time travel or alien contact, constructs a world estranged from everyday reality in a way that activates cognition in the reader, who is compelled to reconstruct, in imagination, the conditions and parameters of this strange narrative world. The effect is to defamiliarize the given through “dynamic transformation” and thus open up horizons of possibility, utopian or dystopian, that can serve a critical function by satirically arraigning present-day reality. Yet Suvin admits that this function is only visible in the very best SF, and that “95% of printed matter claiming the name” of science fiction does not properly belong to the genre. While scholars have found Suvin’s analysis of SF’s narrative dynamics deeply insightful and provocative, his proscriptive hostility to large swaths of work, especially stories emanating from the pulp tradition, has been criticized in some quarters.2

  Marc Angenot’s essay, which follows, is one of the most important—and sadly neglected—formalist analyses of SF ever published. In conformity with Suvin, Angenot sees SF as a genre that constructs estranged worlds, and like Delany, he sees that estrangement operating at the level of signification. For Angenot, what an SF text says is ultimately less important than what it leaves unsaid: the unspoken parameters of the unfamiliar narrative world, which the reader is compelled to reconstruct via linguistic clues and oblique references. Neologisms, for example, are powerful indices to the novelty of the fictional semblance evoked in the text, and the reader is compelled to puzzle out their meaning, in the process fleshing out the contours of the futuristic or alien landscape in which the tale is set. SF, in short, enforces a mode of “conjectural reading,” in which the “absent paradigm” governing the operation of the estranged world of the story is gradually unveiled. Delany’s subjunctivity, Suvin’s cognitive estrangement, and Angenot’s absent paradigm are three of the most powerful tools of formal analysis in the SF critical canon.

  In his 1992 essay, Damien Broderick added another key term to the critical lexicon: the “megatext.” Like the absent paradigm, the megatext is a mechanism, not directly present in the story but accessible to readers via an activity of decipherment and reconstruction, that gives the text’s unfamiliar world shape and coherence. But the megatext exceeds any given text since it is the hypothetical repository of all existing SF themes, tropes, and icons—the “collective intertext” whose web of inference helps readers negotiate the perplexities of individual works. Wells’s time machine is one such icon or idea, progenitor of all manner of subsequent time-travel stories, all of which contribute their particular emphases to the evolving megatext. These recurring themes and icons function as “discursive attractors” that help to “account for the specificity and idiosyncratic coding” of all SF texts. Experienced SF readers are particularly attuned to megatextual elements in the stories they read, the lines of connection and differentiation that link individual stories with the larger corpus of the genre.

  This section concludes with an excerpt from David Wittenberg’s 2013 book on time travel, one of the most compelling recent studies of SF as a narrative system.3 According to Wittenberg, time-travel fictions literalize, at the level o
f their plots, basic narratological issues of “temporality, history, and subjectivity” that characterize stories generally. More specifically, time-travel texts thematize the relationship, identified by Viktor Shklovsky as fundamental to all narrative fictions, between fabula (the linear chronology underlying a story’s events) and syuzhet (the specific sequence of its narrated incidents), invoking plot paradoxes that raise significant philosophical, historiographic, and psychological questions regarding how these two factors of the storytelling process relate to one another. Time-travel fictions thus constitute a “popular philosophy of narrative”: they are not just illustrations of theoretical ideas but “exercises in narratology” themselves. While Wittenberg focuses on just one subgenre of SF, his insights into how time-travel stories activate connections linking literary history and philosophy of science might productively extrapolated to the genre as a whole.

  Notes

  1. For a discussion of the development of the New Wave in Britain and the role of Ballard as a major polemicist for the movement, see my “New Worlds and the New Wave in Fandom: Fan Culture and the Reshaping of Science Fiction in the Sixties,” Extrapolation 47.2 (Summer 2006), pp. 296–314.

  2. Suvin developed the argument of his 1972 essay into his book Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1979). A powerful summary and critique of Suvin’s contributions to SF criticism can be found in Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.’s The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2008), pp. 47–75.

  3. David Wittenberg, Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative (New York: Fordham UP, 2013).

  9

  Which way to inner space?

  J. G. Ballard

  One unfortunate by-product of the Russian-American space race is likely to be an even closer identification, in the mind of the general public, of science fiction with the rocket ships and ray guns of Buck Rogers. If science fiction ever had a chance of escaping this identification—from which most of its present ills derive—that chance will soon be gone, and the successful landing of a manned vehicle on the Moon will fix this image conclusively. Instead of greeting the appearance of the space-suited hero with a deep groan, most general readers will be disappointed if the standard paraphernalia of robot brains and hyper-drives is not present, just as most cinema-goers are bored stiff if a western doesn’t contain at least one major gun-battle. A few westerns without guns have been attempted, but they seem to turn into dog and timberland stories, and as a reader of science fiction one of my fears is that unless the medium drastically reinvigorates itself in the near future the serious fringe material, at present its only justification, will be relegated to the same limbo occupied by other withering literary forms such as the ghost and detective stories.

  There are several reasons why I believe space fiction can no longer provide the main wellspring of ideas for s-f. Firstly, the bulk of it is invariably juvenile, though this is not entirely the fault of the writers. Mort Sahl has referred to the missile-testing site at Cape Canaveral as “Disneyland East,” and like it or not this sums up the attitude of most people towards science fiction, and underlines the narrow imaginative limits imposed by the background of rocket ships and planet-hopping.

  A poet such as Ray Bradbury can accept the current magazine conventions and transform even so hackneyed a subject as Mars into an enthralling private world, but science fiction can’t rely for its survival on the continued emergence of writers of Bradbury’s calibre. The degree of interest inherent in the rocket and planet story—with its confined physical and psychological dimensions and its limited human relationships—is so slight as to make a self-sufficient fictional form based on it almost impossible. If anything, however, the success of the manned satellites will only tend to establish the limited psychological experiences of their crews—on the whole accurately anticipated, though unintentionally, by s-f writers—as the model of those to be found in science fiction.

  Visually, of course, nothing can equal space fiction for its vast perspectives and cold beauty, as any s-f film or comic-strip demonstrates, but a literary form requires more complex ideas to sustain it. The spaceship simply doesn’t provide these. (Curiously enough, in the light of the present roster of astronauts, the one authentic element in old-style space opera is its wooden, one-dimensional dialogue. But if one can’t altogether blame Commander Shepard for his “Boy, what a ride,” Major Titov’s dreamless sleep after the first night in space was the biggest let-down since the fall of Icarus—how many s-f writers must wish they had been writing his script!)

  But my real objection to the central role now occupied by the space story is that its appeal is too narrow. Unlike the western, science fiction can’t rely for its existence upon the casual intermittent pleasure it may give to a wide non-specialist audience if it is to hold its ground and continue to develop. As with most specialized media, it needs a faithful and discriminating audience who will go to it for specific pleasures, similar to the audience for abstract painting or serial music. The old-guard space opera fans, although they probably form the solid backbone of present s-f readership, won’t be able to keep the medium alive on their own. Like most purists, they prefer their diet unchanged, and unless s-f evolves, sooner or later other media are going to step in and take away its main distinction, the right to be the shop window of tomorrow.

  Too often recently, when I’ve wanted to stimulate my imagination, I’ve found myself turning to music or painting rather than to science fiction, and surely this is the chief thing wrong with it at present. To attract a critical readership science fiction needs to alter completely its present content and approach. Magazine s-f was born in the 1930s and like the pseudo-streamlined architecture of the thirties, it is beginning to look old-fashioned to the general reader. It’s not simply that time travel, psionics and teleporting (which have nothing to do with science anyway and are so breath-taking in their implications that they require genius to do them justice) date science fiction. The general reader is intelligent enough to realize that the majority of the stories are based on the most minor variations on these themes, rather than on any fresh imaginative leaps.

  Historically, this type of virtuosity is a sure sign of decline, and it may well be that the real role science fiction has to play is that of a minor eclectic pastime, its few magazines sustained by opportunist editorial swerves after the latest popular-science fad.

  Rejecting this view, however, and believing that s-f has a continuing and expanding role as an imaginative interpreter of the future, how can one find a new wellspring of ideas? First, I think science fiction should turn its back on space, on interstellar travel, extraterrestrial life forms, galactic wars and the overlap of these ideas that spreads across the margins of nine-tenths of magazine s-f. Great writer though he was, H. G. Wells has had a disastrous influence on the subsequent course of science fiction. Not only did he provide it with a repertory of ideas that have virtually monopolized the medium for the last fifty years, but he established the conventions of its style and form, with its simple plots, journalistic narrative, and standard range of situation and character. It is these, whether they realize it or not, that s-f readers are so bored with now, and which are beginning to look increasingly outdated by comparison with the developments in other literary fields.

  I’ve often wondered why s-f shows so little of the experimental enthusiasm which has characterized painting, music and the cinema during the last four or five decades, particularly as these have become wholeheartedly speculative, more and more concerned with the creation of new states of mind, constructing fresh symbols and languages where the old cease to be valid. Similarly, I think science fiction must jettison its present narrative forms and plots. Most of these are far too explicit to express any subtle interplay of character and theme. Devices such as time travel and telepathy, for example, save the writer the trouble of describing the interrelationships of time and space indirectly. And by a curious pa
radox they prevent him from using his imagination at all, giving him very little true freedom of movement within the narrow limits set by the device.

  The biggest developments of the immediate future will take place, not on the Moon or Mars, but on Earth, and it is inner space, not outer, that needs to be explored. The only truly alien planet is Earth. In the past the scientific bias of s-f has been towards the physical sciences—rocketry, electronics, cybernetics—and the emphasis should switch to the biological sciences. Accuracy, that last refuge of the unimaginative, doesn’t matter a hoot. What we need is not science fact but more science fiction, and the introduction of so-called science fact articles is merely an attempt to dress up the old Buck Rogers material in more respectable garb.

  More precisely, I’d like to see s-f becoming abstract and “cool,” inventing fresh situations and contexts that illustrate its theme obliquely. For example, instead of treating time like a sort of glorified scenic railway, I’d like to see it used for what it is, one of the perspectives of the personality, and the elaboration of concepts such as the time zone, deep time and archaeopsychic time. I’d like to see more psycho-literary ideas, more meta-biological and meta-chemical concepts, private time-systems, synthetic psychologies and space-times, more of the sombre half-worlds one glimpses in the paintings of schizophrenics, all in all a complete speculative poetry and fantasy of science.

  I firmly believe that only science fiction is fully equipped to become the literature of tomorrow, and that it is the only medium with an adequate vocabulary of ideas and situations. By and large, the standards it sets for itself are higher than those of any other specialist literary genre, and from now on, I think, most of the hard work will fall, not on the writer and editor, but on the readers. The onus is on them to accept a more oblique narrative style, understated themes, private symbols and vocabularies. The first true s-f story, and one I intend to write myself if no one else will, is about a man with amnesia lying on a beach and looking at a rusty bicycle wheel, trying to work out the absolute essence of the relationship between them. If this sounds off-beat and abstract, so much the better, for science fiction could use a big dose of the experimental; and if it sounds boring, well at least it will be a new kind of boredom.