Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  Author’s intention or no, that is what badly written SF is about. But anyone who reads or writes SF seriously knows that its particular excellence is in another area altogether: in all the brouhaha clanging about these unreal worlds, chords are sounded in total sympathy with the real.

  “You are talking about subtleties too refined for the vast majority of our readers who are basically neither literary nor sophisticated.”

  This part of the argument always throws me back to an incident from the summer I taught a remedial English class at my Neighborhood Community Center. The voluntary nature of the class automatically restricted enrollment to people who wanted to learn; still, I had sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds who had never had any formal education in either Spanish or English continually joining my lessons. Regardless, after a student had been in the class six months, I would throw at him a full five-hundred-and-fifty-page novel to read: Dmitri Merezhkovsky’s The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci. The book is full of Renaissance history, as well as swordplay, magic, and dissertations on art and science. It is an extremely literary novel with several levels of interpretation. It was a favorite of Sigmund Freud (Rilke, in a letter, found it loathsome) and inspired him to write his own Leonardo da Vinci: A Study in Psychosexuality. My students loved it, and with it, lost a good deal of their fear of Literature and Long Books.

  Shortly before I had to leave the class, Leonardo appeared in paperback, translated by Hubert Trench. Till then it had only been available in a Modern Library edition translated by Bernard Gilbert Gurney. To save my latest two students a trip to the Barnes and Noble basement, as well as a dollar fifty, I suggested they buy the paperback. Two days later one had struggled through forty pages and the other had given up after ten. Both thought the book dull, had no idea what it was about, and begged me for something shorter and more exciting.

  Bewildered, I bought a copy of the Trench translation myself that afternoon. I do not have either book at hand as I write, so I’m sure a comparison with the actual texts will prove me an exaggerator. But I recall one description of a little house in Florence:

  Gurney: “Gray smoke rose and curled from the slate chimney.”

  Trench: “Billows of smoke, gray and gloomy, elevated and contorted up from the slates of the chimney.”

  By the same process that differentiated the five examples of putting books on a desk, these two sentences do not refer to the same smoke, chimney, house, time of day; nor do any of the other houses within sight remain the same; nor do any possible inhabitants. One sentence has nine words, the other fifteen. But atomize both as a series of corrected images and you will find the mental energy expended on the latter is greater by a factor of six or seven! And over seven-eighths of it leaves that uncomfortable feeling of loose-endedness, unutilized and unresolved. Sadly, it is the less skilled, less sophisticated reader who is most injured by bad writing. Bad prose requires more mental energy to correct your image from word to word, and the corrections themselves are less rewarding. That is what makes it bad. The sophisticated, literary reader may give the words the benefit of the doubt and question whether a seeming clumsiness is more fruitfully interpreted as an intentional ambiguity.

  For what it is worth, when I write I often try to say several things at the same time—from a regard for economy that sits contiguous with any concern for skillful expression. I have certainly failed to say many of the things I intended. But ambiguity marks the failure, not the intent.

  But how does all this relate to those particular series of corrected images we label SF? To answer that, we must first look at what distinguishes these particular word series from other word series that get labeled naturalistic fiction, reportage, fantasy.

  A distinct level of subjunctivity informs all the words in an SF story at a level that is different from that which informs naturalistic fiction, fantasy, or reportage.

  Subjunctivity is the tension on the thread of meaning that runs between (to borrow Saussure’s term for “word”:) sound-image and sound-image. Suppose a series of words is presented to us as a piece of reportage. A blanket indicative tension (or mood) informs the whole series: this happened. That is the particular level of subjunctivity at which journalism takes place. Any word, even the metaphorical ones, must go straight back to a real object, or a real thought on the part of the reporter.

  The subjunctivity level for a series of words labeled naturalistic fiction is defined by: could have happened. (While various levels of subjunctivity can be defined by words, those words themselves define nothing. They are not definitions of certain modes of fiction, only more or less useful functional descriptions of different modes of narrative.) Note that the level of subjunctivity makes certain dictates and allows certain freedoms as to what word can follow another. Consider this word series: “For one second, as she stood alone on the desert, her world shattered and she watched the fragments bury themselves in the dunes.” This is practically meaningless at the subjunctive level of reportage. But it might be a perfectly adequate, if not brilliant, word series for a piece of naturalistic fiction.

  Fantasy takes the subjunctivity of naturalistic fiction and throws it into reverse. At the appearance of elves, witches, or magic in a non-metaphorical position, or at some correction of image too bizarre to be explained by other than the supernatural, the level of subjunctivity becomes: could not have happened. And immediately it informs all the words in the series. No matter how naturalistic the setting, once the witch has taken off on her broomstick the most realistic of trees, cats, night clouds, or the moon behind them become infected with this reverse subjunctivity.

  But when spaceships, ray guns, or more accurately any correction of images that indicates the future appears in a series of words and mark it as SF, the subjunctivity level is changed once more: These objects, these convocations of objects into situations and events, are blanketly defined by: have not happened.

  Events that have not happened are very different from the fictional events that could have happened, or the fantastic events that could not have happened.

  Events that have not happened include several subcategories. These subcategories describe the subcategories of SF. Events that have not happened include those events that might happen: these are your technological and sociological predictive tales. Another category includes events that will not happen: these are your science-fantasy stories. They include events that have not happened yet (Can you hear the implied tone of warning?): there are your cautionary dystopias, Brave New World and 1984. Were English a language with a more detailed tense system, it would be easier to see that events that have not happened include past events as well as future ones. Events that have not happened in the past compose that SF specialty, the parallel-world story, whose outstanding example is Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle.

  The particular subjunctive level of SF expands the freedom of the choice of words that can follow another group of words meaningfully; but it limits the way we employ the corrective process as we move between them.

  At the subjunctive level of naturalistic fiction, “The red sun is high, the blue low,” is meaningless. In naturalistic fiction our corrections in our images must be made in accordance with what we know of the personally observable—this includes our own observations or others’ that have been reported to us at the subjunctive level of journalism.

  Considered at the subjunctive level of fantasy, “The red sun is high, the blue low,” fares a little better. But the corrective process in fantasy is limited too: when we are given a correction that is not meaningful in terms of the personally observable world, we must accept any pseudoexplanation we are given. If there is no pseudoexplanation, it must remain mysterious. As fantasy, one suspects that the red sun is the “realer” one; but what sorcerer, to what purpose, shunted up that second, azure, orb, we cannot know and must wait for the rest of the tale.

  As we have seen, that sentence makes very good SF. The subjunctive level of SF says that we must make our correction pro
cess in accord with what we know of the physically explainable universe. And the physically explainable has a much wider range than the personally observable.3 The particular verbal freedom of SF, coupled with the corrective process that allows the whole range of the physically explainable universe, can produce the most violent leaps of imagery. For not only does it throw us worlds away, it specifies how we got there.

  Let us examine what happens between the following two words:

  winged dog

  As naturalistic fiction it is meaningless. As fantasy it is merely a visual correction. At the subjunctive level of SF, however, one must momentarily consider, as one makes that visual correction, an entire track of evolution: whether the dog has forelegs or not. The visual correction must include modification of breastbone and musculature if the wings are to be functional, as well as a whole slew of other factors from hollow bones to heart rate; or if we subsequently learn as the series of words goes on that grafting was the cause, there are all the implications (to consider) of a technology capable of such an operation. All of this information hovers tacitly about and between those two words in the same manner that the information about I and the desk hovered around the statements about placing down the books. The best SF writer will utilize this information just as she utilizes the information generated by any verbal juxtapositioning.

  I quote Harlan Ellison describing his own reaction to this verbal process:

  . . . Heinlein has always managed to indicate the greater strangeness of a culture with the most casually dropped-in reference: the first time in a novel, I believe it was in Beyond This Horizon, that a character came through a door that . . . dilated. And no discussion. Just: “The door dilated.” I read across it, and was two lines down before I realized what the image had been, what the words had called forth. A dilating door. It didn’t open, it irised! Dear God, now I knew I was in a future world . . .

  “The door dilated,” is meaningless as naturalistic fiction, and practically meaningless as fantasy. As SF—as an event that hasn’t happened, yet still must be interpreted in terms of the physically explainable—it is quite as wondrous as Ellison feels it.

  As well, the luminosity of Heinlein’s particular vision was supported by all sorts of other information, stated and unstated, generated by the novel’s other words.

  Through this discussion, I have tried to keep away from what motivates the construction of these violent nets of wonder called speculative fiction. The more basic the discussion, the greater is our obligation to stay with the reader in front of the page. But at the mention of the author’s “vision” the subject is already broached. The vision (sense of wonder, if you will) that SF tries for seems to me very close to the vision of poetry, particularly poetry as it concerned the nineteenth century Symbolists. No matter how disciplined its creation, to move into “unreal” worlds demands a brush with mysticism.

  Virtually all the classics of speculative fiction are mystical.

  In Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, one man, dead on page thirty-seven, achieves nothing less than the redemption of mankind from twenty-nine thousand years of suffering simply by his heightened consciousness of the human condition. (Read “consciousness of the human condition” for “science of psychohistory.”)

  In Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land the appearance of God Incarnate creates a world of love and cannibalism.

  Clarke’s Childhood’s End and Sturgeon’s More Than Human detail vastly differing processes by which man becomes more than man.

  Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination (or Tiger, Tiger! its original title) is considered by many readers and writers, both in and outside the field, to be the greatest single SF novel. In this book, man, intensely human yet more than human, becomes, through greater acceptance of his humanity, something even more. It chronicles a social education, but within a society which, from our point of view, has gone mad. In the climactic scene, the protagonist, burning in the ruins of a collapsing cathedral, has his senses confused by synesthesia. Terrified, he begins to oscillate insanely in time and space. Through this experience, with the help of his worst enemy transformed by time into his savior, he saves himself and attains a state of innocence and rebirth.

  This is the stuff of mysticism.

  It is also a very powerful dramatization of Rimbaud’s theory of the systematic derangement of the senses to achieve the unknown. And the Rimbaud reference is as conscious as the book’s earlier references to Joyce, Blake, and Swift. (I would like to see the relation between the Symbolists and modern American speculative fiction examined more thoroughly. The French Symbolists’ particular problems of vision have been explored repeatedly not only by writers like Bester and Sturgeon, but also newer writers like Roger Zelazny, who brings both erudition and word magic to strange creations generated from the tension between suicide and immortality. And the answers they discover are all unique.) To recapitulate: whatever the inspiration or vision, whether it arrives in a flash or has been meticulously worked out over years, the only way a writer can present it is by what he can make happen in the reader’s mind between one word and another, by the way he can maneuver the existing tensions between words and associated images.

  I have read many descriptions of “mystical experiences”—many in SF stories and novels. Very, very few have generated any feel of the mystical—which is to say that as the writers went about setting correction after correction, the images were too untrustworthy to call up any personal feelings about such experiences. The Symbolists have a lesson here: the only thing that we will trust enough to let it generate in us any real sense of the mystical is a resonant aesthetic form.

  The sense of mystical horror, for example, in Thomas M. Disch’s extraordinary novella, The Asian Shore, does not come from its study of a particularly insidious type of racism, incisive though the study is; nor does it come from the final incidents set frustratingly between the supernatural and the insane. It generates rather in the formal parallels between the protagonist’s concepts of Byzantine architecture and the obvious architecture of his own personality.

  Aesthetic form . . . I am going to leave this discussion at this undefined term. For many people it borders on the meaningless. I hope there is enough tension between the words to proliferate with what has gone before. To summarize, however: any serious discussion of speculative fiction must first get away from the distracting concept of SF content and examine precisely what sort of word-beast sits before us. We must explore both the level of subjunctivity at which speculative fiction takes place and the particular intensity and range of images this level affords. Readers must do this if they want to fully understand what has already been written, Writers must do this if the field is to mature to the potential so frequently cited for it.

  Notes

  1. I am purposely not using the word “symbol” in this discussion. The vocabulary that must accompany it generates too much confusion.

  2. Words also have “phonic presence” or “voice” as well as meaning. And certainly all writers must work with sound to vary the rhythm of a phrase or sentence, as well as to control the meaning. But this discussion is going to veer close enough to poetry. To consider the musical, as well as the ritual, value of language in SF would make poetry and prose indistinguishable. That is absolutely not my intention.

  3. I throw out this notion for its worth as intellectual play. It is not too difficult to see that as events that have not happened include the subgroup of events that have not happened in the past, they include the subsubgroup of events that could have happened with an implied but didn’t. That is to say, the level of subjunctivity of SF includes the level of subjunctivity of naturalistic fiction.

  As well, the personally observable world is a subcategory of the physically explainable universe. That is, the laws of the first can all be explained in terms of the laws of the second, while the situation is not necessarily reversible. So much for the two levels of subjunctivity and the limitations on the corrective
processes that go with them.

  What of the respective freedoms in the choice of word to follow word?

  I can think of no series of words that could appear in a piece of naturalistic fiction that could not also appear in the same order in a piece of speculative fiction. I can, however, think of many series of words that, while fine for speculative fiction, would be meaningless as naturalism. Which then is the major and which the subcategory?

  Consider: naturalistic fictions are parallel-world stories in which the divergence from the real is too slight for historical verification.

  11

  On the poetics of the science fiction genre1

  Darko Suvin

  Science fiction as fiction (Estrangement)

  The importance of science fiction (SF) in our time is on the increase. First, there are strong indications that its popularity in the leading industrial nations (USA, USSR, UK, Japan) has risen sharply over the last 100 years, regardless of local and short-range fluctuations. SF has particularly affected some key strata of modern society such as the college graduates, young writers, and general readers appreciative of new sets of values. This is a significant cultural effect which goes beyond any merely quantitative census. Second, if one takes as differentiae of SF either radically different figures (dramatis personae) or a radically different context of the story, it will be found to have an interesting and close kinship with other literary sub-genres, which flourished at different times and places of literary history: the Greek and Hellenistic “blessed island” stories, the “fabulous voyage” from Antiquity on, the Renaissance and Baroque “utopia” and “planetary novel,” the Enlightenment “state (political) novel,” the modern “anticipation,” “anti-utopia,” etc. Moreover, although SF shares with myth, fantasy, fairy tale and pastoral an opposition to naturalistic or empiricist literary genres, it differs very significantly in approach and social function from such adjoining non-naturalistic or meta-empirical genres. Both of these complementary aspects, the sociological and the methodological, are being vigorously debated among writers and critics in several countries; both testify to the relevance of this genre and the need of scholarly discussion too.