Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  In the following paper I shall argue for a definition of SF as the literature of cognitive estrangement. This definition seems to possess the unique advantage of rendering justice to a literary tradition which is coherent through the ages and within itself, and yet distinct from non-fictional utopianism, from naturalistic literature, and from other non-naturalistic fiction. It thus permits us to lay the basis of a coherent poetics of SF.

  I should like to approach such a discussion, and this field of discourse, by postulating a spectrum or spread of literary subject-matter, running from the ideal extreme of exact recreation of the author’s empirical environment2 to exclusive interest in a strange newness, a novum. From the 18th to the 20th century, the literary mainstream of our civilization has been nearer to the first of the two above-mentioned extremes. However, at the beginnings of a literature, the concern with a domestication of the amazing is very strong. Early tale-tellers tell about amazing voyages into the next valley where they found dog-headed people, also good rock salt which could be stolen or at the worst bartered for. Their stories are a syncretic travelog and voyage imaginaire, daydream and intelligence report. This implies a curiosity about the unknown beyond the next mountain range (sea, ocean, solar system . . .), where the thrill of knowledge joined the thrill of adventure.

  An island in the far-off ocean is the paradigm of the aesthetically most satisfying goal of the SF voyage, from Iambulus and Euhemerus through the classical utopia to Verne’s island of Captain Nemo and Wells’s island of Dr. Moreau, especially if we subsume under this the planetary island in the aether ocean—usually the Moon—from Lucian through Cyrano and Swift’s mini-Moon of Laputa to the 19th century. Yet the parallel paradigm of the valley, “over the range”3 which shuts it in as a wall, is perhaps as revealing. It recurs almost as frequently, from the earliest folk tales about the sparkling valley of Terrestrial Paradise and the dark valley of the Dead, both already in Gilgamesh. Eden is the mythological localization of utopian longing, just as Wells’s valley in the Country of the Blind is still within the liberating tradition which contends that the world is not necessarily the way our present empirical valley happens to be, and that whoever thinks his valley is the world, is blind. Whether island or valley, whether in space or (from the industrial and bourgeois revolutions on) in time, the new framework is correlative to the new inhabitants. The aliens—utopians, monsters or simply differing strangers—are a mirror to man just as the differing country is a mirror for his world. But the mirror is not only a reflecting one, it is also a transforming one, virgin womb and alchemical dynamo: the mirror is a crucible.

  Thus, it is not only the basic human and humanizing curiosity that gives birth to SF. Beside an undirected inquisitiveness, a semantic game without clear referent, this genre has always been wedded to a hope of finding in the unknown the ideal environment, tribe, state, intelligence or other aspect of the Supreme Good (or to a fear of and revulsion from its contrary). At all events, the possibility of other strange, co-variant coordinate systems and semantic fields is assumed.

  The approach to the imaginary locality, or localized daydream, practiced by the genre of SF is a supposedly factual one. Columbus’s (technically or genologically non-fictional) letter on the Eden he glimpsed beyond the Orinoco mouth, and Swift’s (technically non-factual) voyage to “Laputa, Balnibarbi, Glubbdubbdrib, Luggnagg and Japan,” stand at the opposite ends of a ban between imaginary and factual possibilities. Thus SF takes off from a fictional (“literary”) hypothesis and develops it with extrapolating and totalizing (“scientific”) rigor—in genre, Columbus and Swift are more alike than different. The effect of such factual reporting of fictions is one of confronting a set normative system—a Ptolemaic-type closed world picture—with a point of view or glance implying a new set of norms; in literary theory, this is known as the attitude of estrangement. This concept was first developed on non-natural-(ostranenie, Viktor Shklovsky, 1917), and most successfully underpinned by an anthropological and historical approach in the opus of Bertolt Brecht, who wanted to write “plays for a scientific age.” While working on a play about the prototype scientist Galileo, he defined this attitude (Verfremdungseffekt) in his Short Organon for the Theatre (1948): “A representation which estranges is one which allows us to recognize its subject, but at the same time makes it seem unfamiliar.” And further: for somebody to see all normal happenings in a dubious light, “he would need to develop that detached eye with which the great Galileo observed a swinging chandelier. He was amazed by the pendulum motion as if he had not expected it and could not understand its occurring, and this enabled him to come at the rules by which it was governed.” Thus, the look of estrangement is both cognitive and creative; and as Brecht goes on to say: “one cannot simply exclaim that such an attitude pertains to science, but not to art. Why should not art, in its own way, try to serve the great social task of mastering Life?”4 (Later, Brecht was also to note it might be time to stop speaking in terms of masters and servants altogether.)

  In SF, the attitude of estrangement—used by Brecht in a different way, within a still predominantly “realistic” context—has grown into the formal framework of the genre.

  Science fiction as cognition (critique and science)

  The use of estrangement both as underlying attitude and dominant formal device is found also in the myth, a ritual and religious approach looking in its own way beneath the empiric surface. However, SF sees the norms of any age, including emphatically its own, as unique, changeable, and therefore subject to cognitive glance. The myth is diametrically opposed to the cognitive approach since it conceives human relations as fixed, and supernaturally determined, emphatically denying Montaigne’s: “la constance même n’est qu’un branle plus languissant.” The myth absolutizes and even personifies apparently constant motifs from the sluggish periods with low social dynamics. Conversely, SF, which is organized by extrapolating the variable and future-bearing elements from the empirical environment, clusters in the great whirlpool periods of history, such as the 16-17th and 19-20th centuries. Where the myth claims to explain once and for all the essence of phenomena, SF posits them first as problems and then explores where they lead to; it sees the mythical static identity as an illusion, usually as fraud, in the best case only as a temporary realization of potentially limitless contingencies. It does not ask about The Man or The World, but which man?: in which kind of world?: and why such a man in such a kind of world? As a literary genre, SF is just as opposed to supernatural estrangement as to empiricism (naturalism).

  SF is, then a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment.

  The estrangement differentiates it from the “realistic” literary mainstream of 18th to 20th century. The cognition differentiates it not only from myth, but also from the fairy tale and the fantasy. The fairy tale also doubts the laws of the author’s empirical world, but it escapes out of its horizons and into a closed collateral world indifferent toward cognitive possibilities. It does not use imagination as a means to understand the tendencies in reality, but as an end sufficient unto itself and cut off from the real contingencies. The stock fairy-tale accessory, such as the flying carpet, evades the empirical law of physical gravity—as the hero evades social gravity—by imagining its opposite. The wishfulfilling element is its strength and weakness, for it never pretends that a carpet could be expected to fly—that a humble third son could be expected to become a king—while there is gravity. It just posits another world beside yours where some carpets do, magically, fly, and some paupers do, magically, become princes, and into which you cross purely by an act of faith and fancy. Anything is possible in a fairy tale, because a fairy tale is manifestly impossible. Therefore, SF retrogressing into fairytale (e.g. “space opera” with a hero-princess-monster triangle in astronautic costume) is committing creative suici
de.

  Even less congenial to SF is the fantasy (ghost, horror, Gothic, weird) tale, a genre committed to the interposition of anti-cognitive laws into the empirical environment. Where the fairy tale was indifferent, the fantasy is inimical to the empirical world and its laws. The thesis could be defended that the fantasy is significant insofar as it is impure and fails to establish a super-ordinated maleficent world of its own, causing a grotesque tension between arbitrary supernatural phenomena and the empirical norms they infiltrate.5 Gogol’s Nose is so interesting because it is walking down the Nevski Prospect, with a certain rank in the civil service, etc.; if the Nose were in a completely fantastic world—say H.P. Love-craft’s—it would be just another ghoulish thrill. When fantasy does not make for such a tension between its norms and the author’s empirical environment, its reduction of all possible horizons to Death makes of it just a sub-literature of mystification. Commercial lumping of it into the same category as SF is thus a grave disservice.

  The pastoral is essentially closer to SF. Its imaginary framework of a world without money economy, state apparatus, and depersonalizing urbanization allows it to isolate, as in the laboratory, two human motivations—erotics and power-hunger. This approach relates to SF as alchemy does to chemistry and nuclear physics: an early try in the right direction with insufficient sophistication. SF has thus much to learn from the pastoral tradition, primarily from its directly sensual relationships without class alientation. It has in fact often done so, whenever it has sounded the theme of the triumph of the humble (Restif, Morris, etc. up to Simak, Christopher, Yefremov . . .). Unfortunately, the baroque pastoral abandoned this theme and jelled into a sentimental convention, discrediting the genre; but when the pastoral escapes preciosity, its hope can fertilize the SF field as an antidote to pragmatism, commercialism, other-directedness and technocracy.

  Claiming a Galilean or Brunoan estrangement for SF does not at all mean committing it to scientfic vulgarization or even technological prognostication, which it was engaged in at various times (Verne, U.S. in the 1920’s-1930’s, U.S.S.R. under Stalinism). The needful and meritorious task of popularization can be a useful element of the SF works at a juvenile level. But even the roman scientifique such as Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon—or the surface level of Wells’s Invisible Man—though a legitimate SF form, is a lower stage in its development. It is very popular with audiences just approaching SF, such as the juvenile, because it introduces into the old empirical context only one easily digestible new technological variable (Moon missile, or rays which lower the refractive index of organic matter).6 The euphoria provoked by this approach is real but limited, better suited to the short story and a new audience. It evaporates much quicker as the positivistic natural science loses prestige in the humanistic sphere after the World Wars (cf. Nemo’s as against the U.S. Navy’s atomic “Nautilus”), and surges back with prestigious peace-time applications in new methodologies (astronautics, cybernetics). Even in Verne, the structure of the “science novel” is that of a pond after a stone has been thrown into it: there is a momentary commotion, the waves go from impact point to periphery and back, then the system settles down as before. The only difference is that one positivistic fact—usually an item of hardware—has been added, like the stone to the pond bottom. This structure of transient estrangement is specific to murder mysteries, not to a mature SF.

  After such delimitations, it is perhaps possible at least to indicate some differentiations within the concept of “cognitiveness” or “cognition”. As used here, this term does not imply only a reflecting of but also on reality. It implies a creative approach tending toward a dynamic transformation rather than toward a static mirroring of the author’s environment. Such typical methodology of SF—from Lucian, More, Rabelais, Cyrano, and Swift to Wells, London, Zamiatin, and the last decades—is a critical one, often satirical, combining a belief in the potentialities of reason with methodical doubt in the most significant cases. The kinship of this cognitive critique with the philosophical basis of modern science is evident.

  Science fiction as a literary genre (functions and models)

  As a full-fledged literary genre, SF has its own repertory of functions, conventions and devices. Many of them are highly interesting and significant for literary theory and history, but their range can scarcely be discussed in a brief approach as it is properly the subject for a book-length work. However, it might be possible to sketch some determining parameters of the genre.

  In a typology of literary genres for our cognitive age, one basic parameter would take into account the relationship of the world(s) each genre presents and the “zero world” of empirically verifiable properties around the author (this being “zero” in the sense of a central reference point in a coordinate system, or of the control group in an experiment). Let us call this empirical world naturalistic. In it, and in the corresponding naturalistic or “realistic” literature, ethics are in no significant relation to physics. Modern mainstream literature is forbidden the pathetic fallacy of earthquakes announcing the assassination of rulers or drizzles accompanying the sadness of the heroine. It is the activity of the protagonists, interacting with other, physically equally unprivileged figures, that determines the outcome. However superior technologically or sociologically one side in the conflict may be, any predetermination as to its outcome is felt as an ideological imposition and genological impurity: the basic rule of naturalistic literature is that man’s destiny is man, i.e. other humans.7 On the contrary, in non-naturalistic, metaphysical literary genres discussed above, circumstances around the hero are neither passive nor neutral. The fairy-tale world is oriented positively toward its protagonist. A fairy-tale is defined by the hero’s triumph: magic weapons and helpers are, with necessary narrative retardations, at his beck and call. Inversely, the world of the tragic myth is oriented negatively toward its protagonist. Oedipus, Attis or Christ are predestined to empirical failure by the nature of their world—but the failure is then ethically exalted and put to religious use. The fantasy—a derivation of the tragic myth just as the fairy-tale derives from the victorious hero myth—is defined by the hero’s horrible helplessness: it can be thought of as tragic mythemes without metaphysical compensations. Thus, in the fairy-tale and the fantasy ethics coincide with (positive or negative) physics, in the tragic myth they compensate the physics, in the “optimistic” myth they supply the coincidence with a systematic framework.

  The world of a work of SF is not a priori intentionally oriented toward its protagonists, either positively or negatively; the protagonists may succeed or fail in their objectives, but nothing in the basic contract with the reader, in the physical laws of their worlds, guarantees either. SF is thus (possibly with the exception of some prefigurations in the pastoral) the only meta-empirical genre which is not at the same time metaphysical; it shares with the dominant literature of our civilization a mature approach analogous to that of modern science and philosophy. Furthermore, it shares the omnitemporal horizons of such an approach. The myth is located above time, the fairy-tale in a conventional grammatical past which is really outside time, and the fantasy in the hero’s abnormally disturbed present. The naturalistic literary mainstream and SF can range through all times: empirical ones in the first, non-empirical ones in the latter case. The naturalistic mainstream concentrates on the present, but it can deal with the historical past, and even to some degree with the future in the form of hopes, fears, premonitions, dreams, et sim. SF concentrates on possible futures and their spatial equivalents, but it can deal with the present and the past as special cases of a possible historical sequence seen from an estranged point of view (by a figure from another time and/or space). SF can thus use the creative potentialities of an approach not limited by a consuming concern with empirical surfaces and relationships.

  As a matter of historical record, SF has started from a pre-scientific or protoscientific approach of debunking satire and naive social critique, and moved closer to the inc
reasingly sophisticated natural and human sciences. The natural sciences caught up and surpassed the literary imagination in the 19th century, the sciences dealing with human relationships might be argued to have caught up with it in their highest theoretical achievements but have certainly not done so in their alienated social practice. In the 20th century, SF has moved into the sphere of anthropological and cosmological thought, becoming a diagnosis, a warning, a call to understanding and action, and—most important—a mapping of possible alternatives. This historical movement of SF can be envisaged as an enrichment of and shift from a basic direct or extropolative model to an indirect or analogic model.

  The earlier dominant model of SF from the 19th century on (though not necessarily in preceding epochs) was one which started from certain cognitive hypotheses and ideas incarnated in the fictional framework and nucleus of the fable. This extrapolative model—e.g., of London’s Iron Heel, Wells’s The Sleeper Wakes and Men Like Gods, Zamiatin’s We, Stapledon’s Last and First Men, Pohl and Kornbluth’s Space Merchants, or Yefremov’s Andromeda—is based on direct, temporal extrapolation and centered on sociological (i.e., utopian and anti-utopian) modelling. This is where the great majority of the “new maps of hell” belongs for which postwar SF is justly famous, in all its manifold combinations of socio-technological scientific cognition and social oppression (global catastrophes, cybernetics, dictatorships). Yet already in Wells’s Time Machine and in Stapledon, this extrapolation transcended the sociological spectrum (from everyday practice through economics to erotics) and spilled into biology and cosmology. Nonetheless, whatever its ostensible location (future, “fourth dimension”, other planets, alternate universes), “extrapolative modelling” is oriented futurologically. Its values and standards are to be found in the cognitive import of the fable’s premises and the consistency with which such premises (usually one or very few in number) are narratively developed to its logical end, to a cognitively significant conclusion.