Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  SF can thus be used as a hand-maiden of futurological foresight in technology, ecology, sociology, etc. Whereas this may be a legitimate secondary function the genre can be made to bear, any oblivion of its strict secondariness may lead to confusion and indeed danger. Ontologically, art is not pragmatic truth nor fiction fact. To expect from SF more than a stimulus for independent thinking, more than a system of stylized narrative devices understandable only in their mutual relationships within a fictional whole and not as isolated realities, leads insensibly to critical demand for and of scientific accuracy in the extrapolated realia. Editors and publishers of such “hard” persuasion have, from the U.S. pulp magazines to the Soviet agitprop, been inclined to turn the handmaiden of SF into the slavey of the reigning theology of the day (technocratic, psionic, utopian, catastrophic, or whatever). Yet this fundamentally subversive genre languishes in strait-jackets more quickly than most other ones, responding with atrophy, escapism, or both. Laying no claim to prophecies except for its statistically to be expected share, SF should not be treated as a prophet: neither enthroned when apparently successful, nor beheaded when apparently unsuccessful. As Plato found out in the court of Dionysus and Hythloday at cardinal Morton’s, SF figures better devote themselves to their own literary republics, which, to be sure, lead back—but in their own way—to the Republic of Man. SF is finally concerned with the tensions between Civitas Dei and Civitas Terrena, and it cannot be uncritically committed to any mundane City.

  The analogic model in SF is based on analogy rather than extrapolation. Its figures may but do not have to be anthropomorphic or its localities geomorphic. The objects, figures, and up to a point the relationships from which this indirectly modelled world starts can be quite fantastic (in the sense of empirically unverifiable) as long as they are logically, philosophically and mutually consistent. Again, as in all distinctions of this essay, one should think of a continuum at whose extremes there is pure extrapolation and analogy, and of two fields grouped around the poles and shading into each other on a wide front in the middle.

  The lowest form of analogic modelling goes back to a region where distinction between a crude analogy and an extrapolation backwards are not yet distinguishable: it is the analogy to Earth past, from geological through biological to ethnological and historical. The worlds more or less openly modelled on the Carboniferous Age, on tribal prehistory, on barbaric and feudal empires—in fact modelled on handbooks of geology and anthropology, on Spengler and The Three Musketeers—are unfortunately abundant in the foothills of SF. Some of them may be useful adolescent leisure reading, which one should not begrudge; however, their uneasy coexistence with a superscience in the story framework or around the protagonist, which is supposed to provide an SF alibi, brings them close to or over the brink of minimum cognitive standards required. The Burroughs-to-Asimov space-opera, cropping up in almost all U.S. writers right down to Samuel Delany belongs here, i.e., into the uneasy borderline between inferior SF and non-SF (forms mimicking SF scenery but modelled on the structures of the Western and other avatars of fairy-tale and fantasy).

  The highest form of analogic modelling would be the analogy to a mathematical model, such as the fairly primary one explicated in Abbott’s Flatland, as well as the ontological analogies found in a compressed overview form in some stories by Borges and the Polish writer Lem, and in a somewhat more humane narration with a suffering protagonist in some stories by Kafka (The Metamorphosis or In the Penal Colony) and novels by Lem (Solaris). Such highly sophisticated philosophico-anthropological analogies are today perhaps the most significant region of SF, indistinguishable in quality from best mainstream writing. Situated between Borges and the upper reaches into which shade the best utopias, anti-satires and satires, this semantic field is a modern variant of the conte philosophique of the 18th century. Similar to Swift, Voltaire, or Diderot, these modern parables fuse new visions of the world with an applicability—usually satirical and grotesque—to the shortcomings of our workaday world. As different from the older Rationalism, a modern parable must be open-ended by analogy to modern cosmology, epistemology, and philosophy of science.8

  The indirect models of SF fall, however, still clearly within its cognitive horizons insofar as their conclusions or import is concerned. The cognition gained may not be immediately applicable, it may be simply the enabling of the mind to receive new wavelengths, but it eventually contributes to the understanding of the most mundane matters. This is testified by the works of Kafka and Lem, of Karel Čapek and Anatole France, as well as of the best of Wells and the “SF reservation” writers.

  For a poetics of science fiction (summation and anticipation)

  The above sketch should, no doubt, be supplemented by a sociological analysis of the “inner environment” of SF, exiled since the beginning of 20th century into a reservation or ghetto which was protective and is now constrictive, cutting off new developments from healthy competition and the highest critical standards. Such a sociological discussion would enable us to point out the important differences between the highest reaches of the genre, glanced at in this essay in order to define functions and standards of SF, and the 80% or more of debilitating confectionery. Yet it should be stressed that, as different from many other para-literary genres, the criteria for the insufficiency of most SF is to be found in the genre itself. This makes SF in principle, if not yet in practice, equivalent to any other “major” literary genre.

  If the whole above argumentation is found acceptable, it will be possible to supplement it also by a survey of forms and sub-genres. Beside some which recur in an updated form—such as the utopia and fabulous voyage—the anticipation, the superman story, the artificial intelligence story (robots, androids, etc.), time-travel, catastrophe, the meeting with aliens, etc., would have to be analyzed. The various forms and sub-genres of SF could then be checked for their relationships to other literary genres, to each other, and to various sciences. For example, the utopias are—whatever else they may be—clearly sociological fictions or social-science-fiction, whereas modern SF is analogous to modern polycentric cosmology, uniting time and space in Einsteinian worlds with different but co-variant dimensions and time scales. Significant modern SF, with deeper and more lasting sources of enjoyment, also presupposes more complex and wider cognitions: it discusses primarily the political, psychological, anthropological use and effect of sciences, and philosophy of science, and the becoming or failure of new realities as a result of it. The consistency of extrapolation, precision of analogy and width of reference in such a cognitive discussion turn into aesthetic factors. (That is why the “scientific novel” discussed above is not felt as completely satisfactory—it is aesthetically poor because it is scientifically meager.) Once the elastic criteria of literary structuring have been met, a cognitive—in most cases strictly scientific—element becomes a measure of aesthetic quality, of the specific pleasure to be sought in SF. In other words, the cognitive nucleus of the plot co-determines the fictional estrangement in SF. This works on all literary levels: e.g., purely aesthetic, story-telling reasons led modern SF to the cognitive assumption of a hyperspace where flight speed is not limited by the speed of light.

  Finally, it might be possible to sketch the basic premises of a significant criticism, history and theory of this literary genre. From Edgar Allan Poe to Damon Knight, including some notable work on the older sub-genres from the utopia to Wells, and some general approaches to literature by people awake to methodological interest, much spadework has been done.9 In the work of Lem (see note 1) we may even possess some cornerstones for a needed critical home. If one may speculate on some fundamental features or indeed axioms of such criticism, the first might be the already mentioned one that the genre has to be evaluated proceeding from its heights down, applying the standards gained by the analysis of its masterpieces. The second axiom might be to demand of SF a level of cognition higher than that of its average reader: the strange novelty is its raison d’être. As a mini
mum, we must demand from SF that it be wiser from the world it speaks to.

  In other words, this is an educational literature, hopefully less deadening than most compulsory education in our split national and class societies, but irreversibly shaped by the pathos of preaching the good word of human curiosity, fear, and hope. Significant SF (to which, as in all genres—but somewhat disappointingly so—at least 95% of printed matter claiming the name does not belong) denies thus the “two-cultures gap” more efficiently than any other literary genre I know of. Even more importantly, it demands from the author and reader, teacher and critic, not merely specialized, quantified positivistic knowledge (scientia) but a social imagination whose quality, whose wisdom (sapientia), testifies to the maturity of his critical and creative thought.

  Notes

  1. The first version of this essay crystallized out of a lecture given in the seminar on fantastic literature in the Yale University Slavic Department in Spring 1968. It was presented at Temple University, Philadelphia, at the University of Toronto, and at the 1970 conference of the Science Fiction Research Association at Queens-borough Community College, New York. I am grateful for the opportunity of discussing it in these places. In particular I have derived much profit from personal discussion with Professor David Porter at the University of Massachusetts, J. Michael Holquist and Jacques Ehrmann at Yale, with Mr. James Blish and Miss Judy Merril, and with my colleagues at McGill University, Michael Bristol, Irwin Gopnik, Myrna Gopnik, and Donald F. Theall. This final version owes much to Stanislaw Lem’s Fantastyka i futurologia, undoubtedly the most significant full-scale morphological, philosophical, and sociological survey of modern SF so far, which has considerably emboldened me in the further pursuit of this elusive field, even where I differed from some of its conclusions. I am also much indebted to the stimulus given by members of my graduate seminar on SF in the Department of English at McGill University. The final responsibility for the structure and conclusions of the essay cannot be shifted onto any other shoulders than mine, however little I may believe in private property over ideas. “Literature” and “literary” are in this essay synonymous with “fiction(al)”.

  2. A virtue of discussing this seemingly peripheral subject of “science fiction” and its “utopian” tradition is that one has to go back to first principles, one cannot really assume them as given—such as in this case what is literature. Usually, when discussing literature one determines what it says (its subject matter) and how it says what is says (the approach to its themes). If we are talking about literature in the sense of significant works possessing certain minimal aesthetic qualities rather than in the sociological sense of everything that gets published at a certain time or the ideological sense of all the writings on certain themes, this principle can more precisely be formulated as a double question. First, epistemologically, what possibility for aesthetic qualities is offered by different thematic fields (“subjects”)? The answer of dominant aesthetics at the moment is—an absolutely equal possibility, and with this answer our aesthetics kicks the question out of its field into the lap of ideologists who pick it up by default and proceed to bungle it. Second, historically, how has such a possibility in fact been used? Once you begin with such considerations you come quickly up against the rather unclear concept of realism (not the prose literary movement in the 19th century but a meta-historical stylistic principle), since the SF genre is often pigeonholded as non-realistic. I would not object but would heartily welcome such labels if one had first persuasively defined what is “real” and what is “reality”. True, this genre raises basic philosophical issues; but is perhaps not necessary to face them in a first approach. Therefore I shall here substitute for “realism” and “reality” the concept of “the author’s empirical environment”, which seems as immediately clear as any.

  3. Subtitle of Samuel Butler’s SF novel Erewhon.

  4. Viktor Shklovsky, “Iskusstvo kak priem,” in Poètika, Petrograd 1919. In the English translation of this essay “Art as Technique,” in Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis eds., Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, Lincoln Nebraska 1965, ostranenie is rendered somewhat clumsily as “defamiliarization.” Cf. also the classical survey of Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism: History-Doctrine, The Hague 1955.

  Bertolt Brecht, “Kleines Organon für das Theater”, in his Schriften zum Theater 7, Franfort a.M. 1964, translated in John Willett ed., Brecht On Theatre, New York 1964. My quotation is from p. 192 and 96 of this translation, in which I have changed Mr. Willett’s translation of Verfremdung as “alienation” into my “estrangement,” since alienation evokes incorrect, indeed opposite connotations: estrangement was for Brecht an approach militating directly against social and cognitive alienation.

  5. Since my first penning these lines, such a thesis has been ably developed in Tzvetan Todorov, Introduction à la littérature fantastique, Paris 1970.

  6. Note the functional difference to the anti-gravity metal in Wells’s First Man on the Moon which is an introductory gadget and not the be-all of a much richer novel.

  7. In cases such as some novels of Hardy and plays by Ibsen, or some of the more doctrinaire works of the historical school of Naturalism, where determinism strongly stresses circumstances at the expense of the main figures’ activity, we have underneath a surface appearance of “realism” obviously to do with an approach to tragic myth using a shamefaced motivation in an unbelieving age. As contrary to Shakespeare and the Romantics, in this case ethics follow physics in a supposedly causal chain (most often through biology). An analogous approach to fairy-tale is to be found in, say, the mimicry of “realism” found in the Hollywood happy-end movies.

  8. I have tried to analyze one such representative work in my afterword to Lem’s Solaris, New York 1970, entitled “The Open-Ended Parables of Stanislaw Lem and Solaris.”

  9. On this continent, one ought to mention in the first place Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism, New York 1966, and Angus Fletcher’s Allegory, Ithaca, 1964.

  Selected bibliography: Theory and general surveys of SF after Wells

  Kingsley Amis, New Maps of Hell, New York 1960.

  “William Atheling Jr.” (James Blish), The Issues at Hand, Chicago 1970.

  —, More Issues at Hand, Chicago 1970.

  James O. Bailey, Pilgrims Through Space and Time, New York 1947.

  Henri Baudin, La Science-fiction, Paris-Montreal 1971.

  Reginald Bretnor ed., Modern Science Fiction, New York 1953.

  Jean-Jacques Bridenne, La littérature francaise d’imagination scientifique, Paris 1950.

  Anatolii Britikov, Russkii sovetskii nauchnofantasticheskii roman, Leningrad 1970.

  Roger Caillois, Images, images . . . , Paris 1966.

  Thomas Clareson ed., The Other Side of Realism, Bowling Green, Ohio 1971.

  I. F. Clarke, Voices Prophesying War 1163-1984, London-New York-Toronto 1966.

  Basil Davenport ed., The Science Fiction Novel, Chicago 1964.

  Richard Gerber, Utopian Fantasy, London 1955.

  Georgii Gurevich, Karta Strany Fantaziy, Moscow 1967.

  Ryszard Handke, Polska proza fantastycznonaukowa, Wroclaw 1969.

  Mark R. Hillegas, The Future as Nightmare, New York 1967.

  Damon Knight, In Search of Wonder, Chicago 1967.

  Hans-Jürgen Krysmansky, Die utopische Methode, Köln 1967.

  Stanislaw Lern, Fantastyka i futurologia I-II, Cracow 1970.

  Sam Moskowitz, Explorers of the Infinite, Cleveland 1963.

  —, Seekers of Tomorrow, New York 1967.

  Alexei Panshin, Heinlein in Dimension, Chicago 1968.

  Michael Pehlke and Norbert Lingfeld, Roboter und Gartenlaube, Munich 1970.

  Martin Schwonke, Vom Staatsroman zur Science Fiction, Stuttgart 1957.

  Darko Suvin ed., Other Worlds, Other Seas, New York 1970.

  Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, Ann Arbor 1960 (ch. 6).

  Donald A. Wollheim, The Universe Makers, New Yor
k 1971.

  The best available anthology is Robert Silverberg ed., The Mirror of Infinity, San Francisco 1970, with critical introductions by various hands to each story.

  12

  The absent paradigm: An introduction to the semiotics of science fiction1

  Marc Angenot

  My aim in this essay is to describe SF as a semiotic practice. That is, I will attempt to provide the kind of theoretical groundwork that seems to me an indispensable preliminary for any consideration of the meaning of SF relative to its social context.

  The modem reader can immediately identify an SF text as such. This implies that there exist certain simple yet essential rules and criteria for doing so. Semiotics can be thought of as the formalization of those rules or criteria. Just as the modern linguist deals methodically with the sort of knowledge that every speaker of a language possesses (albeit unconsciously) by the age of four, so the semiotician endeavors to organize the prior knowledge of literary discourse that the ability to read (or write) necessarily presupposes. SF criticism, however, has persistently ignored the semiotic approach: either because semiotic problems are seen as being too simplistic or (what is more likely) because critics of SF generally have a penchant for philosophical idealism rather than materialism.