Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  In A Trap on Zarkass (Piège sur Zarkass, Paris 1958) by Stefan Wul, for example, the Terran hero looks down on a native Zarkassian:

  One of his arms looked faded pink. The other one was glowing, with a new brown skin - shining as the peel of a fruit. When passing by, Lawrence stepped over a relinquished piece of epiderm . . . . He yelled: if you go on peeling like this before me, I shall kick your ass.” (chapt. 1)

  Such a fragment is intelligible only by filling in a “rule of intercom-prehension” that the author takes care not to provide immediately. The Zarkassians, vaguely humanoid beings, slough regularly. The reader’s attention is attracted not specifically to the superficial anecdote—the altercation between Terrestrial and Zarkassian—but to what is presupposed and not immediately explained: this queer biological feature of the alien, and also the relations between that aborigine and the colonialist-cum-racist Earthling (here the reader may draw upon the empirical paradigms of his own world to supplement the information given in the text). However, the conjecture does not stop here: other Zarkassian features can be correlated to the biological trait already mentioned. The reader necessarily embarks upon a series of expanding conjectures. At the same time, he elaborates a structure which is not integrated in the plot, a structure through which the narrative sequence seems to run without ever showing it exhaustively.

  The linear plot evokes a tabular paradigm, the complexity and limits of which it gives merely a notion. This might become a rhetorical feature peculiar to the kind of “realism” required in SF. In a fiction set on an alien planet, what represents for the “Terran reader” the utmost strangeness must be perfectly trivial and banal for the Alien narrator. It would therefore be totally abnormal for the narrator to stress this obvious feature at the outset. It seems more “realistic” that such data be given en passant, late in the narrative, and in a rather indirect way. A number of readers of Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed may not have noticed that the members of the Cetian race on Urras and Annares have their bodies and faces covered with hair. For why should Shevek, the narrator, state (for him) the obvious? He does so only in a very enigmatic way when meeting the Ambassador from Terra:

  The woman’s skin was yellow-brown, like ferrous earth, and hairless, except on the scalp; not shaven, but hairless. (chapt. 11)

  Even where SF features the first meeting of an Earthling and an Alien, although the latter tries to “explain” as much as he can (if he is supposed to be in a cooperative mood), there are always basic value systems that will slip his mind: they are at the same time too obvious and too complex. And one value judgment in the text is never isolated: it carries with it contiguous hierarchies, institutions, a whole society in capsule form. In this sense, the reading of the text requires a kind of drifting: the semiotics of SF calls forth a centrifugal model.

  The author could, of course, try to explain systematically every datum, but this would be tedious and contrary to the “rules” of the genre. SF novels are elaborated in a way that makes them resemble a Hall of Mirrors in an amusement park—a labyrinth of glass which disorients the passers by strolling through it. An immanent aesthetics of SF is implied here: if the mechanical transposition of “this-worldly” paradigms is sufficient to account for every narrative utterance, we have a witless, even infantile, type of SF. If, on the contrary, a maximum distance is maintained between the empirical and the “exotopic” paradigms, although the alien rules tend to organize themselves into a consistent whole, the reader’s pleasure increases.

  In The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula Le Guin begins the narrative with the following incipit (I assume that the incipit of a given text contains clues for its decipherment, what French sociocriticism calls its “conditions of readability”):

  From the Archives of Hain. Transcript of Ansible Document 01-01101-934-2 Gethen: To the Stabile on Ollul: Report from Genli Ai, first Mobile on Gethen/Winter, Hainish Cycle 93, Ekumenical Year 1490-97.

  The non-aficionado will consider this fragment to be gibberish (and rightly from his point of view). However, all these fictive words do not only convey a feeling of remoteness. Through their eventual repetition in various contexts, they lead to the elaboration of a paradigm: the envoy of the League explores institutional systems more than actual places. Pleasure rests not so much in the final structure extrapolated as in its progressive reconstruction. Summaries never give a good idea of the value of an SF narrative. They cannot take into account the numerous possible meanings hidden in it. What Michel Butor says of Finnegans Wake can also be said, mutatis mutandis, of “significant” SF: “Each word will become like a railway switching device, and we will go from one to the other through a multitude of routes.”8

  By virtue of the aims inherent in the genre, the SF writer does not endeavor to thoroughly subvert the production of paradigms; but he does use a technique that may lead to a powerful critique of them. A certain skepticism as to the limits of human knowledge—a skepticism present in contemporary SF, and particularly in the work of Stanislaw Lem—finds expression in Solaris (1961) as precisely the fruitless creation of paradigms. The central theme of Lem’s fiction concerns the Sisyphean labor of taxonomies and nomenclatures. The object of the story is not so much the mysterious planet Solaris as “Solaristics” itself, the science dealing with it, contained in the thousand-volume series “Solariana.” Hundreds of definitions, schemes, hypotheses, models, and taxonomies pass through the text in brief and fragmentary allusions. Here is the missing paradigm. But the author is very careful in judging the relation between this “knowledge” and its object:

  Giese devised a plain descriptive terminology, supplemented by terms of his own invention, and although these were inadequate and sometimes clumsy, it has to be admitted that no semantic system is as yet available to illustrate the behavior of the Ocean. The “tree-mountains,” “extensors,” “fungoid,” “mimoids,” “symmetriads” and “asymmetriads,” “vertebride” and “agilus” are artificial, linguistically awkward terms, but they do give some impression of Solaris to anyone who has only seen the planet in bluffed photographs and incomplete films. (chapt. 8)

  Contemporary SF unfolds in its very structure, as a parabolic double, its own cognitive project. The “realism” of SF resides in a paradigmatic delusion: codes, series, coordinates, systems, are simultaneously absent yet indispensable for the coherence of the syntagm. That is what Lem admits and claims in the above-quoted sentence.

  5 The missing paradigm, the empirical paradigm, and the referent

  The reader projects onto the text semantic, logical, and anthropological structures taken from his empirical world. This fact does not contradict my general hypothesis.

  By analogy, contiguity, or inversion, paradigms of the empirical world will be—have to be—used to interpret the SF text. SF criticism has invested a lot of energy in trying to measure the distance between the empirical and fictive worlds. Such a focus might be quite useful in its place, but it tends to assume that the empirical world is homogenous and that a verbal construction can be compared right away to the empirical reality. This diverts analysis away from the semiotics of textual structures. No doubt, links exist between the worldview of the author’s society and the fictive topoï since without such links the fictional world would remain arbitrary and unintelligible. Yet the first task of the SF critic is to identify precisely the SF “world” as something estranged from the reader’s empirical world and possessing its own rules. Even the question of verisimilitude, as a tacit contract in SF, is strongly related to the metaphorical, metonymical, and other transformations from the empirical cognitive systems to the paradigms of the story.

  For the SF writer the “map” and the “ground” are necessarily confused (small wonder Van Vogt and others were fascinated by Korzybski’s general semantics). How many maps have been drawn by SF authors, from that of Lincoln Island (Jules Verne) to those of Urras and Anarres (Ursula Le Guin)? The veracity of the story has been implied in the coherence of its codes. This mi
ngling has often been used in eighteenth-century utopias. The European traveller, upon his arrival on the Utopian island, would ask his wise mentor: how do you say “steal,” “rape,” “murder”? We do not have such words, would be the answer. And the traveller would then conclude with amazement: What? No robberies! No rape! No murder!

  At the beginning of this essay, I noted that the linguistic sign does not “hide” or “conceal” anything. If it denotes, it does so through its paradigmatic position, through the semantic universe which as a whole is coextensive with the phenomenal world. “We cannot say that language creates reality (in the literal sense of the word ‘create’) nor that language makes a copy of reality (in any sense of the word ‘copy’).”9 The truthfulness of language is twofold: external (in its reference to the empirical world), and internal (in the operative character of its code). SF takes advantage of this cleavage between the signified and the referent, concepts which are incompatible yet necessarily linked and taken for each other. My intent has been to show that SF produces a paradigmatic mirage, and consequently entails a conjectural mode of reading. The consideration of such traits immanent to SF is an essential step in understanding the genre. Semiotic description is far from being the alpha and omega of literary criticism; but to pass it by is to deal with the text in an idealistic way that greatly increases the chances of being taken in by the semiotic lures which I have tried to identify.

  Notes

  1. A different version of this article was published in French in Poétique, 33: Feb. 1978.

  I am grateful to the Canada Council for a two-year grant for research into SF history and theory.

  2. See the list of SF texts quoted above.

  3. Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale. (Paris: Payot, 1915) translated as Course in General Linguistics. (New York: McGraw Hill, 1966) Il, chap. 4, sect. 2.

  4. This statement is inspired by Luis Prieto, Pertinence et pratique (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1975), especially chapt. 1.

  5. Myra E. Barnes, Linguistics and Language in SF – Fantasy. (New York: Arno Press, 1975).

  6. From a synchronic point of view the fact that these meanings do not relate to the same etymology is irrelevant.

  7. Georges Mounin, “La Communication avec 1’espace,” Introduction à la sémiologie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1970).

  8. Michel Butor, Introduction aux fragments de Finnegans Wake. (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), p. 12 (My translation).

  9. Adam Schaff, “Langage et réalité,” Problèmes du langage. (Paris: Gallimard, 1966).

  SF texts quoted

  Félix Bodin. le Roman de l’avenir. Paris: Lecointe & Pougin, 1835.

  B.R. Bruss. Complot Vénus-Terre. Paris: Fleuve noir, 1963. (My translation).

  Sterling E. Lanier. Hiero’s Journey. New York: Bantam, 1973.

  Ursula K. Le Guin. The Left Hand of Darkness. New York: Ace Books, 1969.

  —. The Dispossessed. New York: Harper & Row, 1974.

  Stanislaw Lem. Solaris. New York: Berkeley Publishing Corp., 1970. (original: Warsaw, 1961).

  [N. Restif de la Bretonne]. les Posthumes, lettres reçues apres la mort du Mari par la Femme qui le croit à Florence. Par Feu Cazotte [forged attribution]. Paris: Duchène, 1802. 4 Vols. (My translation.)

  Albert Robida. le Vingtième Siècle. Paris: G. Decaux, 1883.

  Stefan Wul. “Piège sur Zarkass,” Oeuvres. Paris: Laffont, 1970. (My translation.)

  13

  Reading sf as a mega-text

  Damien Broderick

  There is an apparent paradox at the heart of science fiction’s narrative method. Unlike most other literary projects, sf’s inventions are alienatingly distanced from any consensual Weltbild outside their own very elaborate intertext—yet the mode is carefully mimetic (rather than metaphoric) in address, and explicitly cognitive, centering on systems of knowledge (rather than unchecked or surreal imagination). Sf insists on the literal level.

  Nor is the function of estrangement in sf identical with more familiar textual strategies. With Roland Barthes, for example, we can value history “for the strangeness of other epochs and what they can teach us about the present [. . .]. History is interesting and valuable precisely for its otherness.”1 It is an ambiguous project, of course:

  We need to develop the historical sense [. . .] into a real sensual delight. When our theatres perform plays of other periods they like to annihilate distance, fill in the gap, gloss over the differences. But what comes then of our delight in comparisons, in distance, in dissimilarity—which is at the same time a delight in what is close and proper to ourselves? (Bertolt Brecht)2

  Does sf then, above all else, write the narrative of the other/s? If this suggestion is taken in a spirit of description (though hardly of definition), a negating (perhaps demystifying) alternative is instantly inscribed in its logical shadow: that sf writes, rather, the narrative of the same, as other.

  Consider Phillip Mann’s The Eye of the Queen, an extremely effective dramatization of the central sf notion of alienness: the quiddity of nonhuman consciousness in three-and-a-half meter tall aliens who shed their skins, reproduce asexually, and spend much of their time patched into the spiritual broadcasts of beings resembling angels (a trope echoed in Card’s Xenocide). For all their alienness, though, Mann’s Pe-Ellians resemble a child’s idea of human adults: very large, very mysterious, custodial but selfishly dedicated to the incomprehensible, and (of course and perhaps above all) the focus of enormously confusing thoughts and feelings about gender and sex, usually dealt with at the conscious level (for the child) by repression.

  So sf, like fairy tales, clearly transforms and subdues elements of forgotten experience that linger to trouble us, allowing us to articulate these repressed perceptions. In this regard, it familiarizes the estranged. Yet it also allows us to speak (and relish) the unspeakable, to sanitize malign wishes by presenting the known under a new label. Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s Footfall was palpably a metaphor for US/Soviet nuclear war. Their interstellar invaders are a herd species, a fact gratifying to the commissars before Russia, too, gets pounded. It’s a hymn to grit, xenophobia, manifest destiny and the Joy of Nuclear War, capturing the Reagan ’80s even more vividly than the Rambo movies.

  Gregory Renault locates this co-opting move at the core of Darko Suvin’s cognitive estrangement model:3 “The claim is that naturalist fiction portrays the Same (author’s empirical environment) by the Same (‘exact recreation’), while estranged fiction portrays the Same by the Other [. . .]” (p. 115). But any act of signification “selects from available potential signifiers; the strictest attempt at representation is therefore always an interpretation, an artistically mediated re-presentation or re-construction of ‘the real’ (itself signifier as well as signified)” (p. 116). Sf’s special character must therefore be in part to extend the range of potential signifiers. Citing Brian Stableford, Renault observes that sf is reliant on “an ever-changing supply of images which ‘gradually change so as always to appear novel while never becoming truly strange’” (p. 136).

  For sf’s amusing (or shocking) distortions and defamiliarizations of the present consensus world can be merely random, catch-penny. As Kim Stanley Robinson notes: “when this is done regularly, as it was during the 1930s, then the distortions are meaningless individually, and cumulatively they tend to reinforce the assumptions and values of the dominant culture of our time, for assumptions and values survive this sort of distortion and are presented as existing unchanged, thousands of years into the future.”4

  Unsympathetic commentators have regularly advanced this general point with a killing flourish, evidently in the belief that sf criticism has never thought of it. Gerald Graff, in his assault on poststructuralist and postmodernist trends in fiction and theory, is unmistakeably of this view:

  Might not the effect of radical disorientation and cognitive estrangement be to confuse or disarm critical intelligence rather than to focus it? The question is never asked. [.
. .]

  It does not follow that such a work induces its audience to see things more critically. [Estrangement effects] discovered by recent critics in the conventions of science fiction may result in a dulling of the audience’s sense of reality, in shell-shocked acceptance rather than criticial intransigence. The “models for the future” celebrated by Scholes and other critics of science fiction may stimulate escapist fantasies rather than critical thinking—all the more probably if these models are inserted into an already uncritical, fad-worshipping mass culture. [. . .] Whether fantasy makes us more critical or merely more solipsistic and self-indulgent depends finally on whether it is accountable to something that is not fantasy.5

  Graff’s critique is not without force, the more so today, over a decade later, as paperback racks replace traditional sf with an endless succession of 1500-page Tolkienesque trilogies. (Graff here conflates sf and genre fantasy, and might today add horror; I am prepared to do the same for the sake of the argument and because most sf specialty stores and their customers blur the distinction.) He is quite wrong, however, in supposing that “the question is never asked.” Darko Suvin himself, for example, has recently summarized this aporia nicely:

  SF can be grasped as a genre in an unstable equilibrium or dynamic compromise between two factors. The first is its cognitive—philosophical and political—potentiality as a genre that grows out of the subversive, lower-class form of “inverted world,” within the horizons of knowledge and liberation. The second is a cluster of powerful upper and middle-class ideologies that has, in the great majority of texts, sterilized such potential horizons by contaminating them with mystifications which preclude significant presentations of truly other relationships, with the horizons of power and repression.6