Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  Vulgar manifestations of the sf mode are even more one-sided than this portrait of a narrative field struggling with internal tensions and antinomies might suggest. “Sci-fi” (“skiffy”) is now more common than sf, for an opportunistic market has forced a return to the 1930s.

  For all that, science fiction’s “glorious eclecticism,” notes the feminist critic Sarah Lefanu, “with its mingling of the rational discourse of science with the pre-rational language of the unconscious—for SF borrows from horror, mythology and fairy tale—offers a means of exploring the myriad ways” in which the social construction of feminine identity is accomplished.7 What is more, it allows those ways to be put in question.

  So it is clear that sf need not inevitably restrict its ambitions to “Instant Whip” whimsy. Implicit in the kinds of stories it tells, and the ways it tells them, is the clue we seek for the specific ways in which science fictions codes and transcodes the discourses from which it springs: the rhetorics and practices of the sciences and the humane arts, of wishful compensation fantasies which disclose the lacunae of our lives and the social order within which we live those lives, and of elaborated speculations which sometimes go beyond wish into aspiration and artistry. Geoff Ryman’s wonderful The Child Garden, say, with its rich reverberations of The Divine Comedy, dystopian tradition, and hard sf usages alike, comes close to genuine sf that is simultaneously literature, as do John Crowley’s late fictions (poised uncertainly between hermeticism, sf, and fantasy).

  There have been abundant attempts to define sf in terms of mimeticism in the service of imagination, which suggests that sf operates metaphoric strategies via metonymic tactics. In its very structure, sf thus constitutes a break from literature’s cycle of formal polarities from metaphor to metonymy and back, avoiding the alternative postmodernist traps of unchecked babble and tongue-tied silence.8

  On this account, the strategy of realism is centrally metonymic. In its attempts to “represent the real world,” realist textuality (John Updike is a premier exemplar, as is Robert Stone) enacts an epistemological fragmentation and reconstitution: it builds strings of signifiers which themselves are chosen for their contiguity with interacting elements in the socially/linguistically constructed Umwelt. Sf textuality, by contrast (Delany’s oeuvre, especially, but really everything from Heinlein’s Beyond This Horizon to, say, Zindell’s Neverness), is grounded in a different subjunctivity,9 one in which metonymy passes first through cascades of suspended paradigm sets, detached and sent aloft from any last vestige of quotidian referentiality.

  Yet the process is very far from solipsistic. Christine Brooke-Rose provides a germinal account of its principles of operation in several theoretical discussions of postmodernist sf novels (McElroy’s Plus, Vonnegut’s Sirens of Titan), comparing their mechanisms with those of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.10 Regrettably, she blurs her most telling insight.

  Her poetics of the fantastic starts with a modification and compression of Philippe Hamon’s 1973 study of the mechanisms of reading,11 one parameter of which is the parallel story or mega-text:

  [T]he realistic narrative is hitched to a megastory (history, geography), itself valorized, which doubles and illuminates it, creating expectations on the line of least resistance through a text already known, usually as close as possible to the reader’s experience. Exoticism is reduced to the familiar. This gives points of anchorage, allows an economy of description and insures a general effect of the real that transcends any actual decoding since the references are not so much understood as simply recognised as proper names (p. 243).

  Most of Hamon’s parameters are shared with conventional sf, but the mega-text or parallel story is not, Brooke-Rose believes; or not to any great extent. Her reasoning is deceptively direct.

  If the function of the parallel story is to evoke shared verities and commonplaces (however provisional and arbitrary these might be from the standpoint of a deconstructive critic, cultural relativist, or epistemological anarchist), providing behind every item in a syntagm a certified and secure paradigm of references, how could this procedure be mimicked in sf, where many of the lexical items have no “real-world” references? She grants that an sf story or novel “usually creates a fictional historico-geographico-sociological megatext but leaves it relatively vague, concentrating on technical marvels” (p. 243). Thus, Tolkien’s fantasy compensates for this lack of external referentiality by providing its own lumbering mega-text:

  [The Lord of the Rings], like SF but more so, is particularly interesting in that there is such a megatext, not pre-existent but entirely invented, yet treated with the utmost seriousness and in great detail, thus destroying the element of recognition and hence readability which this feature provides in the realistic novel, and causing on the contrary a plethora of information and the collapse of the referential code. [. . .]

  That is to say, it is treated as if it existed, except that instead of allowing an economy of description and ensuring a general effect of the real, it needs on the contrary to be constantly explained (since it is unfamiliar) [. . .] (p. 243).

  So its function is radically unlike that of any “realist” mega-text. “Since the megatext is not ‘already known,’ it cannot fulfil the readability requirement, but on the contrary, produces a pseudo-exoticism, much of which can be savoured simply as such, rather than tactically understood [. . .]” (p. 248).

  Tolkien fans are not alone in savoring the details of invented worlds and peoples (quite a different pleasure to that found in relishing those invented “realistic” biographies known as “fiction”). Star Trek enthusiasts have for years gathered together garbed in the costume of starship crews, complete with weapons and “Beam me up, Scotty” communicators. Manuals showing the design features of starships are purchased and pored over. Members of the Society for Creative Anachronism, who tend to be fans of both sf and genre fantasy, not only dress in mock mediaeval garb but adopt appropriate personae and have at one another with blunt instruments. The extension of sf and fantasy mega-texts into board and computer gaming has developed into a series of virtual cults, whose mega-texts, in a continuous state of communal expansion, are far more ornate than those once-and-for-all histories and genealogies which, in Brooke-Rose’s tart words, “have given much infantile happiness to the Tolkien clubs and societies, whose members apparently write to each other in Elvish” (p. 247).

  The element in sf which Brooke-Rose appears to have slighted, at a severe cost to her analysis, is the extensive generic mega-text built up over fifty years, even a century, of mutually layered sf texts. Using a similar strategy of semiological compensation, or redundancy and over-coding, which Hamon and Brooke-Rose discern in realism, the sf mega-text works by embedding each new work, seen by Delany12 as a self-structuring web of non-mundane signifiers and syntagms, in an even vaster web of interpenetrating semantic and tropic givens or vectors.

  Consider the astonishing amount of tacit detailed knowledge invoked without a moment’s thought in decoding the second paragraph of Robert Stone’s contemporary Outerbridge Reach:

  When the last week of February came in mild and spring-scented as April, Browne decided to deliver a boat to Annapolis. He passed under the Verrazano Bridge shortly after dawn on the last Wednesday in February. With Sandy Hook ahead, he cut his auxiliary and hoisted the mainsail and genoa.

  For an Australian, the first remark suggests delusion, since April is early autumn. The place-names aid orientation, and the nautical lexicon (opaque to one who, like me, hasn’t a clue what a “genoa” is) conveys authority as well as fact. Above all, the text situates itself within the actual American universe.

  Contrast this with Zindell’s Neverness:

  My ship did not fall out into the center of the moons. Instead, I segued into a jungle-like decision tree . . . Each individual ideoplast was lovely and unique. The representation of the fixed-point theorem, for instance, was like a coiled ruby necklace. As I built my proof, the coil joined with feathery, diamond fibres of
the first Lavi mapping lemma.

  These star pilots, the sf-trained reader understands via a many-plyed reconstruction from the mega-text, are taking their ships through windows in hyperspace by proving theorems! It’s an audacious and shivery pleasure to those who know the trick to decoding such sentences is not by way of the conventional dictionary and encyclopedia—although it is true that recognizing the fixed-point theorem (which governs the transformation of one set of points into an isomorphic set) helps you appreciate a sense of recursion in what is being described/constructed.

  Some of these have been dubbed “icons” by Gary K. Wolfe;13 they include the spaceship, the robot and the monster, as well as paradigmatic items shared with the “real” world lexicon, such as the city, the wasteland and the barrier:

  Like a stereotype or a convention, an icon is something we are willing to accept because of our familiarity with the genre, but unlike ordinary conventions, an icon often retains its power even when isolated from the context of conventional narrative structures. (p. 16)

  It is, then, to be conceived as more nearly a narrative archetype; not an archaic trace so much as a proleptic one, or at any rate one in a linguistically unprecedented subjunctive state.

  While Wolfe’s suggestion is provocative, it is important to see what an iconography of sf does not propose. None of the candidates (alien, robot, spaceship, etc.) has a single, univocal conventional weight or meaning even within a given generic timeframe or publishing regime. If robots are seen as soulless and threatening in the 1930s, Asimov reconstructs them a decade later as rule-governed and sweet-natured (though not every writer follows his lead; Clarke re-reconstructs them two decades on as murderous (2001’s HAL) or rather, on second thoughts, baffled by Hofstadterian aporia (the version in 2010); Lem, in Poland, makes them the allegorical focus of comical but profound parables of “cosmic constructors”; in the 1980s and ’90s, Benford (especially the chip-augmented humans and fused organism-machines of his Great Sky River and Tides of Light) and many cyberpunk authors (especially William Gibson, with his data cowboys jacked into cyberspace), blend human and machine into a disturbing symbiosis; still other writers, like opportunistic Darwinian species, develop and invest every possible modulation.

  Yet all these variants bear certain family resemblances, and tend to cohere about a limited number of narrative vectors. Wolfe was not unaware of this dissemination within his schemata:

  such transformations and combinations of the favorite images of the genre become like variations on a theme, with writers working from a relatively limited number of consensual images to create a vast and complex body of fiction that nevertheless often rests upon the assumption of reader familiarity with the fundamental icons of the genre (p. xiv).

  But that familiarity, so necessary in alerting trained readers to the appropriate reception codes and strategies for concretizing an sf text, maintains at its heart a de-familiarizing impulse absolutely pivotal to the genre’s specificity. Basic to the very definition of most genres is stability in characteristic situations, emblems, actions and types of conflict and personality-response—it is why one chooses to discern/construct a category out of a catalogue. Sf is different, being (at least by vocation) grounded in a novum. Discussing the literal iconography of sf film, Vivian Sobchack stresses this feature of sf by contrast to the Gangster or the Western genres:

  [B]oth these genres are visually circumscribed by an awareness of history, the Western even more so than the Gangster film. This linkage of situation and character, objects, settings, and costumes to a specific past creates visual boundaries to what can be photographed and in what context. This historical awareness, which leads at least to an imaginative if not actual authenticity, demands repetition and creates consistency throughout these genres. This is not true, however, of the SF film, a genre which is unfixed in its dependence on actual time and/or place.14

  The railroad, for Sobchack, has a quite different iconic weight to the spaceship. “From its first silent chugging to the clangorous present, the railroad in the history of the Western film has not altered in its physical particularity or its specific significance; it is, indeed, an icon” (p. 68). But “there is no consistent cluster of meanings provided by the image of a spaceship” (Idem). From the sleek aerofoil Noah’s Ark of When Worlds Collide to the sublime or celebratory UFO in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, from the clinical spinal column of 2001’s Discovery to the adventurous “dog-fighting” modules of the Star Wars films which naturalize the future in the image of a glamorous and heroic past, the iconographical weight and density alters radically.15 The spacecraft is a means of transportation which enables an entire cosmology of narratives, positive, negative and neutral in moral and aesthetic charge.

  In what sense, then, can it be an icon? In the minimal sense, at least, that the spaceship is not a railroad, nor any other known, assimilated component of the quotidian (except, precisely, in its now-extensive iconicity). A vast range of connotations hang in generic hyperspace above or behind its manifestation in a given text, drawn together by association and practice into certain most-probable-use vectors, but the image or concept of the sf emblem remains parsable as a new noun or verb, a signifier which posts notice to us of an “absent signified,” an empirically empty but imaginatively laden paradigm.16

  Still, there are constraints. Marie Maclean notes: “The reader’s development of the missing paradigm may be idiosyncratic, but it remains limited by the syntagmatic aspects of the narrative” (p. 171), as does the use within any given text of any given iconic signifier by the grand exfoliating syntagm of the sf mega-text. At the very least, we can agree with Wolfe that sf’s icons

  consolidate the “sense of wonder” and offer readers some word or image that will assure them that what they are reading is in some way connected to the vast body of other science-fiction works.

  The use of conventional symbols or icons is one of the most convenient methods for science-fiction writers to make this connection, for they embody not only the dialectic of known and unknown but also the germ of recognizable formulas. They are a message in code to the initiated reader and an emblem of dissociation to the uninitiated. (Wolfe, p. 27)17

  It is the creation of such a shared, icon-echoing, redundant and inconsistent mega-text in the collective intertextuality of those works we name “sf” which gives this kind of writing its power, a power verging on obsession or dream and only available elsewhere in other somewhat comparable varieties of textuality (genre fantasy, myth, fairytale, surrealism) and then just because of their resonances with primordial—if often culture constrained—signification nexi (key cultural aporia, in myth; key psychosocial development episodes, in fairytale; dream states, in surrealism).

  One is reminded of Bachelard’s speculations on the elements (literally) of science and poetry, while reading as well the kinds of objections raised to them. Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962), at one time a tremendously influential historian and philosopher of science, proposed a “psychoanalysis of matter,” using a sort of proto-structuralist aesthetic of dream and reverie. He proposed water as wine’s binary opposite, for instance (though Roland Barthes argued in Mythologies that milk rather than water had become the cultural “other” to wine; in Australia it would, of course, be Foster’s beer). Culler has commented wryly on the psychoanalytic motifs Bachelard brought to literary studies “as a way of analyzing not authors but images, whose power is said to derive from their exploitation of a primordial and archetypal experience—not unlike that of a nineteenth-century village childhood of the kind, by a curious coincidence, that Bachelard himself enjoyed.18 Some of sf’s favorite icons clearly work this way—one thinks of recurrent tropes in the sweet pastorales of Clifford Simak19—but Culler is not wholly dismissive: Bachelard’s doctrine

  has the virtue of falsifiability. We dispute it by showing that the force and significance of images depend more on specific ideological or differential functions within a text than on universal associations:
that images of earth are not always ‘stables et tranquilles’ nor walls and houses welcoming and protective.

  Moreover Bachelard’s hypothesis leads us to argue that much poetry does not simply evoke or invoke an immediate and “natural” experience of the world but works much as Bachelard claims science does; breaking down immediate intuitions, deconstructing a universe of archetypical clichés, and reinventing the world by giving it an order which is discursive rather than immediately affective. (Idem.)

  It is this same fulcrum upon which any theory of sf iconography teeters: icons in a literature of cognitive estrangement must be intrinsically destabilized and multivocal (in a degree which outruns the always-already ruptured dissemination postulated by deconstruction for every act of language; that is, these icons are unstable at a higher level of discursive strategy, as science’s always-provisional hypotheses must be, by contrast to the graven doctrinal character of traditional religious claims, for example), yet they undoubtedly exist as discursive attractors, about which narratives orbit in their contained but unpredictable paths. And while it is important to grasp that they are not archetypes in any timeless and universal sense (though their invocation of the known and unknown, stressed by Wolfe, comes close to such a station), this fact does not detract from their salience in helping account for the specificity and idiosyncratic coding of sf texts.

  In consequence, only readers inducted into the sf mega-text web or intertext (only “native speakers,” as it were) will be competent to retrieve/construct anything like the full semiotic density of a given text, most of which will overflow or escape the “realistically”-sanctioned definitions of the words in the fiction, not to mention their unorthodox schemata of combination. This is certainly not immediately obvious to the inexperienced reader, and helps explain why many capable but uninitiated readers recoil in utter bafflement at sf-conventionalized rhetorical moves in the narrative, as well as from a textual surface which seems bizarrely under-determined (a difficulty usually experienced as defective characterization, which, as it happens, is usually the case, though not as a deficiency). Estrangement indeed!