by Duncan, Hal
Robert A. Heinlein
This type of definition may adopt a wide or narrow scope in terms of what exactly constitutes realistic speculation, where the boundaries lie between the sciences and the humanities. At its very narrowest we have Campbell rejecting sociology and psychology, establishing the sort of strictures that bind a core of Hard SF to the hard sciences—mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology. At its widest, with the soft sciences considered fair game, all manner of utopian, dystopian and heterotopian fictions founded on politics and ethics may be considered as within the form. But even at its most encompassing, this type of definition remains qualitatively different from scientific fancy or even scientific fabrication in one clear respect: its exclusion of the metaphysical.
The inexplicable, the irrational, the metaphysical is something of a sticking point for some SF writers. Rooted deep in a Rationalist worldview, refusing to accept the limitations of reason, they reject a whole form of conceit allowed by other forms of SF. Where scientific fancy and scientific fabrication are predicated solely on the inclusion of a certain speculative element, this scientistic fabrication is predicated also on the exclusion of another element, often referred to as magic.
It is the premise of science fiction that anything shown shall in principle be interpretable empirically and rationally. In science fiction there can be no inexplicable marvels, no transcendence, no devils or demons—and the patterns of occurrence must be verisimilar.
Stanislaw Lem
This is an SF that many of its advocates will insist defines the core of the genre—an SF where the science must be wholly central and wholly rigourous, and where the metaphysical/magical is absolutely unacceptable. Regardless of the number of works this stricture exiles from the canon, the advocates of scientistic fabrication insist there are no shadows in their world. The universe is, for them, laid flat and bare by reason’s light, there are no shadows anywhere. None of Dick’s dead gods. None of Bradbury’s ghost Martians. There is no mystery that cannot be unravelled in this type of fiction.
Not the easiest sell to the incognoscenti perhaps. There are those who do not find science exciting in and of itself, who are not thrilled by the enigma of theories beyond their understanding, or the sudden moments of comprehension when those theories are made clear through fictive explorations. These readers will be left cold by fiction utterly enrapt with science, if they are not scared off from even reading it by the fear it will be full of calculus and other such mathematical bogeymen. Lacking even a rudimentary understanding of what is or isn’t possible, they may well see the whole narrative problem as irrelevant. If they are not alienated by incomprehension, they may feel utterly deflated by a mundane explanation.
These are not, of course, intrinsic certainties, only inherent risks, and in their determination to apply intellect to the form, the scientistic fabricators have undeniably pushed SF into new territories, beyond the Romantic adventures of scientific fancy, beyond even the “what if” scenarios of scientific fabrication. This is, in part, the worldview that gives us the Mundane SF movement with its resolute commitment to authenticity, not simply as an end in and of itself, rigour for the sake of rigour, but as an antidote to wish-fulfilment, as an ethical dedication to tackling the actual problems of this world’s most likely future(s), addressing issues like global warming in terms of feasible hypotheticals rather than fantasising about aliens and AI. For the scientistic fabricators, to whom fantasy equals fancy, which is to say whimsy as a mere diversion, this is the very real and very important purpose of SF.
Of course, there are those who disagree completely.
Scientific Fabulation
Science fiction is not fiction about science, but fiction which endeavors to find the meaning in science and in the scientific technology we are constructing.
Judith Merril
Definitions of SF are not all predicated on the presence or absence of a certain type of content. In the differentiation between fancy and fabrication it should be clear that much of the distinction between modes is in terms of process rather than content. Where writers treat our scientific culture as a source of metaphor, with one or more scientific fancies exploited as conceits, extended through the body of the narrative, where the science is not merely plot device or structural basis but becomes the locus of theme, the stuff of story, what we have is not just fabrication but fabulation.
In his Strategies of Fantasy, Brian Attebery shows how science fiction uses science as its “megatext.” The nourishing medium, the origin of the imagery, the motive of the narrative, is to be found in the contents, assumptions, and world view of modern science and technology. “Science [writes Attebery] surrounds, supports, and judges SF in much the same way the Bible grounds Christian devotional poetry.”
Ursula K. Le Guin
There is no explicit exclusion of the metaphysical in this SF; it is scientific rather than scientistic. In its thematic focus on the relationship between science and humanity it is arguable that this SF is more likely to treat any metaphysical forces, events or agencies it might utilise as either open to rational explication or of secondary import, but this is not necessarily the case.
With many of the works of Philip K. Dick, the process of fabulation is largely focused on metaphysical conceits, albeit embedded within a context of scientific fabulation (i.e. fabulation using futurology); this does not exclude them from this definition of SF. Where scientistic fabrication often situates the purpose of SF in literal explorations of its conceits, this SF is all about literary exploration.
Playing fast and loose with probability may simply result in the whimsy of scientific fancy, but it is important to remember that even an idea we know to be impossible can have profound import, playing on our desires or fears, tempting or terrifying us. This is why that mode of SF is so thrilling. The shock of the new and the intrigue of complexity are integral aspects of the conceit’s power. Reining in the whimsy can make the process of constructing the narrative around that conceit more rational, more logical, which is where fancy becomes fabrication. Where the conceit is used metaphorically, (or more correctly, pataphorically,) the theme of the fiction extrapolated, developed with the narrative structure—this is where the process becomes fabulation.
[A] fictional exploration of human situations made perceptible by the implications of recent science. Its favourite themes involve the impact of developments or revelations derived from the human or physical sciences upon the people who must live with those revelations or developments.
Robert Scholes
In Jeffrey Ford’s The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, a jaded painter is challenged to paint an accurate portrait of a woman he will never see, constructing his visual image of her from the life story she tells him while hidden behind a screen. Ford’s novel could be tagged as Fantasy, playing as it does with the dream of muses and sibyls, of divination. But as a novel predicated on and explicating its conceit as a source of meaning, it is a work of fabulation.
In Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, a Pulitzer-prize-winning photojournalist begins a documentary on his own family’s arrival in a suburban dream-house, which becomes an exploration of the house’s disturbingly impossible inner architecture, this narrative framed within that of an LA waster who is reconstructing the journals of a dead blind man into an analytic study of this film. Danielewski’s novel could be tagged as Horror, playing as it does with a nightmare of labyrinths and catacombs, of death. But as a novel predicated on and explicating its conceit as a source of meaning, it is a work of fabulation.
Science fiction, then, commonly uses techniques both from the realistic and the fantastic traditions of narrative to tell a story of which a referent, implicit or explicit, is the mind-set, the content, or the mythos of science and technology.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Fantasy and horror, like SF, are rich with such conceits, are often predicated on such conceits. Both, like SF, breach the everyday world of realism with the strange, the unfamiliar, w
ith unrealities which could only be possible in some elsewhen where things work differently. Both, like SF, exploit our emotional reaction to the potentiality of these unrealities being made real; and it is this as much as anything that defines whether a story is seen as SF and/or fantasy and/or horror. Could it happen? Should it happen? Must it never happen? It is because our reactions are complex that these three forms do not just coexist as separate types of imaginative fiction but rather constantly cross-breed, feeding into/off one another. The literary utility of fabulation, the metaphoric focus of it, indeed, is why many works of fabulation are simply labelled magical realism or general fiction.
Where do we distinguish scientific fabulation, then, from fabulation in general? In SF, those conceits, drawn from the field of science, may tend to be more rational, separating SF from fantasy and horror in terms of plausibility. Fantasy and horror may also tend to be more closely aligned with the unconscious and its desires and fears, the fiery stuff of the imagination, less audaciously/arrogantly Promethean than SF which wilfully tries to bend the irrational to its will, hammer it into rational shape, invest it with a clear purpose. Revelling in the intellectual aspects of the conceits rather than the sensational, SF tends to be the form of fabulation least obviously in thrall to the unconscious.
Bester’s PyrE is the conceit of many SF writers, at heart. Writers of this SF are not theoreticians but technicians, less concerned with the futurologies than with the creative application of those as conceits, as tools, the technology of writing itself. At best they are craftsmen and artificers working with what Joyce termed “the smithy of the soul.” This is the process of scientific fabulation and it’s why this SF is a fundamentally modernist enterprise, its best writers, like Bester—like Bester’s character Gully Foyle—part everyman and part Prometheus. It is no coincidence that Bester gives a nod to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in basing his hero’s rhyme, “Gully Foyle is my name…” on that of Joyce’s protagonist, Stephen Dedalus. In The Stars My Destination, Bester tears the text apart towards the end to do his Burning Man justice, a thoroughly modernist technique. The ambitious drive of this SF is what really characterises it, the audacity it has to create and use the wildest of conceits, to concretise the metaphoric, render it pataphor. In that respect, it is a world away from any formulaic fare it is sold beside, bound to like Prometheus manacled to his rock, dreaming of the day those chains crumble away, the day SF shakes off its rusting ties to formula, stands up straight and proud.
Albeit at the same time essentially clinging to that dead hunk of stone for the security it offers.
Scientific fabulation has more traction in the mainstream than any of the modes of SF outlined above. By not focusing on science or on a Romantic adventure plot structure, it becomes more accessible and less generic. The reader only has to accept a few strange conceits, maybe just one Big Idea, and that conceit is developed in the familiar literary mode of extended metaphor. The greatest risk of this mode is that it becomes too abstract and arbitrary for a reader seeking the easy read of a holiday pot-boiler, a reader to whom the concrete metaphors of the conceit remain unparsed, the work read literally, as fancy or fabrication.
In the next mode of SF those conceits are equally as integral, but however abstract they might be they are far from arbitrary. In the SF of the next definition what we find is not simply fabulation but something that engages at a deeper level than the intellectual, a mode of SF not just sensational but profoundly so. The result is not fable but myth.
Soul Fiction
[Science fiction] is the myth-making principle of human nature today.
Lester del Rey
Another type of definition based on the effects of the process treats SF as the mythology of the Modern Age, as the form of fiction which renders physical forces, events and agencies with the same import and to the same purpose as the pre-industrial religious literature rendered metaphysical forces, events and agencies. In other words, SF is not structurally but functionally distinct.
Science fiction is a form of fantastic fiction which exploits the imaginative perspectives of modern science.
David Pringle
This is SF as soul fiction, the mythopoeic mode of writing that creates, intentionally or otherwise, the mythology of the Modern Era. This is where SF and fantasy converge most clearly, even where fantasy is closely-defined in terms of the affective import of its imagery, the evocation of not just incredulity but awe, Yeats’s terrible beauty. It is this emotional resonance that is at the heart of the mythic, the impact of the marvellous and/or the monstrous, in imagery charged with desire and/or dread.
Science fiction frequently tries to imagine what life would be like on a plane as far above us as we are above savagery; its setting is often of a kind that appears to us technologically miraculous. It is thus a mode of romance with a strong tendency to myth.
Northrop Frye
The tendency that Frye identifies, for romance to become myth, is the tendency for the imagery of awe to become archetypal. If not innate, not natural metaphors as Jung would have it, archetypes can be understood as, at the very least, root metaphors of the culture, resonant metaphors of the psyche primed by it. One might well understand them, I would argue, as recursive metaphors, with multiple signifiers pointing to each other (earth pointing to mother, mother pointing to earth, for example), setting up a feedback loop of connotative import, with the resultant icon-combos gaining a yet further intensity of import from their utility as signifiers of components of the psyche—persona, anima, id, self, ego, shadow, senex.
Science fiction is the myth of machine civilization, which, in its utopian extrapolation, it tends to glorify.
Mark R. Hillegas
Where such archetypes inhabit its marvels, SF becomes soul fiction, enacting the psychodramas and oneiric odysseys of the Modern Era. So we find Bester’s The Stars My Destination not just as a retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo but as a re-enactment of the Prometheus myth, with Gully Foyle as thief of fire, thief of PyrE, and distributor of it to humanity. Insofar as fantasy and horror can and often do work in the same mythopoeic manner, the three become functionally equivalent, the main distinction(s) lying simply in SF’s preference for the contemporary iconography of the Machine Age over the retrograde pseudo-historical iconography more common in fantasy, or in the tendencies of fantasy and horror to become rapt in desire and fear, to cast the mythic in a simplistic positive or negative role, to ease the terrible beauty of awe more towards the beauty or the terror.
For the middlebrow, middle-class reader of contemporary realism set at the kitchen-sink or in the drawing-room, a reader perhaps looking more for melodrama than for myth, this soul fiction may bear little relation to their mundane lives. They don’t want profundity; they want perception, the witty observational insights of High Fidelity or Bridget Jones’s Diary. More concerned about their work-life and relationship issues, they don’t want mythic resonance, universal import; they want break-ups and break-downs, mid-life crises and monetary problems. This sense of irrelevance may well be deepened by the key risk of soul fiction, the tendency for it to degenerate into crude monomyth and become indistinguishable from Romance, to all intents and purposes. As much as the Hero’s Journey can be read as a fictional enacting of the individuation process, the endless regurgitations of it serve less as psychodramas leading the reader to maturity than as attempts to extend adolescence through a never-ending succession of retellings of the same old rites-of-passage story, “The Emperor of Everything,” as Spinrad put it.
The attempt to redress the risk of irrelevance by humanising the archetypal, grounding it in wider stories of societies and politics, wars and rebellions that are not simply a single Hero’s psychodramatic tale, are a constituent factor in the next mode of SF.
Spectaculist Fabrication
Stories and spectacle are what command attention in the cultural commons—which is just to say that the exploration of the representational power of lang
uage is where the real power is at. (And there’s no social or aesthetic canvas better, I personally think, than epic fantasy).
R. Scott Bakker
The misconceived conflations of fantasy with Epic Fantasy and of Epic Fantasy with the formulated regurgitations of the Hero’s Journey born from derivations and degradations of soul fiction obscure the centrality that the epic form has its place in SF as much as in fantasy. If we ignore the content-based definitions that lump distinct aesthetic idioms together as “fat fantasy” while disregarding the equivalent “fat SF,” we are in a better position to build a picture of a type of SF with its own processes and purposes, akin to those we have identified but distinguishable in its own right. This epic SF (or SF/F) is what I term spectaculist fabrication.
The spectaculist fabrication of epic SF is functionally identical to that of Fantasy or Alternate History, the difference being largely in the nature of the conceit—hypothetical as opposed to metaphysical or counterfactual—rather than in how or whether the conceit is utilised. Whether excused by convention, explicated via exhaustive worldbuilding, or some mixture of the two, the conceits of this mode serve to fabricate an elsewhen in which story-as-spectacle can be unleashed. That process of fabrication is more obvious in the secondary world fiction drawing on the extensible chivalric romance tradition of works like Amadis de Gaula, building marvellous backdrops, CGI grandiosities of castles, mountains and battles against which the human-level drama takes place. But it is there to be found also in the serial Space Opera form.
