Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

by Duncan, Hal

  Emphasis on the was. (Or might have been would be more apposite, coulda woulda shoulda been. In stepping through a door into a conjured elsewhen, we’re always already entering a territory of argument. In that breach of the possible, we’ve always already sacrificed the actual for that quirk of narrative, for the sake of story. Still…emphasis on the past tense.)

  Don’t misunderstand me. It’s not that I’m sitting down in a booth in the SF Café, firing up my laptop, tapping out a grandiose proclamation on the “death of science fiction” as a start-point. It’s just that…the SF Café is a whole other scene to the Science Fiction Bar and Café that it once was. That elsewhen scene of then is gone, the territory so transformed over the years that I’m entering as an alien, infiltrator of a past that is another world.

  From where I’m sitting now, I’d be a fool to say that what I’m talking about is the science fiction of that elsewhen. At best it might be classed as SF—the S, for me, simply standing for strange, while the F might even stand for fictions, plural, to cast it as non-generic a grouping as queer readers or barking dogs. And both words, for me, shrug off the upper case initial of a proper noun, a nominal label for this nation or that neighbourhood.

  This is not a historical study of science fiction, not by a long shot; at best you can expect a figurative sociography of sorts, an exploration of the broader terrain by which I hope to navigate a course to the strange fictions I’m far more interested in. Nor should you expect a treatise on the nature of science fiction, not by that label, not a coherent and unbiased one; rather this is an argument with that label, a story of why I find it ultimately unsustainable.

  There are two flavours of definition for this science fiction stuff, you see—open and closed. The former I’m okay with, the latter…not so much. By the time we’re done here, maybe you’ll understand why.

  In the open definition, we take a laissez-faire approach. We might characterise this science fiction stuff as a family of works which do this or that, but we’re happy to admit that those features (whatever they might be) are neither essential nor unique to the genre; there are works which might be science fiction and might not. Hell, when we call it a genre, what we really mean is just…a field of fiction. Like indie music, right? Which could be anything from Arcade Fire to Adam Green, Zero 7 to the Zutons. At its most open, the definition is empty, in fact, all that’s left the two figurae of the label SF.

  What is SF?

  It is, as they say, whatever I point to when I say, SF.

  In the closed definitions of Science Fiction, that thumbnail descriptor becomes a stamp of commercial or aesthetic identity, carved with clean edges—hence the capitals large and small to signal not just a proper noun but a brand. If the open definitions treat science fiction as a genre like indie music, Science Fiction is a Genre like the good old-fashioned Rock’n’Roll of the ’50s and ’60s. This is a family of fiction marked out by a combo of conventions unique and essential to it; clear boundaries are set over what is or isn’t Science Fiction.

  What is Science Fiction?

  Well, that’s the million dollar question.

  Down in the ghetto at the SF Café, we do like to argue over what is or isn’t Science Fiction. The jukebox here has all those bands on it—because the clientele is pretty mixed these days—but there are a fair few customers who furrow their brows and frown sullenly when Adam Green comes on. Cause that just ain’t Rock’n’Roll. Old Man Campbell really wouldn’t have approved.

  A Basic Definition of Science Fiction

  By ‘scientifiction’…I mean the Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story—a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision.

  Hugo Gernsback

  The first problem with the closed definition? There’s more than one. There are many definitions of Science Fiction. They are all right…for someone. They are all wrong…for someone. Here’s a rather basic one as an example:

  Science Fiction is a Modern Pulp genre which combines Romantic character types, plot structures and settings with a Rationalist focus on scientific theories and conjectures, requiring a degree of plausibility in the extrapolation of its hypothetical conceits.

  This Science Fiction is scientific romance or Hugo Gernsback’s scientifiction, taken to its logical conclusion. Codified in the early twentieth century explosion of Boy’s Own adventure stories, it is essentially fantasia (fabrication, strange and marvellous: could this happen? oh, it should!) transformed as we source conceits in futurology (speculation, scientific and plausible… more or less). This Science Fiction is born in a binding at the deepest levels, where Gernsback’s “intermingled with” becomes “rooted in.” Old Man Campbell was pretty strict about what was on the menu at the SF Café.

  To be science fiction, not fantasy, an honest effort at prophetic extrapolation of the known must be made. Ghosts can enter science fiction, if they’re logically explained, but not if they are simply the ghosts of fantasy. Prophetic extrapolation can derive from a number of different sources, and apply in a number of fields. Sociology, psychology, and parapsychology are, today, not true sciences; therefore, instead of forecasting future results of application of sociological science of today, we must forecast the development of a science of sociology. From there the story can take off.

  John W. Campbell

  Note the use of the term prophetic by both editors, with its complex of connotations quite at odds with the grounding in science—religion and rapture, voices and visions. An aspect of fantasia remains, and in it we cannot fail to see fantasy—albeit defined, for the moment, not in terms of literature but in terms of psychology: the sustained fancy; the ludic or oneiric imagining; from the Greek phantasia; a making visible. Where prophecy is the name of the game, we are faced with a fiction firmly of the marvellous and/or monstrous. Prophets do not speak of the routine.

  The relationship of these two gestural terms, SF and fantasy, will be a theme here. Some readers may bristle at my use of the f-word. To be fair, I’m not that fond of it myself, its meaning similarly confused by a clash of open and closed definitions, in the conflation of strange fictions which eschew the sublime with the blend of the incredible, the marvellous and the monstrous which I term fantasia, skewed to the marvellous by default. But until we can get stuck into it, we are unfortunately stuck with it.

  Anyway, the point is this: up to and during the Golden Age, born of the simple fact that futurology resulted in arguable fantasias, there was a tight-knit relationship between Rationalism and Romanticism which kept the form aesthetically coherent and commercially viable. Atom bombs and satellites, microwaves and mechanisation—the future looked exciting, rich with the all-important sense-of-wonder that is born where the incredible meets the marvellous. So this new Genre emerged for the Rocket Age, a popular form which, like the other pulp forms, had its own set of rules, its clear boundaries, a form delineated in steel and Formica, Bakelite and plastic, in Old Man Campbell’s Science Fiction Café and Bar, in a world of nuclear power and space flight just around the corner.

  That shiny new Science Fiction didn’t come from nowhere, of course, but as long as we’re talking in closed definitions, let’s not pretend that it’s existed from the dawn of time.

  The Birth of Science Fiction

  Here’s a rather more contentious honing of that definition, situating the aesthetic form in its historical context:

  Originally coined as a substitute for the more unwieldy labels of scientific romance or scientifiction, the term Science Fiction properly applies to a short-lived Genre of the early to mid twentieth century Modern Pulp boom utilising Romantic character types, plot structures and settings but sourcing its fantasia in Rationalist futurology. This genre existed for a few decades at most before its practitioners exploded the rigid conventions of the original form.

  Trust me, I know this closed definition invites irate challenges. Just how short-lived is short-lived? If we are defining this form as pulp are we excluding
works published outside this commercial environment? Where do Jules Verne and H.G. Wells sit in relation to this Science Fiction? What of Orwell or Huxley? Don’t these writers fit the open definitions of science fiction that have accreted to the coinage? And if so, why are we denying them a seat in the SF Café, saying they’re not Science Fiction? Isn’t this too narrowly limiting our scope?

  It’s certainly a narrower view than that of Brian Aldiss who, in his Trillion Year Spree, positions science fiction as an outgrowth of the Gothic, tracing it back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as point of origin. Aldiss’s is a fair argument. He is not simply co-opting a classic in a grasp for literary credibility, the common accusation of science fiction’s detractors whenever this sort of case is made—his analysis is a valid attempt to trace the roots of this mode of writing—but there’s a substantial disjunct between the dynamics of the monstrous in Shelley’s novel and that of the marvellous by which a fantasia is driven.

  They’re as diametrically opposed as dread and desire, as should not and should, as must not and must; the horror (i.e. the monstrous) that permeates Gothic Romance is, if anything, the direct antithesis of the sense-of-wonder (i.e. the marvellous plus the incredible) that this bold Campbellian Science Fiction inherits from the fantasias of Modern Pulp. We might point at Frankenstein as a landmark en route, but it is not Science Fiction.

  No, the SF Café, when it opens, comes as a new scene with a new vibe—it has its goths, but there’s a damn sight more geeks among the host of freaks frequenting it. The Gottischromanzen Kaffeehaus sat on a different corner of Mass Market Square entirely from the SF Café. Its blasted shell still sits there, in fact, haunted by sparkly vampires too meek for the Darkening Biergarten next door, first casualty in the Culture Wars that created the ghetto of Genre.

  The Culture Wars? you say.

  Let’s jump back a few centuries, to the period when the Enlightenment was radically reshaping our notions of literature. In the city-state of New Sodom in those days, coming out of the Renaissance, you had two rival aesthetics, one attaching itself to this new scientific outlook called Rationalism, idealising reason, and the other grounded in the flip-side worldview of Romanticism, idealising passion. Each was defined partly in relation to the past (Classical Greece on the one hand and Dark Ages Europe on the other) but largely in relation to each other.

  One day, into this worldscape, into the city of New Sodom, a strange figure rides. He dismounts, strides into the Tall Tale Tavern, where poets and storytellers sit recounting grandiose nonsenses, endless episodes of Chivalric Romance like Amadis de Gaula. With a bitter biting grin, Cervantes slams his Don Quixote down upon a wooden table and begins, his savage satire bringing a Rationalist’s scorn of wonder to bear, crafting a modern endeavour quite distinct from the heroic Romances of his peers—an endeavour that will come to be known as the novel.

  In the centuries that follow, that novel takes a curious course. The Romantic aesthetic is brought back into play, as writers respond to the response, critique the critique, attempt to fuse the two aesthetics, to create a Rationalist Romance; the Gothic Romance and the Victorian Realist novel make fuckee-fuckee in the minds of unashamed synthesists, give us works like Wuthering Heights. In the dialectic between the two factions, in the interzones where they collide and collude through the medium of individual texts—where the author isn’t purely allied one way or the other but playing out the conflict in their writing—there emerges a synthesis of Rationalist thesis and Romanticist antithesis that we might call Protomodern.

  In that long period up to 1900 or just beyond we get the roots of every contemporary Genre. We get Samuel Richardson, Ann Radcliffe, Emily Brontë, Jane Austen (roots of Romance). We get Sara Coleridge, George MacDonald, Lewis Carroll, E. Nesbit, Kenneth Grahame (roots of Fantasy). We get Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, John Buchan, H. Rider Haggard (roots of Adventure). We get Edgar Allan Poe, Rudyard Kipling, M.R. James (roots of Horror). We get Ernest William Hornung, Arthur Conan Doyle (roots of Crime and Mystery and Thriller). We get Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells (roots of Science Fiction).

  None of their works are genre fiction in the modern sense because Genre in the modern sense doesn’t yet exist—the walls of the ghetto have not yet been built—but a slow drift of writers uptown or downtown does begin to gradually reshape the city of New Sodom, a divide emerging between the polar extremes of Gothic and Realist fictions, Romantic and Rationalist, “Popular Fiction” and “Literature.” The petit bourgeois haven’t yet degraded the debate with their middlebrow propriety, haven’t yet sealed the coming century of straight white male (and middle-aged and middle-class) scorn for the sensational, but writers themselves are a combative bunch when it comes to aesthetics, and the generation before Genre are born into a discourse that’s been brewing since Cervantes.

  In the Name of Propriety

  So, some of these writers find themselves on one or other side of that boundary, drawn to the Gottischromanzen Kaffeehaus downtown or the Social Realist Tea Room uptown. Still, many of them live and work in that interzone between the two, formative of multiple Genres because they work in multiple modes, creating works acknowledged to this day as part of the canon. The literary variety journals in the UK, most notably The Strand, capture the last days of this Protomodern period perfectly, publishing many of the writers named above, printing poetry and fiction in any and every mode. Ghost stories, detective stories, all sorts of strange fictions pervade the Protomodern periodicals, fiction that exploits a sense of the incredible with events that breach the laws of nature, or taps into our fears and desires with the marvellous and the monstrous, or teases us with the mysterious, titillates with the mundane monstrosities and absurdities of melodrama and the grotesque—c.f. Dickens.

  If these works don’t sit in Genre, they’re clearly using the techniques of Genre, the effects derived from stepping outside the strictures of mimetic Realism. But this is hardly shocking, that Genre of Realism only in this period defining itself into existence by the spurning of such quirks, the default of fiction not so delimited thus being to use whatever tools are fit to purpose. The scorn of the sensational may not be entirely modern, but it’s certainly not the prevailing tide in literature’s history.

  It is in these journals, among the tales of mystery and adventure that the embryo that will become Science Fiction gestates, scion of Sherlock Holmes and Allan Quatermain as much as Victor Frankenstein.

  Then the steam train of modernity hits, leads to mass-production and mass-marketing, greater literacy and a corresponding shift in class demographics. Through the last half of the nineteenth century we see the penny dreadfuls and dime novels burgeoning. With the turn of the new century comes category fiction—magazines and imprints dedicated to specific forms. From the early 1900s through to the 1930s or 1940s, a boom of Modern Pulp utterly reshapes the territory. It’s a totally evolutionary process—expansion, diffusion, isolation, specialisation—that leads to the Genres we still have today—and a few that are now all but defunct—as the idioms carved out to sit under a rackspace label.

  A process of formulation sets in within all of those Genres, of course; the formal conceits by which we recognise an idiom are only a step from the formulaic strictures by which we mechanise its manufacturing, and if an idiom sells you can bet that step will be taken. Marketing to readers on the basis that there’s an audience for “more of the same” means codifying “the same,” defining what each Genre is, or should be, in terms of tropes of character, worldscape and plot structure. Where a genre becomes a Genre, indeed, is in large part in that fact of formulation.

  The fallout of this is the Culture Wars. All of these fictions being driven by the Modern Pulp dynamics of the sensational, the power of conjuring what woulda coulda shoulda been, any fiction using that dynamics is now perceived as being not simply a work within this or that Genre (Gothic, Mystery, Adventure, etc.) but as having a common quality of sensationalism by which a super-class can be identified: G
enre Fiction. The requirement for that mode of conjuring in category fiction makes it a marker of populist pandering in opposition to literary craft…assuming an ignorance of the artistry by which sensational and intellectual are allied, assuming an unconsidered reverence for literature that mutes the former and/or mediates it with the latter—as in the distanced narrative of the Victorian novelist as observer, commentator, critic.

  For the middlebrow petit bourgeoisie to whom intellectual status is important and for whom observation and commentary is equated with relevance and insight, a crisis of faith is inevitable—should they really be reading this sensationalist pulp? Should they really be reading this…Genre Fiction? Should they be writing it, editing it, publishing it?

  So the battle-lines are drawn, tastes divided into good and bad, the dynamics of the sensational abjured in the name of propriety, the entire toolkit of formal conceits underpinning it shunned as signifiers of that quality. Soon there’s no way you could publish a journal like The Strand, no way you could run a publishing imprint with a similar diversity. The fiction which mutes and mediates the sensational gets bootstrapped to privilege by privilege, and before you know it that rupture has become a rift between Literature and Genre.

  We cast that schism as highbrow versus lowbrow, but in truth the first salvo in the Culture Wars is fired by the middlebrow and it is their enterprise, this construction of Literature in the abjection of Genre; the mediocre must establish their edification to rectitude, propriety of taste, in the expulsion of the gauche, whereas an actual elevation of craft or critique leads more to scorn of literary decorum. The gauche for their part are blasé about the volleys fired in their direction, happy to see the walls rise around a ghetto they constructed anyway, an aesthetic territory carved out and carved up by rackspace labels in their own enterprise of commercial cultivation. It’s in their interest that the heirs of all those Protomodern writers find the uptown districts of New Sodom hostile.