Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

by Duncan, Hal

  And so the barricades are built and we find ourselves in that downtown district of New Sodom, in that dodgy neighbourhood known as Genre, on the corner of Street & Smith, where Science Fiction was born, in a flurry of futurity’s onset, in panic and excitement, a bastard child of the reviled, of the pulps, of the vulgar mob’s Dime Novel and the hysterical female’s Sensation Novel.

  And its first infant squall ripped the air, a rupture in reality—

  The Third Axis

  It seems to me in some murky way that in genre fiction there ought to be a third axis-of-story here, a third dimension of thought. Call them genre devices. These are the things which make a genre story what it is, rather than naturalistic fiction.

  Jay Lake

  Elsewhen in the SF Café, Jay Lake proposes a three-axis view of what he refers to—what a lot of people refer to—as genre fiction. But what does he mean by that label? Given that Naturalism and Realism are as much genres as SF, Fantasy and Horror, or Western, Crime and Chick-Lit—they’re just not marketing categories—given that all fiction sits in one genre or another, all fiction is, strictly speaking, genre fiction. Sometimes what we mean by the term is simply category fiction, fiction sold under some particular rackspace label. Here in the SF Café though what we mean when we say genre fiction is largely that type of fiction, often sold as pulp, but sometimes not, distinguished from general fiction by the presence of…something. What we really mean is the fiction that doesn’t quite fit with the rest of that common-or-garden everyday mundane fiction.

  What we mean is strange fiction.

  Lake’s three-axis approach makes it clear this is what he means. The first axis he offers is story elements—character, situation, problem, solution. The second axis he offers is craft techniques—voice, tense, point-of-view, style. The third axis is…something, the distinctive quirky whatever-the-fucks that distinguish this type of work from the mimetic, from mundane fiction. What these whojamaflips might be, what might represent that third axis in the model, is the crucial question of what makes strange fiction strange.

  To Map the Strangeness

  We should not, of course, simply ignore the role of authorial intent and reader interpretation in the decision over whether or not this work or that is genre fiction—which is to say, whether or not it’s strange fiction. In its intersection with the rackspace label of SF, strange fiction often seems to acquire that label by ad hoc consensus, as much as anything else. If we begin by looking for some more objective criteria, we are assuming that those criteria exist, that a work of strange fiction may be in that aesthetic idiom regardless of subjective judgement. This isn’t necessarily the best starting point. So:

  1) Does authorial intent determine the nature of the work?

  2) Does authorial intent (legitimately) influence the reader’s experience of the work?

  3) Is authorial intent even relevant at all to the reader’s experience of the work?

  Jay Lake

  The reality is, I think, that all of this depends if you’re viewing genre as a market category, a conventional template or an aesthetic idiom.

  If SF is just a label slapped on a book to position it in the marketplace, then Lake’s Rocket Science, to take one example, is SF because the publisher has decided it is. Authorial intent and reader experience are factors in their decision, but ultimately what matters most is whether more units will shift if you put it in the SF section. Whether a work qualifies to sit in the SF section is arbitrated on a simple basis: fuck it, we can sell this as SF so it is SF. We have only a granfalloon of a marketing category constructed by gatekeepers, inclusion or exclusion decided by authority.

  If we’re to look past those authorities and see SF as a conventional template (or fuzzy set of such), a consensus judgement thrashed out by writers and readers, a matter of purpose (authorial intent) and import (reader experience), we have now a historical genre, but it is still a granfalloon, and there is patently no real consensus. This is the rabbit hole of SF as a subset of SF, a turf war of multiple aesthetics that’s really political, proprietorial: which aesthetic has the more legitimate claim to a nominal label?

  If we want to play that game, we might seek to unravel the legitimacy of claims, the actualities of territorial coups and negotiated compromises, to map out the discourse of a historical genre, but to look for a third axis goes beyond this into the question of what it is about the fiction itself all those turf wars are taking place over, what the purposes are, what the imports are, how they work.

  To map the genre device(s), as Lake puts it, is a different enterprise from mapping the discourse in which those devices are set as criteria of conventional templates and those templates named as genres. It is to map the dynamics of the devices themselves, to map the strangeness.

  Of Sonnets and Conventional Templates

  After all, the thrill you get from a good sf story is not that dissimilar to the thrill you get from a good magic trick. Wow, did you see that, was that real? What if it was real? Part of what sf does is make us look at something impossible, beyond our reach, beyond our ken—and think of it as if it were real, as if we might at some point have to deal with it.

  Paul Kincaid

  To approach strange fiction from my seat in the SF Café, I leave behind the Science Fiction I’ve declared dead, leave it at the point its birth, but take with me the nominal label of SF. Because with that discourse of SF as a subset of SF, we have a useful springboard into the notion of the conventional template versus the aesthetic idiom, the idea of a generic form with consensual/conventional strictures versus a mode identifiable by its characteristics but in which those features (e.g. strangeness) are simply potentials of narrative itself, such that to group the karass of texts using them is simply to recognise that their writers were working in the same fundamental mode.

  But perhaps, in order to clarify what I mean in the distinction of templates and idioms, the following might be a better springboard in the first instance, a sonnet, titled “A Sonnet Lumière”:

  My love is like a red, red fire,

  My heart on flame but out of luck.

  You are my death, my funeral pyre.

  Ripped out and torn and blown to fuck,

  My heart explodes with my desire

  To die beneath your monster truck.

  I offer this, this tawdry verse

  Nail-gun it to my dead eyelids

  Then light the fuse, blow up my hearse!

  My hopes are krushed; my life is shit.

  Put your behemoth in reverse,

  Drive over all my shattered bits.

  [From here the MS can’t be read,

  The last two lines reduced to shreds]

  It’s not Shakespeare, and I’m not sure what class of sonnet the rhyme structure puts it in, but it’s fourteen lines and a volta in the last couplet. The following might be a sonnet…or it might not. It’s from a series of twelve called Still Lives:

  Grave me an ode upon a funeral urn,

  Sonnets of black and ochre, fine-lined grace

  Of classic forms museumed in space

  And time. Now put a bullet in it. Turn

  And scan history as a war-torn foreign place:

  See Babylon fall on your TV sets, see Baghdad burn,

  Humvees patrol the road of no return,

  The trials of grunts. Soldier…about-face.

  Will you paint pictures of sweet fruit to mask sour taste

  Of spoiled milk spilled from broken churn?

  Or will you, poet, as a panther in the sheepfold, pace,

  Savage and true to forms of new rhythms—fuck the rhyme?

  Turn as a corpse behind a car, hung from a streetlight, a dead soldier.

  Turn, twist and turn poet; use the sharp edge of the serrated volta.

  I include this because in some respects it fits the sonnet form—fourteen lines and a volta—but it also deliberately fucks with the conventions. It may not succeed, but what I was trying to do there was have multiple volt
as rather than just the one, and a complete rupture of rhyme scheme. Question is: is it still a sonnet?

  My answer to this is, yes, it is; there’s nothing in the rules to say you have to limit yourself to one volta. Others might disagree; the break in rhyme structure might well be taken as a step too far by some.

  One might well see Science Fiction as a comparable template of conventions, my point is, but I’m not so sure about SF.

  Ode to a Poet

  I have some sympathy for those who’d grump huffily at the idea of a sonnet playing fast and loose with rhyme and metre, because I have a similarly thrawn reaction at times, with certain other types of free verse where…well, let me illustrate it with the following “Ode to a Poet,” which is most definitely not a sonnet:

  The poet spoke a while,

  Then paused.

  He spoke again, spoke for a time and then

  He paused

  Again. I listened as he started up once more

  And paused.

  And then went on to bore us all. It was as if the way

  He paused

  Was just to add a sense of weight, as if

  A pause

  Is somehow deeply meaningful, as if

  That pause

  Is not just fucking ponderous, as if there’s any reason why

  That pause

  Is not just a fucking way of

  Fucking breaking fucking prose up

  Into bite-size chunks,

  Making those fucking bite-size chunks

  Sound so fucking important when

  It’s just some fucking bullshit

  With no rhythm and no rhyme,

  No fucking poetry or patterning at all,

  No literary bite, no verbal claws

  Just

  Blah blah.

  Pause.

  Blah blah. Blah blah blah.

  Pause,

  Blah blah blah, blah blah blah.

  Pause.

  Blah blah.

  Fucking pause.

  I think that we should flay the shite,

  Write sonnets in his blood

  And then make drums out of his hide,

  Sing as we drag his body through the mud.

  This does not have fourteen lines and a volta. It is, however, a poem. It’s not terribly poetic in places, I grant you. Indeed that second verse is deliberately designed to parody a type of not-terribly-poetic poetry, to simulate the sort of poem that makes some of us (on days when we’re feeling particularly snarky) mutter darkly, “That’s not a bloody poem; it’s just prose chopped up into bits.”

  I include this as illustration of a somewhat reactionary attitude I’m not myself immune to. More extreme and committed reactionaries will often express a similar sentiment in regard to works presented as being of a certain idiom but which, to put it bluntly, fuck with the conventions of said idiom, whether it be poetic or prosaic: that’s not a poem because it doesn’t rhyme; that’s not a story because it doesn’t have a proper plot; that’s not SF because…well, because it doesn’t satisfy some non-negotiable criterion.

  Of course, the fact that I present that poem as a poem means that I’m tacitly accepting that the form of poetry it criticises is nonetheless poetry, that you can indeed chop up prose into bits, lay it out in lines and call it a poem. I just think the result is shite. I like my poetry to have the sort of formal structures of the sonnet. I reckon a sonnet does have to follow the rules. But I also want to fuck with those rules, to add extra voltas, or breach the tightly strictured rhyme scheme, to do something extra twisty.

  Yes, I’m conflicted.

  What I’m trying to illustrate here is the difference (and conflict) between a strictured generic form such as the sonnet, where the conventions of the template have been negotiated to the point they’re now non-negotiable criteria, and an aesthetic idiom such as the poem, where some readers may well bristle at the absence of characteristics that are expected as part of a local tradition, but will do so wrongly, the idiom itself opened in definition such that what we’re really dealing with is a fundamental mode of the medium. The question I’m leading to is this: is SF really comparable to the sonnet, or is it better seen as analogue of the poem?

  It’s no doubt obvious that my stance as regards strange fiction leans toward the latter, to put it mildly. My stance is perhaps, however, not the prevailing one. Well, if you insist your science fiction is a sonnet…

  The Spirit of ’76

  In the SF Café there are a fair few arguments over the music on the jukebox. There are those who hate punk rock (because they are idiots) and those who love it (because they are not idiots); even among the latter there’s a disagreement not unlike those arguments over the roots of this thing we call science fiction. To wit: there’s no doubt that both The Velvet Underground and The Stooges were heavily influential to punk rock, but does this mean we should class them both as punk bands?

  Put it this way:

  With The Velvet Underground, we have the far more complex sound of art rock and an attitude more that of the bohemian auteur than the suburban anarchist. Associating this band with the genre of punk at any deeper level than that of influence seems a pretty spurious claim. But The Stooges are a different matter. While they’re more generally considered a garage band, and a seminal one at that, the distinction between early ’70s garage and mid ’70s punk is largely a matter of labelling. Somewhere between The Sonics (Chuck Berry on strychnine) and The Ramones (The Beach Boys on speed), garage rock seamlessly morphs into punk. The Clash song “Garageland” makes that lineage explicit, in fact, acknowledges the origins of punk in garage. So at what point does garage become punk?

  We could just draw a line at the New York Dolls or the Sex Pistols, and say, punk starts here, and nothing before that, nothing outside the historical context of the New York or London punk scene circa 1976, can truly be considered punk. We could carry on from this and argue that Television were a punk band, regardless of their twenty-minute instrumental tracks, regardless of the music’s stylistic intricacy, rich with syncopated guitars and complex rhythms, simply because they, unlike The Stooges, were part of this historical context, in the right place at the right time, playing CBGB in 1976.

  But there’s a problem. If we examine the actual characteristics of the music—what it’s doing, how it works—and the attitude of insolent aggression that went along with it, The Stooges are way more punk than Television ever were. Listen to the confrontational shambles which is The Stooges’ last concert, recorded on the album Metallic KO. Listen to the fuck-you lyrics of “Cock in My Pocket,” Iggy’s hectoring of the audience, the stripped-down, ramped-up sound of a classic guitar, bass and drums combo playing (when they are actually playing) with energy in inverse proportion to their skill. Look at the cover where Scott Asheton in full Nazi regalia can be seen cradling an unconscious and bloody Iggy Pop. Not punk? If that isn’t in the spirit of ’76, fuck knows what is.

  If we could dismiss these similarities with a claim that The Stooges were simply a formative influence upon punk, we could say the same of the New York Dolls, maybe even The Ramones. Malcolm McLaren would have us believe, after all, that punk only truly came into existence with the Sex Pistols. Given that this album was recorded only a few years before the punk label became common currency, however, on the basis of shared characteristics alone, a simple widening of historical perspective could surely lead us to argue that The Stooges are not simply proto-punk but in fact embryonic punk, aesthetically every bit as punk as the bands that followed in the chaos of their wake but historically situated in a period of gestation, before punk proper was born and named.

  Hey, what’s the point in having your cake if you can’t eat it too?

  A Flash of Lightning

  There’s a point to this:

  Does Frankenstein sit in the same relationship to Science Fiction as The Stooges do to punk, or is that relationship more analogous to that of The Velvet Underground and punk? The answer, it seems to me, i
s the latter. For all that it extrapolates from the scientific theories and experiments of its period, positing the monster as a patchwork of body-parts reanimated by scientific craft rather than magical skill, the novel is as commitedly Gothic Fiction as Wuthering Heights or Northanger Abbey, infused with a tremulous fear of the uncanny (where the incredible meets the monstrous), and so informed by that horrorific mode of Romanticism that the Rationalism of Science Fiction stands in stark contrast. The world that Shelley’s aesthetic inhabits is not the exotic alien planet of the Campbellian pulps but the desolate wilderness of Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare or Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, a world of storms and nightmares, mountains and icy wastes. Its dynamics is not a matter of reason applied to the marvellous but rather of unreason loosed with the monstrous.