by Duncan, Hal
The reason I do not, with Aldiss, class Frankenstein as the birth of Science Fiction is that in its ultimately Romantic stance it is far better understood as the death of Science Fiction. There is no lightning bolt in the novel bringing life to the monster with the electric vitality of science; that is a spurious invention of the movies. Rather the lightning in Frankenstein is there to paint the creature in sudden stark relief as a monstrum—to coin a phrase analogous to Suvin’s novum for the quirk of narrative, the rupture in equilibrium, that sits as linchpin of Horror:
A flash of lightning illuminated the object, and discovered its shape plainly to me; its gigantic stature, and the deformity of its aspect, more hideous than belongs to humanity, instantly informed me that it was the wretch, the filthy daemon, to whom I had given life.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
This is a lightning bolt that smashes Rationalism, revealing the wilderness of Gothic nightmare and the monstrum that stalks it. One equilibrium ruptured is reality, as with the novum. We are dealing here with the sort of shift in subjunctivity level Delany talks of, the reanimated creature being a technical impossibility: this could not have happened. We are dealing with the incredible. But in Shelley this is of trivial import as set against the rupture of a different stability: affective equilibrium.
If we map the novum to the shift in subjunctivity level, eschewing the Contingency Slip Fallacy, with its wishful thinking in which the impossible is cast as possible, that novum is a conjuring of what cannot be—not yet—inspiring incredulity. Trace that wishful thinking to the rose-tinted spectacles of sense-of-wonder, a willingness to hoodwink ourselves in our sneaky yearning that the novum should be, and we find we’re dealing also with a fiction, at its heart, of the marvellous, inspiring desire. What Shelley offers is the opposite. The monstrum is a conjuring of what must not be, inspiring dread, and where a Rationalist might argue the novum sound, reasonable for all its technical impossibility, the Romantic sets the monstrum as the murder of reason, the bloody hand of the sublime.
This is a lightning bolt that will one day sear right through the genre, a shattering crack of irrationalism that will split it right in two. You can still see the crack in the wall of the SF Café where a seismic futureshock ran through it on the day the beatniks moved in with their garb as black as their European espresso. But we’ll come to that. For now…for me, Shelley sits awkwardly in the role Aldiss ascribes her.
Would Verne or Wells stand as better origin points? Is it not at least fair to talk of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea or The War of the Worlds as Science Fiction? Again, these are understandable as science fiction, but are they Science Fiction? At the end of the day, these are both works which, like The Stooges with punk, fit the aesthetic criteria but sit outside the historical context; they are Protomodern works, written in that distant time before the walls went up around the ghetto of Genre. They are clearly formative influences, taproots of Science Fiction, but they exist as experiments within their own genres, at a point when the term Science Fiction had not even been coined, and it’s inevitable that they will be widely viewed as such, just as The Stooges are most commonly viewed as a garage band, and for good reason. Ultimately if we want to conjure the history that shaped the territory, a narrower context lays a less dubious foundation for our back-story of descent. So we’ll treat Verne and Wells as embryonic, situated in that period of gestation before Science Fiction proper was born and named.
That birth and naming begins with the pulps, with Gernsback’s scientifiction. In those early decades before the SF Café was even built there was not one Genre but a whole host of them, where the Protomodern adventure story was gradually being transformed into the mass market Modern Pulp narrative. One Nick Carter dime novel in 1886 begets Nick Carter Weekly which becomes Detective Story Magazine in 1915; that same magazine publishes Arthur Conan Doyle but it does so alongside the Shadow. The publisher, Street & Smith Publications (who bought Astounding in 1933, funny enough), also gave us comics like Doc Savage and Air Ace, Western magazines like Buffalo Bill Stories and True Western Stories. Edgar Rice Burroughs gives us John Carter and Tarzan of the Apes in 1912, both via All-Story Magazine, which was to merge eventually with Argosy. Amazing Stories gives us Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon only being created derivatively as a rival.
This is our lineage. This is the history of the ghetto of Genre, into which Science Fiction was born, not in a flash of lightning but in the clatter of a printing press, a bastard biomechanical scion of the pulps, part invention, part industry, wholly modern. Born of a technological advance, it was itself, in its day, a virtual novum as quintessentially of its era as the rocketships conjured in its pages.
A Crack in the Wall
The one theme that is really new is the scientific one. Death-rays, Martians, invisible men, robots, helicopters and interplanetary rockets figure largely: here and there. There are even far-off rumours of psychotherapy and ductless glands. Whereas the Gem and Magnet derive from Dickens and Kipling, the Wizard, Champion, Modern Boy, etc., owe a great deal to H. G. Wells, who, rather than Jules Verne, is the father of “Scientifiction.”
George Orwell
If we’re excluding work published before Science Fiction was born, however, this doesn’t mean excluding work published beyond its cradle. George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, for example, sits outside the narrow context we are taking as our start point, outside the pulp magazines which were to Science Fiction as CBGB in 1976 was to punk rock. But to exclude a contemporaneous work like this from an inquiry mining this science fiction stuff for the strange would be as foolish, surely, as to say a band could be considered punk if and only if they played CBGB.
Tapping into a Protomodern lineage of utopic and dystopic fiction in which Rationalist speculation (here futurology) adopted the Romantic tradition of fantasia to construct marvellous/monstrous elsewhens, but flensed the dynamics of Romance, Orwell’s novel is clearly covered under an open definition of science fiction, but when that open definition covers Shelley’s Frankenstein, that’s not saying much; in the open definition that must encompass all manner of experimental oddities published under the rackspace label, to approach Nineteen Eighty-Four as a work in a broad idiom unbound by commercial taxonomies is only to apply a lens in one’s critique that might equally be applied to The Epic of Gilgamesh. If it’s limits and lineage we’re talking, what’s at stake is the question of whether it’s Science Fiction.
If we say yes, it is, are we in danger here of opening ourselves up to that old accusation, that we’re co-opting Orwell to a tradition in the hopes of gaining literary credibility for an inherently gauche Genre? If so, we have a fairly solid defence. Orwell was taught by Aldous Huxley at Eton, he was friends with Olaf Stapledon later on in life, he wrote of his admiration for and influence by Wells, and, in his 1939 essay “Boy’s Weeklies,” he reveals enough familiarity with the pulps to act as a well-informed genre critic, as the quote above demonstrates. Orwell was no stranger to the SF Café.
What we have indeed is someone who identified his own work as in the tradition of Wells, who recognised that same heritage in the pulps, who distinguished Wells from Verne, siding with the Rationalist novels of one over the Romantic adventure stories of the other, and whose novel features world governments, artificial language and other such hypotheticals. All things considered, to exclude Nineteen Eighty-Four from the canon might seem thrawn, akin to a claim that Animal Farm is not a fable because, well, it was published as a serious novel for adult readers; such a distinction is no more than a spurious assertion that the two forms are mutually exclusive.
Animal Farm, as an allegorical animal story, fits a simple standard definition of the fable, and by its nature it demonstrates that, in the hands of a skilled writer, this idiom is more than capable of achieving the depth of a serious novel for adult readers. Nineteen Eighty-Four could equally be argued as demonstration that Science Fiction is not necessarily a lurid sensationalist pandering or a dry intellectua
l exercise, that a work of Science Fiction can, like an allegorical animal story, also be a serious novel for adult readers.
Still, the closed definition of Science Fiction must be opened up to accommodate Orwell, to render key aspects of the Modern Pulp dynamics dispensable, in a step not just towards the utopias and dystopias of the canon but towards the novelistic Rationalism of Realism. If the loosening of the strictures is legitimate it must be because that step is being taken inside the rackspace ghetto even as Orwell takes it outside. To sustain it as a valid redefinition, we must show the sociological thought-experiments kicking in early enough. And if it’s arguable…well then, this is where the first crack in the wall of the SF Café appears, because the abandonment of adventure can only be a betrayal of roots to some, a breach of the strictures defining Science Fiction.
Ultimately, I’m less interested in whether or not Orwell is Science Fiction than in that crack, in the notion that even from its infancy the Genre was dying to be reborn as genre, sloughing shackles of closed definition such that even the earliest revisionist’s claim to the rackspace label is really rather dubious. If from a sound closed definition we might reach beyond the pulps to encompass, for example, Orwell, I’m tickled by the notion that to do so, we must leave that closed definition of Science Fiction behind us, dead in the dust. In a discourse ever dreaming of closed definitions, the one that stands most sound in its simplicity rather conjures an unpretentious pulp which is sealed in its fate by the very stuff we made those dreams on, the stuff we insist on trying to inscribe within some stable set of formal strictures.
The why and how of that fate are easier to answer than the when. As much as Science Fiction was born in the fusion of Romantic and Rationalist aesthetics, the conflict between the ideals of the sublime and the logical quickly fractured the Genre. If the monstrous of Gothic Romance is a dubious forebear, the marvellous of Chivalric Romance is not. The monstrum has its flipside in the numina—to coin another phrase—the conjuring of what must be rather than what must not, inspiring desire rather than dread. And this is inherited direct, the sense-of-wonder many recognise as integral, the modern sublime of the technological marvel—the shoulda in what woulda coulda shoulda been.
So, for every Rationalist “what if” story wherein futurology is an end in itself, there’s a Romantic “if only” story wherein futurology is means to an end. For each narrative intent on a logical working-through of the novum’s ramifications, there’s one where the prophetic impetus is to envision wild fantasias of wonders, where the novum serves first and foremost as numina. For every Foundation there is a Dune. And with the aesthetics of the logical and the sublime in tension, with each reader who comes looking for one and finds the other, disappointment and dispute is inevitable.
So the Genre fractures in its infancy into a dichotomy of aesthetics, the loyalists of the sublime and of the logical each laying claim to the rackspace label, each with realities on their side—history for one, future for the other. The wall in the SF Café cracks and the self-destruction (or perhaps self-deconstruction) of Science Fiction begins before it’s barely out of the cradle. Cheney is right that Science Fiction is no longer truly extant, not if by Science Fiction we mean a singular thing with a closed definition. It died the moment we dismissed its fealty to fantasia over all, raised futurology as new liege lord, and in asserting the legitimacy of this reformed genre cast that Genre as illegitimate.
The king is dead; long live the king. For all the usurpation metaphor, I’m not saying that this in and of itself invalidates the application of that rackspace label to the field of fictions that came after. The titans overthrown, the gods who remade the entire worldscape of that category fiction did so with such creative vigour that it’s them we think of when the words science fiction are uttered. I only mean that they so demand an open definition—many of the core canonical writers most of all demand so open a definition—that it takes us back to genre, to this science fiction stuff, to a whole field of science fictions, essentially plural.
It would be grand if, from this, I could now leap on into a celebration of what that new generation made of Science Fiction, blithely applying that term to an opened definition. Thing is though, that dichotomy between Rationalism and Romanticism is also at the heart of why I’m no great fan of even the open definition of science fiction—because this is what fuels the endless dispute within the field over the differentiation of science fiction and fantasy.
The Marriage(s) of Science Fiction and Fantasy
The Great Debate
The question of whether a certain story of imagination is a fantasy or a science fiction work would depend upon the device the author uses to explain his projected or unreal world. If he uses the gimmick or device of saying: “This is a logical or probable assumption based upon known science, which is going to develop from known science or from investigations of areas not yet quite explored but suspected,” then one could call it science fiction. But if he asks the reader to suspend his disbelief simply because of the fun of it, in other words, just to say: “Here is a fairy tale I’m going to tell you,” then it is fantasy. It could actually be the same story.
Sam J. Lundwall
Down in the ghetto of Genre, in the SF Café that is our literary salon, in this scene of zines and forums, conventions and clubs, there’s a Great Debate that kicks off every so often. The diversity of the clientele maps to a diversity of opinions—convictions, even—and few of these are as contentious as those addressing the differences or lack thereof between science fiction and fantasy. To be fair, the taxonomy of literary genres is a game that appeals to the geek in me as much as anyone, but the diversity we’re dealing with in the SF Café is obscured by the very word genre, its meaning muddled by a conflation of (1) openly defined aesthetic idioms with (2) conventional templates that are closely defined and (3) marketing categories that are all but empty of definition. That the latter two offer absolute authority in the fact of template fit and rackspace label while the former very much does not, that the first and last place no firm strictures on the works whatsoever, while the other is defined entirely by such strictures, is why we must distinguish the three as each quite different creatures, if we want to make any sense at all down in the SF Café, when whoever we’re talking to might be presuming any of the three as a baseline. So:
There’s genre and there’s Genre.
Across the city of New Sodom—and in the SF Café most of all perhaps—we’ve forgotten that the word genre derives from the Latin generis, meaning family, that if a genre is a family of fiction, then a work can be a member of that family by marriage or adoption as much as by birth. Aesthetic idioms are constantly reshaped by writers marrying one technique with another, adopting unfamiliar aims, methods born in other idioms entirely. This is genre as one big open clan. I’ve joked that being a “Celt” is actually fuck-all to do with birth; all you have to do is drink with a Celt, and that’s you initiated into the clan whether you like it or not. It’s like Richard Harris becoming Sioux in A Man Called Horse, only less painful than hanging by your nipples. (Although the hangover the next day…)
But then there’s Genre. Buying into a bullshit of bloodlines, many are proud of the traits inherited with the tartan—so proud of their clan name they’ve forgotten that family can be openly defined, that the in-laws with different names are still family if we accept them as such. For certain feuding factions indeed that very notion is anathema. The clan name is everything, and a pox on any cur who slights it. Any pure-bred work of Science Fiction (or as they will call it, science fiction) is entirely unrelated, they’ll insist, to that damnable Fantasy (or as they will call it, fantasy). There’s Campbells and MacDonalds, and ne’er the twain shall meet. Works in one cannot fit the other’s template, because the templates are mutually exclusive.
But all we really have, an upstart contrarian might say, is a tartan of a marketing category with an empty definition. The presentation of this stuff as a Genre of Science Fiction is
just bagpipes-and-haggis branding. In truth, it’s an open idiom, a genre of works which may be in various Genres, an extended family of fictions better described as Hard SF, Space Opera, Cyberpunk, Technothriller, and so on. Fantasy is in the same position, a tartan label slapped on a box containing the closely defined forms of Epic Fantasy, Swords & Sorcery, Urban Fantasy, Paranormal Romance, etc.
These are not subgenres, but Genres in their own right, and the tartan labels that adorn these works are simply branding, their purpose to position a book in front of this audience or that. And you know, our upstart contrarian might continue, that latter brand was only schismed off from Science Fiction in the 1970s, when Ballantine established their Adult Fantasy line to target the growing market for Tolkien, his direct ancestors and descendants. Look at all the works branded as either which ignore the strictures of Genre altogether. Forget the clan names and tartan; forget the templates which often fit loosely at best; the only sensible way to talk about science fiction or fantasy is as aesthetic idioms. If genre is a matter of familial relationships, what we have here is not two distinct clans with a feud going back longer than living memory. Science fiction is not Clan Campbell, fantasy is not Clan MacDonald, and the ghetto of Genre is not the blood-stained battleground of Glen Coe. The feud begins in 1971; before then science fiction and fantasy were happily married and raising Bradburys together.
