Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

by Duncan, Hal

  And hell, someone else will say, when you look at them as idioms, science fiction is really just a branch on the family tree of fantasy.

  This is when the Great Debate inevitably kicks off.

  A Shit Sandwich and a Diet Coke, Thanks

  I write, not for children, but for the child-like, whether they be of five, or fifty, or seventy-five.

  George MacDonald

  Across the city of New Sodom, there are a lot of cafés and bistros, each with its own menu but all serving sandwiches and soda. Downtown in the ghetto of Genre or uptown in the chi-chi neighbourhood known as Literature, there are joints where the food is bought in ready-made from the Shit Sandwich Company, and behind the counter is a squirt-gun dispensing Coca-Cola, Fanta or Sprite. Dr Pepper? Irn Bru? Maybe, maybe not. But you can guarantee the most populist tastes are catered for in these joints, that the most generic product is on offer. And many are happy with that; all they want is their local greasy spoon with the jukebox they know off by heart, or the franchise with free wifi and coffee that’s the same in every outlet. The sign outside is the genre label, the promise of what you want, how you want it, every time, in the same way and in the same place—and for many that doesn’t mean a wholemeal bagel and a fruit smoothy or any such frou-frou crap; it means a Shit Sandwich and a Diet Coke, thanks.

  And yet…the SF Café has Shit Sandwiches and Diet Coke on tap like all the rest, but it also (again like all the rest) has its own menu of hamburgers and hot dogs, fresh off the hot plate from the fry cook in back. And a fridge stocked full of all those weird soft drinks you won’t get elsewhere. We got that Shinola Cola you won’t get most anywhere else. (Weird yellowy-blue colour, tastes a little strange at first, but a few cans and you’re hooked.) That’s because a marketing category offers more than is promised by the label, those red and white signs for Coca-Cola and the Shit Sandwich Company that adorn the front. As a marketing category it’ll stock whatever the fuck it can sell to its punters. And even if most punters want a Genre, “more of the same,” there’s always some who want “something different,” want the wider menu of a genre as an openly-defined idiom rather than a closely-defined template.

  The menu in the SF Café tells an interesting tale. See, regardless of what some punters might maintain, the SF Café was always under joint ownership. Old Man Campbell never ran the place on his own. Those who remember far enough back can still recall an old guy you’d see pottering around, name of George MacDonald. Some would say he was the senior partner, others that he was just hired help, but whatever his role in things he stamped his mark on the menu, made sure that the SF Café was serving the chicken nuggets of fantasy right from the start, as well as the hamburgers of science fiction. A nasty rumour surfaces from time to time, that he’s that McDonald, the clown who ripped the soul out of soul food, made it junk-food, fast-food, a factory-line product of sugar, salt and fat, identical in every franchise around the world. Pabulum for those with the taste-buds of a child. The quote from him above may go some way to explaining the source of this rumour and the subsequent attempt by one faction of patrons at the SF Café to assert their superiority of taste.

  Science Fiction is not Fantasy, they say. It’s not for the child-like, never mind for children. No, Science Fiction is for the adolescent at least! So there!

  Welcome to the clan gathering at the SF Café. The feuds are great fun.

  The Campbells and MacDonalds of science fiction and fantasy have been intermarried and interbred from the get-go, fucking and fighting, coming together at the SF Café’s drunken wakes and weddings, bickering over who belongs where and who doesn’t. Resentments bubble. Alliances are made and broken. Curmudgeons insult their second cousins. Black sheep flirt across the barricades. But for all the broadsides and back-stabbing, the talk of this side of the family and that, the gene pool is too mixed to talk about different genres on any level other than loyalty. Genres? We can talk about Space Opera, Technothriller, Epic Fantasy, Swords & Sorcery, the Campbells of the West Side, the MacDonalds of the Left Bank, and vice versa. There are the Three Sisters over here: Aunties Asimov, Heinlein and Clarke. There are the Twins over there: Cousins Leiber and Howard. And there’s Crazy Uncle Lovecraft in the corner (the corner that doesn’t look…quite right). But many of us these days are bastards and step-kids, our lineages too mixed-up for us to give a fuck about some old fart’s obdurate insistence on a dichotomy that just doesn’t exist:

  Science Fiction is not Fantasy?

  Yeah, whatever. I’m more interested in the naked lunch that is the cold buffet. In the SF Café, because it is the SF Café, there are those who look at that naked lunch and say:

  The Buck and the Bottom Line

  —Who cares? It’s just a fucking marketing label, anyway.

  The shrug is appealingly simple, I admit, and it short-circuits all the essentialist strictures my thrawn experimentalism rebels against. If SF is just a label slapped on a book to position it in the marketplace then ultimately a work “is” SF only because the publisher/bookseller has decided so. I don’t have to worry about it. You don’t have to worry about it. As an attitude, this “So Fuck?” indefinition of SF is pragmatic, but it drops us into a circularity comparable to the oft-repeated maxim that if it’s SF, it can’t be good; if it’s good, it can’t be SF.

  Why is it SF? Because it will sell as SF.

  Why will it sell as SF? Because it is SF.

  The field is thus established as a zone of commercial viability, with the most popular (and therefore exemplary) at the centre and the most unpopular (and therefore exceptional) at the margins. Popular and unpopular don’t necessarily map to shit and shinola, of course, but in the world where Dan Brown sells fuckloads and Guy Davenport is largely out of print (to name two writers of an imaginary rackspace label of History Fiction), is it any wonder that outsiders buy into a vision of SF with shit as the exemplar and shinola as the exception? Writers and readers pass the buck to publishers and booksellers, the buck stops at the bottom line, and the bottom line is the lowest common denominator, savvy?

  So let’s ditch that So Fuck indefinition, take the emptiness of the two figurae as carte blanche, a Get Out of Genre Free! Card, and see if we can make sense of the stuff. That circularity seems awkward anyway, in the context of a field where works not sold as SF are often claimed as SF by readers, while works sold as SF are often rejected as not proper science fiction. Works like Nineteen Eighty-Four continue to cause arguments over whether or not they’re SF, regardless of how they’re sold, with works like Dune sparking similar disputes over whether they’re really fantasy.

  The question then: whether a work being SF (not Science Fiction, but SF,) is a matter of criteria or characteristics—i.e. is it a generic form or a mode of the medium?

  Is it a sonnet or a poem?

  Characteristics, Conventions, Consensus

  We can offer any text as a poem.

  We can only truly offer a text as sonnet if it has fourteen lines and a volta; those criteria are non-negotiable. It doesn’t matter if a reader has never heard of sonnets, doesn’t know he’s reading one, and simply thinks of it as a “poem”; it’s still a sonnet. Hell, even if the writer has never heard of sonnets and doesn’t know they’re writing one, if it has fourteen lines and a volta, if it fits the conventional template, then it’s a sonnet. If it doesn’t, then it isn’t. We can offer any text as a poem though.

  We can offer any text as a poem; while a poem will dance to keen eyes expecting a display of certain characteristics, those characteristics are ever reforged by the very texts which are presented as poetry, concrete word collage shenanigans of verbal jauntes having abolished strictures of tradition, freed the field of forms to a mode: exploration of the capacities of expression in the medium of language itself, spoken or written; no more, no less; an exploitation of the raw dynamics.

  We can offer any text as a poem.

  Not that everyone will appreciate such liberties, such license. Take a chunk of prose
, chop it into lines, perform it as a poem; some will accept it as such, but others may well argue from two centuries ago. Though unrhyme and weirder have been poetry for years, decades, centuries, millennia, though other cultures ever worked other songs than the sonnet from the dynamics of their argot, you’ll still find nay-sayers.

  —This doesn’t rhyme, they’ll say.

  —Poetry doesn’t have to rhyme, you’ll say.

  —Yes, it does, they’ll say.

  And here now, in the elsewhen of the SF Café? It’s not so different, I think, but behind the times, the strictures of tradition still holding sway, the nay-sayers stuck with a nominal label, an empty definition, that allows for the wildest riff to be offered, verbal jauntes in a pulp paperback, as SF, forced to stand their ground: that the characteristics are conventions, a granfalloon of generic forms in a fuzzy set of poetry considered as a subset of poetry: sonnet; rondel; ballade; villanelle; sestina; haiku; and so on. Here now, in the elsewhen of the SF Café, we’ve had the shenanigans going on for decades, but we haven’t yet adjusted to the idea of SF as a mode, still search for ways to parse it all as one big generic form, one big conventional template, bound in negotiated strictures albeit abstract.

  We can offer any text as SF.

  —These works are SF, we shrug, because those who partake in the decision-making—the readers, writers and publishers—are all on some deeper level in agreement that we know it when we see it and this is it.

  Well, pretty much in agreement.

  Most of the time.

  Sometimes, I guess.

  Okay, hardly ever.

  But hey, it’s only where the consensus breaks down that we have to judge who has the final say.

  And then it’s just a matter of who wins the day.

  So, say some New Wave writer comes along and does some weird-ass shit riffing off sociology instead of physics, calls it SF. The argument kicks off, with a whole host of nay-sayers arguing that it’s not SF. Others dig this New Wave stuff, accept the offer of this narrative as SF, defend it. When the dust finally settles, you have a new consensus, a genre (re)defined in terms of (re)negotiated conventions.

  We can offer any text as SF.

  Not Proper Science Fiction

  Problem is, there’s little coherence, never mind consensus, only a bunch of camps—scientific fancy, scientistic fabrication, soul fiction, scientific fabulation, symbolic formulation…and so on. Within each of these, there’s generally a coherent idea of what does and does not constitute SF, but these camps are often deeply antipathetic to each other’s views. While renegotiation of conventions may take place within those camps, the talks between them in the SF Café break down into stalemates as positions ossify and negotiable conventions are proclaimed non-negotiable criteria, as if one were to demand metre and rhyme for a poem to be a poem. A reader of scientistic fabrication, for example, might reject the work of a writer of scientific fancy as not proper science fiction.

  —That’s fantasy, they might well say.

  Each camp allied to a generic form, holding to conventional templates for their SF, angled keen for features as objective and as necessary as the structural criteria of the sonnet versus the mercurial characteristics of poetry, we end up not with a genre (re)defined by the (re)negotiation of conventions but with a turf war over non-negotiable criteria, vague notions of SF that abstract from common strictures the rhyme and metre our free verse eschews.

  That every definition offered by a camp is too narrow, too restrictive, an inaccurate schema for the field in toto—this should be self-evident. But I hazard the very notion of negotiated conventions occludes from us a truth indexed in the So Fuck indefinition, that there are no strictures, that under, and within, and through, and beyond the conventions, we can offer any text as SF and make it so, because SF is a mode as the poetic, exploitation of a raw dynamics. We can offer any text as SF, and it is only a matter of time before we remember this.

  In the meantime though, the Gordian Knot of SF’s ongoing argument over what constitutes SF is simply cut by the publishers, side-stepping this argument entirely to make what they can of SF as a rackspace label. And we’re back to Square One, as someone in the SF Café shrugs and says SF is just the fantasy that can be sold as SF.

  A Really Big House

  “The Carrick,” “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” and “The Metamorphosis”: all three are commonly called fantasies. From my point of view, any outstanding work of art is a fantasy insofar as it reflects the unique world of a unique individual. But when people call these three stories fantasies, they merely imply that the stories depart in their subject matter from what is commonly called reality.

  Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures

  Definitions of fantasy, just like those of science fiction, come in three flavours—empty, open and closed. The quote from Nabokov above is misleading as regards his own contrast of fantasy and reality, but it’ll serve as a pointer to the first two. In the empty definition, fantasy is just imagination, story as extended fancy; all fiction is fantasy. This is not a terribly useful definition though, not when we use the term fantastic to mean that which is strange, bizarre in form or appearance. Where we say something is fantastic we mean that it is unrealistic, based on or existing only in extravagant fancy. It is an oddity, a quirk of impossibility. We may even mean that it is wondrously so, that the quirk is to be marvelled at, an exercise in the marvellous, a numina.

  Since not all fantastic fiction is marvellous in this sense, an open definition seems more apt: here, for now, what we mean by fantasy is simply fiction which uses the incredible, which departs from “what is commonly called reality.” It entails, to repeat,

  a rupture in reality,

  a quirk in narrative created,

  an impossibility conjured, breach of

  • known science,

  • known history,

  • the laws of nature,

  • even the strictures of logic itself,

  a strange yellowy-blue (or reddish-green) colour to the cake on your plate at this drunken wedding reception in the SF Café, where everything is kicking off, a colour that simply cannot be, yellow and blue being bound in an opponent process in your brain, the sensation of each inhibited whenever the other is stimulated. To make a text fantasy, in this definition, is as simple as to drop the word yellowy-blue into a sentence.

  This open definition slides towards closure though, as the bounds of reality mark out a limit of fancy’s extravagance between based on and existing only in, where the unrealistic fractures for many into the improbable and the impossible. The nature of the fantastic, some will insist, is that it transgresses the laws of nature, is impossible, magical in the sense of metaphysical. We can play with known science and known history in our thought-experiments, but this is not the same thing.

  The notion of the marvellous closes the definition further, specifying a distinctly positive tinge to our incredulity, not just awe but a wonder that implies desire, magical in the sense of delightful. While many of those in the SF Café shrug this off, drinking Kafka as their coffee, taking their fantasy bitter and black (exercises in the monstrous rather than the marvellous, the quirk in use a monstrum rather than a numina), there are those for whom the definition is and must be closed to fantasia further:

  —There is no such fantasy, they say. Whether they revere it or revile it, they acknowledge only Fantasy, that Genre where the conventions of metaphysical agency and wondrous wish-fulfilment are essential, the conventional template with all its stereotypes of secondary worlds and heroic quests.

  All too often there’s a scent of abjection when it’s a Science Fiction loyalist asserting a closed definition of fantasy, a sense that by defining these generic elements as Fantasy it is easier to banish them from Science Fiction. Because it’s not like science fiction was ever…you know…born from the frickin’ pulps.

  —Fuck that shit, I say to this. Don’t be pissing on my Flash Gordon roots, motherfucker. Or on my metaphysical ma
estro, PKD.

  There is a neatness to the pairing of Fantasy and Horror as literatures of desire and fear, of numina and monstrum. And the notion that science fiction deals with hypothetical improbabilities (playing with known science and known history) while fantasy deals with metaphysical impossibilities (flouting the laws of nature or the strictures of logic) is one you’ll hear from many corners of the SF Café. But it’s not so easy as that; it never is with a genre (versus a Genre) with an aesthetic idiom (versus a conventional template).

  No, many works in the openly-defined aesthetic idiom of fantasy have zero interest in wish-fulfilment or the iconography of magic, scoff at the strictures of Fantasy. Meanwhile, delightful wonder abounds within Science Fiction, a direct inheritance of Gernsback’s “charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision.” (My italics.) Even the blithe assertion that science fiction deals with science while fantasy deals with magic is called into question by a glance at the shelves, where we see Herbert’s Dune labelled as Science Fiction and Peake’s Titus Groan labelled as Fantasy. Isn’t the former chock full of magic—priests and prophecies, monsters and messiahs, a drug that lets you warp reality, gives you visions of the future. And what is the most fantastical (metaphysical? marvellous?) idea in the latter? What wondrous magic does it contain?