Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

by Duncan, Hal

  A really big house.

  That Tasty Tang of Boot Polish

  The glib differentiations don’t hold up to scrutiny. If we contrast the extremes of Hard SF and Epic Fantasy, obviously there’s a polarity between these two aged maiden aunts of the family, these grandes dames who think everything revolves around them; but to try and apply this science/magic divide as a basis for taxonomy across the board is futile. Science fiction long since assimilated the notion that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic (much to its benefit), while fantasy long since assimilated the notion that any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology (much to my boredom). Writers on this side of the schismed family or that write the stories they want to, quite often treating the two as entirely interchangeable.

  Even the Science Fiction of a Campbellian closed definition is deeply complexified by sense-of-wonder and futureshock so that the most rigourous futurology can be at once marvellous and/or monstrous. Which is to say that the work itself may be, functionally speaking, by any argument, both science fiction and fantasy, or both science fiction and horror, or all three. Ray Bradbury’s entire oeuvre exemplifies the crumbling of Science Fiction into the open interplay of science fiction, fantasy and horror. With stories like “The Veldt,” for example, one is forced to ask: Is this science fiction, fantasy, horror…or all of the above?

  And do we actually give a shit, given that it’s a fucking immense story?

  (The correct answer, by the way: No.)

  The buffet at this clan gathering is a crawling chaos of pilfered tropes and techniques, shared plot structures and character types. Cowboys in space or knights fighting dragons! Dragons in space or cowboys fighting knights! The Shit Sandwiches munched down on both sides of the family have more in common than they have to distinguish them, heroic wank-fests filled with Objects of Power, Grand Devices of technological magics, every FTL drive a mass-produced metaphysical causation engine, every wormhole a Clutean portal. Where the affective dynamics of Modern Pulp is what matters, the reality is one of a mandatory story template, with the other conventional elements that make for templates of individual Genres largely interchangeable.

  The Shinola Cola passed out on both sides has much in common too—using those Grand Devices as metaphors rather than simply MacGuffins, extrapolating that Big Idea, working through the ramifications of the quirk as conceit, crafting innovative narratives where there’s thematic import in the impact on worldscape and plot, drawing 3D characters who interact with that worldscape and with each other on a deeper level than the Boy Hero’s Never-Ending Journey. If the glamour of incredibility can be seductive, if the formulae of plot offer easy options, and if these lead to different levels of aesthetic and ethical engagement, the difference is not between Science Fiction and Fantasy but between genre and Genre.

  You get different flavours of ice cream in your Shinola Cola Floats, but it’s that tasty tang of boot polish that makes them all so moreish.

  Still, we do like our feuds. So we obscure this in every assertion of the science/magic dichotomy, each assertion fuelling the eternal argument partly because it carries or is perceived to carry an implicit judgement: that fiction utilising the former is intrinsically rational (intellectualist and critical) while fiction utilising the latter is intrinsically romantic (sensationalist and uncritical).

  ’Cause, you know, magic is for children.

  A Model of Magic

  Let’s define magic. In essence, magic is metaphysical causality, a circumvention of the laws of nature; it’s cause-and-effect working outwith the temporal protocols of the cosmos. It is the activity, and it is the capacity for that activity invested in any of the following: a system of forces; a location or state through which that system of forces can be accessed; an object (agent or artefact) charged with or tapping into that system of forces. By this simple definition time-travel and FTL are magical.

  For all the temporal impossibility of the novum—the could not which remains could not, no matter if one sandwiches it between the should of the marvellous and the would of the logical to sell a sublimely logical bullshit of what woulda coulda shoulda been—there is a difference of level; the novum is simply playing with known science, breaching the real with hypothetical capacities as a conceit but setting the laws of nature as a limit. We can say that Suvin’s quirk has a queerer bedfellow then, a companion quirk of the impossible: a chimera.

  Where the novum is a conjuring of what could not be (not yet), the chimera is a conjuring of what could never be (not ever), not in the system of physical rules by which this worldscape of reality works. Both inspire incredulity. Both can double as monstrum or numina. But a chimera is not a novum insofar as it breaks the rules of the game. One can revise the rules, shift the goal posts, but to do so is just to conjure a chimera and mask it as a novum. You might manage to sell your snake-oil; some (not least the writer) may buy into it so wholly they even apply the Contingency Slip Fallacy, cast it as possible. But your time travel and FTL are and will remain chimerae masked as nova, identifiable as such and therefore illegitimate to some.

  They will remain, quite arguably, the magic of fantasy.

  Or maybe not. Ted Chiang has suggested a distinction between science and magic that’s worth considering: the former is reproducible industrially, on a mass scale, while the latter is not; generally, in fact, as a literary convention, magic is the preserve of a select elite of exceptional individuals, so much so that it’s often a signifier of their selection by the ultimate magic of the divine, a signifier of their destiny. Unpacking this and looking across the field of fiction though, we can say that human application of magic is located on a spectrum of methods of production that runs thus:

  facility (gift) | art (talent) | craft (skill) | technique (process)

  In any given work, the rarity of magic is largely a product of where it is placed on this spectrum. Magic may be presented as a facility, a gift that only the exceptional have; it may be presented as an art that only the exceptional will have a talent for, but that is learned almost as much as it is innate; it may be presented as a craft, a skill that comes naturally to some, but that’s more learned than innate and therefore open to use by anyone; it may be presented as a technique, a process which can be reproduced industrially because it is abstracted to mechanistic procedures.

  The last presentation of magic is rare, used largely as a deliberate subversion of conventions, so Chiang’s distinction seems fair at first sight. What is science, after all, but the system of abstraction by which craft is transformed to technique, process identified in skill and therefore rendered reproducible, open to industrialisation? But if so, Dune is utilising magic rather than science: the Guild navigators circumvent the temporal protocols of the cosmos; they travel through large distances of space in shorter periods than are allowable by those protocols; their manipulation of time and space is a craft, signified as such by the term guild (a pre-industrial organisation of skilled tradesmen); all of this is achieved only by means of a mental state bought on by melange; the procedure cannot be mechanised, reproduced industrially.

  Similarly, note that in the TV series Andromeda for a ship to travel through the slipstream (FTL) it requires a human pilot, because even machines with a fully-sentient AI are not capable of navigating this (magical) location/state. Note that jaunting, in Bester’s The Stars My Destination is a skill (craft) that pretty much everyone can learn but that jaunting through space is a talent (art) that only Gully Foyle has achieved. Note that at the end of the book Foyle considers teaching this ability to humanity (transforming the talent to a skill, distributing it as he does PyrE) but has not yet begun this task. Note that either way jaunting is an essentially human capacity, not open to mechanisation.

  All of this invites a simple question: What if the non-reproducible nature of magic is a ramification of it being a semiotic phenomenon, the skill an emergent feature of language and consciousness, not mechanised because it
is a matter of semiotic agency?

  An agent dealing with a world of signs has four key abilities: reception; perception; conception; inception. To be a semiotic agent one must be able to receive stimuli, perceive those stimuli as signifiers, conceive what is signified (i.e. process sensation into thought), and initiate action (i.e. act on thought rather than automatic response). Magic is almost invariably presented in such terms, as a semiotic interaction with reality, as a reading of its language and (re)writing of its text through the application of that language.

  Words and gestures,

  symbolic rituals,

  magic is

  a hacking of reality,

  a programmatic poetry,

  beneath the preciousness

  of art

  and talent,

  a craft,

  a skill,

  to conjure a:

  result.

  To mechanically reproduce magic would mean building machines that replicate semiotic agency—AIs. In Asimov’s “Let There Be Light” this is exactly what happens. The end-product of AI technological development achieves the ultimate magic of godhood. It cracks the code of reality, and starts everything running again by calling the function that is the title of the story. There is little that can be more chimeric, more a flaunting of the laws of reality than the action of (re)creating reality itself with a mere utterance.

  If such semiotic agency is deemed limited to humans or similarly living entities, is this a fanciful worldview, or just a healthy scepticism about hard AI? Isn’t Andromeda saying precisely that the ship’s AI is lacking the requisite semiotic flexibility? To posit that a procedure of sentient, semiotic agency can be mechanised, reproduced industrially, is only an additional conceit over and above the basic chimera (masked as novum or not).

  Certainly, magic often goes hand-in-hand with talk of spirits and souls, but is this religion we’re dealing with or is it fiction? Does using magic in a story make one a priest, painting semiotic agency as the product of some metaphysical enspiriting that only humans have? Or might a perfectly atheist and materialist writer simply be using magic and soul as conceits, tools for talking about semiotic agency itself? Trust me, when I describe someone as being “spirited,” this does not mean I believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster or Old Nobodaddy.

  And if we have works like Bester’s wherein the chimera of jaunting is a craft and that of jaunting across space a talent, a procedure that cannot be mechanised, I can happily point to my own “Scruffian’s Stamp” as a story offering magic which is indeed mechanised, the Scruffians of the title being products of a factory-line processing of waifs which Fixes them forever in their current state, the Stamp of the title reading them on the first application to their chest and writing the complete description of what they are on the second application, imprinting them permanently. The details of the process may be unknown to the waiftakers who use it to churn out slave millworkers and chimney sweeps, but the magic is abstracted to technique, the process wholly mechanised.

  It’s essentially uploading a pre-made hack into a person’s reality code, a hack that saves the system at the point of installation, with a tweak that sets it to constantly restore that state. I was a code monkey in my past life, man, not a fricking clergyman.

  Magic is characterised as a semiotic skill because it’s symbolic of such semiotic skill itself—a metaphor of the power of language, of consciousness. The use of “spirit” as a metaphor for semiotic agency that goes with it is so profoundly resonant if we take it figuratively and so profoundly religious if we take it literally, it’s no wonder that magic pervades Science Fiction even as it’s abjected as Fantasy. It’s no wonder that the magic of Bester’s jaunting goes hand-in-hand with the Promethean fire of PyrE, an enervated and explosive substance triggered by thought, a blatant concretion of the metaphor of semiosis-as-power. It’s no wonder that some will insist, till they’re blue in the face, that Dune is not “proper” Science Fiction, no, not with all of that metaphysical mumbo-jumbo, all that magic.

  Some get that it’s a metaphor, doofus; but some just ain’t got no poetry in their soul.

  The Aesthetics of Old Maids

  SF is about confronting the strange in order to understand it and push the boundaries back but fantasy is either about enjoying the experience of strangeness (as in M. John Harrison’s Viriconium books) or bludgeoning it into submission in favour of a frequently politically dubious status quo (in the case of epic fantasy).

  Jonathan McCalmont

  These sort of hoary old chestnuts which conjure miserably limited Genres of Science Fiction and Fantasy in their assertions as to what the two are “about” are unsustainable even as broad generalisations. Countless works wearing the rackspace label of Science Fiction are deeply reactionary in their response to the strange, fascistically heroic adventures in which the aliens serve exactly the same purpose as Tolkien’s orcs: unknown-as-enemy; Other. Countless works of fantasy, conversely, use the strange precisely to conceptualise what lies beyond our understanding. They are very much not fantasias.

  And when we get into specifics? It is deeply problematic—to put it charitably—to view the Viriconium books as ultimately sensationalist pleasures, when Harrison’s fiction is so self-evidently designed to disrupt and defy any attempt at passive immersion, to refuse the comfort of givens, to continually force the reader to face the unknown in the text and deal with it. Hell, it is quite simply complacent to construct one’s Science Fiction out of privilege in this way, as the more serious and committed form, boldly pushing forward to challenge the unknown and find answers (as opposed to, say, consciously or unconsciously manifesting knee-jerk right-wing American paranoia over enemies within and without—c.f. The Puppet Masters), while presenting fantasy as a reactionary enforcer of the social order (as opposed to, say, a cutting critique of the early twentieth century class system and the impact upon it of populist but essentially totalitarian ideologies—c.f. Titus Groan).

  But let’s just dispense with the weary eye-rolling at the interminable obliviation of the Contingency Slip Fallacy, the Paradigm Shift Caveat, the seductive snake-oil of the marvellous evidenced by their persistence, and the reality of dodgy cock-fluffing that results. One could point again and yet again to the innumerable exceptions to the essentialist claptrap…but suppose instead we just strip away the shit and the shinola so quality isn’t even an issue. Suppose we strip away all the clunk-click assemblage of off-the-shelf clichés, the adolescent wank-reveries based on techno-magical MacGuffins, there to be found under either rackspace label. Suppose we put to one side also all that slippery stream of stuff that runs from Ray Bradbury up through writers of the New Wave such as M. John Harrison all the way to Kelly Link, the stuff that is perpetually elided, it seems, for the sake of bogus closed definitions. Suppose we forget for a second that the shitty bulk of all Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror is, to all intents and purposes, simply formulaic Modern Pulp product, while the shinola is, to all intents and purposes, simply strange fiction of a range of complex flavours. Suppose we forget that for a moment.

  There are two oppositional aesthetics in the field, both products of the Enlightenment and each associated with one side or the other in its most specialised form—the Rationalism associated with Science Fiction and the Romanticism associated with Fantasy—indexed by the words hard and epic. Hard SF and Epic Fantasy—both of these forms have been conventionalised, proscribed and prescribed, such that they constitute valid Genres in a way that science fiction and fantasy do not.

  Those two grandes dames do make a lot of noise, and people do listen to them. If they don’t and can’t circumscribe science fiction and fantasy, readers and writers do perceive them as the centres of their respective genres, in a sort of “fuzzy set” model where both science fiction and fantasy lack clear boundaries but each congregates around a different centre. Within that great ongoing drunken wedding party of this vast divided clan, the two of them sit there, Old Granny Campbell and Grea
t Aunt MacDonald, holding court at separate tables, their arms folded, their gazes severe, each with quite distinct notions of how things should be done.

  —Use your head, m’boy! says one.

  —No, says the other, it’s the heart that matters!

  Even if most of the field is intermarried, interbred, even if many of us don’t really give a damn about those dotty old maids with their outmoded ideas on science and magic, they insist that us young ’uns must pick sides. If they and their devotee broods want to feud, I’m loath to come between their bickering by challenging their wild fancies of what conventional template is the Essential Truth of the Inherent Nature of this or that side of the Inarguable Divide. But with their tribalist dogma corroding discourse with a false dichotomy, I see no option but to take a stand, dismiss all that essentialism for the tosh it is.

  Bollocks to it.

  The division of aesthetics is there, yes. And the aesthetics those old maids have aligned themselves with are cut deep enough in our culture that the field can’t help but be affected by the real centuries-old rift—that between Rationalism and Romanticism. But that dichotomy is artificial and obsolete, has been from the start. So one group sits at the booths in the SF Café, while the other sits at the tables; one comes and leaves through the Nth Street door, while the other enters and exits through the door onto Avenue X. Who gives a fuck?

  That sign which used to read The Science Fiction Café and Bar? You know, they tried out a few variants before they settled on that: The Fantasy and Science Fiction Diner; The Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Bistro; The Weird Fiction Greasy Spoon; The Café Fantastique; The Science Fiction / Fantasy Snack Shack.