Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

by Duncan, Hal

  The marriage of the two aesthetics, the weird fusion of cuisines, is what made it vital in the first place, a viable concern.

  A Thoroughly Modern Molly

  Contrary to the hogwash spouted by our Grumpy Old Gits, Great-Uncles Campbell and MacDonald—changing up with a gender flip for equality’s sake—the feud has little to do with the novum versus the chimera, and sod all to do with engagement versus escapism. Or to lay bare the sweeping hauteur on one side, it has sod all to do with some nobly intrepid essence to the mob of fictions grouped under one banner versus some whipping boy of an Othered opposite onto which one projects the grave sins, false and real, one is demonstrably in denial of: the sensational(ist) relish of incredible and/or marvellous strangeness as an end in itself, which is a phantom sin of neurotic intellectualism anyway; the craven brutality of will-to-power wet dream, which is all too real on both sides. This is to say, collapsing all fantasy past even fantasia to an imaginary Fantasy is a shameless smokescreen.

  At its depths, you see, the division is a direct analogue of that between the Romantic and the Neo-Classical movements in painting, that schism in post-Renaissance art, that sifting of the aesthetic techniques of broad-brushed Rembrandts and tight-lined Raphaels, of airy Titians and earthy Brueghels, these techniques born from a new world of new technologies and new politics—oil-based paints, burgermeister patrons, a world where even if the subjects weren’t new—Vermeer painting a cleaning lady—the approaches were. This schism resulted in Jacques-Louis David on the one hand and Eugène Delacroix on the other, in Neo-Classicism with its emphasis on the ordered and Romanticism with its emphasis on the sublime. It is this same division that, in the marketing category of Science Fiction / Fantasy, where the reality of marriage is indisputable, gives us the conflicting emphases on futurology and fantasia, the aesthetic of the logical and the aesthetic of the sublime.

  In writing, that Romantic idealisation of the sublime gives us the archetypal flights of fancy, rakish wanderers, rebel poets and all the epic wildernesses we will eventually see in Epic Fantasy, while the Neo-Classical idealisation of order gives us the novel as social study, as empirical observation, and all the solemn restraint we will eventually see in Hard SF. Passion and Reason—the prevailing themes of the Enlightenment, the Age of Revolution. Both Delacroix and David painted scenes from the French Revolution—Liberty Leading the People, and The Death of Marat. These paintings illustrate the difference of the two aesthetics rather neatly.

  There was a third aesthetic however that developed in the dialogue between these—the modernism (or modernity) of Caravaggio, who was fusing Romantic chiaroscuro and Neo-Classical formality long before these terms were even in use, who painted sublimely ordered scenes, who used a dead whore dragged from the river as his Magdalene, thieves and peasants for his saints. His work is fiercely passionate and coldly reasoned all at once. A pretty boy Bacchus, in a Caravaggio painting, is at once the Greek god himself and an urban hustler from the streets. Caravaggio plays the sublime and the logical off against each other. The sublime is Yeats’s “terrible beauty,” born in the collision of monstrum and numina, but Caravaggio comes to it as anatomist, rendering the wild passion of a decapitation in the most coolly ordered composition.

  A thoroughly modern molly, Caravaggio in his work embodies the re-scaling that was going on, the re-evaluation of God and Nature and Humanity’s relationship to them both. The first modern(ist) painter, he is distinct from his Renaissance forebears in the sheer humanism of his work, and distinct from the schismatics who follow, never surrendering to the idealisations that set the Romantics and the Neo-Classicists at each others’ throats. He leaves it to the Romantics to blather on about the worth of bold colour over clean line, leaves it to the Neo-Classicists to witter on about the value of clean line over bold colour. Passion versus Reason—the world of Western Art spends centuries bickering over which is better, centuries of Royal Academies and revolutionary outsiders, of worthy High Art and vulgar Low Art, of intellectualist Literature and sensationalist Genre…and somewhere along the way that hoary old argument of Reason / Passion ends up in Science Fiction / Fantasy. As if that’s all there is. As if there’s scientifically rigourous rationalism or weirdly wild romanticism, and ne’er the twain shall meet.

  —Fuck that shit, says Caravaggio.

  The Fantasy of Genre, The Science of Fiction

  There is a shared methodology in much strange fiction, whatever rackspace label it goes by, an approach shaped by a shared aesthetic, neither Romanticism nor Rationalism but rather more akin to the modernism of Caravaggio, reacting to the modern world, portraying humanity’s relationship with “God” and “Nature” in a way that, when it works, plays the sublime grandeur of one aesthetic off against the logical restraint of the other, and in doing so results in something neither could achieve alone.

  Neither science fiction nor fantasy—no matter what those old maids would have you believe—has ever been so pure in its devotion to those antithetical aesthetics that they could be defined thus. The Rationalism of Wells is counterpointed by the Romanticism of Verne. In the Gernsback-Campbell era when Science Fiction was born, those two aesthetics were always-already as much in collaboration as in conflict, in bold Romantic adventures wrought with Rationalist science, futurology as the source of fantasia. The dynamic power of the fiction resides in the interaction.

  The distinction that drives the Great Debate is an illusion, an artificial dichotomy based more on claims of allegiance than on actual practice. Two subsets of the field live by their grandes dames’ rhetoric, creating works that do exemplify the warring aesthetics. But if you look around the drunken wedding party, ignore the two old farts sulking in their corners, that dusty old duality looks largely irrelevant. Perhaps it is only in that shattering crack of lightning which splits the genre that the true nature of the hideous creation is revealed. And it is not Science Fiction. Science Fiction is dead. This is the Frankenstein’s monster of Science Fiction / Fantasy, a patchwork of dead genres, cannibalised from the cadavers of Romanticism and Rationalism, torn apart and stitched back together, a marvellous, monstrous marriage of meat machines. It’s a riven thing—we could hardly expect two or three hundred years of strife between Romanticism and Rationalism to be healed in a few short decades—but it is a thing. A definition for it, if we must:

  Emerging within 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, Science Fiction / Fantasy became a marketing category for strange fictions simply rationalising the sublime and/or romanticising the logical, forcing a fusion of the two aesthetics in the face of its own angst that resolution was inherently unattainable.

  That thing is, in its essence, modernism. We might brand it Pulp Modernism—cheap, populist, balls-to-the-wall trash modernism, out to entertain more than an elite of aesthetes and intellectuals, but still modernism. It uses mimesis on the one hand, semiosis on the other, recasting magic as logical process and science as sublime gift, combining the strange and the mundane, ever testing the limits of its key literary elements. The integrity we project on it, the unity we impose upon it with our so-well-formed closed definitions, is only that of a family which, in truth, extends as far as we decide it does.

  There is no Genre of Fantasy, only the fantasy of Genre. This isn’t the fiction of science; it’s the science of fiction. What we have is one confused clusterfuck of conventional templates ripped apart and rebuilt as an aesthetic idiom, a mode of fiction in which we rupture the narrative with quirks of the impossible, things which cannot be—not yet / not ever—taking these not as passing metaphors but as figurative conceits, so we can put them to the test with literature as the laboratory, by literalising them and working through the ramifications.

  When the results are good, right enough, we do have a tendency to go into mass production mode, churning out low-quality copies from the cheapest of
materials, for a market of consumers who’ll love our new toys for a day or two before abandoning them in favour of the next shiny gadget. There’s an upside to that: that Big Corporate Structure keeps the R & D department going, so to speak, the vast market for commercial product supporting the smaller market for high-end fiction in this pulp modernist mode. But there’s a downside: the commercialisation results in one key drawback, in the depth to which such works become bound to, sold as, and ultimately misunderstood as Genre, as this schismed, schizoid Science Fiction / Fantasy, at odds with itself. And arguing in the ghetto creole of Genre, where aesthetic idiom is ever conflated with conventional template and marketing category, we buy into that, swallow it hook, line and sinker.

  And the Great Debate rages on, an unending feud among the wedding guests, the food fights becoming flame wars, immolating meaning in a holocaust of definitions.

  The Miscegenation of Science Fantasy

  Surrender to the Sublime

  Science fiction makes the implausible possible, while science fantasy makes the impossible plausible.

  Rod Serling

  In the dawning space age of nuclear power and automated household appliances, the sublime seemed logical, the logical sublime, and this served to hold the Romantics and Rationalists of Science Fiction / Fantasy together through the Golden Age, the period of Gernsback and Campbell, the Futurians and so on. Bradbury sat comfortably in the SF Café alongside Asimov, Heinlein and Clarke. If maybe Leiber, Howard and Lovecraft had their own hangouts, there was nevertheless a blatant overlap between the regulars of the SF Café and the crowd frequenting the Fantasy Boutique or the Little Shop of Horror.

  But the increasing sense of a gulf between these modes soon led to the use of the term Science Fantasy as an attempt to map the borderland between them. Though the label was coined originally to refer to works which applied a rationalising rigourous approach characteristic of Science Fiction to the subject matter of what could only be classed as fantasy (Heinlein’s Magic, Inc., for example), over time the meaning shifted such that it now primarily refers to those works which fail to apply that rationalising rigour to the subject matter of Science Fiction, such that alien planets and technology function in the same way as the secondary worlds and magic of Fantasy. We can see Dune as a benchmark in this transition of meaning, the point where the focus on fantasia over futurology becomes sufficient for many to identify it as no longer really science fiction at all.

  This shift in meaning is revealing. It is not simply that Fantasy here signifies magic, metaphysical causation. This could be systematised by the application of critical intellect, an approach entirely in line with scientific methodology which theorises from observation, and in which anomalous observations are to be accepted as falsifying that theory—i.e. we might simply see the impossible events of magic as demanding a reconstruction of our nomology, an update of the laws of nature. That was precisely the project of Science Fantasy in its original sense. Rather Fantasy here signifies the suspension of critical intellect in Romantic rapture, a sensationalist surrender to the sublime. Where the label originally pointed to the tropes of magic, it now applies to an approach to those tropes, the tropes themselves taken as indexes of that approach.

  The Paradigm Shift Caveat

  One might speculate as to the (im)possibility of faster-than-light travel, time travel or alternate realities; no one to my knowledge has ever speculated on the possibility of finding elves, orcs or magic swords any time soon.

  Gary Gibson

  In the blog entry from which the above quote is taken, fellow GSFWC member Gary Gibson singles out the point of contention here in the distinction he makes between science fiction and fantasy, arguing the former is not, as some would maintain, a branch of the latter. Where the former, he argues, does similarly deal with the impossible, it is distinct from fantasy in that it does so on the basis of a history of scientific discoveries and radical paradigm shifts, a recognition of the limitations of our present knowledge. In science fiction, the conceit (the impossibility accepted as possible for the sake of the story) is not simply a spurious fabrication but is rather a rational speculation (which may allow for the possibility of being wrong about what’s impossible).

  On the surface this seems a fair distinction between the Rationalism and Romanticism of Science Fiction / Fantasy. The point of contention, and the reason for the evolution of the term Science Fantasy, lies in the degree to which a recognition of the limitations of our present knowledge, the idea of a potential paradigm shift, becomes a universal caveat exempting the science fiction writer from any real rigour whatsoever. It’s all very well to accept that what’s presented as a novum is in fact a chimera, and argue that with the shifting goal posts of science it is still possible that it will become possible by the laws of nature; but this is essentially just to conjure what can never be—not ever—not in the system of physical rules by which this worldscape of reality works, and then apply a never say never get-out clause which applies equally to any chimera.

  I have no problem speculating that maybe sometime in the future we’ll discover the laws of nature to actually allow for not just alternate realities but wholly alterior ones, and portals to these Faerie realms. Or at least, I have no more problem taking the elves of some secondary world fantasia as arguable thus, as in the latest Thor movie, than I do with the chimera of FTL.

  To see FTL, time travel or alternative realities as possibilities rather than impossibilities we need to imagine a wholesale revision to the laws of nature, a paradigm shift in physics. The same is true of, for example, ESP, jaunting and intersecting realities in canonical works such as Bester’s The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination or Zelazny’s Roadmarks. Magics of metaphysical causality, the core ideas of these works require substantial paradigm shifts to put the mask of a novum on the chimera and sell it as grounded futurology rather than pure fantasia.

  Of course, the evidence is, few readers have any great problem with making that leap; traditionally, we do slap onto these books the label of science fiction. For many, however, judging by their own stated criteria, the transparent fancy of the conceit really ought to render these works unquestionably fantasy.

  On what basis, after all, do we distinguish those paradigm shifts—which are radical enough, make no mistake, to breach the most fundamental principles of current science—from potential paradigm shifts which could redefine even the most spurious fantasia as futurology? As science fiction writers and readers, we are ready, it seems, to abandon the limitation of light speed that comes with Einsteinian Relativity so we can play with FTL, or to ignore the physical foundations of mind in the neurochemistry of the brain so that we can use ESP. We are willing to ditch the Conservation of Energy that is a basic aspect of Newtonian thermodynamics in order to portray teleportation as an act of mere will, jaunting as an ability to transport oneself instantaneously through space-time. We are able to throw away the very coherence of the space-time continuum so we can imagine a road that links all possible times and all possible histories. We simply apply that Paradigm Shift Caveat.

  If we’re ready, willing and able to play this fast and loose with science why should we draw the line at equivalent paradigm shifts that, for us, render a work fantasy rather than science fiction? Aren’t the secondary worlds simply alternative realities where the archaeological distinction of gracile and robust hominids translates to elves and dwarves as distinct races? Aren’t the magics just the semiotic skill of metaphysical causation but with the arguable left unargued? Aren’t these fabrications of the most generic Fantasy in fact recastable as speculations if only we accept paradigm shifts no more radical in truth than those required with the works of Bester and Zelazny still considered seminal science fiction?

  This is the challenge taken up by the original Science Fantasy—replacing the fantasias born of futurology with those born of the more radical paradigm shifts of cosmology. In these fictions the current laws of nature are understood as a revisable hum
an construct, just as in Science Fiction the current limitations of technology are. They may be tweaked, even radically reformed. Recognising the revisions that have taken place historically, that Science Fantasy plays the game of adopting obsolete models, trying to apply them as systems in their own right, perhaps even integrate them with ours. From the perspective of a universe next door, an alterior reality reachable, perhaps, by a road that links all possible worlds (which is surely no more plausible than a wardrobe), our cosmology can be seen as only one of the superset of possible permutations.

  There is a point where maths and physics meet in the metaphysics of the multiverse, and if we accept this point as being in the domain of science then this is science fiction; it is simply not Science Fiction. Unfortunately that distinction doesn’t really work in a spoken discussion in the SF Café.

  So, for my own part, I leave the term science fiction to whoever the fuck wants it, talk instead of SF and strange fictions in the hope of thrashing out a common language, or at least evading the tedious turf wars of the taxonomists. This is the taxonomy I’m more interested in:

  A Taxonomy of Narratives

  One could propose the third axis of SF as a story wherein (a part of) base reality changes (to a greater or lesser extent)… [SF] still relates to base reality by way of the physical laws, that is, reality has changed, but according to the rules of the possible… [For] fantasy (part of) base reality changes, as well, but in ways that ignore the rules of the possible.