Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

by Duncan, Hal

  With a fiction of the marvellous, this not an unfounded fear.

  The Return of the Reviled

  Science fiction is a spectrum, it stretches between fantasy and realism and needs to be anchored in both. But more and more we see at one end of the spectrum fantasy and sf merging seamlessly, while at the other end realism appropriates, quite legitimately, the tropes of sf. In other words that unique affect that once upon a time made us love science fiction is now equally the province of fantasy and of realism.

  Paul Kincaid

  In the hepcat hotspot of the SF Café, it was not entirely unnoticed that this entrenchment was extreme and the application of the Paradigm Shift Caveat erratic at best, that the distinction between Science Fiction and Fantasy unravelled when applied to works like Roadmarks, that Science Fantasy signified the heroic structure as much as the chimeric content, and that the closing of these definitions ultimately schismed these zones from each other. If Science Fiction had this closed definition incompatible with Fantasy, there was also science fiction with an open definition entirely interwoven with fantasy, the former built upon the latter, the latter published as the former.

  In the SF Cafe they sought to articulate the situation more clearly, terms like hard and sense-of-wonder emerging from the dialectic of futurology and fantasia at work in the genre(s), coined to describe the proportional differences of rigour and rapture, the range of possible science fictions encompassing (or limited by) the fantasies of writers like Ray Bradbury at one end, the thrillers of writers like Michael Crichton at the other, those science fictions where science ultimately ceases to play the role it did in Science Fiction, largely functioning as an expedience for thematics in one and plot in the other.

  The problem for the entrenched partisans of Science Fiction was simple: as a hangover from the formative era, disguising the underlying unities and tensions of the field of Science Fiction / Fantasy, the term science fiction was applied very broadly indeed among the subculture of readers, writers, editors and publishers which had established itself in that Gernsback-Campbell period and whose tastes ran exactly the spectrum identified by Kincaid, between the fantastic and the realistic. Many writers worked as much in one mode as the other, even within the one story or novel. Many writers found the market as eager for picaresques and social satires, bildungsromans and “twist” stories as for Romantic adventures based on Rationalist science. And where some sought to differentiate Science Fiction from Fantasy, many simply saw no reason to apply a largely artificial taxonomy born of market forces and subjective application of the Paradigm Shift Caveat to the complexity of their creative projects.

  Rather than argue over semantics or work with a cumbersome hybrid term like Science Fiction / Fantasy, many simply applied this label or that on the basis of ad hoc personal judgements. Before the Ballantine Adult Fantasy imprint set the consensus of Fantasy as a genre, before the Science Fantasy label was negotiated to mean what it does now, the label science fiction had already become a catch-all term for fiction which shared a market rather than any clear definition in genre terms—which, in fact, had two utterly opposed aesthetics at its extremes and a third rapidly expanding into every nook and cranny of indefinition. Unmoored entirely from conventions of character, plot-structure or backdrop, futurology blending into cosmology, science fiction had ceased to be simply the name for the generic form of the closed definition and become instead largely a marker of subcultural affiliation.

  In the SF Café there was a new owner behind the counter and a new fry cook in back, and together they cut loose with a menu of soul food that changed every day, undefinable, unpredictable. There were burgers, yes, and there were chicken nuggets, but there were also all-day breakfasts, pancakes and waffles, hot dogs and omelettes, chop suey and pizza and you name it.

  Were I inclined to contentiousness, I might suggest that the key point of affiliation which came to characterise the field was the desire of its readers for that sense-of-wonder, and that this affiliation marked, to all intents and purposes, a resounding victory for the aesthetic of the sublime over the aesthetic of the logical, that in attempting to segregate out Science Fantasy from the Genre of Science Fiction defined by Campbell and redefined by those whose motto was “rigour over rapture,” Science Fiction only succeeded in invalidating its own definitional control, allowing the very sense-of-wonder it set itself against to usurp its place, allowing the fantasia to become the defining characteristic of the genre rather than futurology.

  Were I inclined to contentiousness, I might suggest that the eventual victor was, in fact, that which was abjected as either Science Fantasy or Fantasy outright. In the face of Hard SF’s insistence on rigour, writers and readers alike simply asserted the ultimate exemption of the Paradigm Shift Caveat in order to circumvent the restrictions. The abject may be dross best disposed of (like shit) or a vital component (like blood), and where it is valued as the latter one may well see a reaction of sedition and subversion to that process of abjection, a return of the reviled, the exiled, the repressed. I might suggest that Science Fiction lost the battle, was defeated and usurped, such that what we now call science fiction is, most characteristically, this abjected “Fantasy in Science Fiction drag.”

  Otherwise known as Sci-Fi.

  The Scourge of Sci-Fi

  Ordure and Bullshit

  Nine tenths of science fiction is crud. Of course, nine tenths of everything is crud.

  Theodore Sturgeon

  In the uptown district of Literature and the midtown district of Mainstream, so the story goes, the highbrow and the middlebrow all turn their noses up when they glance downtown, in the direction of Genre. Fairy tales for children, they sneer. On the door of the Bistro de Critique there was, for a good many years, a sign that read:

  NO GENRE ALLOWED

  They are not like us, both sides agree. The nearest they ever got to a rackspace label is General Fiction—a term with an empty definition if ever there was one, catch-all for a host of idioms and idiosyncrasies. No, Genre Fiction, as we happily identify ourselves, just isn’t de rigueur there, so we’re given to understand. So, fuck ’em, we say. Fuck the mundanes of Mainstream, the elitists of Literature. We’re Genre Fiction and proud of it, proud to wear that brand painted on the backs of our biker’s jackets.

  We have plenty to be proud of. Even during the Golden Age, the boundaries were blurred as to what exactly constituted science fiction, and in the SF Café that made for a dynamic melting pot. Claiming the core of the field, those tables right in the centre of the SF Café, was that Science Fiction characterised by its futurological fantasias of space travel, robots, contact with aliens, off-world colonies. That gang owned the place, and with just cause. For all that this mode was born from the pulps and inherited the callow, shallow Rocket Age Romanticism, Old Man Campbell had brought something new to the table, a Rationalist bent that called for writers to level up their intellectual game. And so they had, turning an idiom of Boy’s Own Adventures to more gnarly purposes—like the social commentary and critique of Pohl & Kornbluth’s 1952 satire The Space Merchants. Edging into this meanwhile were the visions of writers with even subtler agendas, outsiders like Orwell or insiders like Bester who saw yet greater potential in this strange new fiction. In their disregard for, or subversive approach to, the pulp formulae, these writers sowed the seeds of at least one revolution that was to come in the shape of the New Wave. And what about the feminist SF of the ’70s? And the cyberpunks of the ’80s?

  Damn straight, we’re Genre Fiction! We know that means Delany, Butler, Gibson, and a thousand other things.

  It’s a dangerous game though, that pride, because when we turn this noun into an adjective or a genre label in its own right—saying this is Genre Fiction, or simply this is Genre—we’re buying into the very rhetoric of abjection that built the ghetto walls around us. It is a term that functions in the same way coloured does; the rhetorical strategy is identical, as that in two examples of asyndeton.

&nbs
p; Hold that thought a second though. I must be crystal clear here, quash right up front any misconception that, in tracing out the parallels in linguistic action, I mean to suggest the reader of category fiction is facing prejudice in any way equivalent to the monstrum that is racism: though the abjection of category fiction must, I think, be set in its context as a mechanism of classism, misogyny and indeed racism, I have zero interest in bolstering the victimhood claims of the geek. I’m talking here of a process acting upon the fictions, not the fanboys, where the victims remain as ever the lower class, women, and people of abject ethnicity. What is abject in literature is so precisely because it is, in the rhetoric of those prejudices, vulgar, hysterical, primitive. Those fictions are abjected as a means to institutionalise those prejudices, I’d maintain. If the peer group pecking order turns the geek into whipping boy, that’s another story, one in which a retreat into category fiction seems rather more effect than cause to me.

  The point then:

  Skin colour is a quality we all have, all of us literally of some specific colour, just as every work is of some specific genre—my pale pinky-beige no less a colour than your deep brown, my contemporary realism no less a genre than your science fiction. But the term coloured people twists language itself to establish an abjected Other in contrast to an artificed normative, to posit people of some specific skin-colours as on the flip-side of a default white people, to privilege those normative white people as lacking some abstracted quality of being Coloured. So too the term genre fiction twists language to establish its own abject Other in contrast to an artificed normative, to posit fictions of some specific genres as on the flip-side of a default general fiction, to privilege those normative fictions as lacking that abstracted quality of being Genre.

  Of course, the reality is those works of general fiction are also of genres, idioms with their own characteristics, sometimes conventions and clichés, and it doesn’t take much for these genres to become Genres, definitions closed, works formulated to factory-line product. Sometimes they manage to pass, you might say, despite the giveaway packaging. One glance at that sepia-tinted photograph cover, say, fading to white at the edge, that picture of a 1930s child in hobnail boots on a tenemented street, and you recognise that Kitchen Sink Realist Family Memoir Melodrama à la Angela’s Ashes. But that’s not fiction of a genre, in common parlance. Well, it’s not Genre Fiction, doesn’t have that quality of being Genre. Supposedly.

  Sometimes they’ll be named—like the Chick-Lit spawned from Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary—and exiled sharpish to the ghetto with the rest of us category fiction scum. And I hazard that example was tagged for exile even before formulation had really set in, the very name reeking of exactly the sort of prejudice I suggest above. If Chick-Lit is Genre Fiction where some Kitchen Sink Realist Family Memoir Melodrama is not, it begs the question: what exactly is the quality being ascribed to every single work in some specific genres?

  And should we really be so eager to go along with the charade?

  There is of course a political purpose in taking a term coded/loaded with abjection and reclaiming it. We find that rhetorical strategy at its most abstract, perhaps, where for all the idiosyncratic foibles inherent in humans not being fucking clones, for all that everyone has some quirk of queerness, only some specific foibles become the focus of abjection with the label queer. But here, some of us who find ourselves so-labeled choose to make that term our own, the accusation owned as assertion of identity.

  Maybe that rhetorical strategy is a valid response in other similar cases.

  Yeah, we’re queer, we say. Non-normative in our sexual tastes. Our quirks are apparently something you have an issue with. So fucking what? Should I give a fuck that you equate your normative with propriety, that you recoil in disgust at my rejection of your standards? As Old Bill Burroughs used to say:

  Yeah, we’re genre, we say. Non-normative in our aesthetic tastes. Our quirks are apparently something you have an issue with. So fucking what? Should I give a fuck that you equate your normative with propriety, that you recoil in disgust at my rejection of your standards? As Old Bill Burroughs used to say:

  I am not innarested in your condition.

  But never mind the quirks of impossibility like the novum or chimera, or those quirks that disrupt affective equilibrium, the monstrum or the numina. We often use the term genre to refer to strange fictions, but we can hardly exclude Chick-Lit from that label, and that’s hardly built of strangeness. If we’re to be defiantly proud, reclaiming genre as a label, it is conventionality itself that we’re defending, the cleaving to a template.

  If you have an issue with conventionality, the upstart ghetto kid might say, let me introduce you to my friend the sonnet. I’ll carve my fourteen lines into your skin with a volta for a scalpel. I’ll even write it backwards so you can read it in the mirror every day until you appreciate the rigour of formal restraint and the capacities of poetry not limited by genre but unleashed by it, loosed through it.

  But still, to take a scalpel for a volta, slice, turn from genre to Genre—

  —back in the SF Café, even in the heyday of the Hard, with Old Man Campbell calling the shots, it’s not difficult to see where the sneers and jeers found their source. Sturgeon’s Law doesn’t say that ninety percent is of no consequence. Lest we begin to forget who the target of the prejudice is (not us often-privileged readers and writers of category fiction but rather those ultimately abjected by propriety’s discourse of the vulgar, the hysterical, the primitive), maybe it’s worth a little whiplash whirl to a counterpoint of our complicity as producers and consumers of formula fare.

  There is a key distinction between the sort of abjection that takes place with the segregation out of an abject Other by skin colour, and that which takes place with the segregation out of certain genres by the fact of their being published with rackspace labels: where individual human beings tend to be individual human beings, duh, rather than stereotypes, category fiction is by its commercial nature aiming to achieve a template fit, if in no other respect than by being sellable to a particular target market; with formulation there’s an active drive toward embodying a stereotype.

  Down in the SF Café back then, the menu was varied but the place still carried a legacy of its origins as a junk food joint. If the market encompassed literature enthusiasts with tastes for more mature cuisine, it was focused, as it always had been, on a continuing—indeed burgeoning—audience of adolescent pulp geeks who wanted Romantic adventure stories with exciting trimmings. Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, John Carter—the heart of this genre lay with heroes who lived next door to Doc Savage and The Shadow (both published, with Astounding, by Street & Smith). For every writer who saw the literary utility of this new mode of writing with its contemporary language of ideas encoded in concrete metaphors, there were plenty for whom those sleek and shiny phallic symbols of the Rocket Age weren’t exactly subtle and to whom the ideas they expressed weren’t exactly complicated. The lurid covers and exclamatory titles of the magazines promised cheap thrills, food pills, women with gills, heroes with skills, and aliens to kill.

  Science Fiction or science fiction, it was ten percent Orwell and ninety percent ordure, ten percent Bester and ninety percent bullshit.

  The Symbol That Ate the Text

  Pataphor (noun)

  1. An extended metaphor that creates its own context.

  2. That which occurs when a lizard’s tail has grown so long it breaks off and grows a new lizard.

  Pablo Lopez

  We talk of science fiction as the literature of ideas, but all literature uses ideas; what distinguishes this particular mode is that those ideas are made flesh. Where a writer using mimesis renders the dynamism of youth in a metaphor such as the boy rocketed through the room, an SF writer uses semiosis, rendering an AI rocket with an adolescent joy in its own destructive force, exploring the signified-signifier relationship from the inside, as an interesting thing in its own right. Held as a conceit
in the narrative, this quirk of a technical impossibility is extended metaphor gone wild, unleashed to devour all representational stability. It is the symbol that ate the text, the vehicle of the metaphor unmoored from any specific tenor; the AI rocket with an adolescent joy in its own destructive force is just that, a figurative vehicle that could blast into the reader’s imagination a whole explosion of tenors. To collapse it to a single tenor would be a failure, in fact, a reduction to mere allegory of what must really be understood as pataphor. The quirk does not speak directly to a context in which it is symbolic analogue of a stable mundane element, but rather creates its own context.

  Given that we’re not all writing absurdist pataphysics in the manner of Alfred Jarry, clearly there’s a distinction in our use of pataphor though, in our creation of contexts sprung from strange conceits that nonetheless make sense. Is it a matter of limitations, of being at least theoretically realistic? At a base level, possibility and plausibility are relevant to this conceit, but their relevance is more complex than we’re given to believe.