Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

by Duncan, Hal

  The orthodoxy is a simple dichotomy. Delany is not alone in applying the notion of possibility to distinguish science fiction and fantasy on the basis of the subjunctivity level (i.e. alethic modality) of their sentences; though I’m given to understand, by way of a comment during a recent discussion hosted by John Clute, that current thinking may be moving more in the direction I’m suggesting, The Encyclopedia of Fantasy sets it as a straightforward either/or, assigning science fiction a subjunctivity level of could happen, fantasy a subjunctivity level of could not happen.

  At first glance, this seems so cut and dried only a fool would deny it: science fiction limits its conceits to the possibilities of the future, while fantasy throws off those shackles and runs amok; who could argue? But this is the Contingency Slip Fallacy in action. Could happen? Even if we buy into the not yet caveat written into the novum’s impossibility, in a past or present tense narrative—and future tense narratives are few and far between—we are dealing with what could have happened or what could be happening now. The novum may not, as the chimera, strain suspension-of-disbelief with the more extreme alethic modality of could not happen ever, but that doesn’t make it a possibility yesterday or today.

  Plausibility? What we might see is conceits developed from arguable speculation and justified with futurological rationalisations; the text may make a concerted effort to persuade us to project into it another alethic modality, one that acts as palliative to the rupture of possibility: would happen. But this is the plausibility of the con-man or conjurer as often as not, and the logic games of if-then are as likely to be left implicit in the backstory. What may well sell a reader more on the pretence of possibility is not so much argument as it is allure, not the would but the should. Which is to say, the marvellous tint to the incredible, the novum acting as numina.

  Coulda, woulda, shoulda—the words in use here are markers of modality, judgements written into the text. As the earlier references to epistemic modality might suggest, such judgements come in more hues than just the judgement of possibility. There is: epistemic modality, judgement of fact; alethic modality, judgement of possibility; deontic modality, judgement of duty; and boulomaic modality, judgement of desire/dread. If strange fiction is characterised by the alethic quirk (novum or chimera), we’d do well not to underestimate the extent to which it may be driven by the boulomaic quirk (numina or monstrum).

  If the potential of the field of strange fictions lies in equipping a writer with a whole toolkit of pataphors to work with over and above the plain old metaphors, the downside of that toolkit is that it also allows a writer to pander to the most infantile wish-fulfilment and the most paranoid neuroses, to conjure alethic quirks tinted marvellous or monstrous to exploit the most basic (and base) desires and fears in wholly superficial terms, to simply push those buttons for the sake of narrative drive. It always has been true and always will be, no doubt, that some are so much more interested in the numina or monstrum as cheap thrill that the strangeness of the quirk, its potential function as novum or chimera, is as irrelevant as prose quality, mere means to an end.

  Before we jump to defend our ghetto of Genre from the slanderers of Mainstream and Literature, we might want to bear in mind that the pulp we have our roots in was a juvenile fiction, and last century’s juvenile fiction at that.

  Those who do not remember history, as they say…

  Walk into the SF Café twenty minutes into the future, slide into a booth with your iRobot mate, and if you look around you’ll likely still see the genreheads wiring into the wonder. You’ll still see those who happily accept the cheapest, crappiest junk as long as the price is low, the portions big, and the food comes fast and hot, smothered in ketchup, with crack cocaine for salt. There’s a killer buzz to the games those Microself X-Books immerse you in. They’re hip, they’re happening, they’re fictive smartdrugs!

  Jack in and jerk off, kid! You too can save the world…from those evil, bug-eyed commies from space!

  To be clear, the sway of the juvenile market was hardly wholly malign, leading to a focus on clarity and economy, and even thematic concerns beyond those of the middlebrow and middle-aged. Losing maturity in one’s fiction for the sake of marvels and monsters can also mean losing propriety, and that’s not always a bad thing. It makes for a freedom to fail the standards of solemn literature.

  So we had Ray Bradbury writing stories such as “All Summer in a Day” (published in F&SF in 1954), where a kid at school on Venus gets shoved in a closet by other children, misses a brief glimpse of the sun…which comes only once every seven years. This, along with many other stories, is quite clearly aimed at adult sensibilities as much as at those of children. Bradbury may be sentimental about youth, nostalgia rather than angst powering much of his fiction, but his work is hardly shallow sensationalism; even those stories most imbued with wonder and creepiness display the thematic maturity of an adult writer using the worldviews of children as alterior perspectives on reality rather than simply seeking to capitalise on the crudity of their tastes. And that sentimentality is a feature, not a bug; he’s writing American Pastoral, which is as valid as any dreary mid-life crisis novel.

  We can contrast this however with works directly targeted at younger readers. Around the same time we have Robert A. Heinlein writing novels such as Have Space Suit—Will Travel (serialised in F&SF in 1958), where a kid with his own spacesuit has a romantic adventure in space—enacting the desire of the reader in his escape from mundane Middle America to the Great Beyond, being kidnapped by malevolent aliens, saving the human race from destruction; there’s even a female child genius for the clever tomboys. Rocket Ship Galileo with its Nazis on the moon, the frontier adventures of Red Planet and Farmer in the Sky—it’s stating the obvious to say that these stories are aimed at adolescent sensibilities, but we tend to be disingenuous within the field about the extent to which these juveniles are at the root of a purportedly adult-oriented Science Fiction’s genre cooties. Those uptight ass wipes at the Bistro de Critique thinks it’s all fairy stories for children?

  No shit, Sherlock.

  Sometimes when the symbol eats the text, the first thing it devours is any hint of fiction as something other than a means to an immersive end.

  Nipples That Go Spung

  Some say the golden age was circa 1928; some say 1939; some favor 1953, or 1970, or 1984. The arguments rage till the small of morning, and nothing is ever resolved. Because the real golden age of science fiction is twelve.

  Peter Graham

  But I don’t want to suggest that juvenile fiction is inherently lower quality, nor even that escapism and wish-fulfilment are bad things per se. Young Adult fiction may well be the freest category out there right now, openly defined by demographic rather than formal conventions. If you’ve got your snoot ready to cock at it, go read Octavian Nothing. And if some kid—or adult, for that matter—out in the world beyond the city of New Sodom wants to take a weekend city break in Genre, sit in the SF Café and—shock! horror!—read a book I don’t rate, a book that offers nothing other than a temporary reprieve from the drab nine-to-five, a retreat into immersive adventure…well, power to them. It might be me in there, you know, rereading Edgar Rice because today I’m just not in the mood for Bill.

  Still, there’s something about the truth of Sturgeon’s Law that we elide, about the particular nature of our particular crud. The commercial pressures on fiction aimed at juveniles in a conservative culture were formative in the field, having wide-ranging and long-lasting effects, not least in Heinlein’s work; we need only look at Podkayne of Mars, bowdlerised by the publisher, Heinlein forced to revise the ending against his judgement, in order to see how these story-patterns limit the capacity of fiction to challenge a reader with, say, a tragic outcome for a beloved hero. This is how formulation works, how Genre works. In Romance, the expectation and demand is for the heroine to get together with the hero in the end. In Mystery, the expectation and demand is for that mystery to be solved. In the
Action-Adventure of the Hollywood schlockbuster, the expectation and demand is for the hero(ine) to save the day at the end and be lauded for it. In every such Genre there’s an audience that wants “more of the same” and writers out to supply that desire, not thwart it.

  Romantic adventures bound to a narrative grammar where the hero cannot lose, loaded with wonder and wish-fulfilment, aimed at credulous adolescents who’re far more interested in the thrills and spills of the spectacle than what Richard Feynman has to say about the physics of a twirling, nutating dish moving through the air…here at the very core of the field of science fiction—Science Fiction even—in the work of one of its cardinal influences, one of the Big Three, we have much that the churlish intellectual might reject (or abject) as Fantasy. For all that those juveniles are generally well-crafted bildungsromans, with philosophical subtleties and social pertinence to their moral messages, they signify a return to the narrative logic of pulp where moral fibre and fortitude are written into the hero as champion, and instant karma awaits him/her in her/his inevitable victory.

  If Heinlein initially published works which were clearly juvenile or adult, the distinction between these works quickly became muddled in a field catering to precocious adolescents and immature adults. Starship Troopers may not be considered juvenile fiction now, but it’s the classic example of the Science Fiction Bildungsroman and was aimed for Scribner’s with the rest of them. Heinlein’s juveniles begin to bleed into his later works. The Rolling Stones, with its precocious child heroes, gets linked into the same universe as The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress through the character of Hazel Stone, while the twins, Castor and Pollux reappear in The Number of the Beast. And so on.

  As his novels degenerate into rambling exercises in hot air and cloying cuteness, they become increasingly emotionally retarded; they may offer a spur towards post-conventional morality for a questioning fourteen year old (for all that his manner is didactic and his message dubious, the individualist message invites the very dialogue that may destroy it), but they hardly demonstrate the most mature approach to their themes, the quirky flavourings of the idiosyncratic ideologue ultimately drowned in the ketchup of redheaded twins and nipples that go spung.

  The late Heinlein works gain an originality from his eccentric libertarian character, and before the slow slide into bloat and blather there’s some peachy stuff if you can get past the politics. But where Bradbury’s weird wonders, for all the nostalgia, lead via The Twilight Zone to works such as Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” or Disch’s “Descending,” in Heinlein’s overgrown Tom Swift, Juan “Johnnie” Rico, we might well trace one root of a grand oak of tosh and piffle that dominates the field. As that adult/adolescent market grew over time, and the work aimed at that market replicated and codified itself—its audience requiring consistency of effect more than novelty, seeking the stability and security of conventions, demanding “more of the same”—derivative, formulaic power fantasies of Space Opera and Military SF built on the foundations laid by the pulps, around the statue of the Man/Boy Hero erected by Heinlein, constructing a Genre within science fiction that is neither juvenile nor adult but kind of just puerile.

  I likes me some “Shit Blows Up” fiction, don’t get me wrong, but this derring-do form, with its boys’ own tales of hardy heroes, grizzled old-timers, evil aliens and so on, is Science Fiction’s version of the tales of orphan-princes permeating Fantasy. Both are ultimately defined by the strictures of Genre—epic / heroic Romantic adventures—and populist enough to have impressed a stereotype on the minds of the uninitiated.

  But it’s not the fiction I’m out to skewer here, only the self-serving pomp around it, the grandiose handwaving in denial.

  Down in the ghetto, in the SF Café, there are those who blame it all on cinema and television, mutter darkly about Star Wars, how this and that movie or show is not really science fiction. Never mind Flash Gordon. Never mind Tom Swift. Never mind all that “fans are slans” nonsense. Never mind Heinlein’s juveniles. Never mind that the patent legacy inherited from Modern Pulp is a drive to churn out pandering pabulum that fits a template. For all too many, it’s Hollywood to blame if the vast majority of the public think of the fiction we love as that puerile dross of formulaic genre…that stuff they so abjure that they must call it by another name.

  Down in the ghetto, in the SF Café, there are those who grit their teeth and clench their fists whenever that dread name is spoken: Sci-Fi.

  Spandex and Mullets

  The distinction between Science Fiction and Sci-Fi is by no means universal within the community but for those who hold to it that term is loaded. For some the label sci-fi is just a shorthand for science fiction, an alternative to sf gesturing at…you know, that stuff we like. But for some that label signifies the pernicious influence of—fuck it, construct your enemy to blame with a scatter of and/or as you will:

  Fantasy,

  corrupting the form

  with

  Hollywood,

  diluting the form

  into

  Television,

  presenting the form

  as

  Fandom,

  demanding the form

  be

  tosh and piffle.

  Wherever the term sci-fi is reserved for the visual media or the pabulum in print, wherever the blame is placed, the distinction serves to segregate out “proper” Science Fiction from formulation. Coined by überfan Forrest J Ackerman, the term has been reviled by writers from its origins. As a diminutive and a pun, it’s a bit too cute and clever. It hints, perhaps, at a sort of baby-talk whereby Samuel R. Delany could be referred to as Sammy-Wammy, while Harlan Ellison would find himself saddled with Harley-Warley as his moniker. When I first started hanging out with other would-be writers at the SF Café, back in the early nineties, as a member of the GSFWC, I quickly realised how that term raised hackles. By 1995, when Worldcon hit the home town, the local rag headline was “Sci-Fi Freaks Beam Down to Glasgow.” ’Nuff said.

  The irony is that many down in the SF Café have forgotten its origins; every so often you’ll hear grumbling about how literary fiction (or Literary Fiction, rather,) doesn’t suffer the indignity of a similarly demeaning diminutive. Aside from ignoring the (ghetto Creole?) coinage of lit-fic, (or the common pomo abbreviation for postmodernism), this illusion of victimhood is disingenuous. It would be nice to imagine the label as an act of semantic trivialisation perpetrated by the elitists of Literature and mundanes of Mainstream, a hostile Othering like the twist of genre to Genre, with its roots in the Culture Wars; but this is simply not the case. The label was created by us, taken up as a membership badge, printed on black T-shirts to be sold over the counter at the SF Café, worn with pride. We forget that we brought it on ourselves.

  It caught on, it spread, it seeped into the public consciousness, and now there’s that bristling irk sparked when we hear it in the mouths of naïfs who don’t know their Asimov from their Ellison. Why? Because from them it comes with an arched brow at the garish façade of the SF Café, the mass-market eye-candy filling its windows: racks of media tie-ins, franchise novels, lurid art books, t-shirts; merchandise, merchandise, merchandise; posters for conventions, clubs, cosplay; role playing furry filk knows what.

  It comes with a superior smirk at this superfice out on display and the unseemly squee it speaks of, the enthusiasms so excessive they short-circuit everyday decorum when unleashed, and sometimes social skills, and maybe even simple common sense, the zeal of a subculture jonesing at the privilege of being advertised to with OMG! the new trailer for the reboot of the reboot of crap from a director whose entire oeuvre is set in a cosmos where the fundamental particle is not the quark but the shark.

  We twitch that they’re looking at the SF Café and seeing a Genre, a marketing category, because that means formulation for a market that sustains it, demands it, celebrates it, throwing money at any hack who can put a lurid patina of hyperkitsch on the clunk-click plots
and card-board characters, power-fantasies and happy endings that are, and have always been, characteristic of a junk fiction indulgence.

  From the mouths of the incognoscenti, that term conjures the stigma of what they expect to see inside the SF Café: the stereotype of sweaty-palmed geek-boys with a hard-on for gadgetry, scarfing down sub-literate comfort food, venting furious unreason at the affront of factory-line crap being factory-line crap, duh, and always going back for more, more, more. Why, we wonder, can’t they imagine us all connoisseurs who relish the haute cuisine and know exactly where to find it? Why can’t they just see past the All You Can Eat sign on the door that screams unbridled appetite rather than educated palate?

  We forget that we brought it on ourselves not just by the coinage, but by our consumption, all those years as slack-jawed kids pressing noses to the SF Café’s windows of wonders. Come on. Is it any wonder when your aged Aunt Agnes sees Delany’s Dhalgren on your shelf and asks, Is that some of your Sci-Fi? what she’s thinking isn’t New Wave?

  It’s the same as when she hears you playing your Sonic Youth album and complains that “all of that Heavy Metal stuff is just noise.” Her understanding of rock music formed by fragmentary horrifying glimpses of Mötley Crüe, Whitesnake and Slayer on MTV back in the ’80s, when you loved that shit, she hears those loud guitars and has no idea that there’s a difference between Heavy Metal and rock in general, that there’s punk rock, prog rock, post rock and more. It’s all just Heavy Metal to her, the shriek of guitars evoking an image in her mind’s eye—crude self-caricatures of posturing adolescent moppets in spandex and mullets. To aged Aunt Agnes, similarly, Sci-Fi is a strange unfathomable spectre, a patchwork of fleeting impressions stitched loosely into a fuzzy notion, something she can only imagine as the literary equivalent of spandex and mullets.