by Duncan, Hal
The ghost of SF is no supernatural spirit, just the simulacrum of an essence, the abstract agency we glimpse as we gaze round the SF Café with our mayashades scanning for hidden meaning, a wireframe model reconstructed in a virtual medium. As for the golem? Let’s make the monster a machine, a robot made of muck instead of metal. We’ll say its clay is carbon, the grey goo of nanotech devices, millions of minuscule mechanisms fused into one lumpen mass, given identity in the name projected onto it, SF as its logos and its logic.
Hey presto! Magic becomes science. Fantasy becomes SF.
For the benefit of those who care about that shit, you know.
Genre and the Generic
It’s not that hard to see SF’s relationship with Genre, I think, to critique it with clarity and objectivity, picking out juvenile tropes and themes from adult treatments—as Spinrad does, say, in his classic “Emperor Of Everything” article, showing Bester’s smart and mature inversion of the heroic rags-to-riches power fantasy in The Stars My Destination. But resisting critical analyses that recognise the aesthetic idiom for what it is makes it easier to excuse generic twaddle such as Independence Day or The Matrix, to forget why these are twaddle because, well, they’re enjoyable twaddle. Both are juvenile. Both are formulaic. Both are Genre in precisely the way that the Form = Formulation Syllogism damns it. We only need to compare them to, say, Gibson’s Neuromancer or Stephenson’s Snow Crash—to pick two works that are hardly lacking in the good old-fashioned plot-driven dynamics of the thriller or action / adventure genres they inhabit—to judge them pretty much derivative hokum. But if we like these two movies and hate another two—Minority Report or War of the Worlds—we can simply wave our hands, say that the former are genre, the latter generic.
This distinction is a wonderfully expedient sophistry. Both genre fiction, as we all too often use the term, and generic fiction are defined by the familiarity of their forms; more, they are fictions which exploit that familiarity. What they offer the reader, we say, what the reader requires of them, is a narrative composed of conventional template elements—plots and characters, settings and themes. There may be originality in the treatment, but too much originality, not enough familiarity, and that novel ceases to be generic; exchange even more familiarity for originality and it ceases to be of the genre at all. Or at least, this is the conventional wisdom—that it’s all a matter of conventions. The marketing categories have become ghettoised as Genre because the Genres bound to them exist to be generic in this way, to provide the reader with more of the same, all gathered together in one place, under a certain branding.
But, of course, what we have then is all this fiction gathered together under that branding, the works that we love because they’re genre-but-not-generic. And the ones we hate because they are generic and thereby give the genre a bad name, reviling them even to the extent sometimes of denying that they’re really SF, refusing to recognise them as being valid examples of the genre on the basis that they’re too generic. In contrast to the canon of definitive works that we describe as transcending the genre.
Run that by me again?
Personally, I’d like to see the word genre taken out back and shot, a bullet in the back of its head, if it’s going to be so overloaded with meanings it’s just gibberish skewed to self-serving doublethink. Even Campbellian Science Fiction might be best not considered a Genre if that’s going to tangle us up in the morass of genre versus the generic. Its key stricture of futurology works more like the arbitrary constraint of an Oulipo writer than the conventions of form that mark out fiction as generic. Where Gernsback’s definition sets out distinctly standardised aesthetic criteria in requiring the plot structures of Romantic adventure, Campbell’s allows for entirely non-generic plot-structures as long as the fiction employs this strange Oulipo-style stricture of grounding fantasia in futurology.
And as for the ghost and the golem, the model and the machine, the stuff that’s out there now? As for SF, or speculative fiction, or whatever you want to call it? Construct the narrative with MacGuffin devices and stock plots, and the SF novel or story may become generic, as much SF undeniably is. There is a mode of Epic SF which all too closely parallels Epic Fantasy with its exotic settings, noble heroes, quests as archetypal psychodrama, more Joseph Campbell than John W. Campbell. But SF as a whole, which delights in offering unfamiliar forms…is it really generic enough that we’re happy to call it a genre, when to do so is inevitably to call it Genre—because it’s not like the capitalisation I’m using here works in speech? Before you answer, bear in mind that every time we dismiss some formulaic dreck as generic or extoll the latest masterpiece with the rhetoric of transcendence we’re reifying the notion of genre at the heart of the Form = Formulation Syllogism?
Fuck, if only “aesthetic idiom” didn’t sound so damn poncy.
Thing is, if we examine other marketing categories—Crime, Western, Romance—it seems SF is not alone in being, essentially, an openly defined aesthetic idiom damned by the formulation that it’s inextricably bound to. Crime, for one, is in a similar position to SF, with as much originality twisting and tearing at its orthodoxy of familiar tropes and tricks. (Or rather, as much originality emerging from its dynamics of quirks. What is a crime in fiction but the quirk of an event with a boulomaic and deontic modality of must not? What is a mystery in fiction but the quirk of an event left undetailed to introduce uncertainty, epistemic modalities of might/might not?)
All marketing categories have their deconstructions and subversions, parodies and pastiches, reinventions and restorations, non-generic works that might be better understood as Anti-Genre insofar as their categorical imperative is to bring something new into the family, to force the adjustment of aesthetic criteria required to accommodate them and thereby counteract the impulse to formulation. It’s the paradox of the ghetto of Genre, that the canonical works are exemplary because they are exceptional, not just another iteration of The MacGuffin Device, but rather, like The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, freaks and sports.
A Fabulous Formless Starkness
But holding fast under a flag of pedantry in which genre means simply family, trying to unravel the conflations of aesthetic idiom, conventional templates and marketing categories that make the word, in a phrase like genre fiction, synonymous with formulaic, seems to be pissing in the wind. For all that the term genre might be applied to an aesthetic idiom as openly defined as the novel, for all that it may be applied, as a label slapped on a book shelf, to a marketing category that amounts to little more than “that stuff over there, that stuff I’m pointing to,” I’m not sure we can redeem it from the abjection by which it is applied to that which is most commercially conventional and conventionally commercial, that which lives downtown in Genre rather than in Literature. So fuck it.
From here on in, in this book, when I talk of SF, I’m talking of a field and the various forces that comprise it. I’m talking of SF as a mode of fiction, an approach in fiction, a telling of tall tales with strange elements, where those elements are integral to the dynamics of the story, where the process of the story is generated from the strangeness of the idea, where the story is an event enacting strangeness. This is SF not as a singular form fitted to a template but as, at best, a loose federation of forms, a field so diverse that you can throw a hundred different definitions at it and none of them will stick.
All genre definitions will fail, I think, because they attempt to describe the field as this form or that, in templates of conventions, and all those forms may actually be, I’d argue—even the most conventional—better understood as forces, the illusion of delimitation (in terms of plot and character, setting and theme) ultimately a trick of perspective, these types and tropes of genres and subgenres mere snapshots of whorls in cigarette smoke, emergent from and embedded in a wider process: carving the fabulous in the reader’s mind in an experience as sharply-defined as the so-called genre is inchoate. This is SF as a fabulous formless starkness of effect(s), bound
only to an acronym that acknowledges its own emptiness of meaning in its rejection of specificity.
If the field is as definitionally circular as Spinrad’s statement asserts it to be, this seems only right; the empty signifier of SF is far more apt as a label than science fiction. As Cheney said in the quote way back at the start, the genre of science fiction no longer exists. As we have declared right here, Science Fiction is dead.
SF, on the other hand, seems to be alive and well—for a ghost.
Or maybe it’s not a ghost at all. Maybe that simulacrum of an essence we see as we gaze through our mayashades at the SF Café, that wireframe model of an abstract agency…maybe it really only wore the skin of Science Fiction the same way it now wears the golem’s clay. Maybe it was there all the time, this field of forces, and simply took that form as a response to the time and place.
Part 2
The Combat Fiction Bar & Grill
The Wars My Destination
Gully Foyle is my name,
And combat is my nation.
Gunfire is my dwelling-place,
The wars my destination.
Alfred Bester, The Wars My Destination
The SF Café is a curious place. Take a wrong turn when you step inside the door, and you can find yourself not where you expected at all. Or rather, not when you expected to be. You walk into the SF Café, and mostly you’re reckoning on seeing the shape of things to come—twenty minutes into the future, twenty years or twenty millennia—but there’s a corner of the SF Café that’s not the future at all. Take a step to the left, as the door swings shut behind you with a ting of the bell, and you may well find yourself in a today or yesterday where it’s not the science that’s strange but the history.
This is the SF not of Suvin’s novum but of its compatriot errata, quirks of difference like the holes in your New Yorker’s Swiss Cheese, points of divergence and the oddities of a world evolved from them. You look around the café, find the posters of 1950s Sci-Fi flicks are gone, replaced by images of Confederate victories and Nazi triumphs. Where the salt cellars on the Formica tables were once sleek chrome rocket-shapes, now they’re khaki and bulbous…grenades. What the fuck?
You step back out the door, gaze around. The downtown ghetto of Genre seems unchanged, but now when you turn and look up, you see the proof of your shift sideways across the timestreams: where the sign above the door should read The SF Café, now you’re standing before The Combat Fiction Bar & Grill. A parallel reality. An alternate history. And now, as you shrug and head inside, curious to explore this half-familiar elsewhen, the air shimmers around you; a jukebox comes alive with the sound of Swing. It’s bang in the middle of the twentieth century, and the Combat Fiction Bar and Grill has just opened for business.
Out of the pulp fiction boom, a new Genre has emerged, focused on warfare like that erupting in Europe even now. It comes from the industry of dime novels and magazines—Nick Carter Stories, Flying Aces, Marvel Tales, Buffalo Bill Weekly—draws on a 1920s/1930s recipe of hokey heroism, big explosions and valourous deaths as perfected in the Boy’s Own adventure. Without its American flavour it might not be so very different from the even earlier tales of Haggard and Buchan, except that in the hands of a few editors, in the magazines and publishing imprints that they run, a more solid shape has been given, with something of a novel twist to it.
Where it might be just one more in the stable of Street & Smith’s pulp publications, under the editorship of John W. MacDonald, Astounding Stories in particular is bringing a level of Rationalism to this mode of Romance, reborn for the wars of the Industrial Age as Modern Pulp. Clear guidelines demand a sharp focus on plausibility: weaponry must work the way it works in reality; strategies must be authentic; the combat must be extrapolated with rigour. And so a whole new Genre is born—inheriting from its romantic forebears but essentially Modern in its fusion of plot dynamics and intellectual mechanics.
MacDonald names it Combat Fiction.
As this Genre matures, that rationalist bent takes its effect. As a new generation of writers enters the field, many turn a cold eye on the sensationalist fluff that is their roots. Oh, they devoured the pulps as kids and they retain a deep love of the boldness to be found there, the sheer vigour of stories driven by peril, driven by death and glory, the monstra and numinae of war; but as adults they now appreciate more mature themes. For them, the crass and pandering jingoism is something to be subverted. For them, warfare is not merely a backdrop for heroic adventure stories; rather it is an intrinsic element of plot and theme through which to explore the human condition. The twentieth century is a century of combat, after all. What other Genre is better equipped to address the big philosophical questions of life and death, of what it is to be a human in this world of war? Writing in response to what has gone before, working with the accrued toolkit of tropes or simply with the substrate of war-as-metaphor or war-as-backdrop, this new generation begins to explore these ideas in greater depth, find new angles. Those who are conversant with the Genre are increasingly aware of its potential, keen to exploit it. To exploit the dynamics of the quirks in ways unbound by conventional templates.
Certainly, the pulp roots show through. The commercial impetus of the Genre is evident. Some Combat Fiction readers will buy any old shit as long as you slap a cigar-chomping sergeant on the cover—they want more of the same—and there are plenty ready to serve that up. But that dedicated readership offers a ready-made market for literate—even experimental—works dealing with war. Some readers have read all the permutations of the Combat Fiction novel, even the gritty realist ones, and they’re bored now—they want something original, something novel, something different. So, publishers can take risks on unconventional works which might otherwise fail to reach an audience; the uncritical fans of Genre supports the innovations of a non-generic aesthetic idiom—not Combat Fiction but simply combat fiction…the fiction of combat.
So, one writer called Alfred Bester, in his seminal novel The Wars My Destination, boldly flies his modernist colours in typographic trickery. In the opening pages of the book, he proclaims where he’s coming from in no uncertain terms, with the rhyme quoted above, directly based on a similar rhyme from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Verisimilitude/Authenticity
In one traditional pulp approach to alternative / future narratives, while the reader is thrown into an elsewhen for which they must reconstruct the underlying logic, there is a concerted effort to make that logic apparent, to explicate the elsewhen through the course of the narrative. The explication may be offered mainly in the form of rich pseudo-temporal detail—technological and historical worldbuilding—that is left to speak for itself in the internal consistency of its mimetic and pseudo-mimetic weft, to create a sense of verisimilitude. We can and should distinguish this verisimilitude from the sense of authenticity engendered in the narrative by ensuring that these details are also consistent with the theories of known science and known history if not the facts, the way we define the world and societies as working from our observations of how they’ve worked in the past. The difference is subtle, but it is that of appearance and actuality, many works achieving plausibility by a combination of excuse and verisimilitude rather than authenticity.
So, in those types of alternative / future narrative seeking a sense of authenticity over and above this, we find explication that attempts to provide a solid (or semisolid) base of theory and extrapolation on which these nova and errata can be grounded. In reconstructing the elsewhen, the reader may gradually unpack these quirks as the fallout of a basic suppositional premise: the assassination of Hitler leading to a more organised Third Reich, for example; or the advancements in AI required to create a properly intelligent robot.
For some, the rationalisations provided by a solid (i.e. arguable) suppositional premise, or rather by the acts of explication indicating such a premise, are essential as counterbalances to the “could not have happened” alethic modality,
essential in order to sustain suspension-of-disbelief in the face of constant challenges. For each writer and each reader there are different thresholds at which the “could have happened” alethic modality can simply no longer be maintained, and for that set of writers and readers with the lowest threshold verisimilitude and authenticity may be critical. Without sufficient explication that threshold will be crossed, suspension-of-disbelief will collapse, the game of make-believe will be abandoned, and the reader will throw the book across the room in disgust. Speak to many hardcore fans of Hard SF or Alternate History, offer them a book where the counterfactual / hypothetical is treated as a fancy, no more, no less, around which to build a story. Watch them tear it to shreds with disdain for how “that couldn’t happen.”
From The Naked and the Dead to Catch-22
Unfortunately, there’s a catch for these freeform stories exploring the monstra and numinae of war; their marketing as Combat Fiction places them below the radar of many middlebrow readers, who look at Astounding Stories and see only another Boys’ Own pulp. Little wonder—it’s sold as a Boys’ Own pulp, with covers of All-American GIs socking Nazis, storming bunkers, stopping tanks in their tracks with a well-aimed grenade. And amongst its siblings, there might be a subtler title like The Magazine of Espionage & Combat Fiction here and there (espionage being a bedfellow of combat fiction from its earliest days), but it’s mostly Bloody Battle Tales and Glory! and Heroic War Stories.