by Duncan, Hal
And more than anything, the public perception of Combat Fiction is shaped by John Wayne movies, where hokey heroism, big explosions and valourous deaths are still the order of the day. Not familiar with the written form, but seeing the lurid covers and sensational titles, they imagine all Combat Fiction to be written at that intellectual level; that’s how it presents itself. They’d only have to read The Naked and the Dead to realise this perception was bollocks, but unfortunately, The Naked and the Dead is on sale from one of the most successful Combat Fiction imprints, with a brawny GI on the cover, cigar clenched in his gritted teeth. It’s selling shitloads, but not to those who look at that cover and think “John Wayne movie.”
(In another parallel reality, by the way, just another half-step to the left, Mailer’s novel is sold without the label, and is as widely regarded as a twentieth-century classic as it is in our reality. It’s not really regarded as Combat Fiction at all, in fact, much to the chagrin of the patrons of the Combat Fiction Bar and Grill. This is just literary snobbery, they say. The Naked and the Dead is clearly Combat Fiction, clearly of the same Genre as Biggles Defies the Swastika and 300—and The Iliad, no less! But that’s another fold. In this one, those patrons need not worry; here, The Naked and the Dead is where it belongs, shelved in Combat Fiction.)
Mailer’s novel is only the first of many to meet this fate. One day, a young writer called Joseph Heller sends his novel Catch-22 to an editor, and the editor finds himself in a quandary. It’s obvious from the first few pages of the manuscript that this is about warfare. But it’s also obvious that this is a literary masterpiece. To a public who thinks Combat Fiction means “John Wayne movies,” this non-linear, absurdist narrative might well be seen simply as what it is—a great work of fiction. To some reactionary fans of Combat Fiction, indeed, it might be too flagrant a breach of their expectations. But then again, to a public who thinks Combat Fiction means “John Wayne movies,” the first hint of a WW2 setting might be enough to turn them off. And to the progressive fans of Combat Fiction, this will be exactly what they’re clamouring for.
Marketed as General Fiction, it might stand a better chance of critical and commercial success. But its unconventional nature makes it a risky proposition. Maybe readers unfamiliar with Combat Fiction won’t understand it. Maybe readers wary of Combat Fiction won’t be open enough to understand it. Will they just see a confusion of conventions—brothels and bombing runs—and a silliness they can’t make sense of, lacking the protocols of combat fiction? Will they simply be alienated by the strangeness of it all?
And there is this ready-made market for Combat Fiction. There are the fans who will buy it simply because there’s an airstrip being blown up on the cover. There are a lot of them—and a whole lot of the others too, the ones crying out for innovation just like this. The non-linear absurdism is a Unique Selling-Point for them. This is an original take on the established tropes if ever there was one, a work which pushes the boundaries of Combat Fiction further than ever before. Within the genre, the editor is convinced, this will win instant renown. They’ll say it transcends the genre.
And he’s right. Whole generations of readers too young for it now, readers who haven’t yet graduated to the mature works, readers who haven’t yet been born, will one day buy Catch-22 as part of the Combat Fiction Masterworks series.
If Only…
Quite different from the approaches of comic / tragic narratives which exploit the strangeness, the explications of Hard SF and a comparable style of Alternate History may be more akin to the implicit social models underpinning the plots of the pathetic narratives of the mundane. At their most extreme, like the domestic novel, these alternative / future narratives are seeking to persuade us that this really, honestly could happen elsewhen. They deny the absurd, the abject, the surreal. They deny the incredible, dewarp the quirk. They insist that the counterfactual / hypothetical is, was or will be a very real possibility. It would happen like that, they insist, if only…
That said, there is an element of excuse that remains even with works which remain firmly grounded in the mundane, where they utilise the character tropes of melodrama, the heroes and villains. It is the same heightened pathos, the same “operatic” quality, which gives its name to both Space Opera and Soap Opera, and even the most explicated narrative may retain that quality.
Unfortunately an obliviousness of the convention of explication may well contribute to why other readers are unable to connect with pulp at this level, even with works grounded firmly in the most reasonable counterfactuals and hypotheticals. Offer a solid work of Hard SF or Alternate History to a reader unfamiliar with those modes, and they may click to it. The technique works for many pulp readers, after all, so we can expect it to work, in some cases, even on those not attuned to it. If it doesn’t work for them, however, it is liable to backfire completely.
From The Sands of Iwo Jima to The Guns of Navarone
It is the death knell for those paradoxically exemplary/exceptional works tagged as combat fiction, of course, in terms of wider recognition—to be shelved in a section of the bookstore that many readers simply will not think to browse. They don’t particularly dislike John Wayne movies, those readers, but they’re not fans of them, so why should they bother with that Combat Fiction section? If they want popcorn fiction, they’ll go to the movies. If such a book gets reviewed, it’s in the Combat Fiction magazines. It may be hailed as a classic by the patrons of the Combat Fiction Bar and Grill, but when they try to persuade the incognoscenti of its value they’re met with arched eyebrows of doubt.
Today, in the Bistro de Critique, a sceptical friend lowers the copy of Neuromancer he happens to be reading.
(He sighs. He’s only just finished arguing with a Crime Fiction fan that Neuromancer is not, as they were insisting, “really Crime Fiction” simply because it has criminals in it. In this fold, it should be noted, where the strange is a third mask between tragedy and comedy, where García-Márquezian magical realism has its mainstream bedfellow in Orwellian speculative realism, there is no question of a novum or chimera rendering a work “genre fiction.” Still, those Crime Fiction fans will insist on laying claim to literature like Neuromancer that explores the noir idiom as part of its dystopian approach.)
He looks at the copy of Catch-22 that’s being waved in front of him.
—But that’s Combat Fiction, he says. That’s just formulaic dreck, isn’t it? All hokey heroism, big explosions and valourous deaths.
The Combat Fiction fan tries; they really do. They list Combat Fiction works, detail their merits, insisting that the field is not intrinsically formulaic. Their incognoscenti friend is dubious that any Genre novel could really achieve the profundity of a Nobel prize winner, or stand the test of time, or satisfy a number of vague criteria of literary quality—that it could really be that good. The fan points to The Naked and the Dead as proof. But the title doesn’t ring any bells to the incognoscenti. Eventually the Combat Fiction fan must point outside the Genre simply to find something the incognoscenti have read. So they point to Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, a recognised classic. This is dismissed as at most an influence on Combat Fiction, a taproot text, not an actual work of Combat Fiction.
Finally the sceptical friend is persuaded, against his will, to give Catch-22 a go; he’ll find it funny, honestly. He approaches the book with scepticism, expecting something like that John Wayne movie he caught on the TV the other day. It immediately becomes apparent that this is not The Sands of Iwo Jima, and by fuck, it turns out that he loves it. The blend of tragedy and comedy, the fragmented narrative, the dark humanism, the core conceit extrapolated not unlike the speculative realism that is his normal taste. An ambitious book like this is not really Combat Fiction at all. No, it belongs with For Whom the Bell Tolls, not Where Eagles Dare.
When he returns it to the fan, he happily confesses his appreciation, oblivious of the dark look flashing across the fan’s face when he praises it as “not really
Combat Fiction.” The exasperated fan is just about to hit their clueless friend upside the head when another mate happens by. One of two things happens. Also a patron of the Combat Fiction Bar and Grill, but with more conventional tastes, Philadelphia Stein—Philly for short—can’t help but clock the book he hated. It’s “not really” Combat Fiction as far as he’s concerned, not like Alistair MacLean’s 1957 classic, The Guns of Navarone. Or Robert A. Heinlein’s seminal work from just two years later, Starship Troopers. Now, those are proper Combat Fiction.
As the two fans argue over what is and what isn’t Combat Fiction, the sceptical friend turns the copy of Catch-22 over in his hands. On the back of it, a blurb proclaims how this work “transcends the genre.” Well, he thinks, it certainly breaks the boundaries that stretch from The Sands of Iwo Jima all the way to The Guns of Navarone.
What We Ignore
For those who lack an interest in science and history, the explication will likely alienate them from the very things which make the book interesting for the pulp reader. They will be bored by the exposition, by diagrams and equations and dates and places laid out in tiresome detail. They don’t give a fuck how richly detailed the elsewhen is. They don’t give a fuck how well a flight of fancy is rationalised with solid extrapolations from an arguable premise. Indeed, the more acts of explication the work offers in an attempt to justify a “would have happened” alethic modality, the more bored they get with what reads to them as geekish obsession, a dubious mania for extraneous detail. In the end, regardless of this spurious explication, that whole suppositional premise simply strikes them as…a flight of fancy. We will likely see a scorn not just of the story in terms of plot, character and writing; rather it will be a scorn of the “ridiculous” idea, the “silliness” of the conceit, an inability to take the entire premise seriously. This is generally infuriating to the fan.
Ironically, offer these same readers a work which functions as a fanciful spectacle and they’ll likely lap it up, because they are entirely familiar (and comfortable) with the Romantic technique of excuse. These are the people who will flock to the cinema to see Tom Cruise running from the Martians and have a great time, while SF readers will be screaming at the screens about why the fuck the Martians would wait underground a couple of thousand years, until humanity had developed the technology to fight them, before attacking. I’m sure most of us are familiar with this attitude, from friends and family who will happily sit and watch Star Wars, but who, when offered a serious work involving a counterfactual / hypothetical elsewhen extrapolated logically from a suppositional premise, will a) find it boring, b) dismiss it as nonsense, c) respond to any argument that, actually, if you think about it, it is quite plausible with a mixture of bafflement and disdain at the fact that you are geekish enough to “take this stuff seriously.” After all, it’s Sci-Fi; it’s not meant to be taken seriously.
Sidelined by our own knee-jerk reaction against the attitude that “only a geek would take SF seriously,” that “only a geek would expect rigourous science,” pissed off by the implicit insult here (science is boring, so your interest is boring, so you are boring), we risk going off half-cocked in our response. What we ignore when we argue the case for SF as rational futurology, founded in theory and extrapolation, is that those alternative / future narratives which best serve as examples here are only a fraction of the field. Yes, explication is one of the tricks by which SF as a subset of SF prevents the quirks from overpowering the suspension-of-disbelief. But it is only one of the tricks.
From Perilous Visions to War Stars
What is and what isn’t Combat Fiction? It’s an argument that begins with Catch-22, if not before, and slowly comes to consume the discourse. With Vietnam and the sexual revolution as a backdrop, the ’60s and ’70s see a renaissance in Combat Fiction, much of it socio-political and experimental, treating the fractured world of war as a reflection of the confusing (post)modern condition. Dubbed the New Wave, some writers in this mode become uncomfortable with the very label Combat Fiction. Many works of Combat Fiction now deal with guerrilla warfare, terrorism, the Holocaust, the Cold War, civil unrest, psychological warfare, inner-city gang culture, drug wars, even disputes between neighbours or the “war of the sexes.” Some of it is so abstract in its connection with war that a more accurate descriptor seems called for.
It’s not combat that’s makes this fiction what it is so much as it’s the “confrontational element.” It’s confrontational fiction. Though coined by Heinlein, that term is taken up by writers like Ellison, like the cohort of Young Turks who appear in his seminal anthology Perilous Visions. Many fans of Golden Age Combat Fiction consider these writers of the New Wave to be “not really” Combat Fiction.
—Where is the solid grounding in actual warfare here? they say. Where is the rigour in weaponry and tactics? Hell, where’s the damn story? Give me Force 10 from Navarone any day.
Meanwhile, the fan who sees this strange modern idiom as a battlefield of any and all literary techniques and tactics, a free-for-all where the rules of engagement have long since been lost, can hardly mention Combat Fiction to an intransigent member of the hardcore incognoscenti without facing a dismissive sneer and a reference to those War Trek fans who go to conventions dressed up as Spock, in their khaki War Trek uniforms, with their papier-mâché helmets, and toy rifles. It doesn’t help that, in their uncritical love for all things Combat Fiction, those with the most devotion refer to the Genre by the cute and clever monicker of Com-Fi (pronounced “comfy” by those in the know these days.) It’s hardly a damning indictment—a charge of enthusiasm to the point of silliness—but these strange subcultural shenanigans turn the brand image of Combat Fiction into a barricade.
The situation isn’t helped when a young director named George Lucas, in homage to the G.I. Joe comics he loved as a kid, makes a puerile but rollicking piece of hokum called War Stars. John Wayne movies are out of fashion now, so Combat Fiction isn’t a box-office draw any more, but War Stars is a surprise smash hit. Kids and adults around the world fall in love with it, and it changes the face of cinema, ushering in a new era of blockbusters, many of which have strong elements of Combat Fiction, but few of which have the depth of the written form. Battle Beyond the Stars is no 2001: A Space Iliad. Most of the those who lap up this Com-Fi would not class themselves as fans. While arching their eyebrows at the fans, indeed, they feel no shame at enjoying this cinematic junk food, because they don’t take it seriously, treat it on the level it essentially belongs, as a frippery. With disdain or disregard, they’ll tell the proselytising fan: they don’t mind spending a few hours on a flick like War Stars, but if they’re going to read a book they prefer something substantial.
—But War Stars, some fans of the written form begin to declare, isn’t really Combat Fiction. With its plot revolving around stolen plans, the infiltration of an enemy base, and the rescue of a captive agent of a resistance movement, it’s clearly Espionage. Which is not a good thing, as far as they’re concerned. The cult of Fleming has exploded by now, and the 1970s sees a glut of derivatives, often hugely successful; most follow such a rigid formula in their tales of James Bond clones on missions to uncover and foil the Evil Genius’s plans for world domination that the term “espionage” becomes synonymous with sub-Fleming power-wank.
—Puerile wish-fulfilment, scorn the hardcore Combat Fiction devotees, hardly wrong but turning a blind eye to the subtleties of le Carré and Greene in the idiom they abject, and to the testosterone-fuelled power-tripping in their own backyard, in writers like Mac-Lean. No, Espionage is the enemy within. For some fans, anything from Perilous Visions to War Stars might be this enemy.
The incognoscenti, knowing nothing of this aesthetic turf war and seeing no sense in the distinctions being made…nod and smile.
Nod and smile.
Strategies of Resolution
It is possible to combine excuse and explication. Since both techniques work towards maintaining suspension-of-disbelief, o
ne by widening the parameters of what’s acceptable (android-as-conventional-trope), the other by arguing the acceptability (android-as-plausible-speculation) on a case-by-case basis, these two strategies of resolution can work in tandem, with the writer “spreading the load,” so to speak, over both techniques. The fact that androids are a conventional trope (a given of the idiomatic fantasia) hardly negates the effect of a plausible scientific explanation based on A-Life and AI theories; it might make the work a bit more boring for the type of fan who’d rather you just got on with the story, but it might also make it more interesting for the type of fan who wants authenticity. Conversely, the use of scientific theory isn’t going to detract from the conventionality of the trope, make it less excusable. You’re not suddenly going to stop believing in the android because the author made it more plausible.
So you get the explanatory and excusatory techniques working together. You can offset less rigourous science with more vigourous (i.e. Romantic, adventurous, trope-bound) narrative, and vice versa. Early Heinlein like Starship Troopers is a good example. Giant bugs are kinda scientifically dodgy. Interstellar warfare without FTL is a bit unlikely to say the least, and FTL itself is hardly on a solid scientific basis. Heinlein’s Cherenkov Drive is an Unobtainium Drive. In part, it’s the form of Heinlein’s book that makes it work, a bildungsroman in an idiomatic fantasia. Same with his juveniles where the science is even more handwavy. And this kind of stuff is at the core of what we label SF.
The two strategies can however be used pretty much independently, in more “purely” excusatory SF or in more “purely” explicatory SF, and just as readers will prefer one technique over the other, so too will writers. A deep commitment to one technique may even shade into an animosity towards the other. So, you end up with the Hard SF versus Science Fantasy schism within the genre.
