by Duncan, Hal
There is, of course, a third option that is neither.
From Slaughterhouse-Five to Harry Potter
Time passes. Down in the ghetto, in the Combat Fiction Bar & Grill, there’s unrest. One of the writers who’s pushed the boundaries the most, Kurt Vonnegut, author of the classic Combat Fiction novel Slaughterhouse-Five, denies that his work is Genre in an attempt to escape the inexorable taint of formulaic shit that goes with the label Combat Fiction. Regardless of the blatant and direct tackling of the subject matter of Combat Fiction, he rejects the confines of a Genre dismissed by the general public as “John Wayne movies” and celebrated by many of its most ardent admirers on the basis of its “sense of glory.” A large proportion of fans who now vehemently reject Com-Fi as an implicitly derogatory term in favour of a less loaded CF—standing for combat fiction, confrontational fiction, or any number of alternatives—consider this a betrayal of the worst kind.
So it goes.
Time passes. Mainstream writers start turning their hand to combat fiction only to be regarded with extreme suspicion, if not outright hostility. Pat Barker’s Regeneration, a novel set during World War One but taking place almost entirely in Craiglockhart War Hospital, is a point of controversy. For some fans, the problem is simply that Barker’s book is old hat, done before. If Barker were familiar with the genre she’d know that the War Hospital story was a hoary old cliché, done to death. For others, the problem is that Barker leaves the trenches in the background, which is utterly at odds with the conventions of this Genre of hokey heroism, big explosions and valourous deaths. Barker, as a dabbling mainstream writer, doesn’t really understand the way Combat Fiction works, and so her novel doesn’t work as Combat Fiction. Barker compounds her crime by, in an interview, denying that she writes Combat Fiction, which she dismisses as “grunts with guns” stories. She accepts the label confrontational fiction, but few CF fans notice this.
So it goes.
Time passes. An Espionage series aimed at children and young adults—J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books—takes hold in the public imagination. Adults who haven’t read a novel in years are suddenly obsessed with Harry Potter, with its secret weapons to be sought after, intrigues to be uncovered, plots to be foiled. People like reading about machinations, it seems, and given the choice between middle-class, middlebrow, mid-life crisis novels and books in which a trainee secret agent thwarts the schemes of the Evil Genius Voldemort, they’ll opt for the latter. Some of those writers who now treat confrontational fiction as an umbrella term for Combat Fiction and Espionage keep their fingers crossed that this will translate to an influx of new readers as fans of Harry Potter graduate to more mature works. Others simply see this as a mainstreaming of the confrontational genres in their most commercial and juvenile form, dubious that Rowling’s fans will really move on to Heller and the like.
So it goes.
Peru or Mars
SF does not always excuse its quirks as conventions, or, like the pathetic narrative, explain how things are or might be, substituting the scientific for the psychological and socio-political, explicating the counterfactual / hypothetical until we’re persuaded that, oh, well, of course this could have happened—not here, not now, but in the right circumstances, maybe, it would have happened. It doesn’t always treat the quirk as an awkward untruth—a threat to suspension-of-disbelief that must be sugar-coated to be sold, with immersive artifice or reasoned argument.
To illustrate, let’s try another alternative narrative:
There was an old woman in Peru, ’52.
She had so many children she didn’t know what to do.
She gave them some broth without any bread.
She joined the revolt and replaced the State’s Head.
And another future narrative:
There was an old woman in Mars City 2.
She had so many children she didn’t know what to do.
She gave them some broth and chips in the head.
She ripped their meme-patterns, installed them in Teds.
As you can see, the counterfactual premise of the alternative narrative is presented right up-front, and pretty much composes the entirety of the story, but it’s hardly a product of extensive research into the socio-political situation in Peru in the 1950s, possible revolutionary factions, and events and actions which might have led to the deposing of the government of the day. And the future narrative is hardly notable for the less-than-rigourous science underpinning speculations on the viability of Martian colonies, robotics as toys, and the potential translation of human thought-patterns into other media so they can be made to persist outside the human flesh. Neither of these narratives seeks to establish its authenticity.
In those two examples, the disjunction should be obvious between, on the one hand, alternative narrative and Alternate History, and on the other hand, future narrative and Hard SF. The sort of alternative narrative which simply changes the past and tells a story in that altered setting (The Man in the High Castle? The Plot Against America?) is quite distinct from the type of Alternate History which pivots on theory and speculation regarding (often military) courses of particular events. The same holds for future narratives and Hard SF. In the latter example there’s not even the slightest effort at justifying the quirks as solid supposition.
But given that it’s essentially a four-line story, why would we want to bloat the poem up with the infodump of explication anyway? Is it any less functional as a future narrative? And, hell, in the first example, rather than leaving out all the specificity of dates, peoples and places necessary to rationalise a counterfactual coup, I could have (with a few problems of rhyme and scansion) simply substituted Ruritania for Peru and still had what is fundamentally an alternative narrative. In The Prisoner of Zenda there is not even the remotest attempt to explicate the scenario as premised.
From The Iliad to War and Peace
In the uptown district of Literature, in the Bistro de Critique, where Literary Fiction is the order of the day and the discourse of propriety is always on the menu, a discussion kicks off about this trend in reader tastes. A bookshop assistant who hangs out down in the Combat Fiction Bar & Grill from time to time tries to explain. She describes the simple desire of readers for something more heroic, and the expectations readers have of Genre Fiction fulfilling that desire. She begins to speak of the thwarting of those expectations by fiction which does not, in fact, fulfil this desire—but this last point is lost amid the horrified cries of the middle-class and middlebrow regulars of the bistro, busy bewailing the debased taste of adult readers who would lower themselves to reading Genre Fiction, denying point blank that any work of Combat Fiction could be more than formulaic dreck. To the bookshop assistant they seem driven by some bourgeois neurosis about genre cooties eating away at the foundations of civilisation.
The bookshop assistant, as a reader of CF—a marker of mode rather than identity to her, not a brand label but a shorthand for an aesthetic idiom—is all too familiar with this prejudice, knows that argument is futile. She might point to everything from the Iliad to War and Peace as examples of CF, but the very idea will be dismissed as ludicrous; these aren’t Com-Fi. She knows that For Whom the Bell Tolls will likewise be disregarded along with any work that wasn’t published in the actual marketing category. She knows that Slaughterhouse-Five will be classed as satire or postmodernism. And there’s no point even mentioning The Naked and the Dead; this will be entirely unfamiliar, having been published under a Combat Fiction imprint, consigned to the ghetto of Genre. Why should anyone take her word that there are CF novels of the very highest calibre? With a mind already made up about Com-Fi and its freakish fans, why should anyone sift through the shit of that section in their local bookstore for the gems these crazies claim are hidden in the muck?
As a last resort, the bookshop assistant draws a wild comparison to fiction which focuses on, for example, science as a metaphor or backdrop rather than combat. Imagine, she says, a hypothetical and a
bsurd new genre label…call it Science Fiction. And then she traces out a strange counterfactual scenario where such recognised modern classics as Delany’s Dhalgren, Lem’s Solaris, Ballard’s The Drowned World, a whole host of landmark novels, are all lumped together under an arbitrary rackspace label. She conjures a pseudo-history of the world, a parallel timestream where—crazy as it may sound—these sort of books are considered genre fiction.
—If the course of events only played out a little differently, she says, you can see how a disjunct could exist between the reality of this field and the popular perception of it. Just as it does, she argues, for combat fiction. Or confrontational fiction, or CF, as she prefers to call it. Surely, she says, you can’t fail to see the absurdity of a prejudice dismissing these works simply because they’re genre fiction, where this genre fiction contains a novel like Dhalgren.
(She doesn’t stop to think before picking Dhalgren as an example. It’s so familiar in its renown that the very name of its apocalyptic city-setting, Bellona, has passed into common usage as a term for any catastrophic collapse from civilisation to senselessness. Bosnia was “a real Bellona.” Rwanda was “a real Bellona.” New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was “a real Bellona.”)
Trust me, she says. Catch-22 is at least as good as that, maybe even better. The only reason it’s not considered a modern classic is because it’s seen as Com-Fi, and Com-Fi is seen as hokey heroism, big explosions and valourous deaths—all that John Wayne movie shit. But the real CF that’s out there is about as far away from that as you can get. It’s not all plot-driven Boys’ Own adventures. It’s not all about weaponry and strategies. The characters and themes and prose can be way more important than any of that—and are in Catch-22. If it wasn’t for the misperceptions surrounding that Combat Fiction label, Catch-22 might be as much of a household name as Dhalgren is today.
The incognoscenti remain unconvinced. The sort of breadth of definition she’s talking about would cover everything from the Iliad to War and Peace, and that’s not a Genre just a gesture at such.
To Exploit the Estrangement
The Peru and Mars limerick examples are boiled down to a ridiculous simplicity, but the future narrative is a good example of what’s actually going on in a lot of SF; it’s a little microcosmic picture of how at least one type of SF story may be constructed and, in its blithe disregard for any real honest-to-god theory and explication, it begs the question: why the fuck should we take this kind of crazy shit seriously? Mars colonies…chips in the head…identities stored as “meme-patterns”…downloaded into “Teds”…Hmmm. You don’t think that sounds a bit…fanciful?
We can and do take it seriously, but not because it’s possible. This is fiction containing elements which utterly contradict our knowledge of how the world is; those elements aren’t possible but at most have the possibility of one day becoming possible. Right now we don’t have Mars colonies. The only people with chips in their heads are a few loons at MIT who read one too many issues of Mondo 2000. Identities cannot be stored as meme-patterns. And what the fuck is a Ted, anyway? (It’s a robotic teddy-bear, dude. Isn’t it obvious?) Half of that story is telling us “this could not have happened,” and none of it is functioning as explication to counter that.
So, of course your average reader with only a passing familiarity with pulp, recognising the dependence on conventionality, recognising the strategies of Romantic adventure stories—the heroic cowboys and the evil monsters and the gosh-wow rocket-ships and so on—is going to wonder why on Earth we take this cock-fluffing fiction of the marvellous seriously. As long as we continue to justify SF by reference to the plausibility of the science, they’ll continue to counter with the references to the innumerable works where no such plausibility is evidenced, the countless cases that work, that we immerse ourselves in, suspend our disbelief in, regardless of their fanciful content…simply because the tropes that they’re constructed from are accepted as “harmless fun.”
Of course they too are wrong. Yes, one technique for dealing with the disruptive artificiality of the counterfactual / hypothetical is to explicate it. Yes, another technique is just to excuse it as an idiomatic whimsy. But an equally valid technique is to exploit the estrangement, as a surrealist might. Like the comic and tragic narrative, this type of (alternative / future) narrative functions by making the irrationality of the quirk an integral component of the story, a structural feature. It treats the import of the quirk—and the tension towards disbelief that it generates—as a strength to be utilised. As the comic and tragic narratives are built around the absurd and the monstrous, so this narrative is built around the implausibility which it capitalises on.
From The Guns of the South to The Plot Against America
That’s some catch, that Catch-22.
Joseph Heller, Catch-22
So our bookstore assistant heads back to the Combat Fiction Bar and Grill. She begins to wonder, on her way, how events might have played out for the field of CF if that combat fiction label had never been coined, if they just had “war novels”—like modernity novels, but focusing on combat rather than progress as their background and theme. She imagines a world where Kelly’s Heroes isn’t blithely lumped in with Schindler’s List, or Life Is Beautiful with Where Eagles Dare; where fans of John Wayne movies, Commando comics, Alistair MacLean novels and other such Combat Fiction don’t kvetch about some latter-day Catch-22 not playing by the rules; where there’s no need to argue the validity of Slaughterhouse-Five with the granfalloon of a tradition stretching back through Faulkner and Tolstoy and Shakespeare to the Iliad itself; where there’s no bitter resentment of the lack of respect for genre fiction like The Naked and the Dead or Starship Troopers; no bitching about mainstream writers who deny their work is Combat Fiction when it’s set in a war hospital; no teacup tempests over how Combat Fiction is polluted by Intrigue; no cringing at the self-coined nickname of Com-Fi because that’s really just the movies and TV shows, which really just give CF a bad rep.
It’s natural for her to think this way. Alt History is part of the Genre, after all, with all its counterfactuals of Confederate victories and Nazi triumphs. She’s not that big on the whole Guns of the South approach herself, but the subgenre’s been a corner of CF from way back. She’s imagining a world where there’s no argument over whether or not Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America is “really combat fiction,” just at the point where she pushes open the door of the Combat Fiction Bar and Grill. As she walks inside, takes a step to the left, she’s imagining a world where the lack of classifications means Catch-22 isn’t “not really” Combat Fiction to either fan or incognoscenti.
Because in her fold, there’s a double-bind of double-binds. As much as the incognoscenti apply that notorious axiom—If it’s Combat Fiction, it can’t be good; if it’s good, it can’t be Combat Fiction—the fans have their own, it sometimes seems, those who’re looking for “more of the same” at least: if it’s “not really” Combat Fiction, it can’t be good, if it’s good, it can’t “not really” be Combat Fiction. That fan axiom is written into the very nature of Genre itself, the demand of readers for something that coheres as a Genre.
If it’s exceptional, it can’t be exemplary; if it’s exemplary, it can’t be exceptional.
It’s a real Catch-22, she thinks.
The Booker and the Bistro de Critique
Those Rocket Age Rhapsodies
No SF novel ever won the Booker.
Somebody, Somewhere, Somewhen
Hang out long enough down in the ghetto of Genre, in the SF Café, and eventually you’ll hear this axiom, or an axiom like it, muttered with a certain tone of harrumph, a petulance in proportion to the wounded pride. Maybe you’ll say it yourself, sullen in your sense of injustice, disregard; I know I have. And whenever it’s spoken, that truism will likely spark a little to-and-fro on the exclusion of SF from the modern canon. There is, after all, an absenting in the absence, an active excision; the ghetto of
Genre is a territory of the abject, an enclosure for the refused, that paraliterary pulp exiled from Literature—despite the fact that literature means only that which has been written—delimited as Genre—despite the fact that every work of literature sits within some genre or other.
But the question is: What are we going to point to as the stuff that should have won the Booker, the works of SF that prove to the outside world how good SF can be? Looking at our heritage of Asimov, Bester, Clarke and so on, would any of it actually rate that laurel if the prize had existed back in the day? Of the writers working since 1969, the year the Booker was born, how many of them can we imagine on the shortlist? Dick? Ellison? Farmer? Gibson? Heinlein? I love the work of Philip K. Dick—great ideas—but maybe the pills and booze had an impact on his prose because it just ain’t that sparkly. Ellison’s power was always as a short-story writer. Farmer, Gibson, Heinlein…we can go through the alphabet, and here and there a few names might jump out, but even with my own nomination, as a disciple at the altar of Delany, I’d actually be pointing at works like Dhalgren or the Nevèrÿon books—works which will only invite the old “Yes, but that’s not really SF” from insiders and outsiders alike.
The questions is: Once we scrap the crap of badly-written adventure stories, technothrillers, thought-experiments—the sensationalist or intellectualist lettuce for the genre bunnies, all too often potboiled to pabulum—just what novels do we have that deserve the Booker, what writers of the required level of literary merit that inarguably classify as SF?
