by Duncan, Hal
So we can see here an example of the cognitive estrangement Suvin sets as characteristic of the novum. What we’re looking at is an overload of linguistic strangeness, coinages piled on top of one another, heaped around the core idea of “chips in the head” until the conceptual mass is sufficient for that accumulation of suggestions of innovation to collapse into a singular idea. This novum is not the same thing as a trope, not at all—though most nova will eventually be recycled by later writers, and a trove of tropes derived from the process of conventionalisation, symbolic formulation. Even when a novum is constructed in a fiction which plays with existing tropes, familiarity is of less import than the estrangement, the peculiar novelty it capitalises on.
Suvin’s novum is a “genre device” if ever there was one, but what constructs his SF as a subset of SF, a genre of cognitive estrangement, is less the quirk per se than a specific approach to it, an approach of exploitation. If the comic narrative exploits the absurd sutura and the tragic narrative exploits the monstrum, this particularly conceptual type of future narrative exploits the novum. Strictly speaking, rather than future, the term novel would sit better beside absurd and monstrous, but it would be rather confusing to talk of novel narratives or novels that exploit the novel, so we’ll have to live with it.
These nova work, and make the story work, make us take it seriously, because they function as conceits that are both original and meaningful. The reader enters the story with a willing suspension-of-disbelief. The writer deliberately fucks with that, introducing a quirk. But that quirk is neither mere thought-experiment (which may lack meaning) nor mere fancy (which may lack originality). Rather it integrates plot and theme, glues the story together around it, its power resting in the peculiar relationship of literal untruth and non-literal veracity—albeit that the veracity is multiplicitous and reader-generated, pataphoric rather than metaphoric, if the narrative is truly exploiting the quirk rather than co-opting it to crude allegory.
Okay, the writer says, if you’re happy to believe my plausible lies, let me give you an implausible lie. Let me give you the absurd, the abject, the surreal—or the novum. Let me give you a strange conceit, a quirk. Yes, it’s patently unreal. Yes, it’s going to throw you out of that cosy alethic modality of “this could happen.” But it’s an integral part of the story without which the story would not function, would not be a story at all. And if you just keep your disbelief suspended, with that lie I’m going to try and tell you something true. Or rather, I’m going to give you a figuration you can apply to whatever facets of the world you will, and hopefully find, in seeing those facets defamiliarised, their truths.
Those Old Equations
There is a conflict that emerges here between the first two strategies of explication and excuse and the third strategy of exploitation, since the latter is geared towards challenging that suspension-of-disbelief. If the strangeness is excused or explicated doesn’t that make it less strange? This is especially problematic with the novum. If the android is an utterly familiar trope, or rationalised to the most rigourous degree, or both, surely it can’t continue to function as a novum, surely that dissipates its novelty. Doesn’t it just become another tired variable in those old equations?
Well, yes…but…
The trope trove of SF has been constantly replenished over the decades by writers generating new nova in their work precisely because novelty is essential to the novum. The power of the old nova is dissipated as they are conventionalised into tropes, but as we exhaust the strangeness of the spaceships, aliens and robots, we add cyberspace, singularities and posthumans. There is a disenchantment with the Rocket Age, to be sure. Scientific advance now feels more commonplace and our world is so techno-whizzy anyway that the sense-of-wonder which drives SF may well be less intense for many. We’re harder to futureshock too. But we haven’t yet, to my mind, entirely run out of strange new scientific ideas—strange enough to test our suspension-of-disbelief, and new enough not to be conventional.
Also, over and above the replenishment of the trope trove with new nova, there is a constant détournement of those tropes in order to defamiliarise them. So you have the robot as genre convention—a mechanical worker, occasionally treated as sentient but more usually a mindless drone—and in order to make a good SF story you have to add your own twist. Asimov gives us (the logical permutations of) his Three Laws of Robotics in I, Robot. Bester gives us the AI psychosis of “Fondly Fahrenheit.” Sladek gives us the put-upon child robot of Roderick. Each is, in his own way, using the conventionality of the trope as something to kick against, to confound expectations. A genre using conventions to excuse implausibility creates expectations around those conventions. A writer can either meet those expectations or go out of their way to fuck with them.
As a Grenade
Does that reimagined trope then become a novum itself, or is the novum within those stories located in the twist—the Three Laws, the psychosis, the childhood? I don’t know. We should not cling too hard to the articulation of a shift in narrative modality as an object in the text; the notion of the quirk it is a useful encapsulation but let’s not be too literalist about it; sometimes the novum will be better seen as a more abstract effect that is generated by the work rather than an item of content, a thing which the work contains. Rather than a noun, the novum of an SF narrative, as a form of quirk, as a matter of modalities, is a narrative itself, boiling down to a noun-verb statement with a modal auxiliary hue (if you can even reduce it that far); that’s what distinguishes it from a trope.
In its deliberate inversions and subversions, this type of SF can read as parody, pastiche or satire, or it can read as something more serious, more pointed, a sort of fictive critique of conventions, a sort of anti-genre. As should be obvious from the examples of Asimov and Bester, this has been going on in SF from way back. If there is a danger that even the new twists will be exhausted, the trove is not yet all played out. Every so often you see even the hoariest old cliché transfigured by some cunning subversion. Writers take this as a challenge.
And if explication can declaw the strange, this is not the whole story. A writer may build the most rationally explicated world through the details and then throw a novum right into the heart of it as a grenade. Indeed, in something like 2001 you have the futurology of the human spaceship (no artificial gravity, no hyperdrive, and it takes a long time to get to Jupiter) but with the monolith as a huge big novum at the core of the story. The remake of Solaris might be another example where you have a backdrop that’s not wildly weird, that’s made acceptable by its visual extrapolation from our time (in terms of technology, style, culture, etc.), and then the novum in the middle of that, the utterly inexplicable alien consciousness of the planet. In some senses, you could say, the verisimilitude and authenticity of the human culture only heightens the strangeness of the alien other in both of those fictions.
So, if you can then, theoretically, put these all together you end up with…what? Maybe Bester’s The Stars My Destination. There you have some of the classic tropic conventions—space travel, asteroid miners. These are treated with some level of scientific theory and extrapolation (though I’d have to say, not much). The story itself, as we all know, is straight from The Count of Monte Cristo. How Romantic do you want to get? But Bester fucks with the conventions, makes Foyle an anti-hero, an Everyman. He treats jaunting and PyrE as nova, weaves all these elements together into something that combines the best of all three approaches to SF.
Their Unrealised Potentialities
Bringing it all back to the idea of suspension-of-disbelief, the game SF plays, more often than not, is to play the alethic modality of “could have happened” off against the alethic modality of “could not have happened.” It’s rare for an SF work to simply collapse back into the pathetic narrative by explaining everything, and rare (though maybe less rare—and quite common in the visual media) for it to excuse itself as formulaic Romanticism where anything goes. But it’s also rare, I’d say, for an SF wo
rk to not utilise excuse or explanation at all, to remain purely conceptual. Rather, those excuses and explanations become mechanisms for sustaining the tension, for offering little releases here and there, little placations which mitigate the sense of incredibility enough that the reader gets drawn into a more intense state without suffering incredibility-overload and getting kicked out of the story.
If you look at some of the most novum-saturated SF—like Neuromancer, say—the denseness of the environment is mitigated heavily by borrowings from the noir idiom, by constantly reminding the reader that this is a thriller, so it’s okay, ’cause this sorta wild adventurous hokum is acceptable in a thriller. And by reigning the time scale in to a very near-future, extrapolating low-level computing and information technology rather than space travel and immortality and other such Grand Science, Gibson achieves a hard edge, an illusion of plausibility. This is perhaps one of the reasons why cyberpunk took off so well; it was able to utilise all three techniques of dealing with the incredible—to excuse, to explicate and to exploit—with incendiary results. Hell, look at that opening line about the sky being the colour of a TV set tuned to a dead channel. Its voice is noir (excuse,) its description is bleak naturalism (explication,) and it’s simultaneously the opening statement of the conceit that permeates the novel, artificial reality (exploitation.)
We could break the field down into subsets of SF narrative which only explicate, only excuse, or only exploit, but in truth all three techniques may be present in any one narrative. More importantly though, if the hypothetical novum is only a particular type of quirk that can be exploited in a certain way this raises the question of its comparison with other types of quirk exploited the same way. What about the complementary counterfactual and metaphysical quirks which offer us deviations other than innovation? If these errata and chimerae lack novelty they have their own power in the resonance of their unrealised potentialities. We can expect to find them explicated and excused too, and we can expect to find them, like the novum, thoroughly and gorgeously exploited.
And unrealised, I’d note, is not the same as unrecognised. Whether it’s a matter of explication, excuse or exploitation, tapping the trope-trove or adding to it, reinventing or replenishing, the power of the quirk is such that for all the gulf of propriety between the uptown district of Literature and the downtown district of Genre, the estrangement I’m dealing with here is far from being the sole province of the latter.
A List of the Most Laudable
It had to happen, that turning of the tables in the Bistro de Critique. For years, the distinctly literary approach of many writers in the ghetto wasn’t just inviting comparisons with their forebears and contemporaries in the uptown district of Literature; it was demanding it. A critic could hardly help but see the influence of Vladimir Nabokov in the work of Jeff VanderMeer, say, or of Franz Kafka in the work of Jeffrey Ford. The walls of the ghetto slowly weakened as writers like Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem tunnelled under them to pass freely back and forth; and eventually those walls came crashing down, a brave new world emerging from the ruins, a world foreshadowed by the placement of Kelly Link’s Magic for Beginners at #3 in Time magazine’s Top Five Books of 2005, alongside Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and E.L. Doctorow. In this new day and age, it was inevitable that deserving works of SF would finally catch the eyes of the literary establishment.
As far back as 2008, in fact, an article in the Times Online set out the fifty greatest British writers since 1945. It was the sort of utterly subjective list which says more about the people who put it together than anything else, but kind of interesting for that reason. If the Times doesn’t count as literary establishment, after all, what does? Whether we agree or disagree personally with the names on it, this is a list of the most laudable, not in the sense of the most objectively worthy, but in the sense of the most feasibly lauded, of those who the compilers feel secure in placing on their little pedestals.
In the Bistro de Critique that list might have passed without much notice, but I remember laying it out on the counter of the SF Café, and grinning to myself. Looking at this list, you see, you have a handful of poets:
1. Philip Larkin
4. Ted Hughes
23. Penelope Fitzgerald
31. Derek Walcott
36. Geoffrey Hill
39. George Mackay Brown
47. Alice Oswald
48. Benjamin Zephaniah
You also have a couple of non-fiction writers:
40. A. J. P. Taylor
41. Isaiah Berlin
You have a grand total of ten writers who have worked solely within the genre(s) of realism, contemporary or otherwise:
7. V. S. Naipaul
12. Iris Murdoch
20. Anthony Powell
21. Alan Sillitoe
25. Barbara Pym
30. John Fowles
33. Anita Brookner
37. Hanif Kureishi
45. Colin Thubron
46. Bruce Chatwin
You have two writers who’ve worked in the popular genre of the spy novel:
14. Ian Fleming
22. John le Carré
Of the rest, well, we’ll separate out the writers who’ve played around with historical and prehistorical fiction, because while these could be seen as artificially constructed elsewhens comparable to those of fantasy or alternate history, they’re more exotic than fantastic in its common usage (the incredible with implications of the chimeric and/or the marvellous), and we wouldn’t want to push a point. So:
3. William Golding
26. Beryl Bainbridge
49. Rosemary Sutcliff
Then, however, you have a whole bunch of fiction writers, all of whom have, at some point in their career, written works which utilise the strange in its strangest mode—nova or chimerae, disruptions of credibility, the alethic modality of could not happen. Some writers have worked with a sort of slipstream blend of naturalism and the unreal, some have only written one or two works utilising a strange conceit of some description, and some are best described as magic realists (or even Magic Realists, if we want to consider the approach a closely definable, marketable category.) But more than a few have written what we’d call science fiction, fantasy or horror—and in the outright Genre usages of those terms):
2. George Orwell
5. Doris Lessing
6. J.R.R. Tolkien
8. Muriel Spark
9. Kingsley Amis
10. Angela Carter
11. C. S. Lewis
13. Salman Rushdie
15. Jan Morris
16. Roald Dahl
17. Anthony Burgess
18. Mervyn Peake
19. Martin Amis
24. Philippa Pearce
27. J. G. Ballard
28. Alan Garner
29. Alasdair Gray
32. Kazuo Ishiguro
34. A. S. Byatt
35. Ian McEwan
38. Iain Banks
42. J. K. Rowling
43. Philip Pullman
44. Julian Barnes
50. Michael Moorcock
That’s twenty-five of the Times Online’s fifty greatest British writers since 1945. Which is to say fifty percent. As opposed to ten dyed-in-the-wool realists. Which is to say twenty percent, over that last half-century and a bit—where of all time periods we should expect to see the mimeticists privileged over purveyors of the strange, of the incredible and marvellous.
Ah, yes. I still remember thinking wryly of how this was at odds with the ghetto mentality of us genre kids: yeah, that damned mainstream with its literary establishment, always pissing on our genre cause they’re, like, mundanes, so boring, so banal. All they’ll ever take seriously is that dreary, dull, depressing Realism stuff… Yeah!
Even as far back as 2008 the writing was on the wall, the names of twenty-five bona fide writers of strange fiction scribbled in black ink graffiti on a stall in the toilets of the Bistro de Critique. This w
as the shape of things to come.
The Last Realist
—No SF novel ever won the Booker, they say in the SF Café, damn near every year, when that season comes around. In the SF Café, every year when that plaudit is about to be announced, we can expect more of the same old same old, mutterings about the absence of genre fiction from the shortlist. But this is what’s happening right now in the Bistro de Critique:
In the Bistro de Critique, the Last Realist comes staggering out of that toilet stall, dishevelled and haggard, eyes wild with visions of the future he’s a fugitive from, visions of geeks and freaks lauded for writing tales of singularities and superheroes, visions of the Untermenschen pouring out of the ghetto of Genre, storming the Bistro de Critique.
—There’s a Reign of Terror coming! he cries. Well, a Reign of Horror, strictly speaking…and Fantasy, and that sodding freaking Science Fiction too. An Unholy Trinity of the Unreal. Oh, they don’t always call it that—they’re fucking sneaky that way—but it’s…it’s…genre fiction!
He collapses into a chair, slumps forward, head in hands.
—We just didn’t see it coming, he moans. I mean, no SF novel ever won the Booker.
