by Duncan, Hal
He looks down, kicks his heels.
—I mean, okay, sure, Rushdie got the Booker of Bookers with Midnight’s Children, and but that’s not SF, albeit you could maybe argue it’s a work of fantasy, I guess. And, okay, sure, we teach Spenser and Milton, Shakespeare and Blake in the Temple of Academia. And, okay, sure, we always had a lot of time for Kathy Acker, Mikhail Bulgakov, Angela Carter, and…well, too many to mention, really.
He coughs nervously.
—But that’s not the point. Thing is, the question was never whether any SF novel deserved to win the Booker, as much as it was whether any novel that deserved the Booker was really SF. Like, Midnight’s Children may be a work of fantasy, but it ain’t Fantasy, see? You and I know that; it’s Literary Fiction. Hell, even the genre bunnies got that; why else would they talk about literary fantasy or literary SF? As if those weren’t oxymorons!
He slumps further forward till his head rests on the table, buried in his arms, his words (and sobs) muffled.
—It used to be so simple. We had them in their place with the whole literary/genre thing. Spenser, Milton, Shakespeare, Blake—when they tried to co-opt the canon to their cause we just laughed, said they were appropriating ancestors for a spurious validation. And as for Acker, Bulgakov and Carter, they aren’t genre writers, we said. If they aren’t generic, how can they be genre?
—But everything changes, he tells the gathered literati.
In the Bistro de Critique of twenty years into tomorrow, he’s now the only one left still scorning the grand claims of all the genre kids, insisting that it was the realism in the magic realism that made these works great, that Midnight’s Children may be fantastical but it’s not really fantasy; that no SF novel will ever win the Booker, and for good reason; that The Road winning the Pulitzer doesn’t count. Oh, but he should have seen it coming.
—Am I too late? he says. What year is it? Have they given the fucking Nobel to Doris Lessing yet?
The Librarian’s Sad Smile
In a corner of the Bistro de Critique sits a spy—one of us. In another timestream just a step to the left, she might be a bookshop assistant arguing the merits of a counterfactual category of Combat Fiction. Here in this elsewhen, she’s a librarian with a taste for good SF, listening to the time traveller’s tale with wry interest, with a sad smile.
Oh, yeah, baby, she thinks. You should have known. Didn’t Moorcock get the Guardian Prize for one of the Cornelius books? And can’t we geeks and freaks happily claim The Cornelius Quartet as bona-fide, honest-to-God SF? Moorcock is ours, a Grand Master of the SFWA, no less. He’s written New Wave SF and Swords & Sorcery, and even Contemporary Realist novels like Mother London that put your shit to shame, motherfucker. He’s a one-man goddamn emporium of literary experiments, but one thing we know for sure: he’s one of us, a genre kid. And while Moorcock and others like him have published straight-up balls-to-the-wall pulp fiction, Moorcock and others like him have also created masterpieces that—to use the fucking tired old fucking phrase—transcend the genre.
To the librarian that phrase is articulated with an irony that inverts the implicit admission of limitations, revealing a deeper truth: that over forty years ago we realised it wasn’t about rising above the boundaries but about tunnelling under them, burrowing down through the bowels of the city, wiring ourselves into its nervous system. In this era of SF defined in negative space, redefined by every act of indefinition that comes when we slap that nominal label on whatever we can sell as SF, to transcend the Genre means to expand the idiom.
Not that you’d know this from the talk in the ghetto, where those deep tunnels under the SF Café have become a haven from the incognoscenti, a safe and cosy Watership Down warren for genre kids become genre bunnies. We poke our noses out, sniff the air and the merest scent of fox or farmer in the air sends us scurrying back to safety. We peer out of the rabbit hole, peek between the blades of grass, but we’re blinded by this myxomatosis rife within our warren, spread by our living in such close proximity, a disease of timidity that leaves us sightless and frothing at the mouth, twitching in delirium, whimpering about the lack of respect given to SF, how those howwible elitists at the Bistwo de Cwitique don’t wike us.
The librarian has the same sad smile whenever she sits in the SF Café, listening to that kvetching. Mostly, she’d rather be there than in the Bistro de Critique, but whenever award season comes around, man, the genre bunnies do tend to get agitated. Like, they’re out to get us, all those straw literati, the farmers and the foxes of the self-defeating fantasies that keep us cosily in our little burrow. It’s a cold, hard world out there. And we don’t deserve it, you see. We’ve shown them how good SF can be, how cute and fluffy and eminently likeable we are, and they still don’t wike widdle us. They must be nasty, cruel, vicious. Oh, yes. Foxes and farmers bad, rabbits good. SF community good, literary establishment BAD.
Lemme just load up my flamethrower here, and put it in the hands of our librarian. Don’t worry; we’re torching the Bistro de Critique as well. Let the whole sorry shithouse go up in flames, I say.
Of Kudos and Catches
So no SF novel ever won the Booker. So fuck? Screw the Booker; awards don’t mean shit. What we’re really talking about here is kudos, the currency passed back and forth in every conversation at the Bistro de Critique. That’s what we really want, the kudos that we feel our favoured works are due. Bookers and Nobels are only indexes of that literary credit. Strip away the talk of canons. Focus on valid comparisons within the timescale of SF—the last fifty years or so. For a measure of the modern classic then, let’s turn again to a little work of absurdist comedy offering a depth of character and theme that makes most SF books look like the teenage wank-fantasy of a Hollywood schlockbuster charlatan…and that makes most mainstream books look like the mid-life crisis of an under-aspiring MFA tutor. Let’s take Heller’s Catch-22 as an example.
We don’t want the Booker. We want the due respect that would be given freely to our equivalent of Catch-22, if our Genre of Science Fiction was as counterfactual as Combat Fiction, our exemplary works of SF published without the damning label. Or at least, that’s what my figurative librarian wants. She happens to think Dhalgren is one of the seminal works of the twentieth century, period, that if it wasn’t for the stigma of Genre that goes with the SF label it would be recognised as such. That if Catch-22 had been sold as Combat Fiction it might easily have suffered the same disregard.
The comparison is more than apt. The central idea of Heller’s novel is, after all, a sort of speculative fiction, an invention of bureaucracy rather than technology, but a “what if” scenario nonetheless and, like an SF speculation, a structural element of plot and theme. What if there was an absurd regulation that put all soldiers in the double-bind of a no-win situation, a rule that any soldier seeking exemption from combat on the grounds of insanity must be, by definition, sane and therefore not exemptible?
With this crystal concept at its core Catch-22 throws its main protagonist, Yossarian, into the horrific fantasia of World War II, the dystopia of humanity’s inhumanity extrapolated from that rule. The rule changes throughout the book, becomes more general, a pataphor creating its own context. Eventually we come face to face with it in its most sinister form, when the US army closes down a brothel, taking the prostitutes away and validating all of this by reference to Catch-22. What law justifies their action? Catch-22. Don’t they have to show this law, to prove it exists? No, the law says they don’t have to. And which law is that? Why, Catch-22, of course. The core concept here is as incredible as a fair whack of Kafka.
For all its non-linear construction, Catch-22 is an utterly accessible book, using humour the way SF uses strangeness, to give the reader a pleasure they wouldn’t find in many dreary realist tomes. It dances, it plays, it gives the reader a ludic inroad to its thematic kernel, all the while developing it to intrigue us, horrify us, point us back at the reality being satirised, re-presented in an imaginative trans
formation. It shows us the unreal so that we see the real within it. Not unlike SF.
A work which is both a commercial and a critical success, garnering as much cash as kudos. A popular work but not a populist one. A book which has achieved some degree of cult status and which should therefore, if we genre bunnies are right in our myopia of incipient myxomatosis, be excluded from the canon because of that cult status. The literary establishment don’t like cult books, we think, because they are their own cult, worshipping at the kitchen sink, allowing no other gods before them but the One True God of Realism. So why does Catch-22 stand as one of the twentieth century greats when so many of our great works lie neglected at the bottom of the rabbit warren under the SF Café? Because it’s not lumbered with the label Combat Fiction?
The prize-givings and prattle in the Bistro de Critique don’t matter a fuck if that’s the way it is. So a few fucktarded phonies there—those straw literati who may or may not be the big dealio we make them out to be—bind our strange fictions in our very own Catch-22: if it’s SF, it can’t be good; if it’s good, it can’t be SF. Feh.
Dude, these motherfuckers can be torched with the flick of a finger.
A Fancified, Fanciful Fancy
The Catch-22 that gives Heller’s novel its name is a conceit. Not in the Petrarchan / John Donne / Metaphysical poet sense, but analogous to such, a suppositional fancy adopted for the sake of its figurative import. What exactly do I mean by conceit? Here’s one definition:
An extended metaphor. Popular during the Renaissance and typical of John Donne or John Milton. Unlike allegory, which tends to have one-to-one correspondences, a conceit typically takes one subject and explores the metaphoric possibilities in the qualities associated with that subject.
Silva Rhetoricae
But this definition doesn’t quite tell the whole story in its characterisation of the conceit as metaphor-writ-large. Looking at the definition of the word outside the realms of rhetoric, gives us a richer picture of its webwork of associations. So, from Dictionary.com we get a wider-ranging set of meanings, in which we find:
conceit:
• a favorable and especially unduly high opinion of one’s own abilities or worth;
• an ingenious or witty turn of phrase or thought;
• a fanciful poetic image, especially an elaborate or exaggerated comparison;
• a poem or passage consisting of such an image;
• the result of intellectual activity;
• a thought or an opinion;
• a fanciful thought or idea;
• a fancy article;
• a knickknack;
• an extravagant, fanciful, and elaborate construction or structure.
Discarding the primary meaning of pride, paring away the redundancies, and splicing and dicing the attributes into a semblance of order, what we arrive at is the idea of a conceit as: an elaborate (fancy, extravagant, exaggerated) and fanciful (intellectual, ingenious, witty) construction or structure (turn-of-phrase, passage, poem) based on an idea (poetic image, thought, opinion, comparison). It all sounds rather fluffed-up, rather flouncy. Lurking somewhere in the connotations of those terms there’s hints of flippancy, of being too clever for one’s own good, of needless complexity. A conceit is an idea with an inflated ego, whimsy masquerading as the grandiose.
A fancified, fanciful fancy.
The futurological and cosmological suppositions which underpin SF (e.g. Bester’s PyrE) are conceits adopted for the sake of a good story (i.e. as MacGuffins) and/or to make a point by concretising and extending a metaphor or metonym (as Bester’s PyrE concretises what it signifies—power,) unleashing it to pataphor and representing its impact on characters and worldscapes, rendering it both plot device and locus of theme. For many, the use of an incredible conceit is sufficient to render a work fantasy. For many, the use of an incredible conceit based on arguable supposition is sufficient to render a work SF.
If we accept the absurd regulation at the heart of it as an arguable supposition, Catch-22 is not just a good comparison to SF. It is SF. The conceit may be legal rather than technological, but so fuck? How many dystopias are based more on hypotheticals born of sociology and psychology than anything else? It’s not a question of whether there are SF novels that measure up to Catch-22. The works of Ballard, Burroughs, Vonnegut—surely there’s a list as long as my arm of books with power and insight and ambition to match Heller’s. Hell, there’s Catch-22 itself, if we want to look at it that way. Of course, if you have a problem seeing Catch-22 as a work of sociological SF, maybe you feel the same with Ballard, Burroughs, Vonnegut. No matter. I’m always happy to point to pulp modernists like Bester who used their conceits in a more populist way. With only the odd James Joyce reference and typographical experimentalism.
The point? Twenty years from now, I hazard, the Bistro de Critique will have been rebuilt on the charred ruins of a discourse razed by the recognition that conceits are, you know, an effective tool for a writer, duh. Twenty years from now, I hazard, what’s been going on in SF for the last fifty years will be blindingly obvious. Forget all those labels we use to obscure the emptiness of that signifier, SF, in an illusion of diverse “subgenres”—Alt History, Space Opera, Cyberpunk, Steampunk. These are scribbles on sticky labels patched together with Sellotape to cover up the fragmentation of a field of countless forms, a confusion of comedies, tragedies, satires, adventures, parables, even allegories (though I think of allegory as rather a simpleton second cousin; if you’re going to use the figurative as a means to the end of polemic, just write the damn polemic).
So, over the last half-century and a bit we’ve gathered together the good, the bad and the ugly of this…strange fiction into a cosy warren called SF, into a construction so complicated, so many tunnels burrowing this way and that, the cellar of the SF Café long since collapsed into one big hole in the ground, an empty space where meaning used to be. The ghost of SF howls in that abyss. The golem of speculative fiction stands on the edge, looking down into it, giggling insanely at the senselessness. At this…conglomeration of disparate works lumped together on the spurious basis that, well, there’s something about them all we like. It has these “speculative elements.” Like poetry using metaphors instead of eschewing them. Like a rock band using amps rather than deliberately going acoustic.
So that field is characterised by the use of these fancified, fanciful fancies—these conceits. These quirks. Twenty years from now, I reckon, scorning it for that will seem like cocking a snoot at a rock band for using amps.
Reverse the Polarities
The truth is, there’s already plenty of strange fiction out there getting the kudos—like Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children winning the Booker of Bookers. McCarthy’s The Road winning the Pulitzer. It’s just that the absence of the label means these works aren’t punted down into that rabbit hole of pulp, hidden in the darks of paraliterature. It’s just they don’t languish in our little warren of a marketing niche. It’s just that a writer has to eschew the stigma of category fiction if they want a shot at the dicky-bow ceremony with champagne and hors d’oeuvres; they gotta ditch the emo makeup if they want to be made dux. No shit. Does it matter? If that Times Online list is anything to go by, they can just do whatever the fuck they want, and when the dust has settled, like as not, they’ll be valued for what they are anyway.
In the meantime…?
In the SF Café, the day after the time traveller’s arrival at the Bistro de Critique, our librarian sits with her comrades, playing devil’s advocate, as they bitch about not getting invites to the uptown cocktail parties. What do they expect, after all? There’s a whole lot of dross in the darks of the warren that is Genre.
—Hell, she says, we recognise the formulaic product for what it is, every time we segregate it out in an argument with an outsider, every time they dismiss the whole field with a reference to some heinous example of Hollywood wank and we shake our heads. No, we say, that’s not proper science fi
ction. That’s Sci-Fi. Do you seriously think they’re ever going to get that?
We can’t ignore the gaping disjunction between the formulaic product with its cardboard characters and prefab plots, between the potboiled pulp and the solid SF, the works that take Genre by the balls, squeeze hard and say, “We play by my rules.” We talk proudly of our genre fiction, but where we diss the formula fare as generic, we’re tacitly acknowledging that the good stuff is good because it treats Genre as its bitch. It takes a sledgehammer to the formulae, tears pulp into bits, chews it up, spews it out in huge spitballs to be sculpted into extraordinary forms. And we’re acknowledging that the bad stuff doesn’t. Then we’re surprised that shilling shit with our shinola gives us a bad rep.
We live in the ghetto of pulp fiction, but disown it even as we do, playing the same game as our highbrow, high-society nemeses of the Bistro de Critique, with our very own version of their Catch-22, an irrational “We-like-it-so-it-must-be-SF” rule. They say, if it’s SF, it must be bad; if it’s good, it’s not SF. We say the same of Sci-Fi; it’s just that where it meets our standards of quality control we use the phrase proper science fiction instead of proper literature. Every movie or TV show we dismiss as Sci-Fi—is that really so different from some straw literatus insisting that William Burroughs was a Beatnik writing experimental fiction rather than some SF scribbler? We can bitch about Atwood denying that she writes science fiction, but is this really that different from an SF writer insisting that what they write isn’t Sci-Fi?
