by Duncan, Hal
—So no SF novel has ever won the Booker, says the librarian. So innumerable works of SF that stand on a par with Catch-22 fail to garner the kudos they deserve because they’re tainted by the stigma of Genre. So maybe it’s time for us to reverse the polarities, think the unthinkable, speak the unspeakable, say: They’re right, you know. Genre equals generic equals formulation. So maybe we shouldn’t call it genre. Maybe we shouldn’t call it SF. If the label is empty, do we need it?
If the great works of SF are lumped in with crud that shares, at most, some superficial features with it, in the same way that a John Wayne flick shares superficial features with Catch-22, it’s no surprise it doesn’t get the plaudits. Maybe it’s time we stopped burrowing down to hide the best of SF in the bunny warren of tunnels under the SF Café. Maybe the day’s coming when those strange fictions can just stand upright, walk out across the field and be met with dropped jaws and awed silence. Foxes turn tail and run. Farmers piss their pants in fear: My God, that book walks on its hind legs; that ain’t like no bunny I’ve ever seen!
I mean, we can bitch about the Booker and the Bistro de Critique, but it don’t mean squat if we’re doing it from our hidey-holes, safe and sound in the delusion that we are and will ever be this little paraliterary thing called genre fiction. A genre fiction marked out by the fact it uses one particular tool—the quirk—marked out by the fact that it doesn’t limit itself by excluding that tool, the way the genres of Realism do. I gotta say, I’m not seeing that strange-fictional approach as in the weaker position here, binding itself with injunctions that narrow its scope with every strategy rejected. Far as I can see, the SF I’m talking about doesn’t essentially reject any strategy. Like a lot of those works in the period stretching back from Huxley to Homer, I reckon, it doesn’t see any fucking reason to.
Which seems a fairly natural approach to me, I gotta say. I mean, how exactly does using every fucking tool in the box not constitute the default condition of fiction? So we’ve had some fifty-odd years in which the realistas kept their shell game going, more or less, doing their best to sell the absence of the strange in their fiction as a marker of their serious chops. Meh. Give it a few decades and we’ll see how the kitchen sink holds up against a fiction as fucked-up as our reality.
—Bollocks to the bunny warren, says our librarian. The ghetto is our past, but the whole fucking city is our future.
The Kipple Foodstuff Factory
The Leopardskin Print of Thrift Shop Drag
Good news for you, good sirs, that I am no longer Don Quixote of La Mancha, but Alonso Quixano, whose way of life won for him the name of Good. Now am I the enemy of Amadis of Gaul and of the whole countless troop of his descendants; odious to me now are all the profane stories of knight-errantry; now I perceive my folly, and the peril into which reading them brought me; now, by God’s mercy schooled into my right senses, I loathe them.
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
So here I find myself, a ghetto kid in the city of New Sodom, sitting in the SF Café, drinking my black coffee as I scribble and scratch, slice and stitch, trying to make some sense of the turf wars and textual tricks. Here I find myself, somewhere after Delany and Disch, seeing a power in the very language of this stuff I call strange fiction, but seeing no small reason why that power might be damned to ignominy, saying:
—F’r sure, no SF novel has ever won the Booker. Yeah? And? So? What? Has any Crime novel ever won the Booker? Has any Romance? Has any Western? Let’s simplify it: Has any work in any Genre of extruded formulaic pabulum you care to name ever won the Booker? Has any work in any Genre born of the fricking pulps, in any commercial marketing category specifically designed to target a niche with a promise of generic factory-line junk fiction ever won the Booker?
This is fuck all to do with an antipathy to strange fiction—that fiction born in the breaches of reality, be it fantasia or futurology (or both, or neither, for that matter). Midnight’s Children. Booker of Bookers. Join the fucking dots. No, this is about junk fiction, about pulp fiction. So no novel with the tramp stamp of a Genre on its back ever won the Booker?
No shit.
The middlebrow, middle-class literati of the Bistro de Critique aren’t about to invite a bunch of crack-addled whores and hustlers in red leather miniskirts or denim cut-offs to their cocktail parties. Just ’cause we all know the ghetto chic stylings and those who wear them well enough to tell the bohos from the hobos, don’t expect the incognoscenti to. We see Tiptree-winning transvestite performance artists; they see tramp-stamped tarts in the leopardskin print of thrift shop drag. They see the bad rep that the ghetto has for a reason—because business is done on the street corners, johns passing through in their cars, pulling over at a painted face—pancake makeup gaucher than a 1970s cover illustration of Gully Foyle’s tattoos. You have to be a regular down here to know that the guy or gal leaning in the driver’s window, batting long black eyelashes as they barter, isn’t promising the sort of good time that a stranger might expect them to be.
—Best mindfuck you’ll ever have, baby, they’re saying.
In truth, as we know, they’re touting tickets for some whacked-out warehouse ninja gig with Warhol on the light show, Dallesandro dancing, Old Bill Burroughs croaking his crazed junkie rap over the beats. They’re selling the address of a secret spectacle designed to blow your mind, but there’s no way to know that unless you hang down here by habit. If you’re just passing through, baby, all you see is another hustler climbing into some kerb-crawler’s car, being driven off towards a sordid handjob in an alley somewhere out of sight.
Another book with a spaceship or a dragon on the cover, bought and sold, a few bucks for a shallow buzz.
—Hey, big boy, the next streetwalker says to yer passing member of the incognoscenti. I’ll show you a good time.
—No thanks, says they with a discernible disdain and a wave of the hand. I don’t really like Sci-Fi.
Cut to a lecture in the SF Café:
The Metaphysical and the Mythic
If we turn to the fourth narrative mode in Lake’s taxonomy, the fiction of nomological quirks, we get to the root of idea that there’s a qualitative difference between SF, which deals with science (the possible), and fantasy, which deals with magic (the impossible). In this model, fantasy is equated totally with a mythic narrative distinct from alternative / future narratives as that which involves nomological rather than temporal impossibilities, not erratum or novum but chimera.
In alternative / future narratives there is a synthetic elsewhen offered to resolve the “could not have happened” subjunctivity level by displacement forward or sideways in time (“could not have happened now”), but with the mythic narrative there seems, at first sight, to be no such get-out clause. Where the nova or errata are largely temporal impossibilities, the quirks of mythic narrative are nomological impossibilities, events which entirely contradict the laws of nature. In Delany’s theory of genre he describes the subjunctivity level of fantasy as “could never happen” (his naming of the city of Nevèrÿon, indeed, seems quite significant in this context), and this seems to be an apt description of the mythic narrative as Lake outlines it.
However, we have already noted the fact that many of SF’s quirks are also metaphysical aka nomological impossibilities, events that breach the laws of nature; they are chimerae masked as nova. We’ve also noted (albeit implicitly) that the quirks of works classed as fantasy may be far subtler than a crescent sun, hell, may be even subtler than jaunting or FTL, as with the example of Peake’s Titus Groan where the nomological impossibility is so subtle as to be almost not-there. The castle of Gormenghast is big. It is incredibly big, so big that it may well evoke a sense of incredulity, the alethic modality of “could not have happened,” so big that one has to wonder if it could actually support its own weight against gravity. But this chimera of an edifice is the nearest that this fantasy novel comes to “magic,” in the quirk of the castle, in the conceit of a reality wh
ich can support such marvellous/monstrous scales of construction.
Still the distinction is there. The elsewhen of Titus Groan isn’t a parallel reality, based on a counterfactual where one upper-class family isolated themselves in a mansion, which just grew bigger and more self-contained over centuries. Nor is it a future reality based on a hypothetical where the class system has been extrapolated to a post-technological environment of grandiose decay. It’s more of a metaphysical dislocation we get with the novel, a sense that this world is somehow run on a less complex set of rules than our own. This world is simpler, more basic. The nomology it exhibits is more crudely functional, one that has abandoned the limitations and equations of engineering that would rule out a castle of such immense size. If we can step forward or sideways to elsewhen, we can also—
Cut:
In the Closet
We rile at the response of the incognoscenti, but that handwave of dismissal—I don’t really like Sci-Fi—that unconsidered condescension that sends many a genre kid into waves of apoplexy is not hard to figure, really. What they’re saying is, I’m just not looking for a handjob. Skeezy strip joints, clip joints, lurid neon signs of dragons wrapped round dancing girls, cock rockets firing for the skies, the streets of Genre are a gauntlet of gaudy promises—CHEAP THRILLS! CHEAP THRILLS! CHEAP THRILLS! Come and get it, baby, every corner of the ghetto proclaims.
—No thanks, they say. I don’t really like Sci-Fi. I’m not looking for cheap thrills. And a penicillin shot.
Our faces burn, our fists clench, when those hoity-toity literati cock their snoots and roll their eyes at our protests that this is arrant prejudice. Cheap thrills? Fuck you, asswipe. But you know, we’re really sorta standing there, in our red leather miniskirt or our denim cut-offs, saying, Hey! I’m not a whore. I’m not a hustler. I’m a professional masseuse! We’re wearing our mother’s hip-hugging skirt, baby, our big brother’s butt-snuggling cut-offs, and most of the time we are promising thrills, the sensationalism of sense-of-wonder, a fiction driven not just by the incredible but by the marvellous, the shoulda in that coulda shoulda woulda been, whether it’s dragons or Dyson spheres. We are the slatternly faggot sons and legs-akimbo slut daughters of a whore mother and the patchwork monstrosity that is Frankenstein’s mob, hookers and hustlers just like Momma was and every bit as insatiable as our innumerable dollar-dishing daddies. And it’s time we made our peace with that.
Sure, if we do pick up some incognoscenti on some metaphoric corner, if we get them back to our ghetto crib and that Modern Pulp heritage all too suddenly rears its heads—Sci-Fi, you say?—well, we can shove the parents in the closet, slam the door behind us, and shout over our hidden horror’s thumps and protests: “It’s not Sci-Fi! It’s science fiction! It’s SF! It’s speculative fiction! We can be literary too, damn it! Don’t you oppress me with your elitism!” They’re just gonna blink uncomfortably at our sudden irrational hostility, at our strange unfathomable defensiveness. At the really loud cry of “I am Sci-Fi! Hear me roar!” coming from that closet behind us.
—So what’s with the crack-whore pimp-daddy beast of a thousand cocks in the closet? they say.
—Not us, we say. We’re with Mary Shelley and Jules Verne, H.G. Wells and George Orwell. We’re a class act, baby. And it’s only ten bucks to go around the block with us. Just give us a try and you’ll see!
—A warehouse ninja gig thing, you say? A rave with performance art on the dance floor and a salon of literary discourse in the chill room?
—Totally! We just give our tickets to the guy in the sex shop, and he’ll let us round back, past the toilets and the back-room poker game, downstairs to the basement S&M dungeon and…why are you looking at me like that? Like I’m trying to finagle you into a clip joint?
And they back away slowly…baaaack away slowly.
—Maybe we could just go for a burger? you shout after them. I know this great little joint called the SF Café.
Not that we can persuade them there either.
Cut:
A White Whale Which is God
An even more subtle metaphysical conceit might or might not be found in Moby-Dick, depending on how far we read the White Whale as a metaphor of the divine—God or Leviathan, God-as-Leviathan—a theme bolstered by the naming of Ahab and Ishmael, and the heightened Biblical quality to much of the prose. There is a deep sense of strangeness to Melville’s novel, a sense that the events are incredible, that the whale is not just metaphorically but literally Ahab’s divinely-ordained nemesis, a chimera. But does that conceit require a displacement to a fictive elsewhen? Such a displacement is possible but not necessary. It’s possible to read the White Whale as a metaphysical force, not just a real-world whale but an actual representative of Fortune, Providence, God. But at the same time, it’s not required. The crucial question is whether the symbolic feel does or does not sever us from a subjunctivity of “could have happened.”
For me the answer is “not quite.” It reminds me of Thomas Hardy’s use of Providence or Fortune, or of the Greek idea of hubris and nemesis, but this seems quite in keeping with the Providentialist metaphysics of the time Melville was writing. Coming to it from outside that Providentialist context you could argue that it now reads as taking place in a different metaphysical elsewhen (which raises all sorts of issues about whose metaphysics we’re using as the starting point), one where the divine manifests itself through actions and synchronicities. The level of synchronicity and manifest meaning Melville offers us, however, is within the parameters of his idiom. Which is to say, Melville doesn’t breach the suspension-of-disbelief any more radically than Hardy, Dickens or any number of contemporaries. This may only be to say that the mythic, even for these “realist” writers, is not entirely disallowed in favour of the mundane, that it bleeds into their work just as the absurd and the monstrous do (together, for example, in the form of Dickens’s grotesques).
The distinction I’m trying to draw here is between works which simply utilise a different metaphysics and those which knowingly and deliberately breach suspension-of-disbelief with a chimera—i.e. with a quirk that is accepted as contrary to the metaphysics of the writer (and, the writer presumes, the reader) but which is entertained for its significance. It is a slim distinction, but there is a point where literary techniques of coincidence, synchronicity, foreshadowing, etc. (which can be quite over-the-top in novelists of that Providentialist period but were, to all intents and purposes, par for the course) become substantive and integrated, crystallised and emboldened into the metaphysical conceits which give us the mythic narrative.
Here’s the thing: Ultimately, if Moby-Dick pushes us to the limits of suspension-of-disbelief, it does so in a way that is as tragic as it is mythic. The White Whale is as terrible as it is incredible, more so, and Ahab himself a figure of terror and pity. The whole novel is more the story of Ahab’s self-destruction than it’s an exploration of a chimera, the metaphysical conceit of a White Whale Which is God. But it’s interesting that a lot of strange fiction readers and writers connect with Melville’s book, sense a kindred spirit in it, and I’d suggest that this connection is because it does something we recognise. What it is doing, or what we are reading it as doing, if we see the White Whale as an actual avatar of divine nemesis, is offering us a build-up of these quirks—Queequeg in his coffin like the reverend of If…, Ahab’s summoning of St Elmo’s fire, the sea itself as a strange realm of what Farah Mendlesohn terms the portal-quest—to an eventual crisis of strangeness that reads as mythic.
Cut:
The Kipple Foodstuff Factory
The Kipple Foodstuff Factory sits at the heart of the ghetto of Genre, spewing out noxious fumes from its blackened brick chimneys, spewing out poisonous effluvia into the river from its rusted iron waste-pipes, spewing out lorry-loads of processed and packaged foodstuffs to be delivered to every café, bar and diner in the ghetto. Built in the first half of the twentieth century, it introduced the city to the very idea of junk food. Bu
rgers, fried chicken, fish-n-chips, kebabs, you name it, the KFF created an entire industry in its boom; and it’s still churning out its own brand of schlock, though it’s been in competition now for over half a century with the countless cooks (and capitalists) who, as employees, tweaked its recipes (and recipes for success) until the shoddiness was just too much and they just had to strike out on their own.
You can get a far better burger than a KFF schlockburger these days, from any number of soul food entrepreneurs. It’s hard to get worse. The Kipple Foodstuff Factory gets its raw resources from the city dump and the sewers, essentially reconstituting shit into schlock, a sort of pseudo-meat one step away from Soylent Green. (And the right colour for it, if undercooked, to the extent that KFF Burgers were affectionately dubbed “boogers” at the gastronaut conventions of the 1950s, a monicker that spread to burgers in general and has persisted to this very day in public parlance.) But the Mob seems to have a thing for KFF products, rich as they are in crack cocaine, and nobody in the restaurant business wants to piss off the Mob, so the owners of eateries across the city serve those KFF schlock products, regardless of the fact that they have zero nutritional value and highly variable toxicity levels; hey, if it keeps the Mob happy…
As loath as we might be to admit it, they serve those boogers in the SF Café, and people buy them by the shitload, the glopping gruel of extruded pulp, thickened to solidity with gosh-wow technotoys and adolescent geekwank, pure formula fare. That’s not all that’s on the menu, of course, not by any means. The fry cooks down here in the ghetto of Genre are every bit as skilled as many a master chef in the uptown bistros of Literature. From the basic ingredients through to the methods of preparation, their cuisine has little in common with the dreck of mass-extruded KFF products even though it shares a menu. You won’t find those production-line values here, no design-by-committee-and-focus-group, no franchise bullshit. The best and the brightest—even the middling and mediocre—are often working without a recipe, or at very least playing fast and loose with various recipes, getting creative with the classics.
