by Duncan, Hal
There are real burgers here too, then, burgers that are made by hand—made to a recipe as old as the hills, for sure, and hardly haute cuisine, but an honest kind of junk food that puts the extruded KFF shit to shame even when we’re talking patties of the crudest kind, adventures in space shaped by subtexts of neo-fascist wish-fulfilment, cleverly-crafted thought experiments revealing only some poor scribbler’s utter incomprehension of human behaviour. Asimov’s cardboard characters. Heinlein’s descent into didactic drivel. We’re not talking Michelin stars, baby. But at its best, this is our soul food. It’s seldom just a burger, really. It’s a cheese’n’bacon-burger or a chiliburger. Pepper and onions ground in with the beef. Big chunks of jalapeño in the chilli. Refried beans on the side. It’s a burger with an extra kick, an extra tang that grabs you by the taste buds, tells you someone actually put a bit of effort into making this hit the spot.
There’s even some crazy fusion going on in the SF Café kitchen, real cordon bleu cuisine that in a different context might be labelled “culinary cooking” (like, yanno, “literary fiction”). In the SF Café you’ll find quirks filched from Fantasy, Horror, Western, Noir, you name it, all cooked up daily, just as fresh and just as spicy as the Pomo Chilli of the Bistro de Critique. The chefs in both kitchens apply the same grab-bag approach to writing, where anything and everything might be thrown into the mix. Hell, the ingredients of that Pomo Chilli—nanotech, spaceships, remote viewing, future dystopias, Lovecraftian gods, Sumerian mythology, climate change, robots, aliens, hard-bitten detectives, historical characters, and so on—they learned that shit from us. We cannibalise the bona fide pulp fiction of every fucking Genre around. SF as it stands now is a crazy cuisine of countless forms and flavours.
Down at the greasy spoon SF Café there’s lots of tasty fast food on the menu. Soul food or Savoury Food or speculative fusion—it has a lot of names. The KFF boogers are sold as take-out from a little window in the front, but walk inside the door and you’ll be hard-pushed to find a single patron actually eating that crap. We all know better. You’ll find a whole fucking lot of them eating burgers rather than steak tartare, but that’s hardly surprising. And the tournedos Rossini can hardly be called unpopular. That’s the stuff we really rate, of course, not junk food at all, but fine fare that we know the literati of the Bistro de Critique would be jealous of…if they would ever deign to taste it.
Still, it’s little wonder those incognoscenti are resistant when we try to coax them down to the SF Café, tempt them with the treats in store; cause there’s a motherfucking massive KFF franchise sign in neon outside, lit up night and day. And it’s little wonder our insistence on the glories of the menu doesn’t shatter the shackles of prejudice and lead nay-sayers into the light; ’cause in our insistence that there’s Sci-Fi and there’s proper SF, that there’s boogers and proper burgers, somewhere along the way, somehow, it seems we’ve become…a little over-zealous in abjuring the soul food with the schlockburgers. ’Cause God forbid anyone confuse what we call SF, what we call burgers, with the junk it was born from and still shares a menu with.
Cut:
To Be Written as a Palimpsest
Science fiction represents the modern heresy and the cutting edge of speculative imagination as it grapples with Mysterious Time—linear or non-linear time.
Frank Herbert
How then do we reconcile this mythic narrative with alternative and future narratives, the chimerae with the errata and nova?
The mythic narratives of the past, written in worlds where geography was as undeveloped as history and science, generally apply a comparable technique of spatial dislocation rather than temporal dislocation; the laws of nature need not apply everywhere, so travel far enough from home and one might well find chimeric inhabitants of chimeric realms. So, in Sumer, we get the Heaven of Anu visited by Adapa, situated in the sky, and we get the Kur of Ereshkigal visited by Inanna, situated in the earth; we get the underground source of all fresh-water springs in the Abzu of Enki, we get Dilmun as the same deity’s Edenic island (possibly modern-day Bahrain), and we get the remote lands visited by Gilgamesh, the sacred Cedar Forest of the giant Humbaba, and the valley of the sunrise where Atrahasis lives, guarded by scorpion-men. In Greece we get the underground netherworlds of Hades and Tartarus, Hyperborea in the farthest North, the Hesperides in the farthest West. And so on.
In the context of the times, whether we understand them as literal or symbolic theories, these alterior landscapes can be considered hypothetical conceits of geography rather than technology, foreign elsewheres rather than future elsewhens, beyond the known world just as the future narrative is beyond known science. In the cosmology Christianity inherits from Jewish apocrypha, we find this notion of metaphysical elsewheres systematised and abstracted into seven heavens above, seven hells below and seven earths between them, a multiverse of alterior realms. The idea that these realms constitute afterlives, and the disjunctions from our temporal world that this creates (to eat the food in most is to be bound there forever), is abstracted to the Eternity of a God beyond time itself (and yet existing in his own linear process of time—thinking, acting). In its purest articulation the spatial dislocation becomes that of inside and outside, the Great Below and the Great Above of Inanna reformulated as the Deep Within and the Great Beyond, the immanent and the transcendent. The Outer Space of these narratives is Outer Time.
These geographical elsewheres, then, converge with ideas of temporal cycles, such as the Greek idea of the Golden Age, the Hopi and Maya ideas of the “Fifth World,” or the Ragnarök of Norse myth which implicitly positions the world of the Aesir before ours via the survival of the Völsungar as ancestors of humanity. With the mythic narratives of many cultures, built from the errata that are yet to become known history in the hands of Herodotus and suchlike, there is often a sense of a discrete Age of Myth, an age of gods and demigods and giants walking the earth. The very beginning of the world, in cosmogonies such as that of Hesiod, is posited as a process of generational development—Ocean and Chaos begetting Day and Night, Earth and Sky, and so on, the ordering of reality as the laying down of strata of (meta)physical principles. In these cosmogonies creation is evolution, the accretion of complexity as the (meta)physical features of the world develop from the basics of darkness and light to the intricacy of living beings. Each day is an utterance, an iteration of the cycle, laying down a sedimental strata of form upon the cosmos.
The Deluge is perhaps the most significant symbol in this context, an emblem of the cleaning of the slate that separates a primal era (emergent from chaos and therefore containing the chimera of that chaos) from the latter-day known world, this world with its strangeness expunged in the transition from prototype to product. The Deluge is a scouring of the vellum upon which reality has been sketched out in rough forms, from first principles, in preparation for the narrative of our world to be written as a palimpsest over that which came before, cleanly delineated in bold ink, consistent and complete. Here, in this positing of a before-time, we see something akin to the common conceptualisation of fantasy realms as set in a cycle of time before our own, a history before history.
Compare Delany’s portrayal of and proposed translations for the name of his pre-historical fantasy realm, Nevèrÿon—”across never,” “across when,” “a distant once,” “across the river,” “far never,” or “far when”—the way they point not just to distance in time but to a partitioning of time (and by water). Parse the term metaphysical itself into its root morphemes—the Greek root meta- originally meaning “with” or “after,” but now often used to mean “beyond” or “above,” to convey a sense of a higher order. Compare our notions of higher planes of existence, the supernatural, the profound (from the Latin fundus, meaning “the bottom,” “the deep”), the urgrund (ur-ground) as a base substratum.
Bring together these fragmentary articulations of a root metaphor from a modern context in which the world is a ball in space and our orientation defin
ed by gravity, and the interior/exterior relationship of one model becomes equivalent to the up/down relationship of the other. I am not suggesting that this is how the ancients actually conceived of the metaphysical relationship between their known world and the alterior sphere(s) of divine order, but I am suggesting this as a logical extension of the proposed model: that in the face of chimerae, we re-orient ourselves, parse our estrangement as a conceptual dislocation in what we might think of as a third temporal dimension—an up-down axis of time orthogonal to the forward-back and side-to-side axes of the dislocations associated with the novum and the erratum; that we can conceptualise the metaphysically alterior world as an elsewhen with no more difficulty than that involved in imagining the elsewhen of a future or parallel world.
Cut:
A Conversation at Cross-Purposes
—Come on in, baby, we tell the incognoscenti. This is a proper burger joint, the real deal.
—No, thanks, they say. I don’t really like boogers.
—Don’t call them boogers, we bristle. They’re burgers.
—Sorry, they say. I know you take your boogers really seriously, but—
—Burgers! Boogers and burgers are totally different things.
—Whatever. Look, I don’t really eat junk food at all. I like culinary cooking.
—But proper burgers aren’t junk food. They’re nothing like that shit the Mob goes for. Hell, they’re real food, unlike that hoity-toity culinary cooking. Fucking vegetarian tosh. I mean, come on, look at that. Doesn’t it look tasty?
—Uh, sure, but that’s steak tartare. I thought you said this was a burger joint?
—Steak tartare’s just a fancy way of pretending what you like isn’t really burger! But it is. See the red meat? See? Burger!
—It’s raw. Boogers are cooked.
—Burgers! And they don’t have to be cooked. The chefs in the SF Café long since moved on from that fry cook junk food stuff. That’s, like, Trad burger, Golden Age burger. The New Wave did away with all that; and we’re still finding new ways to make burgers. Look at this! Appetising, right?
—Yes, but that’s pâté.
—And this.
—That’s tournedos Rossini. Looks nice.
—And this.
—That’s chilli con carne. Sure, I like a good chilli, but that’s just…cooking. It’s not a burger.
—But it’s all red meat! So it’s all burgers! Or what are you trying to say: if it’s a burger, it can’t be good; if it’s good, it can’t be a burger?
—No, I’m saying it’s crazy to call a bowl of chilli a booger.
—Burger!
—Whatever! Look, culinary cooking isn’t limited to that cheap ketchup and fries approach, but a burger is a patty in a bun. With ketchup and fries. That’s basically all there is to them. Like those.
—Oh, for fuck’s sake! Those aren’t proper burgers at all. Dude, those are boogers. Typical! You think that’s what all burgers are like cause that’s what fricking Planet Hollywood sells as burgers. But that patty-in-a-bun junk food bullshit has nothing to do with actual burgers. Planet Hollywood is, like, decades behind the SF Café. Our burgers aren’t limited to—what?
—The fuck are you on? Look, that is steak tartare. Those are burgers.
—No, they’re boogers. That’s a burger. You just won’t accept that burgers can be every bit as good as culinary cooking.
—Bollocks to this. You’re nuts. I’m out of here.
—Go on then. But you can’t dismiss all burgers as boogers if you’re not even going to try a proper burger.
But they’re already backing away slowly, looking past us at the chimneys of the Kipple Foodstuff Factory that tower over the skyline of the ghetto, wondering what crazy-inducing chemicals they spew into the air here.
Cut:
The Discourse of Argument
The result is three forms of narrative—alternative, future and mythic—based on three forms of quirk—counterfactual errata, hypothetical nova and metaphysical chimerae. All three types of quirk perform in equivalent manners: each breaches the “could have happened” alethic modality, presenting a challenge to suspension-of-disbelief; but each can be and is rationalised as a sort of temporal displacement; with each the reader transforms the disruptive sense that this “could not have happened” into a sense that this “could not have happened now.” Even where the quirks are metaphysical chimerae, this does not prevent the reader from constructing a synthetic elsewhen in which they could have happened. The conceptual relocation in the mythic narrative is simply in a different direction, so to speak, to that of the parallel or future narrative.
Crucially, this renders that elsewhen arguable. It is not arguable within the discourse of science, but then neither is the counterfactual elsewhen, which is arguable instead within the discourse of history. Rather than posit the metaphysical elsewhen as a qualitatively different type of construct, I would suggest that it is entirely arguable in the discourse of philosophy. Despite what their names might suggest, Nevèrÿon, Neverwhere or Never-Neverland do not throw the reader into realms of absolute impossibility; they assert themselves as outside the sphere of temporal (technical / historical) possibility, but even as they do so they remain open to, and may even invite, explication as suppositional approaches to nomological possibility, explorations of the potentials of nature rather than of history or science. We can understand these quirks in precisely those terms, as figurative signals of the discourse of argument—history, science or philosophy; where the counterfactual argues with known history and the hypothetical argues with known science, the metaphysical argues with known nature.
Cut:
Of Burgers and Boogers
Of course, not all burgers are schlockburgers. We know that all too well in the SF Café. We’ve moved on from the days when the clientele and the cooks lacked a sophisticated palate, when it was ketchup and fries with everything, because that’s what you do when you’re cooking for kids. But the whole burger/booger distinction is just kinda cracked. All those “It’s not Sci-Fi! It’s SF!” remonstrations just sound sorta nuts, all the more so when we’re disowning the soul food with the junk food, all of it, as ersatz boogers, in flagrant denial of the fact our Golden Age SF was born from exactly that. Or when blind loyalty to the tribe has us proclaiming steak tartare a type of burger, scorning the incognoscenti whose rampant elitism must be what leads them to deny the true nature of raw mince, veil it with some fancy-ass name.
Truth is, you will find burgers on the menu in a lot of uptown restaurants, not seen, in that context, as junk food, but still basically burgers. Down in the SF Café, we discuss examples of uptown’s “culinary cooking”—dishes by Atwood or Roth, say. We bitch of how these are blatantly burgers, just like ours—but not so good, we say often, as attempts to reinvent the wheel, hamstrung by ignorance of our conventions, the proper way to make a burger. Sometimes we make sense, sometimes not: that dystopian dish The Handmaid’s Tale, for sure, that’s ground beef in a patty, flame-grilled and served on a bun; the beef stew of The Plot Against America is not a burger by any stretch of the imagining, though, except in the wacky zeal of true believers who’ve seen stew served as burger over and over again in the SF Café, yeah? And besides it has red meat in it, so it must be so. Even if the meat is actually venison.
Not that this makes Atwood or Roth SF writers, mind. In the SF café they’re seen as outsiders, part-timers. Up in the Bistro de Critique, meanwhile, the very suggestion would be laughed off as a blatant attempt to appropriate the cream of culinary cooking for the sake of prestige. As another grab by those ghetto-born geeks with hard-ons for the future, pointing at Wells or Verne, Shelley or Orwell, say. As if you could call Orwell’s dystopia a burger when he’s tackling the twentieth century head-on, reimagining Stalinism and fascism from his direct experience of it during the Spanish Civil War, not telling some Boy’s Own Adventure of battling squids in space. These are sophisticated chefs, not fry cooks of junk fiction, di
shing out burger novels full of fat and sugar and salt and artificial flavourings, all crafted in absolute obeisance to a traditional recipe! What next? Is Kafka a Horror writer just like H.P. Lovecraft, just exactly like H.P. Lovecraft, because The Trial is dripping with fear and paranoia, its main character pitted against profoundly disturbing irrational forces?
It’s hard enough to get the incognoscenti to see past the absence of ketchup and fries with something like Atwood’s work, the fact that it’s not handed to you by a spotty adolescent who needs to learn some hard truths about personal hygiene—to persuade them that actually this isn’t how most burgers are served in the SF Café. It’s hard enough to sell them on the truth that extra ingredients of good prose and characterisation can render a work “culinary cooking” by their standards and not stop it being a fucking burger. It’s not going to get any easier if we ourselves shroud the whole discourse in an artificed dichotomy of burgers and boogers.
Especially not when we’re pointing at steak tartare as an example of good burger. Or when we ourselves are ignoring the cheese, the bacon, the chilli, the jalapeños, the refried beans, etc., on the patties of ground beef that remind us just a little too much of our pulp roots, when we’re so desperate to highlight the steak tartare we’ll happily find some spurious rationale to sweep aside all the pulp, all the junk—the soul fiction with the schlock fiction—in a distinction between burgers and boogers that defies all logic.
