by Duncan, Hal
—It’s not Sci-Fi, we insist, It’s SF.
Every time you say that a Venusian Slime Boy dies, you know.
Cut:
The Dimensions of Estrangement
One thing to make clear: While the metaphysically dislocated elsewhen of the mythic narrative as I’m outlining it is clearly suggestive of the secondary world of fantasy, this model is at odds with many definitions of those elsewhens as essentially inarguable (alterior rather than alternative realities), and of fantasy as a whole as distinct from SF precisely by its alethic modality of “could never happen.” In this model, even if secondary worlds and fantasy are distinct in other respects, that differentiation is questioned.
Taken solely as a model of the mythic narrative, this is not a substantial contradiction of the model of fantasy predicated by John Clute in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. One key distinction emerges however, where Clute considers fantasy not just a matter of stories understood by their authors and readers to concern the impossible, but as a project in and of itself, one which requires the scientific worldview of the Enlightenment to set the boundaries of what is and isn’t possible—the laws of reality—in order that realism can come into existence first. Fantasy and the fantastic are defined by their negation of the realistic, as a “counter-statement to a dominant worldview.”
In this model, that scientific worldview is not required, with the quirk defined in broad terms as any disruption of the suspension-of-disbelief by a response of incredulity—the sense that an event “could not have happened”—here in conflict not with laws of reality as defined by science, but rather with the reader’s individual nomology, their concept of the laws of nature. As a theory of the techniques rather than the genres of fiction, for now I’m more interested in trying to identify its relationship to various projects in literature (e.g. tragedy or comedy) than identifying it as a project in its own right. This narrative form based on metaphysical quirks can and should therefore be considered in a far wider context than the Enlightenment, anywhere we can expect to see such a nomology. If it’s tempting to equate the chimeric with the fantastic we might want to bear that in mind; there may be project here, but if so, it is no more post-Enlightenment than tragedy and comedy are.
There is more to Lake’s mythic narrative than metaphysics however; in his description, these fictions deal with “things which never actually happened, or could have happened in a literal reading, but encapsulate important truths for the tellers of the tale.” There is a specificity in the italicised phrases that we should be wary of, an implication that we are to understand the mythic narrative as intrinsically metaphoric, the chimera as symbolic rather than just strange. This adds an additional requirement that is not applied to alternative / future narratives; and the assumption it suggests is reinforced by the sense of archetypal symbolism associated with the term mythic. It should be stressed that this model implies no such assumption.
For this reason, the alternative / future / mythic narrative nomenclature is going to be discarded from here on in, in favour of a taxonomy of the nature of the conceit itself—i.e. counterfactual / hypothetical / metaphysical—or the quirk—i.e. erratum / novum / chimera. What we arrive at with this model is not a taxonomy of texts anyway, not a system of genres (e.g. Alternate History, Science Fiction and Fantasy) so much as a system of the dimensions of estrangement from which we construct genre (or at least begin to). It is this estrangement, in whichever direction or combination of directions, that is at the heart of all strange fiction, and it is the basic equivalence of the act of dislocation, regardless of direction, that underlies the historic and aesthetic unity of the field, whichever label we apply to whichever of its myriad permutations.
Cut:
The True Face of SF
We’ve had our backs to the closet door too long, running that bullshit mantra over and over in our minds: Oh, that’s not proper science fiction; that’s the schlock of Sci-Fi; that’s half Fantasy, half Hollywood, half whatever—half something else that any fool can see is not the True Face of our valid literary form, said True Face being all serious and shit, all furrowed brows and bearded pondering. If it’s not good, it’s not SF, we say. What kind of sneering elitist are you, disdaining our genre on account of all this schlock that doesn’t count, no sir, not one bit?
Man, that’s a killer strategy, that is, an awesome way to persuade the incognoscenti that we’re not crazed hokum junkies, high on hackwork, trying to pimp our addled euphoria to anyone who passes. Yeah, vehement denial that we’ve got anything to do with the crack-whore pimp-daddy beast of a thousand cocks locked in the closet. Bitter accusations of snootcocking snipewankery when they point out that crack-whore pimp-daddy beast of a thousand cocks in the closet. Offended outrage when they assume the mindfuck we’re touting is a cheap handjob, just because we’re, like, standing on a street corner dressed to sell our arses. And because our first words to a prospective customer just happen to be “Hey, big boy.”
Some of that good old-fashioned ghetto attitude—yeah, that’ll totally persuade them that not every honking big sign for a massage parlour means what they think it does in this part of town.
Fuck that shit. Let’s open up the closet, let the beast out. Let’s all of us go on The Jerry Springer Show—My Parents Are Trash and So Am I. We’ll throw a few chairs around, get weepy and maudlin, and have done with it once and for all. There’s nothing wrong with pulp as pulp, no proper way to do fiction in this postmodernity, no need to scorn sweet Genre’s entertainments just because they might be dodgy art by some uptight arsewipe’s Victorian value system. So they might be hokum at the best, hackwork at worst? Escapist pandering? So fuck? What are we, Puritans, disdaining pleasure for its own sake? Bollocks to that. Screw the sentiments of Cervantes’s Quixote. I love the junk fiction I grew up on, pornography of wonder that it was. I love my slutty slapper of a harlot mother, ’cause, ya know, she does give real good head; a million teenage boys will testify to that. I love her monstrous bestial mate of a million base appetites, the pimp-daddy dragon to her Babylon, ’cause he’s nothing if not generous, and a boy’s gotta eat. And in another world, elsewhen, they’d both be seen without the filter of petit-bourgeois propriety and prejudice that paints them as trash because Cock forbid fiction actually be dynamic, visceral, sensational.
But let’s not bullshit the bullshitters.
When the incognoscenti back away, saying they don’t like Sci-Fi, it’s the formulaic junk of Modern Pulp that they’re rejecting. And if the acronym SF always expands, for them, to schlock fiction, if they don’t get the wacky way that we abjure the strange tautology (to them) of formulaic genre fiction, the way we point them at an utterly implausible oxymoron (to them) of literary genre fiction, if we lose them in our rookery of overloaded terms, it is in part because we’re shrouding sense in daft denials, disacknowledgements of where we came from, where we are now, what is and always will be going on down in the ghetto.
We wouldn’t be here without pulp, without the schlock we’re all too keen to point away from when it comes to lineage. If the True Face of SF is all furrowed brows and bearded pondering, it also has a rather lurid shade of lipstick, and metallic eye shadow that makes early Bowie look subtle. Why shouldn’t it? Strange fiction is queer fiction, kids.
Cut:
A Sort of Metaphysical Equilibrium
If we are to see the metaphysical narrative as utilising a third vector of dislocation in a 3D timespace, a Z-axis to the X and Y of counterfactuals and hypotheticals, then the logical question is whether these chimerae are treated in the same way. In other words, do writers use the same techniques we have identified to validate these metaphysical unrealities, to prevent the collapse of suspension-of-disbelief? Do they explain them, excuse them, exploit them?
The simple answer is yes. Here’s another nursery rhyme as illustration:
There was an old woman who lived back in Mu.
She had so many children she didn’t know what to do.
She gave them some broth and marked all their heads.
She cursed them to die, but was killed by the dead.
In the elsewhen of this variation—the mythical land of Mu—causality works in a whole other way to the world we know. A word, a will, a “mark” can act magically on the world. Dark magic, however, may well come back and bite you on the ass. There’s still a sense of cause and effect, a sense of logic, and people still clearly need to eat to survive, but the rules of the game are different. The metaphysics is different.
But there is a level of (albeit implicit) theory and extrapolation here which aligns this rather folkloric metaphysical fiction with those Alternate History or Hard SF forms of fiction which seek to explicate the how and the why of the implausibility. We should recognise in this story an idea of reciprocity in magic. In many metaphysical fictions the systematic nature of magic will be spelled out. We’ll be told that there are underlying principles—As above, so below; Like affects like. We’ll be told that magic utilises elemental forces—fire, earth, water, air. We’ll be told that there is black magic, white magic, sex magic, death magic, that a spell aimed with evil intent will lead to ill effects on the user. And so on. This type of explanatory approach seems so persuasive, indeed, that there’s a whole New Age industry of neo-pagan craziness aimed at those who seriously believe this stuff.
The point is simply that there is a form of (explicatory, pathetic) narrative which utilises the chimera but seeks to return the reader to a subjunctivity of “could have happened” just as the (explicatory, pathetic) narratives which utilise counterfactual and hypothetical conceits do.
The folkloric vibe of this variation of the rhyme, it strikes me, is related to a moral component to that explication. The metaphysics of this world is one in which good and evil are active forces. To act wrongly, using magic to kill, disrupts a sort of metaphysical equilibrium. In response, the metaphysical order seeks to restabilise itself. Action leads to reaction. The dead return to revenge their murder. This is the moral logic of the fairy-tale, where the wicked will meet their comeuppance and the good live happily ever after, the moral logic of the generic Romanticism we find published as Fantasy. (It is, of course, also the moral logic of the generic Romanticism we find published as Alternate History and Science Fiction. It is, of course, also the moral logic of tragedy.)
As another example, here’s that rhyme rewritten into the fantastic idiom by its most closed definition (chimeric and marvellous), in its most generic form, the Fantasy of elves and dwarves, heroes and maidens:
There was an old dragon who lived in Caer Dhu.
She had so many hatchlings she didn’t know what to do.
She gave them some maids to eat as their bread.
A knight came and killed her and cut off their heads.
Imagine this narrative expanded into a ten-volume saga of several-hundred-page volumes heavily detailed with pseudo-historical worldbuilding; it’s not hard to see that we have narratives which use the same mix of explication and excuse we find in Alternate History and Science Fiction. There are clear traditions in Fantasy that tend to explicate or excuse, for example, a conceit such as the “Big House” of Titus Groan. In one tradition, it might be explicated with some sort of theoretical Stone Magic, explaining how these towers upon towers don’t collapse under their own weight; if the “hardness” of SF lies in the explication, maybe we should be talking also of Hard Fantasy. In another tradition, it could simply have been built by giants, elves or angels, excusing the implausibility with conventionality; if this works in SF, with the grandiose structures left behind by ancient alien races, maybe we should also be talking of Epic SF.
In Titus Groan however that implausibility becomes part of the pataphoric resonance, part of the meaning of the conceit. One obvious tenor for this Big House is the country estate of Edwardian society (often dubbed, indeed, the “big house” by locals), which itself can be read as metonym of that entire society—overbuilt to the point of incredibility. It is redolent with the potential of its own collapse. The architectural conceit, the societal structure of the characters, the style of the prose, and the plot all play off one another. Both SF and fantasy have their Hard and Epic varieties, utilising excuse and explication in different measures, exploiting the incredible, building it to a crisis of spectacle, but both have their more Conceptual flavours, to steal a term from the field of visual arts.
Cut:
That Pornography of Wonder
So, yes, our slut mother, Modern Pulp, is a crack whore who gives blowjobs for ten dollars a pop. Or maybe Modern Pulp is the pimp as our Old Man, the patriarchal ponce of pleasure selling the Muse’s pretty mouth. Or he’s a raddled junky gigolo. Or she’s a molly-house madam. That’s what Genre is, what it does. It gets down on its knees, unzips your fly and uses all the sensual skills of its slick tongue to give you a few minutes of loveless but ecstatic pleasure. And there’s a lot of that in us, Modern Pulp’s brood of similarly hopped-up hustlers and hookers. Oh, there’s also a whole lot more, another sire or dam—a Frankenstein’s monster of another mother or father in the modernism part of pulp modernism—but our cribs are here in the ghetto of Genre.
So the literati of the Bistro de Critique dismiss the fiction of that whole domain, that genre fiction, out of hand, can’t see all the shinola for the shit. So when you show those self-same literati some shinola ripped out of that context, then they’ll laud it to the heavens. So they’ll blithely then dismiss all claims that it belongs with junk as junk, because, well, it’s not junk but genius. That’s not prejudice; it’s just that half the time the discourse is completely fucked by our sophistic double-thinks, our schizoid denials of the stark reality.
Generic fiction sucks as art by most standards. Pulp fiction, junk fiction, sucks as art. It may not suck at all as what it is. Rather than mere extruded product it might be fine handicraft, simple but solid, substantial in its own way. It might be soul fiction that’s full of fat and salt and stuff that just ain’t good for you but that tastes fucking delicious. But as literature designed to give us a quick fix of formulaic figuration, nothing more, it sucks as art. Fiction that does not suck as art, does not suck as art because no matter what tropes and techniques it shares with that pulp fiction, it does not gain its primary power from their familiarity; we might well get a similar high from similar ingredients, but we’ll also get fucked up in a whole other way, from a deeper weirdness than wonder. It is not just a derivative retread of hoary conventions made to fill a hole. It is not recycled pabulum, commercial dross designed to satisfy an appetite for escape. It’s not just that pornography of wonder, that loveless pleasuring. Hey baby, me show you good time! Ten dollah, suckee suckee.
Zzzzzzzzzzip.
—Oh, baby. You make me feel so good.
But that reality makes it a little awkward when you’re living deep in the ghetto of Genre, when you’ve grown up loving soul fiction but the whole discourse says that pulp is—and can only be—a schlock fiction every artist should abjure in shame; so our distinctions between “literary” and “generic” Genre Fiction, between SF and Sci-Fi, emerge as a desperate misdirection from the overwhelming predominance of that sensationalist hokum:
—Don’t look at the slut behind the curtain fellating the fourteen-year-old boy. Ignore the junky gigolo on the nod in the toilet, blissed out on his fix of fascist power-fantasy! Look over here, look! Look at the dancing fingers!
Fuck that shit. The only distinction worth making is between the grifters who play the shell game of formula fiction, taking cash from the punters for a moment’s thrill without even a hint of handicraft in their hackwork, and the grafters whose writing actually has an ounce of creative effort, even if it’s all put into the purest and most pandering pulp. The grafters may not be making great art by most standards, the handjob of hokum they’re offering may be shallow and loveless, but it’s only the formulaic pap that’s truly without substance, not just loveless but gutless, spineless, soulless. Fuck tha
t Kipple Foodstuff Factory schlock. But when it comes to pulp fiction in general…fuck any bullshit preciousness that would lead us to abjure its lusty excesses. So it’s got a bad rep, and for some damn good reasons. Deal with it.
Respect is for schoolmarms and church ministers. This is New Sodom, not New Sunday School.
Cut, with a switchblade, with a quirk, rusty or razor-sharp:
The Ground Ever-Shifting
Here’s another rhyme:
There was an old goddess who lived with Anu.
She had so many children she didn’t know what to do.
She made them some humans to cook them some bread.
But Marduk got angry and cut off their heads.
Here there’s no explication, no attempt at explication, and indeed there’s a certain illogic to the whole sequence. Why make humans to make bread if you’re a goddess and could just skip the middle man, make the bread yourself with your awesome goddess powers? Why does Marduk just get angry all of a sudden? What the fuck is this story trying to tell us? For the modern reader, the use of the Sumerian template here—rather than, say, a more familiar Greek or Christian or Judaic set of tropes—may render the story entirely incomprehensible. The fantasia is not idiomatic.
If you know your Sumerian myth you can probably fill in the gaps. Marduk, see, he’s a young and dynamic warrior god who supplanted Anu round about the time Babylon became the big power in Mesopotamia. The old goddess who made humans is clearly an example of the Middle Eastern mother goddess, probably associated with grain (the bread), and probably usurped along with Anu. Her children, who got their heads cut off by Marduk—that’s clearly a reference to the Sumerian equivalent of the Titans, Tiamat’s monstrous brood who were defeated by Marduk. Because there was a shitload of them stirring up trouble. Compare the apocryphal giants, the Anakim, wiped out in the Flood of Genesis. Cross-reference to the Annunaki, the underworld gods usurped by the younger Igigi. And so on.
