by Duncan, Hal
New Scientist
It should be clear where I stand on the belief that reality cannot be ultimately amenable to reason simply because Old Nobodaddy in the sky slipped the ineffable into his crock pot of creation—dude, I am not innarested in your condition—but as the article on scientism in the special fundamentalism issue of New Scientist quoted above makes clear, the belief that the world is “accessible to and ultimately controllable by human reason” is also “a profoundly unscientific idea…neither provable nor refutable.” Likewise the notion of science as a universal panacea for all human folly. The author points to Hitler’s use of the biology of Ernst Haeckel, the roots of Stalinism in Marx’s conviction that a science of history had been discovered, to illustrate the dangers of this scientism, this fiction of science as hero. It would be bully to believe that everything is and must be explicable and that explication will and must lead to ethical improvement—it’s certainly a good operating assumption, I’d say, tried and tested—but to take that stance as a conviction is an act of faith.
My scepticism calls shenanigans then at the zeal of loyalists like Benford, at the overturned tables of the SF Café, the volleys of blanks fired at brothers-in-arms, accusations of intellectual cowardice, cultural treason. Where a writer takes umbrage at the Hugo win for Harry Potter as fandom’s betrayal of science in favour of superstition, I see Rationalism that has ceased to be rational, goaded to pious outrage at the folly of the faithless. A fantasist writes of a blue flower’s petals stewed to a tea that, with one sip, transports the drinker to another world, a nightmarish détournement of biological determinist pulp, say, and they are the enemy because this unmoored metaphor of estrangement is not…a sun whale using paradigm-shifted science…in a story that casts religion as the source of ethics, science as a straw man of relativism that—quick, push the button!—excuses rape?
My scepticism asks whether SF is engaging with the rapture of unreason here or surrendering to it. Is it analysing the semiotics of reactionary agitprop to defuse it, dissecting the madness of societies, or retreating into the secure self-certainties of ghetto guttersniping? Is it applying Kohlberg’s studies of the stages of moral development in children to critique the conventional worldview as not historically but psychologically immature, or being raptured in a fancy of holding the fort against the savage hordes, of the infrastructure of fandom infiltrated by a treacherous Fifth Column of fantasists—which we must imagine uttered with the emphasis of a sibilant hiss?
Anders and Gibson offer conciliatory perspectives—the former focusing on “narrative complexity and whether the speculative material you read (whether SF or F) serves to turn your brain on or turn it off,” the latter refraining from imposing a definition on fantasy which, “like sf and every other form of literature, is a tool to be used in whichever way a particular author chooses to use it”—but moderates seldom set the tone in the Great Debate. The rapture of unreason won’t stand for such nuanced opinions.
Instead, characterisation collapses into caricature: the hawk-eyed, square-jawed, intellectual brilliance of Science Fiction in the red corner; the slack-jawed, blinkered, credulous nonsense of Fantasy in the blue corner. Science versus Superstition. Or vice versa—the noble poet versus the dreary pedant, the artistic versus the autistic. Dynamism versus mechanism. To close the definitions of science fiction and fantasy to a Rationalist Science Fiction on the one hand, a Romantic Fantasy on the other is tiresome whichever corner is claimed. But those who would do so will seldom be swayed, caught up in their self-heroising narrative.
One expects such from the Romantic, such refusal to countenance the contrary, but reason is discursive or it is not reason. Where that conviction of the limitless efficacy of science turns to condemn the absence of conviction—refusing as inadequate commitment belief held as an operating assumption, as if only absolute conviction were truly conviction—this is not Rationalism but a romance with Reason, blinded by love. Where it collapses the complex discourse to the faithless and the faithful, eliding in one all possibility of truth, eliding in the other all possibility of error, it is not just unsound in principle but in practice, calls us to question the functionality of its dysfunction.
A Substrate of Rhapsodies
Fitting all this theory of strange fiction into the original three-axes-of-story idea, what we have now is Lake’s third axis, the axis of what he calls genre devices analysed in terms of quirks which actively challenge suspension-of-disbelief, playing with subjunctivity level, invoking incredulity by breaching known history (errata), known science (novum), the laws of nature (chimera) and the strictures of logic (sutura). Understanding subjunctivity as alethic modality, however, invites an expansion to encompass not just alethic modality, but boulomaic, deontic and epistemic modalities too; it’s only logical to look for quirks in these areas, and not difficult to identify immediately the numina and monstrum as artefacts of boulomaic modality, the generation of a should/must happen or should/must not happen tension driving the narrative. There is a full framework waiting to be developed here, a toolkit of quirks by which we can decompose a text to the constituent elements a reader will use to parse it as being of this and/or that particular genre(s), elements that are clearly driving forces in the dynamics of narrative.
With this theoretical basis, we can now look at a type of fiction which some aren’t even sure exists, but which is constantly labelled and relabelled by writers and critics who have at least a vague sense that there is something to point to here, even if they can only point in the general direction: that inter-slip-cross-genre-stitial-stream stuff, the type of strange fiction that intransigently refuses to be fitted into any genre; the type of strange fiction that gets published under this label or that and argued over by SF fans; the type of strange fiction Bruce Sterling labelled “slipstream” in his Catscan essay, but that some of us prefer to call infernokrusher.
Burroughs’s The Naked Lunch is on the list of works Bruce Sterling identified as “slipstream” in his essay—works that aren’t necessarily seen as SF but which manifest some quality SF readers pick up on and identify with—because it is essentially strange fiction. It’s a book which I consider as much of a predecessor for my own work as many of the strange fictions published in the commercial genres. It is a rhapsody. Peter Ackroyd, J.G. Ballard, Angela Carter, Guy Davenport…we could go through Sterling’s list from A to Z and pick out, or add to it, authors that spark a sense of recognition, a feeling that, yes, they are doing something similar, something specifically similar. This is simply, I think, a recognition of their strangeness. This does not, however, distinguish Sterling’s slipstream, my infernokrusher, from any other brand of strange fiction.
There is at once a recognition and an oversight, I think, in the notion of slipstream, cross-genre, interstitial or infernokrusher fiction, of the underlying unity of strange fiction. Simultaneously, we are pointing at the cohesive identity of an idiom in its own right, as and when we label it, but in the labels we choose, we seem invariably to position it as a liminal, marginal construct of leftovers and left-outs, as a border, a transgression of borders, an activity in the seams. I see it rather as a substrate, a substrate of rhapsodies, within and upon which the dialectic of Rationalism and Romanticism has played out to create a multiplicity of genres at odds with each other, obscuring a unity as multi-faceted, yes, but as cohesive as that of tragedy or comedy. Slipstream or infernokrusher, strange fiction as rhapsody, this is not (or not just) some itinerant mongrel of the interzones.
It is the third mask of drama, its gaze not mirth or grief but shock, as on the face of Caravaggio’s decapitated Medusa.
This Improper Conjuring
They said, “You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.”
Wallace Stevens, “The Man with the Blue Guitar”
Any rational view of the field should not blind us to the countless writers of strange fiction set on blowing up the walls of Camp Consolation by means other than the
novum of science fiction. The erratum that contradicts known history rather than known science, the chimera that contradicts the laws of nature, the sutura that contradicts the strictures of logic—all of these quirks may be grenades thrown at the accepted order of things. It is simplistic to imagine those most outré quirks, the chimera and sutura, always indices of base superstition.
As an eyeball-kick born of Romanticism, a metaphysical quirk is likely no more (or less) than literary SFX, no more (or less) powerful and perilous than a novum used the same way; that the thrill of incredulity is the quirk’s purpose in being is all we need know to know the nature of the game. If the marvel is to be taken seriously at all, it is as a pataphor, a figurative vehicle of metaphor unmoored from its tenor and rendered concrete; which is to say, it exists to be read for its non-literal meaning. To project belief is silly-kittens; if I write about a Styx-water swilling cynic collecting an unbaptised infant’s soul for the Nursery of Limbo, dude, this is not evidence of faith but a critique of it.
Where fantasy is Fantasy, its definition closed tight to the monomythic mode—to the magically-gifted darlings of destiny, black-and-white struggles of Good and Evil, Dark Lords threatening the bucolic idyll—a supreme wariness is called for. Where the wonder button is being pushed, there may well be Romanticism at play, and of the most reactionary sort. Alternatively though, the text may be articulating a modernist agenda, seeking to resolve the agon of passion and reason, emotion and intellect. It may even be the product of a rationalist’s Absurdism—because the absurd is the modern rationalist’s work even in its apparent illogic, clinical as an autopsy, dissecting a system to expose its disorder(s). Pinter is never more coldly analytic than where exchanges are filleted to a series of non sequiturs.
But the notion of magic as a foreign element is expedient. All problems of structural clichés—of character and setting, plot and theme—all the trite formulae for escapist pabulum developed in the pulps of category product as generic junk food…all of this improper conjuring can be circumscribed as wish-fulfilment and encapsulated in that one word. Every fault in SF can be nailed to this romantic irrationalism. It is never SF that is of pandering purpose, puerile import; if it seems to be, this is because it is not pure SF. It is contaminated, seduced by the exotic colour of the blue flower, intoxicated by its soporific fragrance, polluted by its narcotising essence—magic, which is to say faith.
A contemptuous snort at a bugbear fantasy of fantasy dismisses the imperative of improper conjuring upon all category fiction. It is the first trick taught at Camp Consolation: to ignore a morass of hackwork and focus on the kernel of quality in one’s beloved genre; to ignore the kernel of quality and focus on the morass of hackwork in another; to treat the superior work as exemplary here but exceptional there; to take one mode as essentially good but swamped with dross, the other as essentially bad but scattered with the odd diamond. Such doublethink is a self-reinforcing view. As prejudice presents as piety, so it renders its faults as products of influence, scapegoats the reviled enemy as a blight creating wrongness by a process of corruption. The deflection strengthens conviction, certainty of worth rewarded with certainty of worth.
In the rapture of unreason, history itself may be rewritten.
A Smeared Zone of Detritus
The problem is partly that we continue to think and talk in terms of genre. Take a work which uses, say, the counterfactual conceit of a twentieth-century ideology called Futurism (on a par with Fascism or Stalinism), the novum of nanotech, and the chimera of a magical language. Splice in a pathetic narrative that focuses on WW1, the Red Clyde and the Spanish Civil War. Do you end up with something that sits across genres, in a gap between genres, or in a zone between genre and mainstream? Or is it just the same strange fiction that writers such as Bester and Bradbury were writing back before these terms were invented, before SF and Fantasy had been separated out as marketing labels, before the whole rift between literary Realism and pulp Romance was opened up and stabilised by the processes of commerce and academia into the dichotomy of “mainstream” and “genre,” a nomenclature defined more in terms of commercial and critical marginalisation than in terms of literary form, a dichotomy more economic than aesthetic? Couldn’t we just say that it’s strange fiction, fiction distinguished by the use of the quirk? Alternatively, couldn’t we just say that it’s rhapsody?
Or maybe we might say, No, this is infernokrusher!
I’m not a huge fan of subgenres or movements, but infernokrusher is a movement that revels in its own de(con)struction. It’s about romping wildly across all territorial boundaries rather than defining a niche, carving out a territory within or between existing genres. Slipstream? That would require we recognise a boundary between Genre and Literature, positioning ourselves in a smeared zone of detritus caught between. Cross-genre? That would require we recognise the same boundaries, characterising ourselves as magpie-style gatherers, sourcing one element of our work here, another there. Interstitial? That still requires we recognise those boundaries but positions us in the truly marginal territory of the cracks between, like weeds between paving-stones. Infernokrusher is not about being situated across genres, between genres, or between genre and mainstream. Infernokrusher doesn’t give a fuck about genres, not in that way.
Kessel and Kelly, in their anthology Feeling Very Strange, quote from a discussion on slipstream that ran on David Moles’s blog, in which the term “infernokrusher” was coined by Meghan McCarron, and in which a whole host of contemporary writers try to pin down what they mean by the term. Kessel and Kelly ultimately follow Sterling in their view of slipstream as a literature of the postmodern condition, of cognitive dissonance, the estrangement that comes simply of living in the twentieth / twenty-first century. But how then does this differ from that common-or-garden SF which, according to Suvin, is all about cognitive dissonance? What’s the difference? What is it that these works do?
A Terrain of the Strange
[Benford] talks about SF’s infrastructure being invaded by fantasy writers and fans, implying that there was a time when the two genres WERE separate. In fact, if you look at British Fandom’s infrastructure you see evidence of this…you have the BSFA and you have the BFA, and the BSFA, I get the impression, clearly favours SF over fantasy. So unless the BSFA was an attempt by SF purists to split the genre off, I think that your historical model has problems.
Jonathan McCalmont
Only in a short time frame that skips the formative period of SF entirely, skips everything before the 1970s, can we really sustain this notion of fantasy infiltrating SF from outside; and McCalmont’s example of British fandom backs this up. The British Fantasy Society began in 1971 as the British Weird Fantasy Society, an offshoot from the British Science Fiction Association set up in 1958. Which is to say, the infrastructure of fantasy writers and fans was created by an act of separation out from SF, and in the same year the category of Fantasy began separating out from Science Fiction with the establishment of Ballantine Adult Fantasy Books.
Before this first true Fantasy imprint, diversity was the rule in the Science Fiction imprints. The focus may have been on the latter-day E.E. “Doc” Smiths of science fiction in Campbell’s Astounding, but most of the seminal magazines of the strange fiction genres—Weird Tales, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Galaxy—were publishing the Leibers and Lovecrafts of fantasy and horror alongside such fare, the three genres intimate bedfellows from the start, right up through the Golden Age. No writer better encapsulates the fusion of forms at play than Bradbury, sliding effortlessly between the modes, from SF to fantasy to horror, in a story like “The Veldt.”
Bradbury himself claims Fahrenheit 451 as his only real work of SF, yet his fantasies took the default label of the day—like Silverberg’s The Book of Skulls, Zelazny’s Roadmarks—pointing us at the real seam of alterity running through SF. His legacy is not just popular TV shows like The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, The X-Files. It is New Wave stories like D
isch’s “Descending”, Ellison’s “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman.” It is Interzone in the ’80s, The Third Alternative, all that slipstream blending of the mundane and the strange that characterises the UK and US indie press. It is Jeffrey Ford and Kelly Link. It extends beyond the fantasy of the magical, even beyond the fantasy of the weird, old and new—a terrain of the strange that encompasses the liminality of Todorov’s fantastique, Freud’s uncanny, Pinter’s absurd, Jarry’s pataphysical along with the broadest of bizarro pulp. Looking to the history, it was there from the get-go.
But then…BOOM! The meteor of Tolkien hits the city of New Sodom, his impact shaking the SF Café to its foundation, shockwave travelling far beyond it, opening the age-old crack that splits our beloved haunt in two. In the ghetto of Genre, in the SF Café, the recognition of a wider market than the regulars leads to whole new imprints, a whole new commercial category, and formulation. The informal term fantasy gets formalised into a label for this new category—and that new category is populated with Tolkien’s peers and predecessors at first, but then…let’s see. Is that category characterised by works like Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, Silverberg’s The Book of Skulls, Zelazny’s Roadmarks? Hell, no. It’s dominated by the rotting corpse of Tolkien—the high heroism of “Epic Pooh,” as Moorcock scathingly calls it—and the noxious vapours of its decay, the umpteen volumes of The Chronicles of the Objects of Power. Those fantasists of the weird who gag on the stench of Tolkien’s fetid cadaver find there’s little welcome for them at the tables of adventurers on steroids.
