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37. Everything in a science fiction novel should be mentioned at least twice (in at least two different contexts).

38. Text and
textus
in science fiction? Text, of course, comes from the Latin
textus
, which means “web.” In modern printing, the “web” is that
great ribbon of paper which, in many presses, takes upwards of an hour to thread from roller to roller throughout the huge machine that embeds ranked rows of inked graphemes upon the “web,” rendering it a text. Thus all the uses of the words “web,” “weave,” “net,” “matrix,” and more, by this circular “etymology” become entrance points into a
textus
, which is ordered from all language and language-functions, and upon which the text itself is embedded.

The technological innovations in printing at the beginning of the sixties, which produced the present “paperback revolution,” are probably the single most important factor contouring the modern science- fiction text. But the name “science fiction” in its various avatars—sf, speculative fiction, sci-fi, scientification—goes back to those earlier technological advances in printing that resulted in the proliferation of “pulp magazines” during the twenties.

Naming is always a metonymic process. Sometimes it is the pure metonymy
*
of associating an abstract group of letters (or numbers) with a person (or thing), so that it can be recalled (or listed in a metonymic order with other entity names). Frequently, however, it is a more complicated metonymy: old words are drawn from the cultural lexicon to name the new entity (or to rename an old one), as well as to render it (whether old or new) part of the present culture. The relations between entities so named are woven together in patterns far more complicated than any alphabetic or numeric listing can suggest: And the encounter between objects-that-are-words (e.g., the name “science fiction,” a critical text on science fiction, a science-fiction text) and processes-made-manifest-by-words (another science-fiction text, another critical text, another name) is as complex as the constantly dissolving interface between culture and language itself. But we can take a model of the naming process from another image:

Consider a child, on a streetcorner at night, in one of the earth's great cities, who hears for the first time the ululating sirens, who sees the red, enameled flanks heave around the far building edge, who watches the
chrome-ended, rubber-coated, four-inch “suctions” ranked along those flanks, who sees the street-light glistening on the red pump-housing, and the canvas hose heaped in the rear hopper, who watches the black- helmeted and rubber-coated men clinging to their ladders, boots lodged against the serrated running-board. The child might easily name this entity, as it careers into the night, a Red Squealer.

Later, the child brings this name to a group of children—who take it up easily and happily for their secret speech. These children grow; younger children join the group; older children leave. The name persists—indeed, for our purposes, the locus of which children use and which children do not use the name is how we read the boundary of the group itself.

The group persists—persists weeks, months, years after the child who first gave it its secret term has outgrown both the group and its language. But one day a younger child asks an older (well after the name, within the group, has been hallowed by use): “But
why
is it a Red Squealer?” Let us assume the older child (who is of an analytical turn of mind) answers: “Well, Red Squealers must get to where they are going quickly; for this reason sirens are put on them which squeal loudly, so that people can hear them coming a long way off and pull their cars to the side. They are painted with that bright enamel color for much the same reason—so that people can see them coming and move out of their way. Also, by now, the red paint is traditional; it serves to identify that it is, indeed, a Red Squealer one sees through the interstices of traffic and not just any old truck.”

Satisfying as this explanation is, it is still something of a fiction. We were there, that evening, on the corner. We know the first child called it a Red Squealer out of pure, metonymic apprehension: there were, that evening, among many perceived aspects, “redness” and “squealing,” which, via a sort of morphological path-of-least-resistance, hooked up in an easily sayable/thinkable phrase. We know, from our privileged position before
this
text, that there is nothing explicit in our story to stop the child from having named it a Squealing Red, a Wah-Wah, a Blink-a-blink, or a Susan-Anne McDuffy—had certain nonspecified circumstances been other than the simplest reading of our fiction suggests. The adolescent explanation, as to why a Red Squealer
is
a Red Squealer, is as satisfying as it is because it takes the two metonyms that form the name and embeds them in a web of functional description—satisfying because of the functional nature of the adult épistèmé,
*
which both generates the functional discourse and of
which, once the discourse is uttered, the explanation (as it is absorbed into the memory, of both querent and explicator, which is where the
textus
lies embedded) becomes a part.

Science Fiction was named in like manner to the Red Squealer; in like manner the metonyms which are its name can be functionally related:

Science fiction
is
science fiction because various bits of technological discourse (real, speculative, or pseudo)—that is to say the “science”—are used to redeem various other sentences from the merely metaphorical, or even the meaningless, for denotative description/presentation of incident. Sometimes, as with the sentence “The door dilated,” from Heinlein's
Beyond This Horizon
, the technological discourse that redeems it—in this case, discourse on the engineering of large-size iris apertures, and the sociological discourse on what such a technology would suggest about the entire culture—is not explicit in the text. Is it, then, implicit in the
textus?
All we can say for certain is that, embedded in the
textus
of anyone who can
read
the sentence properly, are those emblems by which they could recognize such discourse were it manifested to them in some explicit text.

In other cases, such as these sentences from Bester's
The Stars My Destination
, “The cold was the taste of lemons, and the vacuum was the rake of talons on his skin . . . Hot stone smelled like velvet caressing his skin. Smoke and ash were harsh tweeds rasping his skin, almost the feel of wet canvas. Molton metal smelled like water trickling through his fingers,” the technological discourse that redeems them for the denotative description/presentation of incident
is
explicit in the text: “Sensation came to him, but filtered through a nervous system twisted and shortcircuited by the PryE explosion. He was suffering from Synaesthesia, that rare condition in which perception receives messages from the objective world and relays these messages to the brain, but there in the brain the sensory perceptions are confused with one another.”

In science fiction, “science”—i.e., sentences displaying rhetorical emblems of scientific discourse—is used to literalize the meanings of other sentences for use in the construction of the fictional foreground. Such sentences as “His world exploded,” or “She turned on her left side,” as they subsume the proper technological discourse (of economics and cosmology in one; of switching circuitry and prosthetic surgery in the other), leave the banality of the emotionally muzzy metaphor, abandon the triviality of insomniac tossings, and, through the labyrinth of technical possibility, become possible images of the impossible. They join the repertoire of sentences which may propel
textus
into text.

This is the functional relation of the metonyms “science” and “fiction” that were chosen by Hugo Gernsback to name his new pulp genre.
He (and we) perceived that, in these genre texts, there existed an aspect of “science” and an aspect of “fiction,” and because of the science something
about
the fiction was different. I have located this difference specifically in a set of sentences which, with the particular way they are rendered denotatively meaningful by the existence of other sentences not necessarily unique to science fiction, are themselves by and large unique to texts of the sf genre.

The obvious point must be made here: this explanation of the relation of the two onomastic metonyms Science/Fiction no more defines (or exhausts) the science-fictional enterprise than our adolescent explanation of the relation of the two onomastic metonyms Red/Squealer defines (or exhausts) the enterprise of the fire engine. Our functional explanation of the Red Squealer, for example, because of the metonyms from which the explanation started, never quite gets around to mentioning the Red Squealer's primary function: to put out fires.

As the “function” of science fiction is of such a far more complex mode than that of the Red Squealer, one might hesitate to use such metonyms—”function” and “primary”—to name it in the first place. Whatever one chooses to name it, it cannot be expressed, as the Red Squealer's can, by a colon followed by a single infinitive-with-noun—no more than one could thus express the “primary function” of the poetic enterprise, the mundane-fictional, the cinematic, the musical, or the critical. Nor would anyone seriously demand such an expression for any of these other genres. For some concept of what, primarily, science fiction does, as with other genres, we must rely on further, complex, functional description:

The hugely increased repertoire of sentences science fiction has to draw on (thanks to this relation between the “science” and the “fiction”) leaves the structure of the fictional field of sf notably different from the fictional field of those texts which, by eschewing technological discourse in general, sacrifice this increased range of nontechnological sentences—or at least sacrifice them in the particular, foreground mode. Because the added sentences in science fiction
are
primarily foreground sentences, the relationship between foreground and background in science fiction differs from that of mundane fiction. The deposition of weight between landscape and psychology shifts. The deployment of these new sentences within the traditional sf frame of “the future” not only generates the obviously new panoply of possible fictional incidents; it generates as well an entirely new set of rhetorical stances: the futureviews-the-present forms one axis against which these stances may be plotted; the alien-views-the-familiar forms another. All stories would seem to proceed as a progression of verbal data which, through their
relation among themselves and their relation to data outside themselves, produce, in the reader, data-expectations. New data arrive, satisfying and/or frustrating these expectations, and, in turn and in concert with the old, produce new expectations—the process continuing till the story is complete. The new sentences available to sf not only allow the author to present exceptional, dazzling, or hyperrational data, they also, through their interrelation among themselves and with other, more conventional sentences, create a
textus
within the text which allows whole panoplies of data to be generated at syntagmatically startling points. Thus Heinlein, in
Starship Troopers
, by a description of a mirror reflection and the mention of an ancestor's nationality, in the midst of a strophe on male makeup, generates the data that the first-person narrator, with whom we have been traveling now through a hundred and fifty-odd pages (of a two-hundred-and-fifty-page book), is non-caucasian. Others have argued the surface inanities of this novel, decried its endless preachments on the glories of war, and its pitiful founderings on repressed homosexual themes. But who, a year after reading the book, can remember the arguments for war—short of someone conscientiously collecting examples of human illogic? The arguments
are
inane; they do
not
relate to anything we know of war as a real interface of humanity with humanity: They do not stick in the mind. What remains with me, nearly ten years after my reading of the book, is the knowledge that I have experienced a world in which the
placement
of the information about the narrator's face is
proof
that in such a world much of the race problem, at least, has dissolved. The book as text—as object in the hand and under the eye—became, for a moment, the symbol of that world. In that moment, sign, symbol, image, and rhetoric collapse into one, nonverbal experience, catapulted from somewhere beyond the
textus (via
the text) at the peculiarly powerful trajectory only sf can provide. But from here on, the description of what is unique to science fiction and how it works within the sf
textus
that is, itself, embedded in the whole language—and language-like—
textus
of our culture becomes a list of specific passages or sets of passages: better let the reader compile her or his own.

I feel the science-fictional enterprise is richer than the enterprise of mundane fiction. It is richer through its extended repertoire of sentences, its consequent greater range of possible incident, and through its more varied field of rhetorical and syntagmatic organization. I feel it is richer in much the same way atonal music is richer than tonal, or abstract painting is richer than realistic. No, the apparent “simplemindedness” of science fiction is not the same as that surface effect through which individual abstract paintings or particular atonal pieces frequently appear “impoverished” when compared to “conventional” works, on first exposure (exposed to, and compared by, those people who have absorbed
only the “conversational”
textus
with which to “read” their art or music). This “impoverishment” is the necessary simplicity of sophistication, meet for the far wider web of possibilities such works can set resonating. Nevertheless, I think the “simple-mindedness” of science fiction may, in the end, have the same aesthetic weight as the “impoverishment” of modern art. Both are manifestations of “most works in the genre”—not the “best works.” Both, on repeated exposure
to
the best works, fall away by the same process in which the best works charge the
textus
—the web of possibilities—with contour.