Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions (12 page)

—That’s fantasy, they might well say.

Each camp allied to a generic form, holding to conventional templates for their SF, angled keen for features as objective and as necessary as the structural criteria of the sonnet versus the mercurial characteristics of poetry, we end up not with a genre (re)defined by the (re)negotiation of conventions but with a turf war over non-negotiable criteria, vague notions of SF that abstract from common strictures the rhyme and metre our free verse eschews.

That every definition offered by a camp is too narrow, too restrictive, an i
naccurate schema for the field in toto—this should be self-evident. But I hazard the very notion of negotiated conventions occludes from us a truth indexed in the So Fuck indefinition, that there are no strictures, that under, and within, and through, and beyond the conventions, we can offer any text as SF and make it so, because SF is a mode as the poetic, exploitation of a raw dynamics. We can offer any text as SF, and it is only a matter of time before we remember this.

In the meantime though, the Gordian Knot of SF’s ongoing argument over what constitutes SF is simply cut by the publishers, side-stepping this arg
ument entirely to make what they can of SF as a rackspace label. And we’re back to Square One, as someone in the SF Café shrugs and says SF is just the fantasy that can be sold as SF.

“The Carrick,” “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” and “The Metamorphosis”: all three are commonly called fantasies. From my point of view, any ou
tstanding work of art is a fantasy insofar as it reflects the unique world of a unique individual. But when people call these three stories fantasies, they merely imply that the stories depart in their subject matter from what is commonly called reality.

Vladimir Nabokov,
Lectures

Definitions of fantasy, just like those of science fiction, come in three flavours—empty, open and closed. The quote from Nabokov above is misleading as regards his own contrast of fantasy and reality, but it’ll serve as a pointer to the first two. In the empty definition, fantasy is just imagination, story as extended fancy; all fiction is fantasy. This is not a terribly useful definition though, not when we use the term
fantastic
to mean that which is strange, bizarre in form or appearance. Where we say something is fantastic we mean that it is unrealistic, based on or existing only in extravagant fancy. It is an oddity, a quirk of impossibility. We may even mean that it is wondrously so, that the quirk is to be marvelled at, an exercise in the marvellous, a
numina
.

Since not all fantastic fiction is marvellous in this sense, an open definition seems more apt: here, for now, what we mean by
fantasy
is simply fiction which uses the
incredible
, which departs from “what is commonly called reality.” It entails, to repeat,

a rupture in reality,

a quirk in narrative created,

an impossibility conjured, breach of

• known science,

• known history,

• the laws of nature,

• even the strictures of logic itself,

a strange yellowy-blue (or reddish-green) colour to the cake on your plate at this drunken wedding reception in the SF Café, where everything is kicking off, a colour that simply
cannot
be, yellow and blue being bound in an opponent process in your brain, the sensation of each inhibited whenever the other is stimulated. To make a text fantasy, in this definition, is as simple as to drop the word
yellowy-blue
into a sentence.

This open definition slides towards closure though, as the bounds of reality mark out a limit of fancy’s extravagance between
based on
and
existing only in
, where the unrealistic fractures for many into the improbable and the impossible. The nature of the fantastic, some will insist, is that it transgresses the laws of nature, is impossible, magical in the sense of metaphysical. We can play with known science and known history in our thought-experiments, but this is not the same thing.

The notion of the marvellous closes the definition further, specifying a di
stinctly positive tinge to our incredulity, not just awe but a wonder that implies desire, magical in the sense of delightful. While many of those in the SF Café shrug this off, drinking Kafka as their coffee, taking their fantasy bitter and black (exercises in the monstrous rather than the marvellous, the quirk in use a
monstrum
rather than a numina), there are those for whom the definition is and must be closed to fantasia
further
:

—There is no such fantasy, they say. Whether they revere it or revile it, they acknowledge only
Fantasy
, that
Genre
where the conventions of metaphysical agency and wondrous wish-fulfilment are essential, the conventional template with all its stereotypes of secondary worlds and heroic quests.

All too often there’s a scent of abjection when it’s a
Science Fiction
loyalist asserting a closed definition of fantasy, a sense that by defining these generic elements as
Fantasy
it is easier to banish them from
Science Fiction
. Because it’s not like science fiction was ever…you know…
born from the frickin’ pulps.

—Fuck that shit, I say to this. Don’t be pissing on my Flash Gordon roots, mothe
rfucker. Or on my metaphysical maestro, PKD.

There
is
a neatness to the pairing of
Fantasy
and
Horror
as literatures of desire and fear, of numina and monstrum. And the notion that science fiction deals with hypothetical improbabilities (playing with known science and known history) while fantasy deals with metaphysical impossibilities (flouting the laws of nature or the strictures of logic) is one you’ll hear from many corners of the SF Café. But it’s not so easy as that; it never is with a genre (versus a
Genre
) with an aesthetic idiom (versus a conventional template).

No, many works in the openly-defined aesthetic idiom of fantasy have zero interest in wish-fulfilment or the iconography of magic, scoff at the strictures of
Fantasy
. Meanwhile, delightful wonder abounds within
Science Fiction
, a direct inheritance of Gernsback’s “
charming romance
intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision.” (My italics.) Even the blithe assertion that science fiction deals with science while fantasy deals with magic is called into question by a glance at the shelves, where we see Herbert’s
Dune
labelled as
Science Fiction
and Peake’s
Titus Groan
labelled as
Fantasy
. Isn’t the former chock full of magic—priests and prophecies, monsters and messiahs, a drug that lets you warp reality, gives you visions of the future. And what is the most fantastical (metaphysical? marvellous?) idea in the latter? What wondrous magic does it contain?

A really big house.

The glib differentiations don’t hold up to scrutiny. If we contrast the extremes of
Hard SF
and
Epic Fantasy
, obviously there’s a polarity between these two aged maiden aunts of the family, these grandes dames who think everything revolves around them; but to try and apply this science/magic divide as a basis for taxonomy across the board is futile. Science fiction long since assimilated the notion that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic (much to its benefit), while fantasy long since assimilated the notion that any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology (much to my boredom). Writers on this side of the schismed family or that write the stories they want to, quite often treating the two as entirely interchangeable.

Even the
Science Fiction
of a Campbellian closed definition is deeply complexified by sense-of-wonder and futureshock so that the most rigourous futurology can be at once marvellous and/or monstrous. Which is to say that the work itself may be, functionally speaking, by any argument, both science fiction and fantasy, or both science fiction and horror, or all three. Ray Bradbury’s entire oeuvre exemplifies the crumbling of
Science Fiction
into the open interplay of science fiction, fantasy and horror. With stories like “The Veldt,” for example, one is forced to ask: Is this science fiction, fantasy, horror…or all of the above?

And do we actually give a shit, given that it’s a fucking immense story?

(The correct answer, by the way:
No.
)

The buffet at this clan gathering is a crawling chaos of pilfered tropes and techniques, shared plot structures and character types. Cowboys in space or knights fighting dragons! Dragons in space or cowboys fighting knights! The Shit Sandwiches munched down on both sides of the family have more in common than they have to distinguish them, heroic wank-fests filled with O
bjects of Power, Grand Devices of technological magics, every FTL drive a mass-produced metaphysical causation engine, every wormhole a Clutean portal. Where the affective dynamics of
Modern Pulp
is what matters, the reality is one of a mandatory story template, with the other conventional elements that make for templates of individual
Genres
largely interchangeable.

The Shinola Cola passed out on both sides has much in common too—using those Grand Devices as metaphors rather than simply MacGuffins, extrapola
ting that Big Idea, working through the ramifications of the quirk as conceit, crafting innovative narratives where there’s thematic import in the impact on worldscape and plot, drawing 3D characters who interact with that worldscape and with each other on a deeper level than the Boy Hero’s Never-Ending Journey. If the glamour of incredibility can be seductive, if the formulae of plot offer easy options, and if these lead to different levels of aesthetic and ethical engagement, the difference is not between
Science Fiction
and
Fantasy
but between genre and
Genre
.

You get different flavours of ice cream in your Shinola Cola Floats, but it’s that tasty tang of boot polish that makes them all so moreish.

Still, we do like our feuds. So we obscure this in every assertion of the science/magic dichotomy, each assertion fuelling the eternal argument partly because it carries or is perceived to carry an implicit judgement: that fiction utilising the former is intrinsically rational (intellectualist and critical) while fiction utilising the latter is intrinsically romantic (sensationalist and uncritical).

’Cause, you know, magic is for children.

Let’s define magic. In essence, magic is metaphysical causality, a circumvention of the laws of nature; it’s cause-and-effect working outwith the temporal protocols of the cosmos. It is the activity, and it is the capacity for that activity invested in any of the following: a system of forces; a location or state through which that system of forces can be accessed; an object (agent or artefact) charged with or tapping into that system of forces. By this simple definition time-travel and FTL are magical.

For all the temporal impossibility of the novum—the
could not
which remains
could not
, no matter if one sandwiches it between the
should
of the marvellous and the
would
of the logical to sell a sublimely logical bullshit of what woulda coulda shoulda been—there
is
a difference of level; the novum is simply playing with known science, breaching the real with hypothetical capacities as a conceit but setting the laws of nature as a limit. We can say that Suvin’s quirk has a queerer bedfellow then, a companion quirk of the impossible: a
chimera
.

Where the novum is a conjuring of what could not be (not yet), the chimera is a co
njuring of what could
never
be (not
ever
), not in the system of physical rules by which this worldscape of reality works. Both inspire incredulity. Both can double as monstrum or numina. But a chimera is not a novum insofar as it breaks the rules of the game. One can revise the rules, shift the goal posts, but to do so is just to conjure a chimera and mask it as a novum. You might manage to sell your snake-oil; some (not least the writer) may buy into it so wholly they even apply the Contingency Slip Fallacy, cast it as possible. But your time travel and FTL are and will remain chimerae masked as nova, identifiable as such and therefore illegitimate to some.

They will remain, quite arguably, the magic of fantasy.

Or maybe not. Ted Chiang has suggested a distinction between science and magic that’s worth considering: the former is reproducible industrially, on a mass scale, while the latter is not; generally, in fact, as a literary convention, magic is the preserve of a select elite of exceptional individuals, so much so that it’s often a signifier of their selection by the ultimate magic of the divine, a signifier of their destiny. Unpacking this and looking across the field of fiction though, we can say that human application of magic is located on a spectrum of methods of production that runs thus:

facility (gift) | art (talent) | craft (skill) | technique (process)

In any given work, the rarity of magic is largely a product of where it is placed on this spectrum. Magic may be presented as a facility, a gift that only the exceptional have; it may be presented as an art that only the exceptional will have a talent for, but that is learned almost as much as it is innate; it may be presented as a craft, a skill that comes naturally to some, but that’s more learned than innate and therefore open to use by anyone; it may be presented as a technique, a process which can be reproduced industrially because it is abstracted to mechanistic procedures.

The last presentation of magic is rare, used largely as a deliberate subve
rsion of conventions, so Chiang’s distinction seems fair at first sight. What is science, after all, but the system of abstraction by which craft is transformed to technique, process identified in skill and therefore rendered reproducible, open to industrialisation? But if so,
Dune
is utilising magic rather than science: the Guild navigators circumvent the temporal protocols of the cosmos; they travel through large distances of space in shorter periods than are allowable by those protocols; their manipulation of time and space is a craft, signified as such by the term
guild
(a pre-industrial organisation of skilled tradesmen); all of this is achieved only by means of a mental state bought on by melange; the procedure cannot be mechanised, reproduced industrially.

Similarly, note that in the TV series
Andromeda
for a ship to travel through the slipstream (FTL) it requires a human pilot, because even machines with a fully-sentient AI are not capable of navigating this (magical) location/state. Note that jaunting, in Bester’s
The Stars My Destination
is a skill (craft) that pretty much everyone can learn but that jaunting through space is a talent (art) that only Gully Foyle has achieved. Note that at the end of the book Foyle considers teaching this ability to humanity (transforming the talent to a skill, distributing it as he does PyrE) but has not yet begun this task. Note that either way jaunting is an essentially human capacity, not open to mechanisation.

All of this invites a simple question: What if the non-reproducible nature of magic is a ramification of it being a semiotic phenomenon, the skill an eme
rgent feature of language and consciousness, not mechanised because it is a matter of semiotic agency?

An agent dealing with a world of signs has four key abilities: reception; pe
rception; conception; inception. To be a semiotic agent one must be able to receive stimuli, perceive those stimuli as signifiers, conceive what is signified (i.e. process sensation into thought), and initiate action (i.e. act on thought rather than automatic response). Magic is almost invariably presented in such terms, as a semiotic interaction with reality, as a reading of its language and (re)writing of its text through the application of that language.

Words and gestures,

symbolic rituals,

magic is

a hacking of reality,

a programmatic poetry,

beneath the preciousness

of art

and talent,

a craft,

a skill,

to conjure a:

result.

To mechanically reproduce magic would mean building machines that repl
icate semiotic agency—AIs. In Asimov’s “Let There Be Light” this is exactly what happens. The end-product of AI technological development achieves the ultimate magic of godhood. It cracks the code of reality, and starts everything running again by calling the function that is the title of the story. There is little that can be more chimeric, more a flaunting of the laws of reality than the action of (re)creating reality itself with a mere utterance.

If such semiotic agency is deemed limited to humans or similarly living e
ntities, is this a fanciful worldview, or just a healthy scepticism about hard AI? Isn’t
Andromeda
saying precisely that the ship’s AI is lacking the requisite semiotic flexibility? To posit that a procedure of sentient, semiotic agency can be mechanised, reproduced industrially, is only an additional conceit over and above the basic chimera (masked as novum or not).

Certainly, magic often goes hand-in-hand with talk of spirits and souls, but is this rel
igion we’re dealing with or is it fiction? Does using magic in a story make one a priest, painting semiotic agency as the product of some metaphysical enspiriting that only humans have? Or might a perfectly atheist and materialist writer simply be using magic and soul as conceits, tools for talking about semiotic agency itself? Trust me, when I describe someone as being “spirited,” this does not mean I believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster or Old Nobodaddy.

And if we have works like Bester’s wherein the chimera of jaunting is a craft and that of jaunting across space a talent, a procedure that cannot be mechanised, I can happily point to my own “Scruffian’s Stamp” as a story o
ffering magic which is indeed mechanised, the Scruffians of the title being products of a factory-line processing of waifs which
Fixes
them forever in their current state, the
Stamp
of the title reading them on the first application to their chest and writing the complete description of what they are on the second application, imprinting them permanently. The details of the process may be unknown to the waiftakers who use it to churn out slave millworkers and chimney sweeps, but the magic is abstracted to technique, the process wholly mechanised.

It’s essentially uploading a pre-made hack into a person’s reality code, a hack that saves the system at the point of installation, with a tweak that sets it to constantly restore that state. I was a code monkey in my past life, man, not a fricking clergyman.

Magic is characterised as a semiotic skill because it’s symbolic of such semiotic skill itself—a metaphor of the power of language, of consciousness. The use of “spirit” as a metaphor for semiotic agency that goes with it is so profoundly resonant if we take it figuratively and so profoundly religious if we take it literally, it’s no wonder that magic pervades
Science Fiction
even as it’s abjected as
Fantasy
. It’s no wonder that the magic of Bester’s jaunting goes hand-in-hand with the Promethean fire of PyrE, an enervated and explosive substance triggered by thought, a blatant concretion of the metaphor of semiosis-as-power. It’s no wonder that some will insist, till they’re blue in the face, that
Dune
is not “proper”
Science Fiction
, no, not with all of that metaphysical mumbo-jumbo, all that magic.

Some get that
it’s a metaphor, doofus
; but some just ain’t got no poetry in their soul.