Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions (17 page)

The exclusion of those literary (for want of a better term) fantasists is signi
ficant, revealing the specifics of the commercial
Genre
as the Y that
Fantasy
requires in order to be
Fantasy
—what Gibson refers to as the elves, orcs or magic swords. All too often it signifies a blinkered view of the actual works published under the rackspace label, reveals the same sort of prejudices that are applied to science fiction by those who do not read it but will nevertheless blithely dismiss it as robots, aliens and spaceships. And insofar as these are emblematic of tropes exhausted to cliché (elves, orcs) and power-wank (magic swords), if we detect in this closure of definition (to crude stereotype) a definition-by-negation of
Science Fiction
, it’s hard not to see a neat rhetorical trick taking place:
Science Fiction
is being defined as that which does not use such tawdry cliché, does not pander with such power-wank.

The marginalisation of the literary fantasists as
impure
Fantasy
is even more telling, a tacit admission that
Fantasy
can and does open up into fantasy, that these (clichéd, pandering) features are
not
a requisite Y, that these writers’ works can still be classed as fantasy regardless of the complete absence of elves, orcs or magic swords. Those features are not what defines a work of fantasy even if they are what defines
Fantasy
. Rather across the zone of strange fictions, the more a work evidences these (clichéd, pandering) features, the more it becomes correct, proper, to deem it
Fantasy
. Again it’s hard not to see a rather self-serving gambit here, a way of defining
Science Fiction
as more properly
Science Fiction
—i.e. less properly
Fantasy
—as it eschews cliché and pandering.

When a
Science Fiction
writer or reader characterises fantasy as
Fantasy
, represents it “in its purest form” by those specifics—the elves, orcs or magic swords—it’s a good way to valorise their favoured form relative to the other, and to absolve it of demonstrable cliché and pandering by casting this as a degree of
Fantasy
in any work evidencing it. In the closure of definition, the gains are also being won at the expense of the other genre and its more sophisticated writers: a territorial politics is being reinforced in which fantasy is centred on
Fantasy
, in which the more a writer seeks to establish the freedom to eschew cliché and pandering within the genre, the more they are marginalised as improper
Fantasy
, disempowered in their struggle against commercial pressures toward formulation.

With this in mind, a pointed question emerges: Why
is
the term
Science Fantasy
attached to works like Herbert’s
Dune
or McCaffrey’s Pern novels, but not attached to works like Zelazny’s
Roadmarks
or Silverberg’s
The Book of Skulls
where it is all but impossible to discern any element of futurology whatsoever to the conceit? The latter two works are utilising conceits that require cosmological rather than technological paradigm shifts. But while Zelazny and Silverberg are exempted by the Paradigm Shift Caveat, Herbert and McCaffrey are not? Is it perhaps that to do so binds the term
fantasy
to emblematic (clichéd, pandering) tropes of
Genre
(prophecies and dragons)? That equivalently
fantastic
(incredible, marvellous, chimeric) tropes (magic roads and secrets-of-immortality) in their novelty then serve to evidence science fiction as
un
bound from its own
Genre
specificity (robots, aliens and spaceships)?

As the definition of
Fantasy
is closed, as the word becomes, in
Science Fantasy
, a signifier of
Genre
tropes that make a work not science fiction, as it becomes a signifier of
the generic
, the distinction of science fiction and
Science Fantasy
becomes a strategy of
scapegoating
, a mechanism whereby deficits perceived in generic
Science Fiction
(like a sensationalist surrender to the sublime) are mapped to those of generic
Fantasy
, so that the latter can be represented as the cause of those deficits. It is not that
Star Wars
is a product of
Science Fiction
, a
Genre
with its own tendency to use its generic tropes (robots, aliens and spaceships) in generic plot-structures (Romantic adventure) going back to the pulp roots of this
Genre
of the marvellous (Flash Gordon). It is not that the clichéd pandering is a product of the process of formulation inherent in a
Genre
, commercial pressures to sate the market’s demand for “more of the same” inevitably leading to derivative copies. Rather this
Science Fantasy
is held to have (errantly or cynically) adopted the template of
Fantasy
, such that the presence of the generic in science fiction is blamed on the pernicious influence of fantasy. For the genre eugenicists of
Science Fiction
, fantasy must be essentialised into generic
Fantasy
to sustain the idea that it is the taint of that “pure”
Fantasy
’s essence which corrupts
Science Fiction
, creates the miscegenation of
Science Fantasy
. As if fantasia were not a fundamental feature.

This is a process of
abjection
, the same process by which
Genre
is ghettoised as the territory of cheap sensationalism—abjection being the idea (articulated by Julia Kristeva) that we react intensely when confronted with substances that were once part of us but which no longer are. Blood, shit, piss, vomit, a severed limb or digit—these things remind us of our own nature, the stuff we ourselves are composed of, and we respond to that reminder with fascination and revulsion, refusing to engage with them, recoiling or driving them from us. Marginalised social groups—people of colour, gays, Roma, Jews—are abject. So, in the term
Science Fantasy
,
fantasy
becomes a signifier of that which is abject in relation to science fiction. Call it Y. Call it magic. Call it elves, orcs or magic swords. These specific tropes are actually indexes of
all
tropes, which are in turn indexes of commodification and formulation, indexes of
Genre
.

Is it possible to unmoor the Sibling-Sibling Model of
Science Fiction
and
Fantasy
from that mechanism of abjection? Can we describe a
Fantasy
distinct from
Science Fiction
, but avoid closing its definition to the specifics of a
Genre
in a way that implicitly renders it a scapegoat? Can we describe it in terms of a different Y? And if so, what is that Y?

In many respects, for a contingent of writers and readers who make exactly that di
stinction, the simple answer is that Y equates to not-X, that it is simply the
absence
of rationalisation that, for them, distinguishes a work out as
Fantasy
rather than
Science Fiction
(both as openly defined as a closed definition can be). In this model
Science Fiction
and
Fantasy
exist as concentric zones, the former nestled within the latter but excluding by definition that which exists outside its strictures, identifying it by negation. This almost, but not quite, collapses the model into a Parent-Child Model in which the science fiction subset can be imagined as a zone within fantasy, but in which that renders it by definition a
type
of fantasy, the subtle difference of the two models enough to engender endless argument, as those working with one model or another fail to articulate it clearly.

This is why the Great Debate persists. The exteriority of fantasy means that there will always be those who see it as encompassing science fiction, co
ntaining it. The exclusivity of
Science Fiction
with regards to works that fall outside its definitional zone means that there will always be those who see
Fantasy
as
essentially
distinct. The impositions of closed definitions to both leads to further confusion in a field where, at the edges of that central zone of
Science Fiction
, these closed definitions fray, as the cosmological conceits and inargued arguabilities of science fiction blend with those of fantasy, the boundary blurred further by subjective application of the Paradigm Shift Caveat.

Here we find
Science Fantasy
as a buffer-zone for
Science Fiction
, a limitation of acceptable incursion. Going hand in hand with the schisming of
Science Fiction
/
Fantasy
, the term
Science Fantasy
signifies an attempt to retrench, to restore integrity to the
Genre
by (re)defining it as exclusively rationalist, exiling that which transgresses its dictates. Anything which smacks of a surrender to sensationalism is abjected into this interzone, viewed as a hybridised combination, or as
Fantasy
masquerading as
Science Fiction
. Insofar as the aesthetic of the logical can and does operate as a counter-balance to the aesthetic of the sublime, the abjection becomes quite comprehensible as a suspicion of Romanticism, rooted in a fear that without the Rationalism there will be nothing to hold the sense-of-wonder in check, that passion will run amok without reason to restrain it, and that the genre will therefore revert to its pulp roots in the follies of heroes and Romantic adventures, devolve back into
Genre
.

With a fiction of the marvellous, this not an unfounded fear.

Science fiction is a spectrum, it stretches between fantasy and realism and needs to be anchored in both. But more and more we see at one end of the spectrum fantasy and sf merging seamlessly, while at the other end realism appropriates, quite legitimately, the tropes of sf. In other words that unique affect that once upon a time made us love science fiction is now equally the province of fantasy and of realism.

Paul Kincaid

In the hepcat hotspot of the SF Café, it was not entirely unnoticed that this entrenchment was extreme and the application of the Paradigm Shift Caveat erratic at best, that the distinction between
Science Fiction
and
Fantasy
unravelled when applied to works like
Roadmarks
, that
Science Fantasy
signified the heroic structure as much as the chimeric content, and that the closing of these definitions ultimately schismed these zones from each other. If
Science Fiction
had this closed definition incompatible with
Fantasy
, there was also science fiction with an open definition entirely
interwoven
with fantasy, the former built upon the latter, the latter published as the former.

In the SF Cafe they sought to articulate the situation more clearly, terms like
hard
and
sense-of-wonder
emerging from the dialectic of futurology and fantasia at work in the genre(s), coined to describe the proportional differences of rigour and rapture, the range of possible science fictions encompassing (or limited by) the fantasies of writers like Ray Bradbury at one end, the thrillers of writers like Michael Crichton at the other, those science fictions where science ultimately ceases to play the role it did in
Science Fiction
, largely functioning as an expedience for thematics in one and plot in the other.

The problem for the entrenched partisans of
Science Fiction
was simple: as a hangover from the formative era, disguising the underlying unities and tensions of the field of
Science Fiction
/
Fantasy
, the term
science fiction
was applied very broadly indeed among the subculture of readers, writers, editors and publishers which had established itself in that Gernsback-Campbell period and whose tastes ran exactly the spectrum identified by Kincaid, between the fantastic and the realistic. Many writers worked as much in one mode as the other, even within the one story or novel. Many writers found the market as eager for picaresques and social satires, bildungsromans and “twist” stories as for Romantic adventures based on Rationalist science. And where some sought to differentiate
Science Fiction
from
Fantasy
, many simply saw no reason to apply a largely artificial taxonomy born of market forces and subjective application of the Paradigm Shift Caveat to the complexity of their creative projects.

Rather than argue over semantics or work with a cumbersome hybrid term like
Science Fiction
/
Fantasy
, many simply applied this label or that on the basis of ad hoc personal judgements. Before the Ballantine Adult Fantasy imprint set the consensus of
Fantasy
as a genre, before the
Science Fantasy
label was negotiated to mean what it does now, the label science fiction had already become a catch-all term for fiction which shared a market rather than any clear definition in genre terms—which, in fact, had two utterly opposed aesthetics at its extremes and a third rapidly expanding into every nook and cranny of indefinition. Unmoored entirely from conventions of character, plot-structure or backdrop, futurology blending into cosmology, science fiction had ceased to be simply the name for the generic form of the closed definition and become instead largely a marker of subcultural affiliation.

In the SF Café there was a new owner behind the counter and a new fry cook in back, and together they cut loose with a menu of soul food that changed every day, undefin
able, unpredictable. There were burgers, yes, and there were chicken nuggets, but there were also all-day breakfasts, pancakes and waffles, hot dogs and omelettes, chop suey and pizza and you name it.

Were I inclined to contentiousness, I might suggest that the key point of a
ffiliation which came to characterise the field was the desire of its readers for that sense-of-wonder, and that this affiliation marked, to all intents and purposes, a resounding victory for the aesthetic of the sublime over the aesthetic of the logical, that in attempting to segregate out
Science Fantasy
from the
Genre
of
Science Fiction
defined by Campbell and redefined by those whose motto was “rigour over rapture,”
Science Fiction
only succeeded in invalidating its own definitional control, allowing the very sense-of-wonder it set itself against to usurp its place, allowing the fantasia to become the defining characteristic of the genre rather than futurology.

Were I inclined to contentiousness, I might suggest that the eventual victor was, in fact, that which was abjected as either
Science Fantasy
or
Fantasy
outright. In the face of
Hard SF
’s insistence on rigour, writers and readers alike simply asserted the ultimate exemption of the Paradigm Shift Caveat in order to circumvent the restrictions. The abject may be dross best disposed of (like shit) or a vital component (like blood), and where it is valued as the latter one may well see a reaction of sedition and subversion to that process of abjection, a return of the reviled, the exiled, the repressed. I might suggest that
Science Fiction
lost the battle, was defeated and usurped, such that what we now call science fiction is, most characteristically, this abjected “
Fantasy
in
Science Fiction
drag.”

Otherwise known as
Sci-Fi
.