Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions (18 page)

Nine tenths of science fiction is crud. Of course, nine tenths of everything is crud.

Theodore Sturgeon

In the uptown district of Literature and the midtown district of Mainstream, so the story goes, the highbrow and the middlebrow all turn their noses up when they glance downtown, in the direction of Genre. Fairy tales for chi
ldren, they sneer. On the door of the Bistro de Critique there was, for a good many years, a sign that read:

NO GENRE ALLOWED

They are not like us, both sides agree. The nearest
they
ever got to a rackspace label is
General Fiction
—a term with an empty definition if ever there was one, catch-all for a host of idioms and idiosyncrasies. No,
Genre Fiction
, as we happily identify ourselves, just isn’t de rigueur there, so we’re given to understand. So, fuck ’em, we say. Fuck the mundanes of Mainstream, the elitists of Literature. We’re
Genre Fiction
and proud of it, proud to wear that brand painted on the backs of our biker’s jackets.

We have plenty to be proud of. Even during the Golden Age, the boundaries were blurred as to what exactly constituted science fiction, and in the SF Café that made for a dynamic melting pot. Claiming the core of the field, those t
ables right in the centre of the SF Café, was that
Science Fiction
characterised by its futurological fantasias of space travel, robots, contact with aliens, off-world colonies. That gang owned the place, and with just cause. For all that this mode was born from the pulps and inherited the callow, shallow Rocket Age Romanticism, Old Man Campbell
had
brought something new to the table, a Rationalist bent that called for writers to level up their intellectual game. And so they had, turning an idiom of Boy’s Own Adventures to more gnarly purposes—like the social commentary and critique of Pohl & Kornbluth’s 1952 satire
The Space Merchants
. Edging into this meanwhile were the visions of writers with even subtler agendas, outsiders like Orwell or insiders like Bester who saw yet greater potential in this strange new fiction. In their disregard for, or subversive approach to, the pulp formulae, these writers sowed the seeds of at least one revolution that was to come in the shape of the New Wave. And what about the feminist SF of the ’70s? And the cyberpunks of the ’80s?

Damn straight, we’re
Genre Fiction
!
We
know that means Delany, Butler, Gibson, and a thousand other things.

It’s a dangerous game though, that pride, because when we turn this noun into an adjective or a genre label in its own right—saying this is
Genre Fiction
, or simply this is
Genre
—we’re buying into the very rhetoric of abjection that built the ghetto walls around us. It is a term that functions in the same way
coloured
does; the rhetorical strategy is identical, as that in two examples of asyndeton.

Hold that thought a second though. I must be crystal clear here, quash right up front any misconception that, in tracing out the parallels in linguistic a
ction, I mean to suggest the reader of category fiction is facing prejudice
in any way
equivalent to the monstrum that is racism: though the abjection of category fiction must, I think, be set in its context as a mechanism of classism, misogyny and indeed racism, I have zero interest in bolstering the victimhood claims of the geek. I’m talking here of a process acting upon the fictions, not the fanboys, where the victims remain as ever the lower class, women, and people of abject ethnicity. What is abject in literature is so precisely because it is, in the rhetoric of those prejudices,
vulgar
,
hysterical
,
primitive
. Those fictions are abjected as a means to institutionalise those prejudices, I’d maintain. If the peer group pecking order turns the geek into whipping boy, that’s another story, one in which a retreat into category fiction seems rather more effect than cause to me.

The point then:

Skin colour is a quality we all have, all of us literally of some specific colour, just as every work is of some specific genre—my pale pinky-beige no less a colour than your deep brown, my contemporary realism no less a genre than your science fiction. But the term
coloured people
twists language itself to establish an abjected Other in contrast to an artificed normative, to posit people of
some
specific skin-colours as on the flip-side of a default
white people
, to privilege those normative
white people
as lacking some abstracted quality of being
Coloured
. So too the term
genre fiction
twists language to establish its own abject Other in contrast to an artificed normative, to posit fictions of some
specific
genres as on the flip-side of a default
general fiction
, to privilege those normative fictions as lacking that abstracted quality of being
Genre
.

Of course, the reality is those works of general fiction are also of genres, i
dioms with their own characteristics, sometimes conventions and clichés, and it doesn’t take much for these genres to become
Genres
, definitions closed, works formulated to factory-line product. Sometimes they manage to pass, you might say, despite the giveaway packaging. One glance at that sepia-tinted photograph cover, say, fading to white at the edge, that picture of a 1930s child in hobnail boots on a tenemented street, and you recognise that
Kitchen Sink Realist Family Memoir Melodrama
à la
Angela’s Ashes
. But that’s not fiction of a genre, in common parlance. Well, it’s not
Genre Fiction
, doesn’t have that quality of being
Genre
. Supposedly.

Sometimes they’ll be named—like the
Chick-Lit
spawned from Fielding’s
Bridget Jones’s Diary
—and exiled sharpish to the ghetto with the rest of us category fiction scum. And I hazard that example was tagged for exile even before formulation had really set in, the very name reeking of exactly the sort of prejudice I suggest above. If
Chick-Lit
is
Genre Fiction
where some
Kitchen Sink Realist Family Memoir Melodrama
is not, it begs the question: what exactly
is
the quality being ascribed to every single work in some specific genres?

And should we really be so eager to go along with the charade?

There is of course a political purpose in taking a term coded/loaded with abjection and reclaiming it. We find that rhetorical strategy at its most abstract, perhaps, where for all the idiosyncratic foibles inherent in humans not being fucking clones, for all that everyone has
some
quirk of queerness, only some
specific
foibles become the focus of abjection with the label
queer
. But here, some of us who find ourselves so-labeled choose to make that term our own, the accusation owned as assertion of identity.

Maybe that rhetorical strategy is a valid response in other similar cases.

I am not innarested in your condition.

But never mind the quirks of impossibility like the novum or chimera, or those quirks that disrupt affective equilibrium, the monstrum or the numina. We often use the term
genre
to refer to strange fictions, but we can hardly exclude
Chick-Lit
from that label, and that’s hardly built of strangeness. If we’re to be defiantly proud, reclaiming
genre
as a label, it is conventionality itself that we’re defending, the cleaving to a template.

If you have an issue with conventionality, the upstart ghetto kid might say, let me i
ntroduce you to my friend the sonnet. I’ll carve my fourteen lines into your skin with a volta for a scalpel. I’ll even write it backwards so you can read it in the mirror every day until you appreciate the rigour of formal restraint and the capacities of poetry not
limited
by genre but
unleashed
by it, loosed
through
it.

But still, to take a scalpel for a volta, slice, turn from genre to
Genre
—

—back in the SF Café, even in the heyday of the Hard, with Old Man Campbell cal
ling the shots, it’s not difficult to see where the sneers and jeers found their source. Sturgeon’s Law doesn’t say that ninety percent is of no consequence. Lest we begin to forget who the
target
of the prejudice is (not us often-privileged readers and writers of category fiction but rather those ultimately abjected by propriety’s discourse of the vulgar, the hysterical, the primitive), maybe it’s worth a little whiplash whirl to a counterpoint of our complicity as producers and consumers of formula fare.

There is a key distinction between the sort of abjection that takes place with the segregation out of an abject Other by skin colour, and that which takes place with the segregation out of certain genres by the fact of their being pu
blished with rackspace labels: where individual human beings tend to be
individual human beings, duh,
rather than stereotypes, category fiction is by its commercial nature aiming to achieve a template fit, if in no other respect than by being sellable to a particular target market; with formulation there’s an
active drive
toward embodying a stereotype.

Down in the SF Café back then, the menu was varied but the place still ca
rried a legacy of its origins as a junk food joint. If the market encompassed literature enthusiasts with tastes for more mature cuisine, it was focused, as it always had been, on a continuing—indeed burgeoning—audience of adolescent pulp geeks who wanted Romantic adventure stories with exciting trimmings. Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, John Carter—the heart of this genre lay with heroes who lived next door to
Doc Savage
and
The Shadow
(both published, with
Astounding
, by Street & Smith). For every writer who saw the literary utility of this new mode of writing with its contemporary language of ideas encoded in concrete metaphors, there were plenty for whom those sleek and shiny phallic symbols of the Rocket Age weren’t exactly subtle and to whom the ideas they expressed weren’t exactly complicated. The lurid covers and exclamatory titles of the magazines promised cheap thrills, food pills, women with gills, heroes with skills, and aliens to kill.