Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions (19 page)

Science Fiction
or science fiction, it was ten percent Orwell and ninety percent ordure, ten percent Bester and ninety percent bullshit.

Pataphor
(noun)

1. An extended metaphor that creates its own context.

2. That which occurs when a lizard’s tail has grown so long it breaks off and grows a new lizard.

Pablo Lopez

We talk of science fiction as the literature of ideas, but all literature uses ideas; what distinguishes this particular mode is that those ideas are made flesh. Where a writer using mimesis renders the dynamism of youth in a me
taphor such as
the boy rocketed through the room
, an SF writer uses semiosis, rendering an AI rocket with an adolescent joy in its own destructive force, exploring the signified-signifier relationship from the inside, as an interesting thing in its own right. Held as a conceit in the narrative, this quirk of a technical impossibility is extended metaphor gone wild, unleashed to devour all representational stability. It is the symbol that ate the text, the vehicle of the metaphor unmoored from any specific tenor; the AI rocket with an adolescent joy in its own destructive force is just that, a figurative vehicle that could blast into the reader’s imagination a whole explosion of tenors. To collapse it to a single tenor would be a failure, in fact, a reduction to mere allegory of what must really be understood as
pataphor
. The quirk does not speak directly to a context in which it is symbolic analogue of a stable mundane element, but rather creates its own context.

Given that we’re not all writing absurdist pataphysics in the manner of A
lfred Jarry, clearly there’s a distinction in our use of pataphor though, in our creation of contexts sprung from strange conceits that nonetheless make sense. Is it a matter of limitations, of being at least
theoretically
realistic? At a base level, possibility and plausibility
are
relevant to this conceit, but their relevance is more complex than we’re given to believe.

The orthodoxy is a simple dichotomy. Delany is not alone in applying the notion of possibility to distinguish science fiction and fantasy on the basis of the subjunctivity level (i.e. alethic modality) of their sentences; though I’m given to understand, by way of a comment during a recent discussion hosted by John Clute, that current thinking may be moving more in the direction I’m suggesting,
The Encyclopedia of Fantasy
sets it as a straightforward either/or, assigning science fiction a subjunctivity level of
could happen
, fantasy a subjunctivity level of
could not happen
.

At first glance, this seems so cut and dried only a fool would deny it: sc
ience fiction limits its conceits to the possibilities of the future, while fantasy throws off those shackles and runs amok; who could argue? But this is the Contingency Slip Fallacy in action.
Could happen?
Even if we buy into the
not yet
caveat written into the novum’s impossibility, in a past or present tense narrative—and future tense narratives are few and far between—we are dealing with what could
have
happened or what could
be
happening now. The novum may not, as the chimera, strain suspension-of-disbelief with the more extreme alethic modality of
could not happen ever
, but that doesn’t make it a possibility yesterday or today.

Plausibility? What we might see is conceits developed from arguable spec
ulation and justified with futurological rationalisations; the text may make a concerted effort to persuade us to project into it another alethic modality, one that acts as palliative to the rupture of possibility:
would happen
. But this is the plausibility of the con-man or conjurer as often as not, and the logic games of if-then are as likely to be left implicit in the backstory. What may well sell a reader more on the pretence of possibility is not so much argument as it is allure, not the
would
but the
should
. Which is to say, the marvellous tint to the incredible, the novum acting as numina.

Coulda, woulda, shoulda—the words in use here are markers of modality, judgements written into the text. As the earlier references to epistemic modal
ity might suggest, such judgements come in more hues than just the judgement of possibility. There is: epistemic modality, judgement of fact; alethic modality, judgement of possibility; deontic modality, judgement of duty; and boulomaic modality, judgement of desire/dread. If strange fiction is characterised by the alethic quirk (novum or chimera), we’d do well not to underestimate the extent to which it may be driven by the boulomaic quirk (numina or monstrum).

If the potential of the field of strange fictions lies in equipping a writer with a whole toolkit of pataphors to work with over and above the plain old met
aphors, the downside of that toolkit is that it also allows a writer to pander to the most infantile wish-fulfilment and the most paranoid neuroses, to conjure alethic quirks tinted marvellous or monstrous to exploit the most basic (and base) desires and fears in wholly superficial terms, to simply push those buttons for the sake of narrative drive. It always has been true and always will be, no doubt, that some are so much more interested in the numina or monstrum as cheap thrill that the strangeness of the quirk, its potential function as novum or chimera, is as irrelevant as prose quality, mere means to an end.

Before we jump to defend our ghetto of
Genre
from the slanderers of
Mainstream
and
Literature
, we might want to bear in mind that the pulp we have our roots in was a juvenile fiction, and last century’s juvenile fiction at that.

Those who do not remember history, as they say…

Walk into the SF Café twenty minutes into the future, slide into a booth with your iRobot mate, and if you look around you’ll likely still see the genreheads wiring into the wonder. You’ll still see those who happily accept the cheapest, crappiest junk as long as the price is low, the portions big, and the food comes fast and hot, smothered in ketchup, with crack cocaine for salt. There’s a killer buzz to the games those Microself X-Books immerse you in. They’re hip, they’re happening, they’re fictive smartdrugs!

Jack in and jerk off, kid! You too can save the world…from those evil, bug-eyed co
mmies from space!

To be clear, the sway of the juvenile market was hardly wholly malign, leading to a focus on clarity and economy, and even thematic concerns b
eyond those of the middlebrow and middle-aged. Losing maturity in one’s fiction for the sake of marvels and monsters can also mean losing propriety, and that’s not always a bad thing. It makes for a freedom to fail the standards of solemn literature.

So we had Ray Bradbury writing stories such as “All Summer in a Day” (published in
F&SF
in 1954), where a kid at school on Venus gets shoved in a closet by other children, misses a brief glimpse of the sun…which comes only once every seven years. This, along with many other stories, is quite clearly aimed at adult sensibilities as much as at those of children. Bradbury may be sentimental about youth, nostalgia rather than angst powering much of his fiction, but his work is hardly shallow sensationalism; even those stories most imbued with wonder and creepiness display the thematic maturity of an adult writer using the worldviews of children as alterior perspectives on reality rather than simply seeking to capitalise on the crudity of their tastes. And that sentimentality is a feature, not a bug; he’s writing American Pastoral, which is as valid as any dreary mid-life crisis novel.

We can contrast this however with works directly targeted at younger rea
ders. Around the same time we have Robert A. Heinlein writing novels such as
Have Space Suit—Will Travel
(serialised in
F&SF
in 1958), where a kid with his own spacesuit has a romantic adventure in space—enacting the desire of the reader in his escape from mundane Middle America to the Great Beyond, being kidnapped by malevolent aliens, saving the human race from destruction; there’s even a female child genius for the clever tomboys.
Rocket Ship Galileo
with its Nazis on the moon, the frontier adventures of
Red Planet
and
Farmer in the Sky
—it’s stating the obvious to say that these stories are aimed at adolescent sensibilities, but we tend to be disingenuous within the field about the extent to which these juveniles are at the root of a purportedly adult-oriented Science Fiction’s genre cooties. Those uptight ass wipes at the Bistro de Critique thinks it’s all fairy stories for children?

No shit, Sherlock.

Sometimes when the symbol eats the text, the first thing it devours is any hint of fiction as something other than a means to an immersive end.

Some say the golden age was circa 1928; some say 1939; some favor 1953, or 1970, or 1984. The arguments rage till the small of morning, and nothing is ever resolved. Because the real golden age of science fiction is twelve.

Peter Graham

But I don’t want to suggest that juvenile fiction is inherently lower quality, nor even that escapism and wish-fulfilment are bad things per se. Young Adult fiction may well be the freest category out there right now, openly defined by demographic rather than formal conventions. If you’ve got your snoot ready to cock at it, go read
Octavian Nothing
. And if some kid—or adult, for that matter—out in the world beyond the city of New Sodom wants to take a weekend city break in
Genre
, sit in the SF Café and—shock! horror!—read a book I don’t rate, a book that offers nothing other than a temporary reprieve from the drab nine-to-five, a retreat into immersive adventure…well, power to them. It might be me in there, you know, rereading Edgar Rice because today I’m just not in the mood for Bill.

Still, there’s something about the truth of Sturgeon’s Law that we elide, about the pa
rticular nature of our particular crud. The commercial pressures on fiction aimed at juveniles in a conservative culture were formative in the field, having wide-ranging and long-lasting effects, not least in Heinlein’s work; we need only look at
Podkayne of Mars
, bowdlerised by the publisher, Heinlein forced to revise the ending against his judgement, in order to see how these story-patterns limit the capacity of fiction to challenge a reader with, say, a tragic outcome for a beloved hero. This is how formulation works, how
Genre
works. In
Romance
, the expectation and demand is for the heroine to get together with the hero in the end. In
Mystery
, the expectation and demand is for that mystery to be solved. In the
Action-Adventure
of the Hollywood schlockbuster, the expectation and demand is for the hero(ine) to save the day at the end and be lauded for it. In every such
Genre
there’s an audience that wants “more of the same” and writers out to supply that desire, not thwart it.

Romantic adventures bound to a narrative grammar where the hero cannot lose, loa
ded with wonder and wish-fulfilment, aimed at credulous adolescents who’re far more interested in the thrills and spills of the spectacle than what Richard Feynman has to say about the physics of a twirling, nutating dish moving through the air…here at the very core of the field of science fiction—
Science Fiction
even—in the work of one of its cardinal influences, one of the Big Three, we have much that the churlish intellectual might reject (or abject) as
Fantasy
. For all that those juveniles are generally well-crafted bildungsromans, with philosophical subtleties and social pertinence to their moral messages, they signify a return to the narrative logic of pulp where moral fibre and fortitude are written into the hero as champion, and instant karma awaits him/her in her/his inevitable victory.

If Heinlein initially published works which were clearly juvenile or adult, the distinction between these works quickly became muddled in a field cate
ring to precocious adolescents and immature adults.
Starship Troopers
may not be considered juvenile fiction now, but it’s the classic example of the Science Fiction Bildungsroman and was aimed for Scribner’s with the rest of them. Heinlein’s juveniles begin to bleed into his later works.
The Rolling Stones
, with its precocious child heroes, gets linked into the same universe as
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
through the character of Hazel Stone, while the twins, Castor and Pollux reappear in
The Number of the Beast
. And so on.

As his novels degenerate into rambling exercises in hot air and cloying cuteness, they become increasingly emotionally retarded; they may offer a spur towards post-conventional morality for a questioning fourteen year old (for all that his manner is d
idactic and his message dubious, the individualist message invites the very dialogue that may destroy it), but they hardly demonstrate the most mature approach to their themes, the quirky flavourings of the idiosyncratic ideologue ultimately drowned in the ketchup of redheaded twins and nipples that go spung.

The late Heinlein works gain an originality from his eccentric libertarian character, and before the slow slide into bloat and blather there’s some peachy stuff if you can get past the politics. But where Bradbury’s weird wonders, for all the nostalgia, lead via
The Twilight Zone
to works such as Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” or Disch’s “Descending,” in Heinlein’s overgrown Tom Swift, Juan “Johnnie” Rico, we might well trace one root of a grand oak of tosh and piffle that dominates the field. As that adult/adolescent market grew over time, and the work aimed at that market replicated and codified itself—its audience requiring consistency of effect more than novelty, seeking the stability and security of conventions, demanding “more of the same”—derivative, formulaic power fantasies of
Space Opera
and
Military SF
built on the foundations laid by the pulps, around the statue of the Man/Boy Hero erected by Heinlein, constructing a
Genre
within science fiction that is neither juvenile nor adult but kind of just puerile.

I likes me some “Shit Blows Up” fiction, don’t get me wrong, but this de
rring-do form, with its boys’ own tales of hardy heroes, grizzled old-timers, evil aliens and so on, is
Science Fiction
’s version of the tales of orphan-princes permeating
Fantasy
. Both are ultimately defined by the strictures of
Genre
—epic / heroic Romantic adventures—and populist enough to have impressed a stereotype on the minds of the uninitiated.

But it’s not the fiction I’m out to skewer here, only the self-serving pomp around it, the grandiose handwaving in denial.

Down in the ghetto, in the SF Café, there are those who blame it all on cinema and television, mutter darkly about
Star Wars
, how this and that movie or show is
not really science fiction
. Never mind Flash Gordon. Never mind Tom Swift. Never mind all that “fans are slans” nonsense. Never mind Heinlein’s juveniles. Never mind that the patent legacy inherited from
Modern Pulp
is a drive to churn out pandering pabulum that fits a template. For all too many, it’s
Hollywood
to blame if the vast majority of the public think of the fiction we love as that puerile dross of formulaic genre…that stuff they so abjure that they must call it by another name.

Down in the ghetto, in the SF Café, there are those who grit their teeth and clench their fists whenever that dread name is spoken:
Sci-Fi
.