Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions (24 page)

And now, if this sortie through the pathetic and the tragic has led us astray from the home turf of the alethic quirk as breach of possibility, we surely find ourselves once again in the realm of strange fiction, in the SF Café of the New Wave, in the strangeness of Bellona and Cornelius and Disch’s “Descending.”

Ask anyone in the SF Café what science is, and many will tell you it’s a method, an approach, but just as many will, in all probability, describe it as products rather than process, as stuff. Maybe they’ll describe it as a domain of knowledge, as the facts and principles accrued within that domain. Maybe they’ll point to the theories and experiments, the sundry instances of the scientific method in action. Or maybe they’ll just hold up some technological doohickey forged in the application of those theoretical principles and experimental procedures.

—Hey, man, check out my new iRobot! Now that’s what I call science!

There’s always been a tendency for the science in
Science Fiction
to focus on the latter, on the gadgetry and gimcracks, but this is not really surprising. The futurological fantasias that the label got slapped on were largely structured round conceits that this or that technical impossibility had been rendered possible in some fictive elsewhere and/or elsewhen, in Outer Space and/or the Future. The literary device that Darko Suvin terms the
novum
, the unit of
novelty
written into the narrative for the protagonist (and by proxy the reader) to confront, is essentially a fancy of a techne that does not exist (not yet, not quite). It is the imaginary technique which does what cannot actually be done, not here and now.

It’s only natural for that mechanism to be figurated in the fiction as a mec
hanism in the concrete sense: the impetus to Romantic adventure creating a pressure for that conceit to function as a MacGuffin, a Maltese Falcon-style plot device…well, a physical object is much easier to fight over; and even where conceits are offered as more than just the basis of “let’s pretend” fun, where there’s an intellectual game of playing through the “what if” scenario in action, where working the conceit has become an end in and of itself, anchoring that conceit in an
object
offers the reader a focal point. The solidity of stuff is useful, and so writers of
Science Fiction
turned to robots and aliens the way another writer might turn to, say, cigarettes and scalpels.

Still, even where we’re dealing firmly with imaginary artefacts of future sc
ience, the substitution of
speculative
for
science
is more accurate, since the novum is
not
known science, no more than the alethic quirk used in alternate history (or
Alt History
) is known history. If one is to claim any intellectual(ist) integrity in this enterprise, there’s no place for pandering pretences that our conceits are actual possibilities; this is pure wish-fulfilment. The strange fictions I’m dealing with here are characterised by the
liberties
they take with the domains of knowledge they play in.

We can imagine a scientific fiction which does not employ the novum, one which i
nstead utilises actual science the way war fiction utilises war, the way historical fiction uses history; but this just isn’t what we point to when we say
science fiction
. A more accurate term, given the novum’s kinship with the erratum of alternate history might be
alternate science
. We’re not dealing with facts but with conceits. A cloned alien brain in a robotic body is not science but fancy, however arguable we consider its hypothetical possibility. It’s a conjecture, a speculation that tickles our “Cool!” response precisely because it breaches the mundane reality of what is technically possible. And since the incorporation of erratum-based alternate history within the field is a given (c.f.
The Man in the High Castle
), calling it all
speculative fiction
to allow for that other flavour of quirk actually kinda makes more sense, no?

But the substitution of
speculative
for
science
also reflects a logical development of the novum itself, from the concrete to the abstract, from the mechanisms of unobtainium, handwavium and spuriotronic cogs, gears and circuits to the mechanisms of individuals and societies. The Campbellian closed definition of
Science Fiction
explicitly excluded “sociology, psychology, and parapsychology” as “not true sciences,” but if the most instantly recognisable nova of the fictions were physical objects—Heinlein’s dilating door, Bradbury’s nursery with viewscreens for walls—the writers were often just as interested in the invented social structures that went with them. The group marriages of
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
, the “firemen” of
Fahrenheit 451
—ironically, if science fiction can be said to actually use real science, it is the soft sciences it employs more than anything, attempting to apply real principles of psychology and sociology to model the impact of a conceit on humanity, how we would respond to what could not actually happen.

To talk of
speculative fiction
rather than
science fiction
is to shift the focus from the solidity of the stuff to the impact of that stuff on humanity, from the mechanics of gadgets and gimcracks to the dynamics of psyches and societies. If we might tend to think of science in terms of its products, speculation is explicitly a process, and so the word serves as a banner of intent. This is about working the conceit, it says. And again, it seems a natural evolution for this approach to turn inwards.

Working the conceit had become a core concern of
Science Fiction
with its Rationalist hat on, and even with Campbell dismissing the soft sciences, the field was quite open to conceits wherein humanity was not just confronted with concrete nova but directly altered by them, not just biologically (Frederik Pohl’s
Man Plus
), but also psychologically (Theodore Sturgeon’s
More Than Human
), intellectually (Daniel Keyes’s
Flowers for Algernon
), linguistically (Samuel R. Delany’s
Babel-17
). Through conceits of biological evolution and chemical augmentation, writers side-stepped Campbell’s strictures (which weren’t exactly the Word of God anyway, not in a field where Horace Gold was publishing Bester’s tales of ESPers and jaunting), and got their teeth into science as soft as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The questions being asked in those four books—all sitting on my shelf in those Gollancz Classics editions from the 1980s as core members of the canon—are questions of identity, of the relationships of human beings to themselves, to each other, and to the world around them.

These are not “what if” stories but “what is” stories. What is reality? What is society? What is humanity?

And slowly but surely they approached the question, What is fiction?

Science fiction is the search for a definition of man and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science), and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or post-Gothic mould.

Brian Aldiss

In the SF Café, the beatniks had moved in, poncy artists and pretentious intellectuals, poets and (post)modernists, God bless ’em. The very sciences that Campbell excluded—sociology and psychology—were at the core of their interests. And when it came to literary aspirations, they saw no reason why science fiction should be any less innovative, any less rich than the mainstream in terms of style and form. It wasn’t just that they wanted all-day breakfasts with eggs-over-easy instead of a burger and fries; they wanted Eggs Benedict. They didn’t want a Diet Coke; they wanted an espresso so black and so strong it blew the roof of your head off. Screw the sugar rush and the fatty satiation of comfort food; they wanted you to feel the jitters of a caffeine overload along with the exquisite tang of a perfect Hollandaise sauce. They refused to recognise (or recognised as irrelevant) the territorial politics of rival aesthetics. The sublime, the logical, the ephemeral, the absurd—these were just the salt, sweet, sour and bitter flavours to be thrown into the mix, and fuck any purist’s proscriptions and prescriptions that set one against another, forbidding miscegenations. If fiction is food, they wanted to be eating and cooking the finest fusion cuisine.

One could say that in their zeroing in on the desire for “something diffe
rent,” on novelty as a key ingredient, these writers were simply reinventing the
Genre
of
Science Fiction
each time they “transcended” it, keeping the conventions under constant revision. One could equally say that they were creating exemplary (rather than exceptional) works within an idiom
predicated on change
by manifesting that change in the idiom itself, in an act of recursion. Either way, in a subculture of writers looking for that “something different,” it was only a matter of time before that search progressed to the next level, before those writers began to search for, find and offer difference in the very language and structure of the narrative itself.

So soon there was Delany’s
Dhalgren
, Moorcock’s
Cornelius Quartet
, Vonnegut’s
Slaughterhouse-Five
. There was Aldiss and Ballard and Crowley and Disch and Ellison and Farmer and so on, some more experimental than others, but all of them bringing their own new twists to the form—looped and fractured narrative, metafictional and intertextual narrative. The fourth alethic quirk, that which ruptures the strictures of logic itself, packs the biggest punch of them—when the absurd goes beyond illogical human behaviour, at least, when it trumps even the chimera with a breach of physics that creates an inherent self-contradiction. (Hell, even when it doesn’t, it can be a taste too rich for some.) Children’s fiction and whimsical humour will play with words to take us over this threshold, e.g. where Alice, in Wonderland, has to run to stay in one place, such that her motion is not motion. But it’s in the New Wave where we see a full-on explosion of this most confrontational of quirks, in disruptions of the very fabric of sense, continuity cut and spliced with hard suturae.

It is difficult to think of a more (post)modern project in any of the arts than that of speculative fiction where it turns its gaze upon itself in this way.
Genre
is inherently self-aware in its impulse towards formulation, its recognition of story as the unifying agency of a narrative; it is continually exploring its own boundaries, reifying or reshaping them. But this so-called
speculative fiction
was not simply self-aware but self-critical, analysing itself, reckoning the relationships between story and narrative, deconstructing and reconstructing its own nature from first principles.

The pastiche of
Genre
found in the work of Moorcock or Farmer is not simply referential play; it is speculation as to the nature of fiction itself. And without the cop-out of ironic distance, this (post)modernism spits on the High Art / Low Art distinction with a sincerity few in the ivory towers ever really had the balls to emulate. With Moorcock, or in Delany’s
The Einstein Intersection
, we have a fiction (already a science of fiction) which takes fiction as its experimental subject, its focus of conjecture. How, it asks,
are we ourselves made
by the stories we make, by the language in which those stories are told, the semiotics and semantics? This was fiction tearing itself apart to understand how it worked, how all narrative worked, including those narratives of identity we call human beings. If it inhabited worlds and cities shattered by catastrophes—real or imagined, Dresdens or Bellonas—no doubt much of this was a mark of the turbulent times the fiction was born in, but more than anything else this is, I think, a marker of…the alterior perspective at the heart of what was termed
speculative fiction
, a clearing away of artificed structures (which is to say strictures) in order to expose the dynamics of deeper connections.

In the SF Café, in the ghetto of Genre, in the City of New Sodom, a trap door had been discovered. In the cellar that it led to was a door, and beyond that door a system of secret tunnels—subways and sewers that led throughout the city and
beyond
it, across the nation,
around the entire world
. And everywhere they came up in the city of New Sodom.

Those who discovered those tunnels, who used them, realised that being part of a
subculture
did not simply mean being a member of some
component
culture within the system as a whole, a community sealed off by its boundaries of identity, walled-in within a ghetto. Rather a subculture was that which existed beneath the culture as a whole, permeating it as a mycelial network of interstices. That subculture might reflect the culture in negative (an oppositional
counter
-culture), as the sewers of Paris map precisely to the streets above, or it might be completely different (an entirely
alternative
culture), as the tube in London links the nodes of places in a pattern utterly unlike the streets above.

Either way, the underground discovered by speculative fiction linked all the important points in this world of New Sodom into one big city-system as ru
ptured in continuity as Dresden or Bellona, explored freely at this level

—of the ghetto of Genre—meant fuck all—a writer could go anywhere they fucking wanted—did— fair game for the spelunkers of speculative fiction every corner of the city of New Sodom’s tunnels—found the power cables gas pipes words images colourless green that linked it all—linguistic innards of a living thing— meant fuck all—kindred spirits in potholers from the uptown district of Literature—the Burroughses and the Burgesses exploring “our” terrain as we explored “theirs”—gourmet chefs check out the menu in the SF Café—going homeward to cook up fusion food in bistros—a buffet froid of a naked lunch—duck à la orange clockwork orange and colourless green—shook hands with them in the urban netherworld—ideas slept furiously and made sense—under the eldritch yellowy-blue glow of glow of glow of biophosphorescent slime seeped through the cracks in ancient brick walls—built mechanical minotaurs whose hollow roars echoed all through the underground—passer-by standing near a ventilation shaft the mushrooms that grew down there—audible even on the surface—a staple on the menu of the SF Café—fuck the territorial politics at street-level—now the walls—

Hal Duncan,
Rhapsody

So they wandered far and wide, the Young Turks of speculative fiction; still, they did keep returning to the SF Café to tell their tales. It was their home. In the Bistro de Critique, in the uptown district of Literature, stuffed shirts still baulked at the unseemly strangeness offered by those (post)modern compatriots, reviled it as obscene pornography or revered it as intellectual play, declawing it with concepts like irony, or “irony,” or even ““irony,”” rendering it safe by herding it off towards the Temple of Academia. In the ghetto of Genre, the writers lived free of the constraints of decency and decorum. In the ghetto of Genre, anything goes, man. When you live in the gutter it doesn’t matter if you’re filthy.

In theory anyway.