Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions (25 page)

It is ironic that where Heinlein’s coinage of the term speculative fiction was intended as a better specification of the form, a marker of the
extrapolative
rather than
technological
focus of the genre (i.e. requiring the
act
of extrapolation rather than the mere
presence
of science-based conceits and plot devices), it has been adopted largely as a descriptor for the field at its most inchoate, used as a default term for works defying easy categorisation within the tribalist rhetorics that stand in place of any coherent taxonomy. But in this explorative and experimental fiction-of-science, science-of-fiction, fiction-
as
-science, it seems apt as a reaction to the ossifying conflict of territorial nonsenses, as a rejection of the whole tired discourse of science fiction versus
Science Fiction
versus
Sci-Fi
versus
science fiction
versus
Fantasy
versus fantasy. It’s what the doohickey does that matters, not whether it comes under the heading of gadget or gimcrack. In the SF Café:

—Is it science fiction, fantasy or horror? you ask.

—Yes, answers the speculative fiction writer.

For all that this answer is apparently unacceptable to some turf war partisans in the SF Café, it is largely their insistence on closed definitions of these id
ioms as
Genres
that makes it inevitable. Lurking in that label is a recognition that this fiction has, as far as many are concerned, stepped beyond the conventions of
Science Fiction
in a fundamental way. Aesthetically, the Young Turks of the New Wave were at odds with the most traditional aspects of the field and quite aware of it, as the title of Ellison’s
Dangerous Visions
anthologies makes clear. But rather than argue with the reactionary writers and readers still seeking to bind their work to the closed definition of
Science Fiction
, the radicals of the New Wave in the USA simply adopted Heinlein’s monicker and made it their own. And insofar as their chosen term has come to signify a broad aesthetic idiom of strange fictions—the superset of all the inextricably interpenetrating commercial
Genres
of strangeness, and pretty much anything of comparable approach in its use of pataphor, regardless of rackspace label—they’ve largely succeeded in establishing a less restrictive model.

Still, when I look back for a branch-point, I see a long history of narratives that had ceased to be futurological fantasias even long before the New Wave. I see writers offering the novum as a source of futureshock rather than sense-of-wonder, conjecturing on the basis of angst rather than argument; I see writers for whom the aesthetics of the sublime and the logical are largely irrelevant as they work on projects quite at odds with Romanticist and Rationalist age
ndas—Delany’s
Dhalgren
, Moorcock’s
Cornelius Quartet
, Vonnegut’s
Slaughterhouse-Five
, Zelazny’s
Roadmarks
, Silverberg’s
The Book of Skulls
. But when you’re faced with those who predicate
Science Fiction
on the abjection of
Fantasy
and/or
Sci-Fi
, to point to these sort of projects and their core qualities and say, this is science fiction, can be a fast route to a flamewar.

—No, that’s really, properly fantasy.

—No, that’s really, properly horror.

It seldom seems worth arguing.

As I see it? The estrangement effect of the alethic quirk (erratum, novum, chimera, sutura) is powerful, and the affective disruption that goes with it is not limited to the dread (monstrum) or desire (numina) that might slide a story over some imaginary border, “out of”
proper science fiction
and “into”
Horror
or
Fantasy
. We’re talking about conceits that can provide the foundations for tragedy or comedy as easily as for a Romantic adventure or a Rationalist thought-experiment—or for the sort of satire that is both tragedy and comedy, as where the dark absurd of Vonnegut’s
Cat’s Cradle
belongs with Heller’s
Catch-22
more than with Heinlein’s
Space Cadet
or Asimov’s
Foundation
.

Where those quirks function pataphorically—as any conceit may—as the unbound vehicles of metaphor and metonym, we begin to deal, in fact, with the figuration of m
odernity in all its strangeness. Whatever label we apply to this fiction, I see in it a staggering range of narrative grammars and an openness to using all the various flavours of conceits. I
can
only be talking here about a fiction that plays not just with known science and known history, but with the laws of nature and the strictures of logic. I
am not fucking innarested
in limiting my scope, either in story or in study, in accordance with definitions closed to cordon off this territory from that, the fiction within my field of vision not being rigidly parametered and perimetered thus. So, if the flexibility I cleave to renders much of the stuff of which I speak improper in the eyes of a whole slew of label-arbitrators I can’t be arsed arguing with, renders it illegitimate as
Science Fiction
, well, maybe another name is a good idea.

Down in the SF Café, of course, this is when the double-bind of the territ
orial rhetoric kicks in. To many,
speculative fiction
seems a coy and euphemistic evasion, a craven attempt to gain literary credibility by distancing one’s work from
Genre
…and hence a betrayal of one’s ghetto comrades in favour of the dreaded literary elite. In all honesty, this may not be entirely unfair; many of the more literate writers who adopted the label made no bones about the taint of trash that they were trying to escape, their disdain of the generic product that defines the field not just to the outside world but even in the community of uncritical devotees. Through the act of abstraction denoted,
speculative fiction
signifies an intellect and intellectualism divorced from the dirty physicality of science, from any slack-jawed wonder at gadgets and gimcracks. It claims a cerebral rather than visceral effect, adopts an attitude of aloofness to the very
Genre
it resides within. As much as it might denote the entire field of science fiction, fantasy and horror, it also connotes (or signals oneself to be a member of) a specific subset of that field—that which has “literary aspirations.”

But I can’t say this strikes me as a mortal sin. One thing to bear in mind: this is not an act of abjection as that meted out to
Fantasy
and
Sci-Fi
. If there’s a rejection of that which is a part of oneself, a recoiling from the generic, it is not a marginalisation of that formulaic product as alterity, as Other. On the contrary, this is a redefinition of
self
as alterity, as Other. Rather than fight a losing struggle against commercialism and conservatism, rather than battle for the broken banner of
science fiction
, for the right to carry an empty label and claim proudly,
we are it!
while expelling the Enemy as
something else
, it seems to me that many of the New Wave and their inheritors, to all intents and purposes, simply shrugged and walked away. As a marker more of literary intent than of aesthetic form, the term
speculative fiction
was and
is
a disavowal of the dross, but this renunciation was and is more surrender than betrayal.

If anything it is the desolate retreat of the defeated in the face of the intra
nsigents’ animosity, the abandonment of rhetorical ground to the reactionary. It’s the slow dismal trudge of refugees down into the tunnels beneath the city, leaving the SF Café to its taxonomic turf wars, surrendering it to that hoary spectre of
Science Fiction
that haunts it still, rattling the shackles of its closed definition angrily as the dogfights rage on.

So it goes, as a wise man once said.

What SF writers write is SF.

Orson Scott Card

So
Science Fiction
is dead; but the death of
Science Fiction
is not the end of the story. Rather it’s the beginning of it. Torn apart in the struggles of its factions, deserted by the blood and breath of its most explorative writers, the carcass of that old
Genre
still sits in the SF Café, a leg here, an arm there, novitiates of this cult or that gnawing on its bones, sucking on what’s left of the marrow. It’s a grisly scene, but if these devotees only looked around them they’d see the ghost that dwells in every corner of the diner.

Everywhere in the SF Café you can still see the stains, still hear the echoes of that ghost—the closed definition reopened to a strange and subtle essence that defies all pr
escription. And for all that its blood was spilled out, the dying breath of
Science Fiction
was guttered into a golem. The spelunkers of speculative fiction mining phosphorescent filth from the bowels of the city of New Sodom, the
Sci-Fi
freaks scraping kipple and kack from the bins of decades-old shit sandwiches out back, composting it to grow shrooms, we have built this thing to take its place.

This is the legacy of generations of writers who’d rather tackle adult themes than pander to puerile power-fantasies, whose interests lay with the soft sc
iences and humanities as much as with the hard sciences and technology, for whom the fiction was always more important than either the fantasia or the futurology. It is also the legacy of those who simply don’t give a fuck about anything other than either fantasia or futurology. This is fiction in which the envelope has been pushed so far out, from ambition or expedience, that all descriptions and definitions—
Science Fiction
,
Science Fantasy
,
Sci-Fi
, even speculative fiction—can only be, at best, nominal labels for it. It is the fiction that abandons those labels for a negation of description, an indefinition—the acronym
SF
, which might mean any or all of those things.

Arguably, where the term
speculative fiction
was, and still is, successful (to an extent) with readers, writers, editors, publishers, etc., for whom the intrinsic diversity of the field is a given and a glory, it is so in part because it abbreviates easily to
SF
. Hence it translates to the label of
science fiction
through that acronym, if and when required for the ease of communication; it is backwards compatible. Look at it from another angle and you see the power of
SF
as a nominal label.

That acronym reanimates the dead
Science Fiction
in the stains and echoes that pervade the SF Café. It binds it to the golem of speculative fiction and
Sci-Fi
all mashed together, this clay-made, über-malleable monster of fictive clay. In it the dichotomy of
Science Fiction
and
Fantasy
is resolved into a unity utterly in contrast with the riven notion of
Science Fantasy
. We can even extend the
F
, echo it, to include both the closed-definition
Fantasy
and/or the openly-defined fantasy in
SF/F
, remove the dividing slash entirely in
SFF
, elide the one into the other as in
SFWA
, the Science Fiction
and Fantasy
Writers of America.

If we want to be all poncy and academic about it, we might even expand that acronym to
structural fabulation
. (Yeah, like that’ll catch on.)

This is the beauty of the SF acronym, in fact, the beauty of the SF Café, that it offers a neutral zone where all the factions can communicate even if they do so in the most a
rgumentative fashion. And as abbreviations go, where
Sci-Fi
is cringe-inducingly cute and clever, SF is short and snappy, no nonsense, like the utilitarian acronyms of soldiers and businessmen.

That all the writers of a myriad subset SF methodologies are grouped t
ogether, SF as a superset of SF, is a mark of the indefinable nature of the field. Forget: the futurology; the Rationalist ideal of the logical; the Romantic wonders of the Rocket Age; the ’60s and ’70s fears of Future Catastrophe; the counterculture of acid visions and sexual revolution; every abandoned zeitgeist; the codified conventions of puerile pap; the cobbled combinatory systems of pulp plots, characters, settings, themes. Forget those illusions of SF as the innumerable permutations of an ever-changing set of tropes filched from deconstructed templates.

Or remember them, but remember them all.

This is a confusion of contradictions that can only be made sense of by cutting the Gordian Knot, by saying, like Spinrad, that SF is whatever is sold as SF, or like Knight, that it’s what I point to when I use the term.

Paring the label down to these two little figurae, we make it stand for wha
tever narratives we throw at it; we use the fiction to define the model. It allows for any narrative to be written as SF, because we are applying the label after the fact, saying: this is SF because it can be sold as SF, because it can be bought as SF—not just literally but conceptually,
bought
not just in the
purchased
sense but in the sense of
admitted
,
swallowed
,
accepted
, as one buys an idea. In this vector of definition, in fact, in place of a model of SF, what we have is instead a method of reading a narrative, most
any
narrative, as SF.

Realism
, after all, the
Genre
that cleaves to that which could have happened, which actually fits the subjunctivity level Delany ascribes to his
speculative-fiction
, is a relatively recent thing, an ideological aesthetic that sets itself apart from the bulk of strange fictions, under rackspace labels or otherwise, to use Clive Barker’s metaphor in a BFS awards ceremony a few years back: an island versus the continent of literature.

To take one example, we might use this as a way of interpreting
The Epic of Gilgamesh
, look for a reading of the story as SF. This is a different thing altogether from laying claim to the work as an example of a genre; and it’s entirely possible; we can understand this Sumerian poem of a hero’s journey, in the context of its culture of origin, as embodying the cosmological conceits of his day, the speculations of the Bronze Age rather than the Rocket Age. John Gardner, as I recall, cites scholarly opinion that it was read as fiction; we should not presume naïve belief with our forebears, no more than with a fan of
Star Trek
or Joyce’s
Ulysses
.

We can read Enkidu, Humbaba and the scorpion-men as cryptids, as
exotica
, as alethic quirks of geography rather than technology, of an era when the Great Beyond was spatial rather than temporal, the known world their analogue of our known science, the Cedar Forest and the imagined lands beyond the sunrise a terrestrial deep space. We can read the Deluge, the Plant of Immortality as hypothetical
arcana
of deep time, these metaphysical quirks in terms of the current workings of the world not requiring an alterior reality, only an earlier one. Adding this SFist reading methodology to the arsenal of Marxist and feminist readings has scope; insofar as SF is rooted in fantasia and futurology, an SF reading of a narrative constitutes an interrogation of its dynamics of passion and reason. Insofar as SF goes beyond this to unpack the full potential of its quirks, such a reading for the narrative modalities becomes an inquiry into the dynamics of narrative itself.

In the Fabric of History

In alternative narrative, as outlined in Lake’s taxonomy, there is a different type of challenge to the alethic modality of “could have happened.” Where in private narrative the events are on a personal level, a domestic level, remai
ning within the confines of a family or a group of friends whose lives would never impact on our own, in an alternative narrative the events are on a scale where we would surely notice. They may be mundane in terms of possibility but not in terms of scope. With Jett Rink, the James Dean character in the movie
Giant
, for example, we would know of his existence in the world, remember him as another Howard Hughes. This great industrialist would be written via reportage into known history.

We know for a fact that the events in this sort of fiction “could not have happened,” because the world would be different than it is. So that conflicting alethic modality is introduced into the narrative, an erratum. With
Giant
we simply sustain Rink as a conceit, an elseworld analogue of Howard Hughes, as with every Hollywood movie or TV show set in the present with a POTUS who isn’t the current incumbent. We barely notice. In the more pulp forms of strange fiction, another approach sets that conceit as its focus, makes a quirk of what “could not have happened
now
.” That is to say, if we could rewind time to before the 1950s and replay history, this temporal impossibility might be undone.
Then
there could have been a Jett Rink.
Then
the events of
Giant
“could have happened.” The resultant history would diverge from ours, branch off from it, continuing forward into an alternative reality we can envisage in a spatial metaphor, as a sideways step away through a second lateral dimension of time, the resultant present being another “now” where Jett Rink
is
remembered by the world as another Howard Hughes.

We’re already playing the game of suspending disbelief, accepting these events as taking place in simulation, accepting for the sake of the story an e
rsatz world of ersatz people performing the drama represented in the sentences, so it is only a small step to tweak that ersatz world into another now, set apart from our own in some lateral dimension of unrealised potentialities. All worlds of fiction are alternative realities.

It should be noted, however, that both the degree of challenge and the d
egree of difference may be minimal. In this example, the counterfactual is no great stretch of the imagination and therefore no great challenge to the suspension-of-disbelief. We’re not asked to accept
sweeping
historic changes with the story of
Giant
, and the simple fact that it is fiction is enough for us to swallow this minor revision in the fabric of history. Conversely, one might argue that the private narrative of a Peruvian multiple infanticide could be expected to impact on our lives were we, for instance, Peruvian; we would know of the old woman from news reports, remember her as a real-life Medea. The boundaries between private narrative and alternative narrative, by this reasoning, must be highly fluid and subjective. But in truth again we can see the old woman as simply an analogue of any infanticidal mother in reality, the ersatz murders a substitution for any number of real examples.