Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions (26 page)

In the pulp form though, the conceit of difference becomes the point, as the narrative doesn’t simply perform a
substitution
in known history, as when we switch in Rink for Hughes or an ersatz POTUS for the real one, but rather it posits
alterations
in the recorded events, breaches that conflict with known history just as the novum conflicts with known science or the chimera with the laws of nature. Remake
Giant
today but keep it set in its own time, portray Jett Rink using his oil money to run for President of the USA, and winning no less, and what we have is an alethic quirk. As the list of corrections to mistakes slipped in at the back of a book rewrite the text, so these counterfactual quirks, these errata, rewrite the mundane worldscape.

Now, let’s introduce some errata into our nursery rhyme:

There was an old Nazi who ran the US.

She had so many children to listen to her address.

She gave them some TV without any truth.

She whipped them up wildly, a new Hitler Youth.

The
Genre
of
Alternate History
(which rather proves the emptiness of nominal labels in its misuse of
alternate
in place of
alternative
) can be positioned here as a form of alternative narrative which quite clearly
does
stretch suspension-of-disbelief in a way Jett Rink does not. If the Nazis had won WW2, if the South had won the American Civil War, if the Roman Empire had not fallen, and so on—these counterfactual conceits are revisions of known history, alterations that reshape the ersatz world of the narrative to something quite unfamiliar. All worlds of fiction are alternative worlds, but some are more alternative than others. Rewritten in the act of supposition, transfigured by the core quirk and any number of smaller quirks cast as ramifications, the ersatz worldscape comes to constitute what we might call an
elsewhen
.

There are narratives that use nova to storify the transfiguration itself; they render the alteration (as mistake, or correction, or both), within the narrative, via actual time-travel, presenting us with the jump back to change the course of history then the jump forward into the rewritten reality, e.g. Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder,” which changes the very basis of history—prehistory—with the death of a butterfly. Sometimes, however, the reader is simply thrust into the elsewhen and faced with the strange details that “could not have ha
ppened,” individual errata from which they must reconstruct the core quirk, the underlying supposition, the counterfactual premise by which such fallout quirks might have come to pass (or
would have
come to pass, some
Alternate History
buffs are prone to argue, in their variant of the Contingency Slip Fallacy).

It’s by no means certain, in fact, that even this will be offered. In the exa
mple offered above, there’s little to indicate what small but significant change might have led to an old Nazi ruling the US. The focus is instead on developing the dystopian scenario of media control and the indoctrination of a generation born into fascist dictatorship.

Another Different Now

We find an equivalent approach in Lake’s future narrative, where novum takes the place of erratum. Again we have the “could not have happened (now)” alethic modality introduced by quirks in the text, events we know for a fact to be impossible. The “could not have happened
yet
” alethic modality is simply another form of that: as errata breach known history, nova breach known science, expanding on it, extrapolating, speculating or simply fabricating in fancy; they breach temporal possibility simply by being hypothetical: by
definition
, any event set in the future could not
have
happened, the
have
indicating past tense. But that future setting, even if it’s only twenty seconds into the future, makes for a get-out clause: where the alternative narrative can take a step to the side, the future narrative can take a step ahead, setting its quirks as artefacts of another different now, displaced frontally rather than laterally in the phasespace of potential realities.

Big Brother, humanoid robots, colonies on Mars—such hypothetical co
nceits are as temporally dislocating as the counterfactual conceits of
Alternate History
, rendering the worldscape a different now, an ersatz reality as an elsewhen twenty seconds, twenty years or twenty centuries into the future, where things have changed enough that the impossible could have come to pass. Why, under the Paradigm Shift Caveat even the laws of nature may have been revised.

Where some
Alternate History
stories will show their workings, so to speak, so there are
Science Fiction
stories which explicate their nova with infodump (the original intro to Bester’s
Demolished Man
, for example, laying out a whole future history as a foundation before the story even begins). But as with
Alternate History
, that elsewhen may be simply given as a
fait-accompli
, any underlying hypothetical premise left to the reader to reconstruct from the details, if indeed it is there to be reconstructed at all. We can illustrate this with another variant of the nursery rhyme, transforming its genre by changing a grand total of one noun and four pronouns:

There was an old robot who ran the US.

It had so many children to listen to its address.

It gave them some TV without any truth.

It whipped them up wildly, a new Hitler Youth.

The power of the alternative and future narratives resides in the way these errata and nova test suspension-of-disbelief: the alethic quirk is always a
lready incredible. For some readers though, for these narratives to work they cannot simply be incredible. Here the “could not have happened” alethic modality is not allowed to
really
fuck with suspension-of-disbelief; the tension is not built up to a peak or crisis-point as it is with the absurd or the abject. In fact, where comic and tragic narratives exploit the tension between alethic modalities, the alternative / future narratives may well seek to resolve them as best they can.

Just Run With It

The Contingency Slip Fallacy and the Paradigm Shift Caveat go a long way to de
warping the alethic quirk, undoing the tension, but there’s an extent to which these aren’t even required. In the pulp tradition, the resolution of incredulity as a strain is partly inbuilt, where the conceits at their heart, counterfactual in one, hypothetical in the other, are so conventional as to be clichés—Nazis winning the Second World War, robots taking over the world.

We recognise these as tropes, idiomatic fancies that we accept for the sake of a good yarn—like those of
Noir
,
Swashbuckler
,
Western
. We know the trench-coat-wearing detective is unrealistic. We know pirates were not actually like Captain Jack Sparrow. We know the portrayal of the Wild West on screen is mostly tosh. But we accept the popcorn quirks as tropes of idiomatic fantasias because it’s more fun that way. Forget the history and futurology, the idea of rigour or even arguability. It’s not really a matter of setting up a “what if,” counterfactual or hypothetical, and extrapolating forward from that, finding a story in the ramifications. As often as not the story comes out of the tropes and those tropes are only bolstered with argument afterwards…if at all.

How did the Nazis win World War II? They just did. How do you get a r
obot that can think and act just like a human? You just do. They’re tropes. Just run with it.

When it comes to known history and known science, if we’re brutally ho
nest, we need to accept that the alternative and future narratives of the pulp traditions posit, as often as not, counterfactuals and hypotheticals that are barely even subjectively
plausible
, never mind objectively
possible
. A subjective
perception
of greater possibility is not an objective
reality
of greater possibility, simply a matter of what the reader is willing to believe; and there are many strategies for persuading a reader, only one of which is to limit the strangeness to the temporal impossibilities of errata and nova, and only one of which is to argue plausibility. With the quirk of jaunting, for example, the reader is offered no theoretical basis. Bester walks roughshod over the laws of physics here, kicking thermodynamics to one side, pushing the dirt over it and saying,
Look, it’s the Goodyear Blimp!
as he points in the other direction.

How does jaunting work in terms of conservation of energy? It just does. It’s a trope in the idiomatic fantasia that our future elsewhens have become by Bester’s time, with tropic features of asteroid mines, etc.; or it’s a quirk o
ffered as such, framed in an elsewhen constructed of tropes so that it’s always already a legitimate move in the game of make-believe; it’s a fresh entry into a shared mythos. If others have used the quirk before us then the conventionality it accrues as it becomes a
trope
situates it in its own ersatz nomology—hence the acceptance of FTL as a tradition of how the laws of nature work within
Space Opera
(versus in reality), and hence the popularity of quirks like wormholes, stargates and jump-points as the tropes of a more recent tradition of
Space Opera
.

Ultimately, there’s a neat symbiosis: as quirks reused to cliché become tropes, they become tired, dewarped, no longer marvellous, but that very id
iomatic familiarity makes the entire mythos a pre-accepted conceit, one we slip into as an idle play, with not a hint of credibility warp; mean-while, fresh quirks that do actually test suspension-of-disbelief provide the crucial eyeball kick, the thrill of the marvellous that is the point of the game, with no more risk of the reader being kicked out of the story than there is of a soccer player suddenly thinking it’s all just silly, so why not just pick up the ball and chuck it into the goal. The fantasia is idiomatic. Just run with it.

If some readers want more of a sugarcoating to make the alethic quirk easier to swa
llow, there are other strategies of excuse. With the general applicability of the Paradigm Shift Caveat, a chimera may be masked as a novum simply by offering it as future reality, as Bester gives us jaunting in the future rather than the present. A bit of worldbuilding, and jaunting can be sold as another natural facet of an elsewhen of spaceships and asteroid mines. Working a little pseudo-scientific explication into that worldbuilding doesn’t hurt, so Bester and a score of other writers present a magical power of ESP or jaunting as a “next stage in human evolution.”

We can literalise the paradigm shift, present the quirk as a product of an e
ntirely alien culture, with a conceit of visitors leaving behind technology beyond our understanding. That conceit may be a startpoint for the Strugatsky Brothers in
Roadside Picnic
to mine the strange for everything it’s worth, but it can as easily be a way to sell one’s snake-oil. Where we cast those aliens as ancient and extinct, I can’t help but see an echo of the arcanum, as if the alethic quirk of Gilgamesh’s era persists, a legacy of strange fictions past. From
Stargate
to
Prometheus
, we do seem drawn to mythic antiquity as an elsewhen strode by titans who claim novum status on the basis of pure grandiosity: they are too vast and ancient to be bound within our laws of nature.