Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions (28 page)

Sadly, in our own conflations and confusions we invite these misperceptions by accepting the framework of logic in which genre means an aesthetic territ
ory of formulation (as in
genre fiction
) rather than an aesthetic idiom (as in
the genre of a fiction
). This ghetto of Genre we ally ourselves with is defined precisely as the region where marketing categories and conventional forms collude to insist on formulation, in contrast to
non-genre
where they do not.
Genre
fiction versus
non-genre
fiction? All fiction is in a genre, even if that genre is only the novel or the short story.

When we talk of works as
transcending the genre
, position them as exceptional rather than exemplary, we tacitly accept: that the
Genre
label indicates some set of aesthetic criteria shared by
Genre
narratives, sought after by a certain target market; that the commercial impetus of those criteria constrain the form at a deeper level than the strictures of a sonnet, create a limitation of quality; that a narrative needs to circumvent those demands of form not by ignoring them (because then the narrative would cease to be
Genre
) but by some shift into a more elevated sphere of abstract action. We accept that the idiom we signify with the
Genre
label is a stereotypical
Genre
form that has to be transcended in this way.

If transcendence is our metaphor then truly SF is an incorporeal spectre, a ghost, slipped free of the flesh and bone forms long ago.

Of course, the fuzziness of the whole notion is expedient, allowing us to wave a hand towards the aesthetic idiom(s) we like, in the form of a shelf labelled SF, referring to this as
genre
, while simultaneously waving away the conventional templates we hate, happily referring to these as generic. When an outsider challenges us on this slapdash clumping of works, we might be able to articulate that SF as a rackspace label is bound to a set of aesthetic criteria too diverse to pin down with precision, diverse enough that they even allow for a
literary SF
with its definition lost somewhere among all the arguments. What we generally fail to articulate is that SF is not a
Genre
at all, but rather a mode of a myriad idioms and forms, a dynamic family of genres and
Genres
, the most ambitious and innovative craftsmanship wed to, and at war with, the most formulated and derivative crap.

Hey ho.

The ghost haunts the café, animates the lumbering golem of the field in its physical form. The name is sustained in our speech, the inchoate idea reiterated in every sibilant and fricative utterance of SF, because it offers a subtle strand of identity even in its indefinition; it is enough for us, as a community of fiction readers, writers, editors and critics to congregate around. In the spectral apparition and the material shape, there is enough rough semblance of
Genre
that these freaks might frighten the citizenry if they stepped out into the city at large; and both are bound to the SF Café by their shared history anyway, by their loyalty to a beloved heritage. And as long as the SF Café is sustainable as a commercial enterprise, as long as it keeps drawing in the punters with the promise of pulp thrills and spills, the promise of exciting entertainments, of
Genre
, the ghost and the golem have a home.

I feel the love, am loyal to that home myself—it’s been fucking good to me—but I think it’s worth being aware of the doublethinks we apply, as when we talk of transcen
ding the genre. The relationship between genre and
Genre
is a weird balance of symbiosis and mutual parasitism, and it seems to me that our unadmitted recognition of that only leads to bitching about lack of respect on the one hand while, on the other, extolling works with a phrase that damns SF as derivative in its essence. The deal with the devil doesn’t seem…well, that big a deal. Commercial pressures toward formulation have a corrosive effect on literary quality, sure; but the market for the most conventional forms subsidises the most literate and ambitious aesthetic idioms—works that might well be unpublishable outside the ghetto, without the security of a dedicated audience. The literary imperatives of the whole aesthetic idiom degrade the efficiency of formulaic products with their narrowly-defined utilitarian function as entertainment; but the continual influx of originality counteracts the Law of Diminishing Returns in a set of
Genres
where “more of the same” can paradoxically mean more novelty.

The ghost and the golem could not survive without the SF Café, but without them the SF Café would quickly become an empty shell.

Ghosts, golems—these metaphysical quirks of fantasy are incongruous in an exploration of SF surely. Ah, well, let’s just employ the Paradigm Shift Caveat here. Let’s hypothesise that the parapsychologists are right, that in the future our empirical observations of some truly strange phenomena force a radical revision of our physics. No ectoplasm here though, no spiritualist mumbo-jumbo of the soul as some aetheric substance. We’ll call it the Quantum Interconnectedness Principle then, say that reality is information and the universe a hologram, that every fragmentary particle of our cosmos contains an image of the whole implicate order, the urgrund.

In the SF Café every patron wears mayashades that reconstruct the urgrund from the fragment-forms immediately perceptible. In part a forensic analysis of reality, in part a data-mining of the urgrund, what is offered is, in essence, a heads-up display of info
rmation we could not otherwise have access to. Gaze into the eyes of another patron and the mayashades scroll their thoughts across your vision. Gaze out of the window and the mayashades flash glimpses of the future on the streets outside—a joyrider ploughing his car into a bus-stop queue you might be standing in five minutes from now. That sort of information is useful, after all; if we had not (hypothetically) developed the technology to access and utilise it we might even (hypothetically) have evolved a natural capacity, some sort of Externalised Simulatory Processing of the world we have to live in, some sort of…
ESP
.

Phil Dick sits in a corner, his mayashades on the blink, showing him the SF Café as a tavern in AD 70, a secret community of Christians hiding from the Roman Empire; his mayashades are communicating an analysis of society in figurative form, the ghetto of Genre as the Black Iron Prison of the Gnostics. They flash words in Koiné Greek across his vision, a language he cannot know but which these wondrous gadgets can use freely in their access to that urgrund. They offer him a reinterpretation of the world in which he is not Phil the SF writer but Thomas the early Christian. This is not a transmigration of souls, but rather reincarnation as retro-incarnation, as a downloading of the data that defined a long-dead psyche, a simulation of another’s memories.

The ghost of SF is no supernatural spirit, just the simulacrum of an essence, the abstract agency we glimpse as we gaze round the SF Café with our mayashades scanning for hidden meaning, a wireframe model reconstructed in a virtual medium. As for the golem? Let’s make the monster a machine, a robot made of muck instead of metal. We’ll say its clay is carbon, the grey goo of nanotech devices, millions of minuscule mechanisms fused into one lumpen mass, given identity in the name projected onto it, SF as its logos and its logic.

Hey presto! Magic becomes science. Fantasy becomes SF.

For the benefit of those who care about that shit, you know.

It’s not that hard to see SF’s relationship with
Genre
, I think, to critique it with clarity and objectivity, picking out juvenile tropes and themes from adult treatments—as Spinrad does, say, in his classic “Emperor Of Everything” article, showing Bester’s smart and mature inversion of the heroic rags-to-riches power fantasy in
The Stars My Destination
. But resisting critical analyses that recognise the aesthetic idiom for what it is makes it easier to excuse generic twaddle such as
Independence Day
or
The Matrix
, to forget why these are twaddle because, well, they’re enjoyable twaddle. Both are juvenile. Both are formulaic. Both are
Genre
in precisely the way that the Form = Formulation Syllogism damns it. We only need to compare them to, say, Gibson’s
Neuromancer
or Stephenson’s
Snow Crash
—to pick two works that are hardly lacking in the good old-fashioned plot-driven dynamics of the thriller or action / adventure genres they inhabit—to judge them pretty much derivative hokum. But if we like these two movies and hate another two—
Minority Report
or
War of the Worlds
—we can simply wave our hands, say that the former are
genre
, the latter
generic
.

This distinction is a wonderfully expedient sophistry. Both
genre fiction
, as we all too often use the term, and
generic fiction
are defined by the familiarity of their forms; more, they are fictions which exploit that familiarity. What they offer the reader, we say, what the reader requires of them, is a narrative composed of conventional template elements—plots and characters, settings and themes. There may be originality in the treatment, but too much originality, not enough familiarity, and that novel ceases to be generic; exchange even more familiarity for originality and it ceases to be of the genre at all. Or at least, this is the conventional wisdom—that it’s all a matter of conventions. The marketing categories have become ghettoised as Genre because the
Genres
bound to them exist to be generic in this way, to provide the reader with
more of the same
, all gathered together in one place, under a certain branding.

But, of course, what we have then is
all this fiction gathered together under that branding
, the works that we love because they’re genre-but-not-generic. And the ones we hate because they
are
generic and thereby
give the genre a bad name
, reviling them even to the extent sometimes of denying that they’re really SF, refusing to recognise them as being valid examples of the genre on the basis that they’re too generic. In contrast to the canon of definitive works that we describe as transcending the genre.

Run that by me again?

Personally, I’d like to see the word
genre
taken out back and shot, a bullet in the back of its head, if it’s going to be so overloaded with meanings it’s just gibberish skewed to self-serving doublethink. Even Campbellian
Science Fiction
might be best not considered a
Genre
if that’s going to tangle us up in the morass of
genre versus the generic
. Its key stricture of futurology works more like the arbitrary constraint of an Oulipo writer than the conventions of form that mark out fiction as generic. Where Gernsback’s definition sets out distinctly standardised aesthetic criteria in requiring the plot structures of Romantic adventure, Campbell’s allows for entirely non-generic plot-structures as long as the fiction employs this strange Oulipo-style stricture of grounding fantasia in futurology.

And as for the ghost and the golem, the model and the machine, the stuff that’s out there now? As for SF, or speculative fiction, or whatever you want to call it? Construct the narrative with MacGuffin devices and stock plots, and the SF novel or story may become generic, as much SF undeniably is. There is a mode of
Epic SF
which all too closely parallels
Epic Fantasy
with its exotic settings, noble heroes, quests as archetypal psychodrama, more Joseph Campbell than John W. Campbell. But SF as a whole, which delights in offering unfamiliar forms…is it really generic enough that we’re happy to call it a genre, when to do so is inevitably to call it
Genre
—because it’s not like the capitalisation I’m using here works in speech? Before you answer, bear in mind that every time we dismiss some formulaic dreck as generic or extoll the latest masterpiece with the rhetoric of transcendence we’re reifying the notion of genre at the heart of the Form = Formulation Syllogism?

Fuck, if only “aesthetic idiom” didn’t sound so damn poncy.

Thing is, if we examine other marketing categories—
Crime
,
Western
,
Romance
—it seems SF is not alone in being, essentially, an openly defined aesthetic idiom damned by the formulation that it’s inextricably bound to. Crime, for one, is in a similar position to SF, with as much originality twisting and tearing at its orthodoxy of familiar tropes and tricks. (Or rather, as much originality emerging from its dynamics of quirks. What is a crime in fiction but the quirk of an event with a boulomaic and deontic modality of must not? What is a mystery in fiction but the quirk of an event left undetailed to introduce uncertainty, epistemic modalities of might/might not?)

All marketing categories have their deconstructions and subversions, par
odies and pastiches, reinventions and restorations, non-generic works that might be better understood as
Anti-Genre
insofar as their categorical imperative is to bring something new into the family, to force the adjustment of aesthetic criteria required to accommodate them and thereby counteract the impulse to formulation. It’s the paradox of the ghetto of Genre, that the canonical works are exemplary because they are exceptional, not just another iteration of
The MacGuffin Device
, but rather, like
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
, freaks and sports.