Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions (29 page)

But holding fast under a flag of pedantry in which
genre
means simply
family
, trying to unravel the conflations of aesthetic idiom, conventional templates and marketing categories that make the word, in a phrase like
genre fiction
, synonymous with
formulaic
, seems to be pissing in the wind. For all that the term genre might be applied to an aesthetic idiom as openly defined as the novel, for all that it may be applied, as a label slapped on a book shelf, to a marketing category that amounts to little more than “that stuff over there, that stuff I’m pointing to,” I’m not sure we can redeem it from the abjection by which it is applied to that which is most commercially conventional and conventionally commercial, that which lives downtown in Genre rather than in Literature. So fuck it.

From here on in, in this book, when I talk of SF, I’m talking of a field and the various forces that comprise it. I’m talking of SF as a mode of fiction, an approach in fiction, a telling of tall tales with strange elements, where those elements are integral to the d
ynamics of the story, where the process of the story is generated from the strangeness of the idea, where the story is an event enacting strangeness. This is SF not as a singular form fitted to a template but as, at best, a loose federation of forms, a field so diverse that you can throw a hundred different definitions at it and none of them will stick.

All genre definitions will fail, I think, because they attempt to describe the field as this form or that, in templates of conventions, and all those forms may actually be, I’d argue—even the most conventional—better understood as forces, the illusion of delimit
ation (in terms of plot and character, setting and theme) ultimately a trick of perspective, these types and tropes of
genres
and
subgenres
mere snapshots of whorls in cigarette smoke, emergent from and embedded in a wider process: carving the fabulous in the reader’s mind in an experience as sharply-defined as the so-called
genre
is inchoate. This is SF as a fabulous formless starkness of effect(s), bound only to an acronym that acknowledges its own emptiness of meaning in its rejection of specificity.

If the field is as definitionally circular as Spinrad’s statement asserts it to be, this seems only right; the empty signifier of SF is far more apt as a label than science fiction. As Cheney said in the quote way back at the start, the genre of science fiction no longer exists. As we have declared right here,
Science Fiction
is dead.

SF, on the other hand, seems to be alive and well—for a ghost.

Or maybe it’s not a ghost at all. Maybe that simulacrum of an essence we see as we gaze through our mayashades at the SF Café, that wireframe model of an abstract agency…maybe it really only wore the skin of
Science Fiction
the same way it now wears the golem’s clay. Maybe it was there all the time, this field of forces, and simply took that form as a response to the time and place.

Gully Foyle is my name,

And combat is my nation.

Gunfire is my dwelling-place,

The wars my destination.

Alfred Bester,
The Wars My Destination

The SF Café is a curious place. Take a wrong turn when you step inside the door, and you can find yourself not where you expected at all. Or rather, not
when
you expected to be. You walk into the SF Café, and mostly you’re reckoning on seeing the shape of things to come—twenty minutes into the future, twenty years or twenty millennia—but there’s a corner of the SF Café that’s not the future at all. Take a step to the left, as the door swings shut behind you with a ting of the bell, and you may well find yourself in a today or yesterday where it’s not the science that’s strange but the history.

This is the SF not of Suvin’s novum but of its compatriot errata, quirks of difference like the holes in your New Yorker’s Swiss Cheese, points of dive
rgence and the oddities of a world evolved from them. You look around the café, find the posters of 1950s Sci-Fi flicks are gone, replaced by images of Confederate victories and Nazi triumphs. Where the salt cellars on the Formica tables were once sleek chrome rocket-shapes, now they’re khaki and bulbous…grenades. What the fuck?

You step back out the door, gaze around. The downtown ghetto of Genre seems u
nchanged, but now when you turn and look up, you see the proof of your shift sideways across the timestreams: where the sign above the door should read
The SF Café
, now you’re standing before
The Combat Fiction Bar & Grill
. A parallel reality. An alternate history. And now, as you shrug and head inside, curious to explore this half-familiar elsewhen, the air shimmers around you; a jukebox comes alive with the sound of Swing. It’s bang in the middle of the twentieth century, and the Combat Fiction Bar and Grill has just opened for business.

Out of the pulp fiction boom, a new
Genre
has emerged, focused on warfare like that erupting in Europe even now. It comes from the industry of dime novels and magazines—
Nick Carter Stories
,
Flying Aces
,
Marvel Tales
,
Buffalo Bill Weekly
—draws on a 1920s/1930s recipe of hokey heroism, big explosions and valourous deaths as perfected in the Boy’s Own adventure. Without its American flavour it might not be so very different from the even earlier tales of Haggard and Buchan, except that in the hands of a few editors, in the magazines and publishing imprints that they run, a more solid shape has been given, with something of a novel twist to it.

Where it might be just one more in the stable of Street & Smith’s pulp pu
blications, under the editorship of John W. MacDonald,
Astounding Stories
in particular is bringing a level of Rationalism to this mode of Romance, reborn for the wars of the Industrial Age as
Modern Pulp
. Clear guidelines demand a sharp focus on plausibility: weaponry must work the way it works in reality; strategies must be authentic; the combat must be extrapolated with rigour. And so a whole new
Genre
is born—inheriting from its romantic forebears but essentially Modern in its fusion of plot dynamics and intellectual mechanics.

MacDonald names it
Combat Fiction
.

As this
Genre
matures, that rationalist bent takes its effect. As a new generation of writers enters the field, many turn a cold eye on the sensationalist fluff that is their roots. Oh, they devoured the pulps as kids and they retain a deep love of the boldness to be found there, the sheer vigour of stories driven by peril, driven by death and glory, the monstra and numinae of war; but as adults they now appreciate more mature themes. For them, the crass and pandering jingoism is something to be subverted. For them, warfare is not merely a backdrop for heroic adventure stories; rather it is an intrinsic element of plot and theme through which to explore the human condition. The twentieth century is a century of combat, after all. What other
Genre
is better equipped to address the big philosophical questions of life and death, of what it is to be a human in this world of war? Writing in response to what has gone before, working with the accrued toolkit of tropes or simply with the substrate of war-as-metaphor or war-as-backdrop, this new generation begins to explore these ideas in greater depth, find new angles. Those who are conversant with the
Genre
are increasingly aware of its potential, keen to exploit it. To exploit the dynamics of the quirks in ways unbound by conventional templates.

Certainly, the pulp roots show through. The commercial impetus of the
Genre
is evident. Some
Combat Fiction
readers will buy any old shit as long as you slap a cigar-chomping sergeant on the cover—they want more of the same—and there are plenty ready to serve that up. But that dedicated readership offers a ready-made market for literate—even experimental—works dealing with war. Some readers have read all the permutations of the
Combat Fiction
novel, even the gritty realist ones, and they’re bored now—they want something original, something novel, something different. So, publishers can take risks on unconventional works which might otherwise fail to reach an audience; the uncritical fans of
Genre
supports the innovations of a non-generic aesthetic idiom—not
Combat Fiction
but simply combat fiction…the fiction of combat.

So, one writer called Alfred Bester, in his seminal novel
The Wars My Destination
, boldly flies his modernist colours in typographic trickery. In the opening pages of the book, he proclaims where he’s coming from in no uncertain terms, with the rhyme quoted above, directly based on a similar rhyme from James Joyce’s
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
.

Verisimilitude/Authenticity

In one traditional pulp approach to alternative / future narratives, while the reader is thrown into an elsewhen for which they must reconstruct the unde
rlying logic, there is a concerted effort to make that logic apparent, to explicate the elsewhen through the course of the narrative. The explication may be offered mainly in the form of rich pseudo-temporal detail—technological and historical worldbuilding—that is left to speak for itself in the internal consistency of its mimetic and pseudo-mimetic weft, to create a sense of
verisimilitude
. We can and should distinguish this verisimilitude from the sense of
authenticity
engendered in the narrative by ensuring that these details are also consistent with the theories of known science and known history if not the facts, the way we define the world and societies as working from our observations of how they’ve worked in the past. The difference is subtle, but it is that of appearance and actuality, many works achieving plausibility by a combination of excuse and verisimilitude rather than authenticity.

So, in those types of alternative / future narrative seeking a sense of authe
nticity over and above this, we find explication that attempts to provide a solid (or semisolid) base of theory and extrapolation on which these nova and errata can be grounded. In reconstructing the elsewhen, the reader may gradually unpack these quirks as the fallout of a basic suppositional premise: the assassination of Hitler leading to a more organised Third Reich, for example; or the advancements in AI required to create a properly intelligent robot.

For some, the rationalisations provided by a solid (i.e. arguable) suppos
itional premise, or rather by the acts of explication
indicating
such a premise, are essential as counterbalances to the “could not have happened” alethic modality, essential in order to sustain suspension-of-disbelief in the face of constant challenges. For each writer and each reader there are different thresholds at which the “could have happened” alethic modality can simply no longer be maintained, and for that set of writers and readers with the lowest threshold verisimilitude and authenticity may be critical. Without sufficient explication that threshold will be crossed, suspension-of-disbelief will collapse, the game of make-believe will be abandoned, and the reader will throw the book across the room in disgust. Speak to many hardcore fans of
Hard SF
or
Alternate History
, offer them a book where the counterfactual / hypothetical is treated as a fancy, no more, no less, around which to build a story. Watch them tear it to shreds with disdain for how “that couldn’t happen.”