Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions (30 page)

Unfortunately, there’s a catch for these freeform stories exploring the mo
nstra and numinae of war; their marketing as
Combat Fiction
places them below the radar of many middlebrow readers, who look at
Astounding Stories
and see only another Boys’ Own pulp. Little wonder—it’s
sold
as a Boys’ Own pulp, with covers of All-American GIs socking Nazis, storming bunkers, stopping tanks in their tracks with a well-aimed grenade. And amongst its siblings, there might be a subtler title like
The Magazine of Espionage & Combat Fiction
here and there (espionage being a bedfellow of combat fiction from its earliest days), but it’s mostly
Bloody Battle Tales
and
Glory!
and
Heroic War Stories
.

And more than anything, the public perception of
Combat Fiction
is shaped by John Wayne movies, where hokey heroism, big explosions and valourous deaths are still the order of the day. Not familiar with the written form, but seeing the lurid covers and sensational titles, they imagine all
Combat Fiction
to be written at that intellectual level; that’s how it presents itself. They’d only have to read
The Naked and the Dead
to realise this perception was bollocks, but unfortunately,
The Naked and the Dead
is on sale from one of the most successful
Combat Fiction
imprints, with a brawny GI on the cover, cigar clenched in his gritted teeth. It’s selling shitloads, but not to those who look at that cover and think “John Wayne movie.”

(In another parallel reality, by the way, just another half-step to the left, Mailer’s novel is sold without the label, and is as widely regarded as a twent
ieth-century classic as it is in our reality. It’s not really regarded as
Combat Fiction
at all, in fact, much to the chagrin of the patrons of the Combat Fiction Bar and Grill. This is just literary snobbery, they say.
The Naked and the Dead
is clearly
Combat Fiction
, clearly of the same
Genre
as
Biggles Defies the Swastika
and
300
—and
The Iliad
, no less! But that’s another fold. In this one, those patrons need not worry; here,
The Naked and the Dead
is where it belongs, shelved in
Combat Fiction
.)

Mailer’s novel is only the first of many to meet this fate. One day, a young writer called Joseph Heller sends his novel
Catch-22
to an editor, and the editor finds himself in a quandary. It’s obvious from the first few pages of the manuscript that this is about warfare. But it’s also obvious that this is a literary masterpiece. To a public who thinks
Combat Fiction
means “John Wayne movies,” this non-linear, absurdist narrative might well be seen simply as what it is—a great work of fiction. To some reactionary fans of
Combat Fiction
, indeed, it might be too flagrant a breach of their expectations. But then again, to a public who thinks
Combat Fiction
means “John Wayne movies,” the first hint of a WW2 setting might be enough to turn them off. And to the progressive fans of
Combat Fiction
, this will be exactly what they’re clamouring for.

Marketed as
General Fiction
, it might stand a better chance of critical and commercial success. But its unconventional nature makes it a risky proposition. Maybe readers unfamiliar with
Combat Fiction
won’t understand it. Maybe readers wary of
Combat Fiction
won’t be open enough to understand it. Will they just see a confusion of conventions—brothels and bombing runs—and a silliness they can’t make sense of, lacking the protocols of combat fiction? Will they simply be alienated by the strangeness of it all?

And there
is
this ready-made market for
Combat Fiction
. There
are
the fans who will buy it simply because there’s an airstrip being blown up on the cover. There are a lot of them—and a whole lot of the others too, the ones crying out for innovation just like this. The non-linear absurdism is a Unique Selling-Point for them. This is an original take on the established tropes if ever there was one, a work which pushes the boundaries of
Combat Fiction
further than ever before. Within the genre, the editor is convinced, this will win instant renown. They’ll say it transcends the genre.

And he’s right. Whole generations of readers too young for it now, readers who h
aven’t yet graduated to the mature works, readers who haven’t yet been born, will one day buy
Catch-22
as part of the Combat Fiction Masterworks series.

If Only…

Quite different from the approaches of comic / tragic narratives which e
xploit the strangeness, the explications of
Hard SF
and a comparable style of
Alternate History
may be more akin to the implicit social models underpinning the plots of the pathetic narratives of the mundane. At their most extreme, like the domestic novel, these alternative / future narratives are seeking to
persuade
us that this really, honestly
could
happen elsewhen. They deny the absurd, the abject, the surreal. They deny the incredible, dewarp the quirk. They insist that the counterfactual / hypothetical is, was or will be a very real possibility. It
would happen
like that, they insist, if only…

That said, there is an element of excuse that remains even with works which remain firmly grounded in the mundane, where they utilise the character tropes of melodrama, the heroes and villains. It is the same heightened pathos, the same “operatic” quality, which gives its name to both
Space Opera
and
Soap Opera
, and even the most explicated narrative may retain that quality.

Unfortunately an obliviousness of the convention of explication may well contribute to why other readers are unable to connect with pulp at this level, even with works grounded firmly in the most reasonable counterfactuals and hypotheticals. Offer a solid work of
Hard SF
or
Alternate History
to a reader unfamiliar with those modes, and they may click to it. The technique works for many pulp readers, after all, so we can expect it to work, in some cases, even on those not attuned to it. If it
doesn’t
work for them, however, it is liable to backfire completely.

It is the death knell for those paradoxically exemplary/exceptional works tagged as
combat fiction
, of course, in terms of wider recognition—to be shelved in a section of the bookstore that many readers simply will not think to browse. They don’t particularly dislike John Wayne movies, those readers, but they’re not fans of them, so why should they bother with that
Combat Fiction
section? If they want popcorn fiction, they’ll go to the movies. If such a book gets reviewed, it’s in the
Combat Fiction
magazines. It may be hailed as a classic by the patrons of the Combat Fiction Bar and Grill, but when they try to persuade the incognoscenti of its value they’re met with arched eyebrows of doubt.

Today, in the Bistro de Critique, a sceptical friend lowers the copy of
Neuromancer
he happens to be reading.

(He sighs. He’s only just finished arguing with a
Crime Fiction
fan that
Neuromancer
is not, as they were insisting, “really
Crime Fiction
” simply because it has criminals in it. In this fold, it should be noted, where the strange is a third mask between tragedy and comedy, where García-Márquezian
magical realism
has its mainstream bedfellow in Orwellian
speculative realism
, there is no question of a novum or chimera rendering a work “genre fiction.” Still, those
Crime Fiction
fans will insist on laying claim to literature like
Neuromancer
that explores the noir idiom as part of its dystopian approach.)

He looks at the copy of
Catch-22
that’s being waved in front of him.

—But that’s
Combat Fiction
, he says. That’s just formulaic dreck, isn’t it? All hokey heroism, big explosions and valourous deaths.

The
Combat Fiction
fan tries; they really do. They list
Combat Fiction
works, detail their merits, insisting that the field is not intrinsically formulaic. Their incognoscenti friend is dubious that any
Genre
novel could really achieve the profundity of a Nobel prize winner, or stand the test of time, or satisfy a number of vague criteria of literary quality—that it could really be that good. The fan points to
The Naked and the Dead
as proof. But the title doesn’t ring any bells to the incognoscenti. Eventually the
Combat Fiction
fan must point outside the
Genre
simply to find something the incognoscenti have read. So they point to Hemingway’s
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, a recognised classic. This is dismissed as at most an influence on
Combat Fiction
, a taproot text, not an actual work of
Combat Fiction
.

Finally the sceptical friend is persuaded, against his will, to give
Catch-22
a go; he’ll find it funny, honestly. He approaches the book with scepticism, expecting something like that John Wayne movie he caught on the TV the other day. It immediately becomes apparent that this is not
The Sands of Iwo Jima
, and by fuck, it turns out that he loves it. The blend of tragedy and comedy, the fragmented narrative, the dark humanism, the core conceit extrapolated not unlike the speculative realism that is his normal taste. An ambitious book like this is not really
Combat Fiction
at all. No, it belongs with
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, not
Where Eagles Dare
.

When he returns it to the fan, he happily confesses his appreciation, obliv
ious of the dark look flashing across the fan’s face when he praises it as “not really
Combat Fiction
.” The exasperated fan is just about to hit their clueless friend upside the head when another mate happens by. One of two things happens. Also a patron of the Combat Fiction Bar and Grill, but with more conventional tastes, Philadelphia Stein—Philly for short—can’t help but clock the book he hated. It’s “not really”
Combat Fiction
as far as he’s concerned, not like Alistair MacLean’s 1957 classic,
The Guns of Navarone
. Or Robert A. Heinlein’s seminal work from just two years later,
Starship Troopers
. Now, those are proper
Combat Fiction
.

As the two fans argue over what is and what isn’t
Combat Fiction
, the sceptical friend turns the copy of
Catch-22
over in his hands. On the back of it, a blurb proclaims how this work “transcends the genre.” Well, he thinks, it certainly breaks the boundaries that stretch from
The Sands of Iwo Jima
all the way to
The Guns of Navarone
.

What We Ignore

For those who lack an interest in science and history, the explication will likely alienate them from the very things which make the book interesting for the pulp reader. They will be bored by the exposition, by diagrams and equ
ations and dates and places laid out in tiresome detail. They don’t give a fuck how richly detailed the elsewhen is. They don’t give a fuck how well a flight of fancy is rationalised with solid extrapolations from an arguable premise. Indeed, the more acts of explication the work offers in an attempt to justify a “would have happened” alethic modality, the more bored they get with what reads to them as geekish obsession, a dubious mania for extraneous detail. In the end, regardless of this spurious explication, that whole suppositional premise simply strikes them as…a flight of fancy. We will likely see a scorn not just of the story in terms of plot, character and writing; rather it will be a scorn of the “ridiculous” idea, the “silliness” of the conceit, an inability to take the entire premise seriously. This is generally infuriating to the fan.

Ironically, offer these same readers a work which functions as a fanciful spectacle and they’ll likely lap it up, because they are entirely familiar (and comfortable) with the Romantic technique of
excuse
. These are the people who will flock to the cinema to see Tom Cruise running from the Martians and have a great time, while SF readers will be screaming at the screens about why the fuck the Martians would wait underground a couple of thousand years, until humanity had developed the technology to fight them, before attacking. I’m sure most of us are familiar with this attitude, from friends and family who will happily sit and watch
Star Wars
, but who, when offered a serious work involving a counterfactual / hypothetical elsewhen extrapolated logically from a suppositional premise, will a) find it boring, b) dismiss it as nonsense, c) respond to any argument that, actually, if you think about it, it
is
quite plausible with a mixture of bafflement and disdain at the fact that you are geekish enough to “take this stuff seriously.” After all, it’s
Sci-Fi
; it’s not
meant
to be taken seriously.

Sidelined by our own knee-jerk reaction against the attitude that “only a geek would take SF seriously,” that “only a geek would expect rigourous sc
ience,” pissed off by the implicit insult here (science is boring, so your interest is boring, so you are boring), we risk going off half-cocked in our response. What we ignore when we argue the case for SF as rational futurology, founded in theory and extrapolation, is that those alternative / future narratives which best serve as examples here are only a fraction of the field. Yes, explication is one of the tricks by which SF as a subset of SF prevents the quirks from overpowering the suspension-of-disbelief. But it is only
one
of the tricks.