Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions (31 page)

What is and what isn’t
Combat Fiction
? It’s an argument that begins with
Catch-22
, if not before, and slowly comes to consume the discourse. With Vietnam and the sexual revolution as a backdrop, the ’60s and ’70s see a renaissance in
Combat Fiction
, much of it socio-political and experimental, treating the fractured world of war as a reflection of the confusing (post)modern condition. Dubbed the New Wave, some writers in this mode become uncomfortable with the very label
Combat Fiction
. Many works of
Combat Fiction
now deal with guerrilla warfare, terrorism, the Holocaust, the Cold War, civil unrest, psychological warfare, inner-city gang culture, drug wars, even disputes between neighbours or the “war of the sexes.” Some of it is so abstract in its connection with war that a more accurate descriptor seems called for.

It’s not combat that’s makes this fiction what it is so much as it’s the “co
nfrontational element.” It’s
confrontational fiction
. Though coined by Heinlein, that term is taken up by writers like Ellison, like the cohort of Young Turks who appear in his seminal anthology
Perilous Visions
. Many fans of Golden Age
Combat Fiction
consider these writers of the New Wave to be “not really”
Combat Fiction
.

—Where is the solid grounding in actual warfare here? they say. Where is the rigour in weaponry and tactics? Hell, where’s the damn story? Give me
Force 10 from Navarone
any day.

Meanwhile, the fan who sees this strange modern idiom as a battlefield of any and all literary techniques and tactics, a free-for-all where the rules of e
ngagement have long since been lost, can hardly mention
Combat Fiction
to an intransigent member of the hardcore incognoscenti without facing a dismissive sneer and a reference to those
War Trek
fans who go to conventions dressed up as Spock, in their khaki
War Trek
uniforms, with their papier-mâché helmets, and toy rifles. It doesn’t help that, in their uncritical love for all things
Combat Fiction
, those with the most devotion refer to the
Genre
by the cute and clever monicker of
Com-Fi
(pronounced “comfy” by those in the know these days.) It’s hardly a damning indictment—a charge of enthusiasm to the point of silliness—but these strange subcultural shenanigans turn the brand image of
Combat Fiction
into a barricade.

The situation isn’t helped when a young director named George Lucas, in homage to the
G.I. Joe
comics he loved as a kid, makes a puerile but rollicking piece of hokum called
War Stars
. John Wayne movies are out of fashion now, so
Combat Fiction
isn’t a box-office draw any more, but
War Stars
is a surprise smash hit. Kids and adults around the world fall in love with it, and it changes the face of cinema, ushering in a new era of blockbusters, many of which have strong elements of
Combat Fiction
, but few of which have the depth of the written form.
Battle Beyond the Stars
is no
2001: A Space Iliad
. Most of the those who lap up this
Com-Fi
would not class themselves as fans. While arching their eyebrows at the fans, indeed, they feel no shame at enjoying this cinematic junk food, because they don’t take it seriously, treat it on the level it essentially belongs, as a frippery. With disdain or disregard, they’ll tell the proselytising fan: they don’t mind spending a few hours on a flick like
War Stars
, but if they’re going to read a book they prefer something substantial.

—But
War Stars
, some fans of the written form begin to declare, isn’t really
Combat Fiction
. With its plot revolving around stolen plans, the infiltration of an enemy base, and the rescue of a captive agent of a resistance movement, it’s clearly
Espionage
. Which is not a good thing, as far as they’re concerned. The cult of Fleming has exploded by now, and the 1970s sees a glut of derivatives, often hugely successful; most follow such a rigid formula in their tales of James Bond clones on missions to uncover and foil the Evil Genius’s plans for world domination that the term “espionage” becomes synonymous with sub-Fleming power-wank.

—Puerile wish-fulfilment, scorn the hardcore
Combat Fiction
devotees, hardly wrong but turning a blind eye to the subtleties of le Carré and Greene in the idiom they abject, and to the testosterone-fuelled power-tripping in their own backyard, in writers like Mac-Lean. No,
Espionage
is the enemy within. For some fans,
anything
from
Perilous Visions
to
War Stars
might be this enemy.

The incognoscenti, knowing nothing of this aesthetic turf war and seeing no sense in the distinctions being made…nod and smile.

Nod and smile.

Strategies of Resolution

It is possible to combine excuse
and
explication. Since both techniques work towards maintaining suspension-of-disbelief, one by widening the parameters of what’s acceptable (android-as-conventional-trope), the other by arguing the acceptability (android-as-plausible-speculation) on a case-by-case basis, these two strategies of resolution can work in tandem, with the writer “spreading the load,” so to speak, over both techniques. The fact that androids are a conventional trope (a given of the idiomatic fantasia) hardly negates the effect of a plausible scientific explanation based on A-Life and AI theories; it might make the work a bit more boring for the type of fan who’d rather you just got on with the story, but it might also make it more interesting for the type of fan who wants authenticity. Conversely, the use of scientific theory isn’t going to
detract
from the conventionality of the trope, make it less excusable. You’re not suddenly going to stop believing in the android because the author made it
more
plausible.

So you get the explanatory and excusatory techniques working together. You can offset less rigourous science with more vigourous (i.e. Romantic, a
dventurous, trope-bound) narrative, and vice versa. Early Heinlein like
Starship Troopers
is a good example. Giant bugs are kinda scientifically dodgy. Interstellar warfare without FTL is a bit unlikely to say the least, and FTL itself is hardly on a solid scientific basis. Heinlein’s Cherenkov Drive is an Unobtainium Drive. In part, it’s the form of Heinlein’s book that makes it work, a bildungsroman in an idiomatic fantasia. Same with his juveniles where the science is even more handwavy. And this kind of stuff is at the core of what we label SF.

The two strategies can however be used pretty much independently, in more “purely” excusatory SF or in more “purely” explicatory SF, and just as readers will prefer one technique over the other, so too will writers. A deep commi
tment to one technique may even shade into an animosity towards the other. So, you end up with the
Hard SF
versus
Science Fantasy
schism within the genre.

There is, of course, a third option that is neither.

Time passes. Down in the ghetto, in the Combat Fiction Bar & Grill, there’s unrest. One of the writers who’s pushed the boundaries the most, Kurt Vonn
egut, author of the classic
Combat Fiction
novel
Slaughterhouse-Five
, denies that his work is
Genre
in an attempt to escape the inexorable taint of formulaic shit that goes with the label
Combat Fiction
. Regardless of the blatant and direct tackling of the subject matter of
Combat Fiction
, he rejects the confines of a
Genre
dismissed by the general public as “John Wayne movies” and celebrated by many of its most ardent admirers on the basis of its “sense of glory.” A large proportion of fans who now vehemently reject
Com-Fi
as an implicitly derogatory term in favour of a less loaded
CF
—standing for combat fiction, confrontational fiction, or any number of alternatives—consider this a betrayal of the worst kind.

So it goes.

Time passes. Mainstream writers start turning their hand to combat fiction only to be regarded with extreme suspicion, if not outright hostility. Pat Barker’s
Regeneration
, a novel set during World War One but taking place almost entirely in Craiglockhart War Hospital, is a point of controversy. For some fans, the problem is simply that Barker’s book is old hat, done before. If Barker were familiar with the genre she’d know that the
War Hospital
story was a hoary old cliché, done to death. For others, the problem is that Barker leaves the trenches in the background, which is utterly at odds with the conventions of this
Genre
of hokey heroism, big explosions and valourous deaths. Barker, as a dabbling mainstream writer, doesn’t really understand the way
Combat Fiction
works, and so her novel doesn’t work as
Combat Fiction
. Barker compounds her crime by, in an interview, denying that she writes
Combat Fiction
, which she dismisses as “grunts with guns” stories. She accepts the label
confrontational fiction
, but few CF fans notice this.

So it goes.

Time passes. An
Espionage
series aimed at children and young adults—J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books—takes hold in the public imagination. Adults who haven’t read a novel in years are suddenly obsessed with Harry Potter, with its secret weapons to be sought after, intrigues to be uncovered, plots to be foiled. People like reading about machinations, it seems, and given the choice between middle-class, middlebrow, mid-life crisis novels and books in which a trainee secret agent thwarts the schemes of the Evil Genius Voldemort, they’ll opt for the latter. Some of those writers who now treat
confrontational fiction
as an umbrella term for
Combat Fiction
and
Espionage
keep their fingers crossed that this will translate to an influx of new readers as fans of Harry Potter graduate to more mature works. Others simply see this as a mainstreaming of the confrontational genres in their most commercial and juvenile form, dubious that Rowling’s fans will really move on to Heller and the like.

So it goes.

Peru or Mars

SF does not always excuse its quirks as conventions, or, like the pathetic narrative, explain how things are or might be, substituting the scientific for the psychological and socio-political, explicating the counterfactual / hypothetical until we’re persuaded that, oh, well, of course this
could
have happened—not here, not now, but in the right circumstances, maybe, it
would
have happened. It doesn’t always treat the quirk as an awkward untruth—a threat to suspension-of-disbelief that must be sugar-coated to be sold, with immersive artifice or reasoned argument.

To illustrate, let’s try another alternative narrative:

There was an old woman in Peru, ’52.

She had so many children she didn’t know what to do.

She gave them some broth without any bread.

She joined the revolt and replaced the State’s Head.

And another future narrative:

There was an old woman in Mars City 2.

She had so many children she didn’t know what to do.

She gave them some broth and chips in the head.

She ripped their meme-patterns, installed them in Teds.

As you can see, the counterfactual premise of the alternative narrative is presented right up-front, and pretty much composes the entirety of the story, but it’s hardly a product of extensive research into the socio-political situation in Peru in the 1950s, po
ssible revolutionary factions, and events and actions which might have led to the deposing of the government of the day. And the future narrative is hardly notable for the less-than-rigourous science underpinning speculations on the viability of Martian colonies, robotics as toys, and the potential translation of human thought-patterns into other media so they can be made to persist outside the human flesh. Neither of these narratives seeks to establish its authenticity.

In those two examples, the disjunction should be obvious between, on the one hand, alternative narrative and
Alternate History
, and on the other hand, future narrative and
Hard SF
. The sort of alternative narrative which simply changes the past and tells a story in that altered setting (
The Man in the High Castle
?
The Plot Against America
?) is quite distinct from the type of
Alternate History
which pivots on theory and speculation regarding (often military) courses of particular events. The same holds for future narratives and
Hard SF
. In the latter example there’s not even the slightest effort at justifying the quirks as solid supposition.

But given that it’s essentially a four-line story, why would we want to bloat the poem up with the infodump of explication anyway? Is it any less functio
nal as a future narrative? And, hell, in the first example, rather than leaving out all the specificity of dates, peoples and places necessary to rationalise a counterfactual coup, I could have (with a few problems of rhyme and scansion) simply substituted Ruritania for Peru and still had what is fundamentally an alternative narrative. In
The Prisoner of Zenda
there is not even the remotest attempt to explicate the scenario as premised.