Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions (37 page)

The truth is, there’s already plenty of strange fiction out there getting the kudos—like Rushdie’s
Midnight’s Children
winning the Booker of Bookers. McCarthy’s
The Road
winning the Pulitzer. It’s just that the absence of the label means these works aren’t punted down into that rabbit hole of pulp, hidden in the darks of paraliterature. It’s just they don’t languish in our little warren of a marketing niche. It’s just that a writer has to eschew the stigma of category fiction if they want a shot at the dicky-bow ceremony with champagne and hors d’oeuvres; they gotta ditch the emo makeup if they want to be made dux. No shit. Does it matter? If that
Times Online
list is anything to go by, they can just do whatever the fuck they want, and when the dust has settled, like as not, they’ll be valued for what they are anyway.

In the meantime…?

In the SF Café, the day after the time traveller’s arrival at the Bistro de Critique, our librarian sits with her comrades, playing devil’s advocate, as they bitch about not getting invites to the uptown cocktail parties. What do they expect, after all? There’s a whole lot of dross in the darks of the warren that is Genre.

—Hell, she says, we recognise the formulaic product for what it is, every time we segregate it out in an argument with an outsider, every time they di
smiss the whole field with a reference to some heinous example of Hollywood wank and we shake our heads. No, we say, that’s not proper science fiction. That’s
Sci-Fi
. Do you seriously think they’re ever going to get that?

We can’t ignore the gaping disjunction between the formulaic product with its car
dboard characters and prefab plots, between the potboiled pulp and the solid SF, the works that take
Genre
by the balls, squeeze hard and say, “We play by my rules.” We talk proudly of our
genre fiction
, but where we diss the formula fare as
generic
, we’re tacitly acknowledging that the good stuff is good because it treats
Genre
as its bitch. It takes a sledgehammer to the formulae, tears pulp into bits, chews it up, spews it out in huge spitballs to be sculpted into extraordinary forms. And we’re acknowledging that the bad stuff doesn’t. Then we’re surprised that shilling shit with our shinola gives us a bad rep.

We live in the ghetto of pulp fiction, but disown it even as we do, playing the same game as our highbrow, high-society nemeses of the Bistro de Cr
itique, with our very own version of their Catch-22, an irrational “We-like-it-so-it-must-be-SF” rule. They say, if it’s SF, it must be bad; if it’s good, it’s not SF. We say the same of
Sci-Fi
; it’s just that where it meets our standards of quality control we use the phrase
proper science fiction
instead of
proper literature
. Every movie or TV show we dismiss as
Sci-Fi
—is that really so different from some straw literatus insisting that William Burroughs was a Beatnik writing experimental fiction rather than some SF scribbler? We can bitch about Atwood denying that she writes science fiction, but is this really that different from an SF writer insisting that what they write isn’t
Sci-Fi
?

—So no SF novel has ever won the Booker, says the librarian. So innume
rable works of SF that stand on a par with
Catch-22
fail to garner the kudos they deserve because they’re tainted by the stigma of
Genre
. So maybe it’s time for us to reverse the polarities, think the unthinkable, speak the unspeakable, say: They’re right, you know.
Genre
equals generic equals formulation. So maybe we shouldn’t call it genre. Maybe we shouldn’t call it SF. If the label is empty, do we need it?

If the great works of SF are lumped in with crud that shares, at most, some superficial features with it, in the same way that a John Wayne flick shares superficial features with
Catch-22
, it’s no surprise it doesn’t get the plaudits. Maybe it’s time we stopped burrowing down to hide the best of SF in the bunny warren of tunnels under the SF Café. Maybe the day’s coming when those strange fictions can just stand upright, walk out across the field and be met with dropped jaws and awed silence. Foxes turn tail and run. Farmers piss their pants in fear: My God, that book walks on its hind legs; that ain’t like no bunny I’ve ever seen!

I mean, we can bitch about the Booker and the Bistro de Critique, but it don’t mean squat if we’re doing it from our hidey-holes, safe and sound in the delusion that we are and will ever be this little paraliterary thing called
genre fiction
. A
genre fiction
marked out by the fact it uses one particular tool—the quirk—marked out by the fact that it doesn’t limit itself by excluding that tool, the way the genres of
Realism
do. I gotta say, I’m not seeing that strange-fictional approach as in the weaker position here, binding itself with injunctions that narrow its scope with every strategy rejected. Far as I can see, the SF I’m talking about doesn’t essentially reject any strategy. Like a lot of those works in the period stretching back from Huxley to Homer, I reckon, it doesn’t see any fucking reason to.

Which seems a fairly natural approach to me, I gotta say. I mean, how e
xactly does using every fucking tool in the box not constitute the default condition of fiction? So we’ve had some fifty-odd years in which the realistas kept their shell game going, more or less, doing their best to sell the absence of the strange in their fiction as a marker of their serious chops. Meh. Give it a few decades and we’ll see how the kitchen sink holds up against a fiction as fucked-up as our reality.

—Bollocks to the bunny warren, says our librarian. The ghetto is our past, but the whole fucking city is our future.

Good news for you, good sirs, that I am no longer Don Quixote of La Mancha, but Alonso Quixano, whose way of life won for him the name of Good. Now am I the enemy of Amadis of Gaul and of the whole countless troop of his descendants; odious to me now are all the profane stories of knight-errantry; now I perceive my folly, and the peril into which reading them brought me; now, by God’s mercy schooled into my right senses, I loathe them.

Miguel de Cervantes,
Don Quixote

So here I find myself, a ghetto kid in the city of New Sodom, sitting in the SF Café, drinking my black coffee as I scribble and scratch, slice and stitch, trying to make some sense of the turf wars and textual tricks. Here I find myself, somewhere after Delany and Disch, seeing a power in the very language of this stuff I call strange fiction, but seeing no small reason why that power might be damned to ignominy, saying:

—F’r sure, no SF novel has ever won the Booker. Yeah? And? So? What? Has any
Crime
novel ever won the Booker? Has any
Romance
? Has any
Western
? Let’s simplify it: Has any work in any
Genre
of extruded formulaic pabulum you care to name ever won the Booker? Has any work in any
Genre
born of the fricking pulps, in any commercial marketing category specifically designed to target a niche with a promise of generic factory-line junk fiction ever won the Booker?

This is fuck all to do with an antipathy to strange fiction—that fiction born in the breaches of reality, be it fantasia or futurology (or both, or neither, for that matter).
Midnight’s Children
. Booker of Bookers. Join the fucking dots. No, this is about junk fiction, about pulp fiction. So no novel with the tramp stamp of a
Genre
on its back ever won the Booker?

No shit.

The middlebrow, middle-class literati of the Bistro de Critique aren’t about to invite a bunch of crack-addled whores and hustlers in red leather miniskirts or denim cut-offs to their cocktail parties. Just ’cause we all know the ghetto chic stylings and those who wear them well enough to tell the bohos from the hobos, don’t expect the incognoscenti to. We see Tiptree-winning transvestite performance artists; they see tramp-stamped tarts in the leopardskin print of thrift shop drag. They see the bad rep that the ghetto has for a reason—because business is done on the street corners, johns passing through in their cars, pulling over at a painted face—pancake makeup gaucher than a 1970s cover illustration of Gully Foyle’s tattoos. You have to be a regular down here to know that the guy or gal leaning in the driver’s window, batting long black eyelashes as they barter, isn’t promising the sort of good time that a stranger might expect them to be.

—Best mindfuck you’ll ever have, baby, they’re saying.

In truth, as we know, they’re touting tickets for some whacked-out warehouse ninja gig with Warhol on the light show, Dallesandro dancing, Old Bill Burroughs croaking his crazed junkie rap over the beats. They’re selling the address of a secret spectacle designed to blow your mind, but there’s no way to know that unless you hang down here by habit. If you’re just passing through, baby, all you see is another hustler climbing into some kerb-crawler’s car, being driven off towards a sordid handjob in an alley somewhere out of sight.

Another book with a spaceship or a dragon on the cover, bought and sold, a few bucks for a shallow buzz.

—Hey, big boy, the next streetwalker says to yer passing member of the incognoscenti. I’ll show you a good time.

—No thanks, says they with a discernible disdain and a wave of the hand. I don’t rea
lly like
Sci-Fi
.

Cut to a lecture in the SF Café:

The Metaphysical and the Mythic

If we turn to the fourth narrative mode in Lake’s taxonomy, the fiction of nomological quirks, we get to the root of idea that there’s a qualitative difference between SF, which deals with science (the possible), and fantasy, which deals with magic (the impossible). In this model, fantasy is equated totally with a
mythic
narrative distinct from alternative / future narratives as that which involves nomological rather than temporal impossibilities, not erratum or novum but chimera.

In alternative / future narratives there is a synthetic elsewhen offered to r
esolve the “could not have happened” subjunctivity level by displacement forward or sideways in time (“could not have happened
now
”), but with the mythic narrative there seems, at first sight, to be no such get-out clause. Where the nova or errata are largely temporal impossibilities, the quirks of mythic narrative are
nomological
impossibilities, events which entirely contradict the laws of nature. In Delany’s theory of genre he describes the subjunctivity level of fantasy as “could never happen” (his naming of the city of Nevèrÿon, indeed, seems quite significant in this context), and this seems to be an apt description of the mythic narrative as Lake outlines it.

However, we have already noted the fact that many of SF’s quirks are also metaphys
ical aka nomological impossibilities, events that breach the laws of nature; they are chimerae masked as nova. We’ve also noted (albeit implicitly) that the quirks of works classed as fantasy may be far subtler than a crescent sun, hell, may be even subtler than jaunting or FTL, as with the example of Peake’s
Titus Groan
where the nomological impossibility is so subtle as to be almost not-there. The castle of Gormenghast is big. It is
incredibly
big, so big that it may well evoke a sense of incredulity, the alethic modality of “could not have happened,” so big that one has to wonder if it could actually support its own weight against gravity. But this chimera of an edifice is the nearest that this fantasy novel comes to “magic,” in the quirk of the castle, in the conceit of a reality which can support such marvellous/monstrous scales of construction.

Still the distinction is there. The elsewhen of
Titus Groan
isn’t a parallel reality, based on a counterfactual where one upper-class family isolated themselves in a mansion, which just grew bigger and more self-contained over centuries. Nor is it a future reality based on a hypothetical where the class system has been extrapolated to a post-technological environment of grandiose decay. It’s more of a metaphysical dislocation we get with the novel, a sense that this world is somehow run on a less complex set of rules than our own. This world is simpler, more basic. The nomology it exhibits is more crudely functional, one that has abandoned the limitations and equations of engineering that would rule out a castle of such immense size. If we can step forward or sideways to elsewhen, we can also—

Cut: