Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions (38 page)

We rile at the response of the incognoscenti, but that handwave of dismissal—I don’t really like
Sci-Fi
—that unconsidered condescension that sends many a genre kid into waves of apoplexy is not hard to figure, really. What they’re saying is,
I’m just not looking for a handjob
. Skeezy strip joints, clip joints, lurid neon signs of dragons wrapped round dancing girls, cock rockets firing for the skies, the streets of Genre are a gauntlet of gaudy promises—CHEAP THRILLS! CHEAP THRILLS! CHEAP THRILLS! Come and get it, baby, every corner of the ghetto proclaims.

—No thanks, they say. I don’t really like
Sci-Fi
. I’m not looking for cheap thrills. And a penicillin shot.

Our faces burn, our fists clench, when those hoity-toity literati cock their snoots and roll their eyes at our protests that this is arrant prejudice. Cheap thrills? Fuck you, as
swipe. But you know, we’re really sorta standing there, in our red leather miniskirt or our denim cut-offs, saying, Hey! I’m not a whore. I’m not a hustler. I’m a professional masseuse! We’re wearing our mother’s hip-hugging skirt, baby, our big brother’s butt-snuggling cut-offs, and most of the time we
are
promising thrills, the sensationalism of sense-of-wonder, a fiction driven not just by the incredible but by the marvellous, the
shoulda
in that
coulda shoulda woulda been
, whether it’s dragons or Dyson spheres. We are the slatternly faggot sons and legs-akimbo slut daughters of a whore mother and the patchwork monstrosity that is Frankenstein’s mob, hookers and hustlers just like Momma was and every bit as insatiable as our innumerable dollar-dishing daddies. And it’s time we made our peace with that.

Sure, if we do pick up some incognoscenti on some metaphoric corner, if we get them back to our ghetto crib and that
Modern Pulp
heritage all too suddenly rears its heads—
Sci-Fi
, you say?—well, we can shove the parents in the closet, slam the door behind us, and shout over our hidden horror’s thumps and protests: “It’s not
Sci-Fi
! It’s science fiction! It’s SF! It’s speculative fiction! We can be literary too, damn it! Don’t you oppress me with your elitism!” They’re just gonna blink uncomfortably at our sudden irrational hostility, at our strange unfathomable defensiveness. At the really loud cry of “I am
Sci-Fi
! Hear me roar!” coming from that closet behind us.

—So what’s with the crack-whore pimp-daddy beast of a thousand cocks in the closet? they say.

—Not us, we say. We’re with Mary Shelley and Jules Verne, H.G. Wells and George Orwell. We’re a class act, baby. And it’s only ten bucks to go around the block with us. Just give us a try and you’ll see!

—A warehouse ninja gig thing, you say? A rave with performance art on the dance floor and a salon of literary discourse in the chill room?

—Totally! We just give our tickets to the guy in the sex shop, and he’ll let us round back, past the toilets and the back-room poker game, downstairs to the basement S&M dungeon and…why are you looking at me like that? Like I’m trying to finagle you into a clip joint?

And they back away slowly…baaaack away slowly.

—Maybe we could just go for a burger? you shout after them. I know this great little joint called the SF Café.

Not that we can persuade them there either.

Cut:

A White Whale Which is God

An even more subtle metaphysical conceit might or might not be found in
Moby-Dick
, depending on how far we read the White Whale as a metaphor of the divine—God or Leviathan, God-
as
-Leviathan—a theme bolstered by the naming of Ahab and Ishmael, and the heightened Biblical quality to much of the prose. There is a deep sense of strangeness to Melville’s novel, a sense that the events are incredible, that the whale is not just metaphorically but literally Ahab’s divinely-ordained nemesis, a chimera. But does that conceit require a displacement to a fictive elsewhen? Such a displacement is possible but not necessary. It’s possible to read the White Whale as a metaphysical force, not just a real-world whale but an actual representative of Fortune, Providence, God. But at the same time, it’s not required. The crucial question is whether the symbolic feel does or does not sever us from a subjunctivity of “could have happened.”

For me the answer is “not quite.” It reminds me of Thomas Hardy’s use of Providence or Fortune, or of the Greek idea of hubris and nemesis, but this seems quite in keeping with the Providentialist metaphysics of the time Me
lville was writing. Coming to it from outside that Providentialist context you could argue that it
now
reads as taking place in a different metaphysical elsewhen (which raises all sorts of issues about whose metaphysics we’re using as the starting point), one where the divine manifests itself through actions and synchronicities. The level of synchronicity and manifest meaning Melville offers us, however, is within the parameters of his idiom. Which is to say, Melville doesn’t breach the suspension-of-disbelief any more radically than Hardy, Dickens or any number of contemporaries. This may only be to say that the mythic, even for these “realist” writers, is not entirely disallowed in favour of the mundane, that it bleeds into their work just as the absurd and the monstrous do (together, for example, in the form of Dickens’s grotesques).

The distinction I’m trying to draw here is between works which simply ut
ilise a different metaphysics and those which knowingly and deliberately breach suspension-of-disbelief with a chimera—i.e. with a quirk that is accepted as contrary to the metaphysics of the writer (and, the writer presumes, the reader) but which is entertained for its significance. It is a slim distinction, but there is a point where literary techniques of coincidence, synchronicity, foreshadowing, etc. (which can be quite over-the-top in novelists of that Providentialist period but were, to all intents and purposes, par for the course) become substantive and integrated, crystallised and emboldened into the metaphysical conceits which give us the mythic narrative.

Here’s the thing: Ultimately, if
Moby-Dick
pushes us to the limits of suspension-of-disbelief, it does so in a way that is as tragic as it is mythic. The White Whale is as terrible as it is incredible, more so, and Ahab himself a figure of terror and pity. The whole novel is more the story of Ahab’s self-destruction than it’s an exploration of a chimera, the metaphysical conceit of a White Whale Which is God. But it’s interesting that a lot of strange fiction readers and writers connect with Melville’s book, sense a kindred spirit in it, and I’d suggest that this connection is because it does something we recognise. What it is doing, or what we are reading it as doing, if we see the White Whale as an actual avatar of divine nemesis, is offering us a build-up of these quirks—Queequeg in his coffin like the reverend of
If…
, Ahab’s summoning of St Elmo’s fire, the sea itself as a strange realm of what Farah Mendlesohn terms the portal-quest—to an eventual crisis of strangeness that reads as mythic.

Cut:

The Kipple Foodstuff Factory sits at the heart of the ghetto of Genre, spewing out noxious fumes from its blackened brick chimneys, spewing out poisonous effluvia into the river from its rusted iron waste-pipes, spewing out lorry-loads of processed and packaged foodstuffs to be delivered to every café, bar and diner in the ghetto. Built in the first half of the twentieth century, it introduced the city to the very idea of junk food. Burgers, fried chicken, fish-n-chips, kebabs, you name it, the KFF created an entire industry in its boom; and it’s still churning out its own brand of schlock, though it’s been in competition now for over half a century with the countless cooks (and capitalists) who, as employees, tweaked its recipes (and recipes for success) until the shoddiness was just too much and they just had to strike out on their own.

You can get a far better burger than a KFF schlockburger these days, from any number of soul food entrepreneurs. It’s hard to get worse. The Kipple Foodstuff Factory gets its raw resources from the city dump and the sewers, essentially reconstituting shit into schlock, a sort of pseudo-meat one step away from Soylent Green. (And the right colour for it, if undercooked, to the extent that KFF Burgers were affectionately dubbed “boogers” at the gastr
onaut conventions of the 1950s, a monicker that spread to burgers in general and has persisted to this very day in public parlance.) But the Mob seems to have a thing for KFF products, rich as they are in crack cocaine, and nobody in the restaurant business wants to piss off the Mob, so the owners of eateries across the city serve those KFF schlock products, regardless of the fact that they have zero nutritional value and highly variable toxicity levels; hey, if it keeps the Mob happy…

As loath as we might be to admit it, they serve those boogers in the SF Café, and people buy them by the shitload, the glopping gruel of extruded pulp, thickened to solidity with gosh-wow technotoys and adolescent geekwank, pure formula fare. That’s not all that’s on the menu, of course, not by any means. The fry cooks down here in the ghetto of Genre are every bit as skilled as many a master chef in the uptown bistros of Literature. From the basic i
ngredients through to the methods of preparation, their cuisine has little in common with the dreck of mass-extruded KFF products even though it shares a menu. You won’t find those production-line values here, no design-by-committee-and-focus-group, no franchise bullshit. The best and the brightest—even the middling and mediocre—are often working without a recipe, or at very least playing fast and loose with various recipes, getting creative with the classics.

There are real burgers here too, then, burgers that are made by hand—made to a rec
ipe as old as the hills, for sure, and hardly haute cuisine, but an honest kind of junk food that puts the extruded KFF shit to shame even when we’re talking patties of the crudest kind, adventures in space shaped by subtexts of neo-fascist wish-fulfilment, cleverly-crafted thought experiments revealing only some poor scribbler’s utter incomprehension of human behaviour. Asimov’s cardboard characters. Heinlein’s descent into didactic drivel. We’re not talking Michelin stars, baby. But at its best, this is our soul food. It’s seldom just a burger, really. It’s a cheese’n’bacon-burger or a chiliburger. Pepper and onions ground in with the beef. Big chunks of jalapeño in the chilli. Refried beans on the side. It’s a burger with an extra kick, an extra tang that grabs you by the taste buds, tells you someone actually put a bit of effort into making this hit the spot.

There’s even some crazy fusion going on in the SF Café kitchen, real cordon bleu cu
isine that in a different context might be labelled “culinary cooking” (like, yanno, “literary fiction”). In the SF Café you’ll find quirks filched from
Fantasy
,
Horror
,
Western
,
Noir
, you name it, all cooked up daily, just as fresh and just as spicy as the Pomo Chilli of the Bistro de Critique. The chefs in both kitchens apply the same grab-bag approach to writing, where anything and everything might be thrown into the mix. Hell, the ingredients of that Pomo Chilli—nanotech, spaceships, remote viewing, future dystopias, Lovecraftian gods, Sumerian mythology, climate change, robots, aliens, hard-bitten detectives, historical characters, and so on—they learned that shit from us. We cannibalise the bona fide pulp fiction of every fucking
Genre
around. SF as it stands now is a crazy cuisine of countless forms and flavours.

Down at the greasy spoon SF Café there’s lots of tasty fast food on the menu. Soul food or
Savoury Food
or speculative fusion—it has a lot of names. The KFF boogers are sold as take-out from a little window in the front, but walk inside the door and you’ll be hard-pushed to find a single patron actually eating that crap. We all know better. You’ll find a whole fucking lot of them eating burgers rather than steak tartare, but that’s hardly surprising. And the tournedos Rossini can hardly be called unpopular. That’s the stuff we really rate, of course, not junk food at all, but fine fare that we know the literati of the Bistro de Critique would be jealous of…if they would ever deign to taste it.

Still, it’s little wonder those incognoscenti are resistant when we try to coax them down to the SF Café, tempt them with the treats in store; cause there’s a motherfucking massive KFF franchise sign in neon outside, lit up night and day. And it’s little wonder our insistence on the glories of the menu doesn’t shatter the shackles of prejudice and lead nay-sayers into the light; ’cause in our insistence that there’s
Sci-Fi
and there’s proper SF, that there’s boogers and proper burgers, somewhere along the way, somehow, it seems we’ve become…a little over-zealous in abjuring the soul food with the schlockburgers. ’Cause God forbid anyone confuse what we call SF, what we call burgers, with the junk it was born from and still shares a menu with.

Cut:

To Be Written as a Palimpsest

Science fiction represents the modern heresy and the cutting edge of speculative imagination as it grapples with Mysterious Time—linear or non-linear time.

Frank Herbert

How then do we reconcile this mythic narrative with alternative and future narratives, the chimerae with the errata and nova?

The mythic narratives of the past, written in worlds where geography was as undeveloped as history and science, generally apply a comparable technique of spatial dislocation rather than temporal dislocation; the laws of nature need not apply everywhere, so travel far enough from home and one might well find chimeric inhabitants of chimeric realms. So, in Sumer, we get the Heaven of Anu visited by Adapa, situated in the sky, and we get the Kur of Ereshkigal visited by Inanna, situated in the earth; we get the underground source of all fresh-water springs in the Abzu of Enki, we get Dilmun as the same deity’s Edenic island (possibly modern-day Bahrain), and we get the remote lands visited by Gilgamesh, the sacred Cedar Forest of the giant Humbaba, and the valley of the sunrise where Atrahasis lives, guarded by scorpion-men. In Greece we get the underground netherworlds of Hades and Tartarus, Hyperborea in the farthest North, the Hesperides in the farthest West. And so on.

In the context of the times, whether we understand them as literal or sy
mbolic theories, these alterior landscapes can be considered hypothetical conceits of geography rather than technology, foreign elsewheres rather than future elsewhens, beyond the known world just as the future narrative is beyond known science. In the cosmology Christianity inherits from Jewish apocrypha, we find this notion of metaphysical elsewheres systematised and abstracted into seven heavens above, seven hells below and seven earths between them, a multiverse of alterior realms. The idea that these realms constitute afterlives, and the disjunctions from our temporal world that this creates (to eat the food in most is to be bound there forever), is abstracted to the Eternity of a God beyond time itself (and yet existing in his own linear process of time—thinking, acting). In its purest articulation the spatial dislocation becomes that of
inside
and
outside
, the Great Below and the Great Above of Inanna reformulated as the Deep Within and the Great Beyond, the immanent and the transcendent. The Outer Space of these narratives is Outer Time.

These geographical elsewheres, then, converge with ideas of temporal c
ycles, such as the Greek idea of the Golden Age, the Hopi and Maya ideas of the “Fifth World,” or the Ragnarök of Norse myth which implicitly positions the world of the Aesir before ours via the survival of the Völsungar as ancestors of humanity. With the mythic narratives of many cultures, built from the errata that are yet to become known history in the hands of Herodotus and suchlike, there is often a sense of a discrete Age of Myth, an age of gods and demigods and giants walking the earth. The very beginning of the world, in cosmogonies such as that of Hesiod, is posited as a process of generational development—Ocean and Chaos begetting Day and Night, Earth and Sky, and so on, the ordering of reality as the laying down of strata of (meta)physical principles. In these cosmogonies creation is evolution, the accretion of complexity as the (meta)physical features of the world develop from the basics of darkness and light to the intricacy of living beings. Each day is an utterance, an iteration of the cycle, laying down a sedimental strata of form upon the cosmos.

The Deluge is perhaps the most significant symbol in this context, an e
mblem of the cleaning of the slate that separates a primal era (emergent from chaos and therefore containing the chimera
of
that chaos) from the latter-day known world, this world with its strangeness expunged in the transition from prototype to product. The Deluge is a scouring of the vellum upon which reality has been sketched out in rough forms, from first principles, in preparation for the narrative of our world to be written as a palimpsest over that which came before, cleanly delineated in bold ink, consistent and complete. Here, in this positing of a before-time, we see something akin to the common conceptualisation of fantasy realms as set in a cycle of time before our own, a history before history.

Compare Delany’s portrayal of and proposed translations for the name of his pre-historical fantasy realm,
Nevèrÿon
—”across never,” “across when,” “a distant once,” “across the river,” “far never,” or “far when”—the way they point not just to distance in time but to a partitioning of time (and by water). Parse the term
metaphysical
itself into its root morphemes—the Greek root
meta-
originally meaning “with” or “after,” but now often used to mean “beyond” or “above,” to convey a sense of a
higher order
. Compare our notions of
higher planes
of existence, the
super
natural, the
profound
(from the Latin
fundus
, meaning “the bottom,” “the deep”), the
urgrund
(ur-ground) as a base substratum.

Bring together these fragmentary articulations of a root metaphor from a modern context in which the world is a ball in space and our orientation d
efined by gravity, and the interior/exterior relationship of one model becomes equivalent to the up/down relationship of the other. I am not suggesting that this is how the ancients actually conceived of the metaphysical relationship between their known world and the alterior sphere(s) of divine order, but I am suggesting this as a logical extension of the proposed model: that in the face of chimerae, we re-orient ourselves, parse our estrangement as a conceptual dislocation in what we might think of as a third temporal dimension—an
up-down
axis of time orthogonal to the
forward-back
and
side-to-side
axes of the dislocations associated with the novum and the erratum; that we can conceptualise the metaphysically alterior world as an elsewhen with no more difficulty than that involved in imagining the elsewhen of a future or parallel world.

Cut: