Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions (41 page)

Night in the city of New Sodom. A librarian sits in the SF Café, looking out on the ghetto of Genre. The whole place has become a little chi-chi over the years, beatnik artists moving in above the brothels and the crack dens. Might almost forget it’s the ghetto, if that avant-garde street theatre troupe out on Mass Market Square didn’t blend in with the hookers and hustlers, make it all look like just one big sensual experience for sale. And whenever she swings by the Bistro de Critique, friends shudder at where she hangs:
That dive?
The librarian takes this in her stride. There’s no point whining about your area being badmouthed when your next door neighbour runs a crack house and, well, you do like a bit of a puff on the old hash pipe now and then.

A status update scrolls across the lenses of her mayashades: epistemic m
odality detected—
is not happening
. Curious. This is meant to be non-fiction, she knows, reportage. She can suspend her disbelief, pretend an epistemic modality of
is happening
is at play here—just as she would with any fictive narrative in present tense—but it’s unsettling to realise she’s just a figurative device. But hey ho.

Hey ho indeed. Fact is, Genre is a dirty and disreputable part of town but it’s that way for a reason, and at the end of the day, the librarian kinda likes it. This is a place where freaks and weirdos feel at home. The bars here are more fun. The rent is cheap. And Mass Market Square is way more dynamic, exci
ting, and relevant than the uptown galleries full of middle-class bores clinking champagne glasses and droning on about how jejune the latest wunderkind is really, darling, just so trite, really, overhyped. There’s a trade-off between the social stigma and squalid trappings of the Genre ghetto and the freedom that it gives to work outside the tight-ass strictures of “proper literature” which until recently also meant the tight-ass strictures of
Contemporary Realism
.

Until recently. A change is in the air.

She looks out at the Kipple Foodstuff Factory that dominates the skyline, but sees also, through her mayashades, hints of a future screamed of by a time-traveller in the Bistro de Critique—the fallen walls of the ghetto, gourmet guerrillas from the slums pouring out into the city. And beyond maybe.

As a traveller once, she remembers walking into a Japanese restaurant in a little town in North Carolina. Cool, she thought. Japanese: miso soup; temp
ura; ramen; noodles hot and spicy; tang-rich food to make your taste buds tingle. But no. No miso soup on the menu here. Swear to Cunt what you had was:

Beef in soy sauce with rice.

Prawns in soy sauce with rice.

Chicken in soy sauce with rice.

Beef & Chicken in soy sauce with rice.

Prawns & Beef in soy sauce with rice.

Chicken & Prawns in soy sauce with rice.

Or, hey, wow, the Special…

Beef & Chicken & Prawns in soy sauce with rice.

Fucking awesome.

Here now, in a booth of the SF Café, she sips the miso soup she couldn’t get that day. The exact miso soup she couldn’t get that day. It’s a quirk, you see, a little rupture in the mimetic weft of her mundane narrative, the stream of stuff that she’s pretending is ha
ppening. This now…this is an event that could not be happening. Fuck the epistemic modality; this is alethic modality we’re talking now, not factuality but possibility.

She could be sitting in a booth, looking out a window, but to be sipping the actual miso soup she couldn’t get that day, here now at midnight in the SF C
afé…that’s an impossibility of level…what? She’s not sure if it’s known history, known science, the laws of nature, or the strictures of logic itself that have been ripped apart to drag that miso soup out from the nowhere to the here now.

Frankly, she doesn’t give a fuck what level impossibility it is though. She’s got miso soup at midnight and it’s fucking tasty.

The librarian jaunts.

Figurae Generated and Combined

In this 3D-time model of counterfactual, hypothetical and metaphysical co
nceits, the inclusion of one type of conceit does not preclude the inclusion of one or both of the others; any potential combination is available. Stephen Fry’s
Making History
offers us the classic combo of novum and erratum in the invention of a time-machine that allows the prevention of Hitler’s birth. Philip K. Dick’s
The Man in the High Castle
skips the novum, simply positing a counterfactual reality in which the Nazis won WW2; the introduction of the
I Ching
as a tool for divination, however, presents the reader with a metaphysical quirk, a chimera. In Bester’s
The Stars My Destination
, the jaunting is another such chimera, a magical ability to wish oneself elsewhere presented alongside the hypotheticals of space travel, asteroid mining and so on. Where proponents of
Hard SF
argue that the inclusion of magic in a narrative renders it fantasy rather than SF, this is a prescriptive application of the label that does not map to the field, many of the most respected works in the canon, in truth, being profligate in their mixing of quirks.

In this model, it is not that certain tropes (dragons, FTL, etc.) function as i
ngredients that suddenly transform the genre of a narrative (to
Fantasy
or SF) just by being dropped into it. Nor, for that matter, do we suddenly transform the genre of the narrative again (to SF or
Fantasy
) if we only add or subtract another ingredient of plausibility. Essentially, in the model of strange fiction based on shifts in narrative modality, we are reversing the polarity, treating those “contents” (errata, nova and chimerae) as the end results of a literary technique of estrangement, the
effects
of strangeness rather than the
cause
. These quirks—dragons, spaceships, magic, FTL—are not things which, in and of themselves, make fiction strange. Rather they are the epiphenomena of an underlying process of semiosis, figurae generated and combined to create meaning, gaining their symbolic power by their application. Genre is not a question of which trove of tropes one uses, of a characteristic set of quirks; rather it is a quality emergent from the underlying dynamics of modalities, the nature of the impossibilities and our affective responses to them—the uncertainties and ethical imperatives too, if we include epistemic and deontic quirks in our scope along with the alethic and boulomaic.

A simple analogy would be to map this 3D time idea to the trinity of prim
ary colours—red, yellow and blue—not simply as shades in their own right, in their purest forms, but as the dimensional qualities which define the shades we encounter on a painter’s palette. The private narrative sticks to the muted tones of charcoal-and-chalk, painting its picture of “things as they are” in subtle shades of grey. The strange narrative may splatter glaringly gaudy primary colours in the centre of the canvas—counterfactual red, hypotheticals yellow, metaphysical blue—but it may also work in combinatory mixtures of those primary colours—oranges and greens and purples. Most shades of strange fiction might even be “natural” colours—ochres and umbers and ambers rather than the bold primary pigments of a child’s paint pots. Or coppers and golds and silvers as much distinct for their
sheen
as for their
shade
. The division between SF and fantasy is about as sensible at times as a division in an art gallery between “Orange” landscapes (
Sunset in the Desert IV
) and “Blue” landscapes (
Winter Ocean at Night, Moonlit VII
), the science/magic distinction between SF and fantasy as superficial as the colour of the foil in which the writer’s name is embossed on the cover of a tatty paperback sat on a table by a bowl of miso soup.

We imagine genres as delimited by formal strictures—like the sonnet’s fou
rteen lines and volta. This need not equate to formulation any more than Oulipo constraints do, but we can’t deny it does. As the librarian looks out on the Kipple Foodstuff Factory, she’s looking at the impact of mass-production in the twentieth century, the pulp boom that was built on formulation. All of the genres boxed and shipped as category fiction did become codified with strictures of form by which more of the same could be churned out, schlockburgers made to recipe from Soylent Brown.

(Soylent Brown? It ain’t people, but it comes from them.)

Still, from the start there was an insatiable demand for ongoing détournement, soon even the bricolage of tropes stolen from
Western
,
Noir
,
Romance
, and who knows what else, the result a hydra-headed hybrid of formulae—the collage, homage, pastiche and parody cooked up by the likes of Farmer and Moorcock, yes? We imagine this to be what makes the menu in the SF Café so peachy keen: New Wave Chilli; Cyberpunk Pad Thai; New Weird Rogan Josh; New Space Opera Bolognese. We imagine it’s the ceaseless recombination of recipes.

The librarian glances at the menu on the window that don’t have none of them fancy foreign words. All it says is:

1) SF Special Hamburger (However You Want It)

2) Fantasy Special Fried Chicken (Just How You Ask)

The librarian can’t remember if she ordered the miso soup she couldn’t get that day in North Carolina as a Number One or a Number Two. It doesn’t really matter to her, not half as much as the local rag’s food critic at the next booth over, who just described his coq au vin as “transcending the genre.”

Every time we use the phrase “transcends the genre,” she knows, we surre
nder to the corollary of positing genre on formal strictures—that our fiction essentially made to formulae must become other than itself to become good. We invite the literati of the Bistro de Critique to sneer, as if we were poets touting our sonnets as “genre poetry,” trite doggerel made to the fourteen lines and one volta formula unless—aha!—one sonnet throws off its shackles, transcends those strictures, becomes great. It is a vacuous valorisation of novelty over substance to imagine a missing line or an extra volta is what makes a sonnet great. It’s also wrong, an insult to the genre that fails to understand—to write a sonnet should be to eschew formulation anyway.

This is how
genre
becomes a dirty word, indeed, how it comes to carry the stench of puked up schlockburgers, overflowing the gutters, filthing the sidewalks, trodden underfoot and carried everywhere we walk. How can we bitch about the snootcockers of the Bistro de Critique when we ourselves laud our exemplary works as rising on adamantium pinions, unchained from the Augean mire we’ve made. Behold the dark horse, loosed from stables of writers shitting!

For the love of Cock, she thinks, we hail the works of Aeschylus and Euri
pides as Greek Tragedy. We don’t extol them as transcending genre, as if to write a Greek Tragedy back in the day would obviously have been derivative hackwork.

A Glint of Hypothetical Gold

It is possible to apply broad taxonomies based on the tonal qualities impar
ted by an artist’s palette: This artist does not just use red and yellow, we might find; they use counterfactuals of copper leaf, hypotheticals of gold foil, seeking to suggest the sun and all its solar symbolism of day, of the noon world shown crisp in the shining light of reason. This other artist does not just use blue, we might find; they use metaphysicals of silver, seeking to suggest the moon and all its lunar symbolism of night, of a dark world picked out in the low light of mystery. We have a whole culture of cross-wired metaphors to tell us how these aesthetics are so deeply distinct. SF is golden, solar, masculine, scientific.
Fantasy
is silver, lunar, feminine, magical.

How does an artist like Bradbury fit into this dichotomy though? Where do we place “The Veldt”? At first glance, this seems a simple work of Golden Age SF, our eye catching a glint of hypothetical gold in the holodeck pla
yroom of the children; but as we are drawn into Bradbury’s painting we see hints of metaphysical silver slowly building until, as we step back to look at the whole picture properly, we realise that the playroom is far more of a chimera than a novum. As the lions come to life, devour the parents (the playroom a monstrum now as well as a chimera), we realise that if we have been taken one step “forward” into the future we have also had the floor drop out from under us, fallen one step “down” into a different type of elsewhen.

Ultimately, the shared dislocatory effect which underpins these narratives unifies all the disparate forms into a single field of strange fictions, the quirk that creates that effect the nearest thing we’ll find to the sonnet’s “fourteen lines and a volta.” There are negot
iated (and renegotiable) conventions as to how that dislocatory effect is dealt with, whether we explicate, excuse or exploit the quirk, but even these bridge the genres as often as they divide them. There are different forms of strange fiction, just as the sonnet has its Spenserian or Shakespearean structures, but in many respects these are marked out more by how we parse the incredibility of the quirk in terms of affect than anything else. This is self-evident with horror, the genre defined simply by our emotional response. It is far from clear however, with SF and fantasy, where the binding of sense-of-wonder to one and the severing of appetence from the other has created the irresolvable clash of definitions and aesthetic territories I’ve referred to as the Great Debate.

That continuous conflagration is something I keep returning to here, partly because in all of this there’s a part that keeps on asking, dude, isn’t all this strange fiction you’re talking about basically just fantasy by another name? And if so, why the fuck rename something that’s already got a perfectly good label?