Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions (47 page)

Fitting all this theory of strange fiction into the original three-axes-of-story idea, what we have now is Lake’s third axis, the axis of what he calls
genre devices
analysed in terms of quirks which actively challenge suspension-of-disbelief, playing with subjunctivity level, invoking incredulity by breaching known history (errata), known science (novum), the laws of nature (chimera) and the strictures of logic (sutura). Understanding subjunctivity as alethic modality, however, invites an expansion to encompass not just alethic modality, but boulomaic, deontic and epistemic modalities too; it’s only logical to look for quirks in these areas, and not difficult to identify immediately the numina and monstrum as artefacts of boulomaic modality, the generation of a
should/must happen
or
should/must not happen
tension driving the narrative. There is a full framework waiting to be developed here, a toolkit of quirks by which we can decompose a text to the constituent elements a reader will use to parse it as being of this and/or that particular genre(s), elements that are clearly driving forces in the dynamics of narrative.

With this theoretical basis, we can now look at a type of fiction which some aren’t even sure exists, but which is constantly labelled and relabelled by writers and critics who have at least a vague sense that there is something to point to here, even if they can only point in the general direction: that inter-slip-cross-genre-stitial-stream stuff, the type of strange fiction that intrans
igently refuses to be fitted into any genre; the type of strange fiction that gets published under this label or that and argued over by SF fans; the type of strange fiction Bruce Sterling labelled “slipstream” in his
Catscan
essay, but that some of us prefer to call
infernokrusher
.

Burroughs’s
The Naked Lunch
is on the list of works Bruce Sterling identified as “slipstream” in his essay—works that aren’t necessarily seen as SF but which manifest some quality SF readers pick up on and identify with—because it is essentially strange fiction. It’s a book which I consider as much of a predecessor for my own work as many of the strange fictions published in the commercial genres. It is a rhapsody. Peter Ackroyd, J.G. Ballard, Angela Carter, Guy Davenport…we could go through Sterling’s list from A to Z and pick out, or add to it, authors that spark a sense of recognition, a feeling that, yes, they are doing something similar, something
specifically
similar. This is simply, I think, a recognition of their
strangeness
. This does not, however, distinguish Sterling’s slipstream, my infernokrusher, from any other brand of strange fiction.

There is at once a recognition and an oversight, I think, in the notion of sli
pstream, cross-genre, interstitial or infernokrusher fiction, of the underlying unity of strange fiction. Simultaneously, we are pointing at the cohesive identity of an idiom in its own right, as and when we label it, but in the labels we choose, we seem invariably to position it as a liminal, marginal construct of leftovers and left-outs, as a border, a transgression of borders, an activity in the seams. I see it rather as a substrate, a substrate of rhapsodies, within and upon which the dialectic of Rationalism and Romanticism has played out to create a multiplicity of genres at odds with each other, obscuring a unity as multi-faceted, yes, but as cohesive as that of tragedy or comedy. Slipstream or infernokrusher, strange fiction as rhapsody, this is not (or not just) some itinerant mongrel of the interzones.

It is the third mask of drama, its gaze not mirth or grief but shock, as on the face of Caravaggio’s decapitated Medusa.

They said, “You have a blue guitar,

You do not play things as they are.”

Wallace Stevens, “The Man with the Blue Guitar”

Any rational view of the field should not blind us to the countless writers of strange fiction set on blowing up the walls of Camp Consolation by means other than the novum of science fiction. The erratum that contradicts known history rather than known science, the chimera that contradicts the laws of nature, the sutura that contradicts the strictures of logic—all of these quirks may be grenades thrown at the accepted order of things. It is simplistic to imagine those most outré quirks, the chimera and sutura, always indices of base superstition.

As an eyeball-kick born of Romanticism, a metaphysical quirk is likely no more (or less) than literary SFX, no more (or less) powerful and perilous than a novum used the same way; that the thrill of incredulity is the quirk’s purpose in being is all we need know to know the nature of the game. If the marvel is to be taken seriously at all, it is as a pataphor, a figurative vehicle of metaphor unmoored from its tenor and rendered co
ncrete; which is to say, it exists to be read for its non-literal meaning. To project belief is silly-kittens; if I write about a Styx-water swilling cynic collecting an unbaptised infant’s soul for the Nursery of Limbo, dude, this is not evidence of faith but a critique of it.

Where fantasy is
Fantasy
, its definition closed tight to the monomythic mode—to the magically-gifted darlings of destiny, black-and-white struggles of Good and Evil, Dark Lords threatening the bucolic idyll—a supreme wariness
is
called for. Where the wonder button is being pushed, there may well be Romanticism at play, and of the most reactionary sort. Alternatively though, the text may be articulating a modernist agenda, seeking to resolve the agon of passion and reason, emotion and intellect. It may even be the product of a rationalist’s Absurdism—because the absurd is the modern rationalist’s work even in its apparent illogic, clinical as an autopsy, dissecting a system to expose its disorder(s). Pinter is never more coldly analytic than where exchanges are filleted to a series of non sequiturs.

But the notion of magic as a foreign element is expedient. All problems of structural clichés—of character and setting, plot and theme—all the trite fo
rmulae for escapist pabulum developed in the pulps of category product as generic junk food…all of this improper conjuring can be circumscribed as wish-fulfilment and encapsulated in that one word. Every fault in SF can be nailed to this romantic irrationalism. It is never SF that is of pandering purpose, puerile import; if it seems to be, this is because it is not pure SF. It is contaminated, seduced by the exotic colour of the blue flower, intoxicated by its soporific fragrance, polluted by its narcotising essence—magic, which is to say faith.

A contemptuous snort at a bugbear fantasy of fantasy dismisses the imper
ative of improper conjuring upon all category fiction. It is the first trick taught at Camp Consolation: to ignore a morass of hackwork and focus on the kernel of quality in one’s beloved genre; to ignore the kernel of quality and focus on the morass of hackwork in another; to treat the superior work as exemplary here but exceptional there; to take one mode as essentially good but swamped with dross, the other as essentially bad but scattered with the odd diamond. Such doublethink is a self-reinforcing view. As prejudice presents as piety, so it renders its faults as products of influence, scapegoats the reviled enemy as a blight creating wrongness by a process of corruption. The deflection strengthens conviction, certainty of worth rewarded with certainty of worth.

In the rapture of unreason, history itself may be rewritten.

The problem is partly that we continue to think and talk in terms of genre. Take a work which uses, say, the counterfactual conceit of a twentieth-century ideology called Futurism (on a par with Fascism or Stalinism), the novum of nanotech, and the chimera of a magical language. Splice in a pathetic narrative that focuses on WW1, the Red Clyde and the Spanish Civil War. Do you end up with something that sits across genres, in a gap between genres, or in a zone between genre and mainstream? Or is it just the same strange fiction that writers such as Bester and Bradbury were writing back before these terms were invented, before SF and
Fantasy
had been separated out as marketing labels, before the whole rift between literary
Realism
and pulp
Romance
was opened up and stabilised by the processes of commerce and academia into the dichotomy of “mainstream” and “genre,” a nomenclature defined more in terms of commercial and critical marginalisation than in terms of literary form, a dichotomy more economic than aesthetic? Couldn’t we just say that it’s strange fiction, fiction distinguished by the use of the quirk? Alternatively, couldn’t we just say that it’s rhapsody?

Or maybe we might say, No, this is
infernokrusher
!

I’m not a huge fan of subgenres or movements, but infernokrusher is a movement that revels in its own de(con)struction. It’s about romping wildly across all territorial boundaries rather than defining a niche, carving out a te
rritory within or between existing genres. Slipstream? That would require we recognise a boundary between Genre and Literature, positioning ourselves in a smeared zone of detritus caught between. Cross-genre? That would require we recognise the same boundaries, characterising ourselves as magpie-style gatherers, sourcing one element of our work
here
, another
there
. Interstitial? That
still
requires we recognise those boundaries but positions us in the truly marginal territory of the cracks between, like weeds between paving-stones. Infernokrusher is not about being situated across genres, between genres, or between genre and mainstream. Infernokrusher doesn’t give a fuck about genres, not in
that
way.

Kessel and Kelly, in their anthology
Feeling Very Strange
, quote from a discussion on slipstream that ran on David Moles’s blog, in which the term “infernokrusher” was coined by Meghan McCarron, and in which a whole host of contemporary writers try to pin down what they mean by the term. Kessel and Kelly ultimately follow Sterling in their view of slipstream as a literature of the postmodern condition, of cognitive dissonance, the estrangement that comes simply of living in the twentieth / twenty-first century. But how then does this differ from that common-or-garden SF which, according to Suvin, is
all
about cognitive dissonance? What’s the difference? What is it that these works
do
?

[Benford] talks about SF’s infrastructure being invaded by fantasy writers and fans, implying that there was a time when the two genres WERE sep
arate. In fact, if you look at British Fandom’s infrastructure you see evidence of this…you have the BSFA and you have the BFA, and the BSFA, I get the impression, clearly favours SF over fantasy. So unless the BSFA was an attempt by SF purists to split the genre off, I think that your historical model has problems.

Jonathan McCalmont

Only in a short time frame that skips the formative period of SF entirely, skips ever
ything before the 1970s, can we really sustain this notion of fantasy infiltrating SF from outside; and McCalmont’s example of British fandom backs this up. The British Fantasy Society began in 1971 as the British Weird Fantasy Society, an offshoot from the British Science Fiction Association set up in 1958. Which is to say, the infrastructure of fantasy writers and fans was created by an act of separation out from SF, and in the same year the category of
Fantasy
began separating out from
Science Fiction
with the establishment of Ballantine Adult Fantasy Books.

Before this first true
Fantasy
imprint, diversity was the rule in the
Science Fiction
imprints. The focus may have been on the latter-day E.E. “Doc” Smiths of science fiction in Campbell’s
Astounding
, but most of the seminal magazines of the strange fiction genres—
Weird Tales
,
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
,
Galaxy
—were publishing the Leibers and Lovecrafts of fantasy and horror alongside such fare, the three genres intimate bedfellows from the start, right up through the Golden Age. No writer better encapsulates the fusion of forms at play than Bradbury, sliding effortlessly between the modes, from SF to fantasy to horror, in a story like “The Veldt.”

Bradbury himself claims
Fahrenheit 451
as his only real work of SF, yet his fantasies took the default label of the day—like Silverberg’s
The Book of Skulls
, Zelazny’s
Roadmarks
—pointing us at the real seam of alterity running through SF. His legacy is not just popular TV shows like
The Twilight Zone
,
The Outer Limits
,
The X-Files
. It is New Wave stories like Disch’s “Descending”, Ellison’s “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman.” It is
Interzone
in the ’80s,
The Third Alternative
, all that slipstream blending of the mundane and the strange that characterises the UK and US indie press. It is Jeffrey Ford and Kelly Link. It extends beyond the fantasy of the magical, even beyond the fantasy of the weird, old and new—a terrain of the strange that encompasses the liminality of Todorov’s fantastique, Freud’s uncanny, Pinter’s absurd, Jarry’s pataphysical along with the broadest of bizarro pulp. Looking to the history, it was there from the get-go.

But then…BOOM! The meteor of Tolkien hits the city of New Sodom, his impact shaking the SF Café to its foundation, shockwave travelling far beyond it, opening the age-old crack that splits our beloved haunt in two. In the ghetto of Genre, in the SF C
afé, the recognition of a wider market than the regulars leads to whole new imprints, a whole new commercial category, and formulation. The informal term fantasy gets formalised into a label for this new category—and that new category is populated with Tolkien’s peers and predecessors at first, but then…let’s see. Is that category characterised by works like Bradbury’s
Something Wicked This Way Comes
, Silverberg’s
The Book of Skulls
, Zelazny’s
Roadmarks
? Hell, no. It’s dominated by the rotting corpse of Tolkien—the high heroism of “Epic Pooh,” as Moorcock scathingly calls it—and the noxious vapours of its decay, the umpteen volumes of
The Chronicles of the Objects of Power
. Those fantasists of the weird who gag on the stench of Tolkien’s fetid cadaver find there’s little welcome for them at the tables of adventurers on steroids.

The pap propagates, filling the tables, spilling out through the café. The r
ationalists in the booths react in horror. Suddenly McCaffrey’s Pern books and Herbert’s
Dune
look suspect; their symbolic and structural tropes (dragons in one, epic in the other) reek of this unreconstructed Romanticism, this…
fantasy
, the term ceasing to signify any old incredible conceit of the marvellous, the uncanny or the monstrous—a carousel that can reverse ageing, a man turning into a beetle, a wheeling-dealing devil—come to signify instead specific formulae of story, structures of Romanticism—e.g. the monomyth at the heart of
Star Wars
. No matter that SF has been selling snake-oil chimerae with a veneer of science for the last fifty years, from Buck Rogers onwards, now the shoddiest pulp charlatanry has a name by which it can be abjured. It is not SF, but fantasy. The Force is magic and jaunting is science.

Magic and monomyth, those fantasists of the weird say, is not what fantasy really is. That, they might say, is only market forces at their most heinous. Those market forces are all too persuasive though. At the booths of SF, they’re regarded with suspicion by those most devout in their idealism, most repulsed by the atavistic nonsenses of wizards and knights. And that suspicion has an impact. Fast-forward through the social pseudo-realisms of feminist SF, through the constant paranoia about “the death of science fi
ction”—as if it was not already the spectre of SF, that emptied signifier—through the boom of cyberpunk, the burst of New Space Opera, the blast of the Singularity, in which it is reborn in new flesh, new forms. The result?
Science Fiction
is risen from the grave. The definitions may contradict, requiring fuzzy set systems of subjective models, but there is certainty now in opposition to indefinition.

The ghost of SF as an empty signifier is exorcised, must whisper itself into the nan
otech grey goo golem of speculative fiction to survive. Adrift in the SF Café, it stands in the corners or at the counter, wanders the gaps between the tables, lurks at the margins, in the indie presses of the UK and the US, small press magazines and webzines, anthology series. As the corpse of Tolkien rots down to its skeletal frame, the golem talks of slipstream and cross-genre, interstitial fictions, interzones and third alternatives, the weird. Clute’s fantastika as a faction inherently estranged from the SF Café’s main agon of aesthetics, as a fiction of estrangement. Those who would once have shrugged and said their work was SF simply because it could be sold as such now shrug that fantasy has become the default label. The SF Café echoes with Knight’s and Spinrad’s indefinitions transferred to another signifier:

—Fantasy is what we mean when we point to it, they say, a rosebud wristlet of blue flowers made obvious as they do just that, raising their hand to point at everything and anything. Any strange rhapsodies.