Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions (10 page)

There’s a point to this:

Does
Frankenstein
sit in the same relationship to
Science Fiction
as The Stooges do to punk, or is that relationship more analogous to that of The Velvet Underground and punk? The answer, it seems to me, is the latter. For all that it extrapolates from the scientific theories and experiments of its period, positing the monster as a patchwork of body-parts reanimated by scientific craft rather than magical skill, the novel is as commitedly
Gothic Fiction
as
Wuthering Heights
or
Northanger Abbey
, infused with a tremulous fear of the uncanny (where the incredible meets the monstrous), and so informed by that horrorific mode of Romanticism that the Rationalism of
Science Fiction
stands in stark contrast. The world that Shelley’s aesthetic inhabits is not the exotic alien planet of the Campbellian pulps but the desolate wilderness of Henry Fuseli’s
The Nightmare
or Caspar David Friedrich’s
Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog
, a world of storms and nightmares, mountains and icy wastes. Its dynamics is not a matter of reason applied to the marvellous but rather of unreason loosed with the monstrous.

The reason I do not, with Aldiss, class
Frankenstein
as the birth of
Science Fiction
is that in its ultimately Romantic stance it is far better understood as the death of
Science Fiction
. There is no lightning bolt in the novel bringing life to the monster with the electric vitality of science; that is a spurious invention of the movies. Rather the lightning in
Frankenstein
is there to paint the creature in sudden stark relief as a
monstrum
—to coin a phrase analogous to Suvin’s
novum
for the quirk of narrative, the rupture in equilibrium, that sits as linchpin of
Horror
:

A flash of lightning illuminated the object, and discovered its shape plainly to me; its gigantic stature, and the deformity of its aspect, more hideous than belongs to humanity, instantly informed me that it was the wretch, the filthy daemon, to whom I had given life.

Mary Shelley,
Frankenstein

This is a lightning bolt that smashes Rationalism, revealing the wilderness of Gothic nightmare and the monstrum that stalks it. One equilibrium ruptured
is
reality, as with the novum. We
are
dealing here with the sort of shift in subjunctivity level Delany talks of, the reanimated creature being a technical impossibility: this could not have happened. We are dealing with the incredible. But in Shelley this is of trivial import as set against the rupture of a different stability:
affective
equilibrium.

If we map the novum to the shift in subjunctivity level, eschewing the Co
ntingency Slip Fallacy, with its wishful thinking in which the impossible is cast as possible, that novum is a conjuring of what
cannot
be—not yet—inspiring incredulity. Trace that wishful thinking to the rose-tinted spectacles of sense-of-wonder, a willingness to hoodwink ourselves in our sneaky yearning that the novum
should
be, and we find we’re dealing also with a fiction, at its heart, of the marvellous, inspiring desire. What Shelley offers is the opposite. The monstrum is a conjuring of what
must not
be, inspiring dread, and where a Rationalist might argue the novum sound, reasonable for all its technical impossibility, the Romantic sets the monstrum as the murder of reason, the bloody hand of the sublime.

This is a lightning bolt that will one day sear right through the genre, a sha
ttering crack of irrationalism that will split it right in two. You can still see the crack in the wall of the SF Café where a seismic futureshock ran through it on the day the beatniks moved in with their garb as black as their European espresso. But we’ll come to that. For now…for me, Shelley sits awkwardly in the role Aldiss ascribes her.

Would Verne or Wells stand as better origin points? Is it not at least fair to talk of
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
or
The War of the Worlds
as
Science Fiction
? Again, these are understandable as science fiction, but are they
Science Fiction
? At the end of the day, these are both works which, like The Stooges with punk, fit the aesthetic criteria but sit outside the historical context; they are Protomodern works, written in that distant time before the walls went up around the ghetto of Genre. They are clearly formative influences, taproots of
Science Fiction
, but they exist as experiments within their own genres, at a point when the term
Science Fiction
had not even been coined, and it’s inevitable that they will be widely viewed as such, just as The Stooges are most commonly viewed as a garage band, and for good reason. Ultimately if we want to conjure the history that shaped the territory, a narrower context lays a less dubious foundation for our back-story of descent. So we’ll treat Verne and Wells as embryonic, situated in that period of gestation before
Science Fiction
proper was born and named.

That birth and naming begins with the pulps, with Gernsback’s scientifi
ction. In those early decades before the SF Café was even built there was not one
Genre
but a whole host of them, where the Protomodern adventure story was gradually being transformed into the mass market
Modern Pulp
narrative. One Nick Carter dime novel in 1886 begets
Nick Carter Weekly
which becomes
Detective Story Magazine
in 1915; that same magazine publishes Arthur Conan Doyle but it does so alongside the Shadow. The publisher, Street & Smith Publications (who bought
Astounding
in 1933, funny enough), also gave us comics like
Doc Savage
and
Air Ace
, Western magazines like
Buffalo Bill Stories
and
True Western Stories
. Edgar Rice Burroughs gives us John Carter and Tarzan of the Apes in 1912, both via
All-Story Magazine
, which was to merge eventually with
Argosy
.
Amazing Stories
gives us Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon only being created derivatively as a rival.

This is our lineage. This is the history of the ghetto of Genre, into which
Science Fiction
was born, not in a flash of lightning but in the clatter of a printing press, a bastard biomechanical scion of the pulps, part invention, part industry, wholly modern. Born of a technological advance, it was itself, in its day, a virtual novum as quintessentially of its era as the rocketships conjured in its pages.

The one theme that is really new is the scientific one. Death-rays, Ma
rtians, invisible men, robots, helicopters and interplanetary rockets figure largely: here and there. There are even far-off rumours of psychotherapy and ductless glands. Whereas the Gem and Magnet derive from Dickens and Kipling, the Wizard, Champion, Modern Boy, etc., owe a great deal to H. G. Wells, who, rather than Jules Verne, is the father of “Scientifiction.”

George Orwell

If we’re excluding work published before
Science Fiction
was born, however, this doesn’t mean excluding work published beyond its cradle. George Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, for example, sits outside the narrow context we are taking as our start point, outside the pulp magazines which were to
Science Fiction
as CBGB in 1976 was to punk rock. But to exclude a contemporaneous work like this from an inquiry mining this
science fiction
stuff for the strange would be as foolish, surely, as to say a band could be considered punk if and only if they played CBGB.

Tapping into a Protomodern lineage of utopic and dystopic fiction in which Rationa
list speculation (here futurology) adopted the Romantic tradition of fantasia to construct marvellous/monstrous elsewhens, but flensed the dynamics of Romance, Orwell’s novel is clearly covered under an open definition of science fiction, but when that open definition covers Shelley’s
Frankenstein
, that’s not saying much; in the open definition that must encompass all manner of experimental oddities published under the rackspace label, to approach
Nineteen Eighty-Four
as a work in a broad idiom unbound by commercial taxonomies is only to apply a lens in one’s critique that might equally be applied to
The Epic of Gilgamesh
. If it’s limits and lineage we’re talking, what’s at stake is the question of whether it’s
Science Fiction
.

If we say yes, it is, are we in danger here of opening ourselves up to that old accus
ation, that we’re co-opting Orwell to a tradition in the hopes of gaining literary credibility for an inherently gauche
Genre
? If so, we have a fairly solid defence. Orwell was taught by Aldous Huxley at Eton, he was friends with Olaf Stapledon later on in life, he wrote of his admiration for and influence by Wells, and, in his 1939 essay “Boy’s Weeklies,” he reveals enough familiarity with the pulps to act as a well-informed genre critic, as the quote above demonstrates. Orwell was no stranger to the SF Café.

What we have indeed is someone who identified his own work as in the tr
adition of Wells, who recognised that same heritage in the pulps, who distinguished Wells from Verne, siding with the Rationalist novels of one over the Romantic adventure stories of the other, and whose novel features world governments, artificial language and other such hypotheticals. All things considered, to exclude
Nineteen Eighty-Four
from the canon might seem thrawn, akin to a claim that
Animal Farm
is not a fable because, well, it was published as a serious novel for adult readers; such a distinction is no more than a spurious assertion that the two forms are mutually exclusive.

Animal Farm
, as an allegorical animal story, fits a simple standard definition of the fable, and by its nature it demonstrates that, in the hands of a skilled writer, this idiom is more than capable of achieving the depth of a serious novel for adult readers.
Nineteen Eighty-Four
could equally be argued as demonstration that
Science Fiction
is not necessarily a lurid sensationalist pandering or a dry intellectual exercise, that a work of
Science Fiction
can, like an allegorical animal story, also be a serious novel for adult readers.

Still, the closed definition of
Science Fiction
must be opened up to accommodate Orwell, to render key aspects of the
Modern Pulp
dynamics dispensable, in a step not just towards the utopias and dystopias of the canon but towards the novelistic Rationalism of
Realism
. If the loosening of the strictures is legitimate it must be because that step is being taken inside the rackspace ghetto even as Orwell takes it outside. To sustain it as a valid redefinition, we must show the sociological thought-experiments kicking in early enough. And if it’s arguable…well then, this is where the first crack in the wall of the SF Café appears, because the abandonment of adventure can only be a betrayal of roots to some, a breach of the strictures defining
Science Fiction
.

Ultimately, I’m less interested in whether or not Orwell is
Science Fiction
than in that crack, in the notion that even from its infancy the
Genre
was dying to be reborn as genre, sloughing shackles of closed definition such that even the earliest revisionist’s claim to the rackspace label is really rather dubious. If from a sound closed definition we might reach beyond the pulps to encompass, for example, Orwell, I’m tickled by the notion that to do so, we must leave that closed definition of
Science Fiction
behind us, dead in the dust. In a discourse ever dreaming of closed definitions, the one that stands most sound in its simplicity rather conjures an unpretentious pulp which is sealed in its fate by the very stuff we made those dreams on, the stuff we insist on trying to inscribe within some stable set of formal strictures.

The why and how of that fate are easier to answer than the when. As much as
Science Fiction
was born in the fusion of Romantic and Rationalist aesthetics, the conflict between the ideals of the sublime and the logical quickly fractured the
Genre
. If the monstrous of
Gothic Romance
is a dubious forebear, the marvellous of
Chivalric Romance
is not. The monstrum has its flipside in the
numina
—to coin another phrase—the conjuring of what
must
be rather than what
must not
, inspiring desire rather than dread. And this is inherited direct, the sense-of-wonder many recognise as integral, the modern sublime of the technological marvel—the
shoulda
in what woulda coulda shoulda been.

So, for every Rationalist “what if” story wherein futurology is an end in i
tself, there’s a Romantic “if only” story wherein futurology is means to an end. For each narrative intent on a logical working-through of the novum’s ramifications, there’s one where the prophetic impetus is to envision wild fantasias of wonders, where the novum serves first and foremost as numina. For every
Foundation
there is a
Dune
. And with the aesthetics of the logical and the sublime in tension, with each reader who comes looking for one and finds the other, disappointment and dispute is inevitable.

So the
Genre
fractures in its infancy into a dichotomy of aesthetics, the loyalists of the sublime and of the logical each laying claim to the rackspace label, each with realities on their side—history for one, future for the other. The wall in the SF Café cracks and the self-destruction (or perhaps self-deconstruction) of
Science Fiction
begins before it’s barely out of the cradle. Cheney is right that
Science Fiction
is no longer truly extant, not if by
Science Fiction
we mean a singular thing with a closed definition. It died the moment we dismissed its fealty to fantasia over all, raised futurology as new liege lord, and in asserting the legitimacy of this reformed genre cast that
Genre
as illegitimate.

The king is dead; long live the king. For all the usurpation metaphor, I’m not saying that this in and of itself invalidates the application of that rackspace label to the field of fictions that came after. The titans overthrown, the gods who remade the entire worldscape of that category fiction did so with such creative vigour that it’s them we think of when the words
science fiction
are uttered. I only mean that they so demand an open definition—many of the core canonical writers
most of all
demand so open a definition—that it takes us back to genre, to this
science fiction
stuff, to a whole field of
science fictions
, essentially plural.

It would be grand if, from this, I could now leap on into a celebration of what that new generation made of
Science Fiction
, blithely applying that term to an opened definition. Thing is though, that dichotomy between Rationalism and Romanticism is also at the heart of why I’m no great fan of even the open definition of science fiction—because this is what fuels the endless dispute within the field over the differentiation of science fiction and fantasy.