Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions (3 page)

Science fiction is not fiction about science, but fiction which endeavors to find the meaning in science and in the scientific technology we are constructing.

Judith Merril

Definitions of SF are not all predicated on the presence or absence of a ce
rtain type of content. In the differentiation between
fancy
and
fabrication
it should be clear that much of the distinction between modes is in terms of
process
rather than
content
. Where writers treat our scientific culture as a source of metaphor, with one or more scientific fancies exploited as conceits, extended through the body of the narrative, where the science is not merely plot device or structural basis but becomes the locus of theme, the stuff of story, what we have is not just fabrication but
fabulation
.

In his
Strategies of Fantasy
, Brian Attebery shows how science fiction uses science as its “megatext.” The nourishing medium, the origin of the imagery, the motive of the narrative, is to be found in the contents, assumptions, and world view of modern science and technology. “Science [writes Attebery] surrounds, supports, and judges SF in much the same way the Bible grounds Christian devotional poetry.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

There is no explicit exclusion of the metaphysical in this SF; it is scientific rather than scientistic. In its thematic focus on the relationship between sc
ience and humanity it is arguable that this SF is more likely to treat any metaphysical forces, events or agencies it might utilise as either open to rational explication or of secondary import, but this is not necessarily the case.

With many of the works of Philip K. Dick, the process of fabulation is larg
ely focused on metaphysical conceits, albeit embedded within a context of scientific fabulation (i.e. fabulation using futurology); this does not exclude them from this definition of SF. Where scientistic fabrication often situates the purpose of SF in
literal
explorations of its conceits, this SF is all about
literary
exploration.

Playing fast and loose with probability may simply result in the whimsy of scientific fancy, but it is important to remember that even an idea we know to be impossible can have profound import, playing on our desires or fears, tempting or terrifying us. This is why that mode of SF is so thrilling. The shock of the new and the intrigue of complexity are integral aspects of the conceit’s power. Reining in the whimsy can make the process of constructing the narrative around that conceit more rational, more logical, which is where fancy becomes fabrication. Where the conceit is used metaphorically, (or more correctly, pataphorically,) the theme of the fiction extrapolated, deve
loped with the narrative structure—this is where the process becomes
fabulation
.

[A] fictional exploration of human situations made perceptible by the implications of recent science. Its favourite themes involve the impact of developments or revelations derived from the human or physical sciences upon the people who must live with those revelations or developments.

Robert Scholes

In Jeffrey Ford’s
The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque
, a jaded painter is challenged to paint an accurate portrait of a woman he will never see, constructing his visual image of her from the life story she tells him while hidden behind a screen. Ford’s novel could be tagged as
Fantasy
, playing as it does with the dream of muses and sibyls, of divination. But as a novel predicated on and explicating its conceit as a source of meaning, it is a work of fabulation.

In Mark Z. Danielewski’s
House of Leaves
, a Pulitzer-prize-winning photojournalist begins a documentary on his own family’s arrival in a suburban dream-house, which becomes an exploration of the house’s disturbingly impossible inner architecture, this narrative framed within that of an LA waster who is reconstructing the journals of a dead blind man into an analytic study of this film. Danielewski’s novel could be tagged as
Horror
, playing as it does with a nightmare of labyrinths and catacombs, of death. But as a novel predicated on and explicating its conceit as a source of meaning, it is a work of fabulation.

Science fiction, then, commonly uses techniques both from the realistic and the fantastic traditions of narrative to tell a story of which a referent, implicit or explicit, is the mind-set, the content, or the mythos of science and technology.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Fantasy and horror, like SF, are rich with such conceits, are often predicated on such conceits. Both, like SF, breach the everyday world of realism with the strange, the unf
amiliar, with unrealities which could only be possible in some elsewhen where things work differently. Both, like SF, exploit our emotional reaction to the potentiality of these unrealities being made real; and it is this as much as anything that defines whether a story is seen as SF and/or fantasy and/or horror. Could it happen? Should it happen? Must it
never
happen? It is because our reactions are complex that these three forms do not just coexist as separate types of imaginative fiction but rather constantly cross-breed, feeding into/off one another. The literary utility of fabulation, the metaphoric focus of it, indeed, is why many works of fabulation are simply labelled magical realism or general fiction.

Where do we distinguish scientific fabulation, then, from fabulation in ge
neral? In SF, those conceits, drawn from the field of science, may
tend
to be more rational, separating SF from fantasy and horror in terms of plausibility. Fantasy and horror may also
tend
to be more closely aligned with the unconscious and its desires and fears, the fiery stuff of the imagination, less audaciously/arrogantly Promethean than SF which wilfully tries to bend the irrational to its will, hammer it into rational shape, invest it with a clear purpose. Revelling in the intellectual aspects of the conceits rather than the sensational, SF tends to be the form of fabulation least obviously in thrall to the unconscious.

Bester’s PyrE is the conceit of many SF writers, at heart. Writers of this SF are not theoreticians but technicians, less concerned with the futurologies than with the creative application of those as conceits, as tools, the technology of writing itself. At best they are craftsmen and artificers working with what Joyce termed “the smithy of the soul.” This is the process of scientific fabul
ation and it’s why this SF is a fundamentally modernist enterprise, its best writers, like Bester—like Bester’s character Gully Foyle—part everyman and part Prometheus. It is no coincidence that Bester gives a nod to Joyce’s
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
, in basing his hero’s rhyme, “Gully Foyle is my name…” on that of Joyce’s protagonist, Stephen Dedalus. In
The Stars My Destination
, Bester tears the text apart towards the end to do his Burning Man justice, a thoroughly modernist technique. The ambitious drive of this SF is what really characterises it, the audacity it has to create and use the wildest of conceits, to concretise the metaphoric, render it pataphor. In that respect, it is a world away from any formulaic fare it is sold beside, bound to like Prometheus manacled to his rock, dreaming of the day those chains crumble away, the day SF shakes off its rusting ties to formula, stands up straight and proud.

Albeit at the same time essentially clinging to that dead hunk of stone for the security it offers.

Scientific fabulation has more traction in the mainstream than any of the modes of SF outlined above. By not focusing on science or on a Romantic adventure plot structure, it becomes more accessible and less generic. The reader only has to accept a few strange conceits, maybe just one Big Idea, and that conceit is developed in the familiar literary mode of extended metaphor. The greatest risk of this mode is that it becomes too abstract and arbitrary for a reader seeking the easy read of a holiday pot-boiler, a reader to whom the concrete metaphors of the conceit remain unparsed, the work read literally, as fancy or fabrication.

In the next mode of SF those conceits are equally as integral, but however abstract they might be they are far from arbitrary. In the SF of the next defin
ition what we find is not simply fabulation but something that engages at a deeper level than the intellectual, a mode of SF not just sensational but profoundly so. The result is not fable but
myth
.

[Science fiction] is the myth-making principle of human nature today.

Lester del Rey

Another type of definition based on the effects of the process treats SF as the mythology of the Modern Age, as the form of fiction which renders physical forces, events and agencies with the same
import
and to the same
purpose
as the pre-industrial religious literature rendered metaphysical forces, events and agencies. In other words, SF is not structurally but
functionally
distinct.

Science fiction is a form of fantastic fiction which exploits the imaginative perspectives of modern science.

David Pringle

This is SF as soul fiction, the mythopoeic mode of writing that creates, i
ntentionally or otherwise, the mythology of the Modern Era. This is where SF and fantasy converge most clearly, even where fantasy is closely-defined in terms of the affective import of its imagery, the evocation of not just incredulity but
awe
, Yeats’s
terrible beauty
. It is this emotional resonance that is at the heart of the mythic, the impact of the marvellous and/or the monstrous, in imagery charged with desire and/or dread.

Science fiction frequently tries to imagine what life would be like on a plane as far above us as we are above savagery; its setting is often of a kind that appears to us technologically miraculous. It is thus a mode of romance with a strong tendency to myth.

Northrop Frye

The tendency that Frye identifies, for romance to become myth, is the te
ndency for the imagery of awe to become archetypal. If not innate, not
natural
metaphors as Jung would have it, archetypes can be understood as, at the very least, root metaphors of the culture,
resonant
metaphors of the psyche primed by it. One might well understand them, I would argue, as
recursive
metaphors, with multiple signifiers pointing to each other (earth pointing to mother, mother pointing to earth, for example), setting up a feedback loop of connotative import, with the resultant icon-combos gaining a yet further intensity of import from their utility as signifiers of components of the psyche—persona, anima, id, self, ego, shadow, senex.

Science fiction is the myth of machine civilization, which, in its utopian extrapolation, it tends to glorify.

Mark R. Hillegas

Where such archetypes inhabit its marvels, SF becomes soul fiction, enac
ting the psychodramas and oneiric odysseys of the Modern Era. So we find Bester’s
The Stars My Destination
not just as a retelling of
The Count of Monte Cristo
but as a re-enactment of the Prometheus myth, with Gully Foyle as thief of fire, thief of PyrE, and distributor of it to humanity. Insofar as fantasy and horror can and often do work in the same mythopoeic manner, the three become functionally equivalent, the main distinction(s) lying simply in SF’s preference for the contemporary iconography of the Machine Age over the retrograde pseudo-historical iconography more common in fantasy, or in the tendencies of fantasy and horror to become rapt in desire and fear, to cast the mythic in a simplistic positive or negative role, to ease the terrible beauty of awe more towards the beauty or the terror.

For the middlebrow, middle-class reader of contemporary realism set at the kitchen-sink or in the drawing-room, a reader perhaps looking more for mel
odrama than for myth, this soul fiction may bear little relation to their mundane lives. They don’t want profundity; they want perception, the witty observational insights of
High Fidelity
or
Bridget Jones’s Diary
. More concerned about their work-life and relationship issues, they don’t want mythic resonance, universal import; they want break-ups and break-downs, mid-life crises and monetary problems. This sense of irrelevance may well be deepened by the key risk of soul fiction, the tendency for it to degenerate into crude monomyth and become indistinguishable from Romance, to all intents and purposes. As much as the Hero’s Journey can be read as a fictional enacting of the individuation process, the endless regurgitations of it serve less as psychodramas leading the reader to maturity than as attempts to extend adolescence through a never-ending succession of retellings of the same old rites-of-passage story, “The Emperor of Everything,” as Spinrad put it.

The attempt to redress the risk of irrelevance by humanising the archetypal, grounding it in wider stories of societies and politics, wars and rebellions that are not simply a single Hero’s psychodramatic tale, are a constituent factor in the next mode of SF.