Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions (33 page)

No SF novel ever won the Booker.

Somebody, Somewhere, Somewhen

Hang out long enough down in the ghetto of Genre, in the SF Café, and eventually you’ll hear this axiom, or an axiom like it, muttered with a certain tone of harrumph, a petulance in proportion to the wounded pride. Maybe you’ll say it yourself, sullen in your sense of injustice, disregard; I know I have. And whenever it’s spoken, that truism will likely spark a little to-and-fro on the exclusion of SF from the modern canon. There is, after all, an absenting in the absence, an
active
excision; the ghetto of Genre is a territory of the abject, an enclosure for the refused, that paraliterary pulp exiled from Literature—despite the fact that literature means only that which has been written—delimited as Genre—despite the fact that every work of literature sits within some genre or other.

But the question is: What are we going to point to as the stuff that
should
have won the Booker, the works of SF that prove to the outside world how good SF can be? Looking at our heritage of Asimov, Bester, Clarke and so on, would any of it actually rate that laurel if the prize had existed back in the day? Of the writers working since 1969, the year the Booker was born, how many of them can we imagine on the shortlist? Dick? Ellison? Farmer? Gibson? Heinlein? I love the work of Philip K. Dick—great ideas—but maybe the pills and booze had an impact on his prose because it just ain’t that sparkly. Ellison’s power was always as a short-story writer. Farmer, Gibson, Heinlein…we can go through the alphabet, and here and there a few names might jump out, but even with my own nomination, as a disciple at the altar of Delany, I’d actually be pointing at works like
Dhalgren
or the Nevèrÿon books—works which will only invite the old “Yes, but that’s not really SF” from insiders and outsiders alike.

The questions is: Once we scrap the crap of badly-written adventure stories, technothrillers, thought-experiments—the sensationalist or intellectualist le
ttuce for the genre bunnies, all too often potboiled to pabulum—just what novels do we have that deserve the Booker, what writers of the required level of literary merit that inarguably classify as SF?

The responses range from the blinkered to the blind, from the faith of those who’d argue Heinlein was as good as Hemingway to the heresy of those who’d argue William S. Burroughs was as much SF as Edgar Rice Burroughs. So the boundary debates begin. When we say SF do we mean
Science Fiction
,
Science Fantasy
,
Sci-Fi
or what? Do we mean any weird-ass, experimentalist, non-mimetic mind-fuck novel which was sold as SF? If that mind-fuck novel wasn’t sold as SF but
might
have been, does it prove SF can cut it with the big boys if it wants to, or is it just proof that the label damns us to the literati, that SF won’t get the kudos if it doesn’t disclaim its nature, cough a phrase like
speculative fiction
up its sleeve? These are the questions that genre bunnies obsess over. (Clearly I’m included in that category.)

And from the boundary disputes come the land-grabs, the fingers pointed to claim everything from Orwell back to Wells and beyond, through Shelley and Swift to Shakespeare. From Huxley to Homer. Casting the net so wide is u
nderstandable, right enough, when SF fans feel they’re expected to provide examples of SF with literary chops, works up to the quality of the “classics from the history of literature,” an all-encompassing taxonomic level that includes everything from
The Epic of Gilgamesh
onwards. When you’re working on that scale, putting the David of a few decades of SF up against the Goliath of all acknowledged literary masterworks ever, well, David’s going to reach for a big-ass stone, even if he has to stretch pretty far. But this strategy only brings the argument down at the first hurdle, if one is facing some straw literati to whom these embryonic SF works are, at best, precursors to or influences upon the
Genre
of
Science Fiction
. Such finger-pointing says nothing for the works born in the modern era’s ghetto of Genre, those Rocket Age rhapsodies, those Information Era operas of futurology and fantasia.

And it’s all about them and a very contemporary action of canonisation by award. It’s all about the Booker and the Bistro de Critique where that’s som
ething of a big deal.

We need to focus in then. What we forget in these debates driven by defe
nsiveness is that the period from Huxley back to Homer is out of bounds anyway: if it’s a valid comparison we want, and precursors and influences are to be excluded for SF, since SF didn’t exist before Day Zero, we have to scratch all the classics from before Day Zero also; these are inadmissible as non-SF by the same logic; the taxonomic distinction didn’t exist. Where
literary fiction
is set against
genre fiction
both have burned their bridges to the past, set themselves as things of that so twentieth-century dichotomy. Like the genre bunnies of
Literary Fiction
have any more claim to Shelley, Swift or Shakespeare than us? Get real, realistas.

It is as if a
Genre
of
Fantasy Drama
had come into existence over the last decade or so—with
Angels in America
, say, as its precursor, its prime influence. It would be absurd to ask fans of this idiom to provide examples measuring up to a millennia-long heritage of “literary drama” classics like
Prometheus Bound
. To expect them not to simply point at
Prometheus Bound
…or
Angels in America
indeed. Still, in ten years of that commercial
Genre
maybe nothing would have won the Pulitzer. The bright lights, big bucks, Broadway productions might have garnered Tonys as they sold shitloads of tickets to punters looking for a little extra sparkle in their spectacle, but of course we’re talking largely commercial drama here, more
Cats
than
The Crucible
. So no FD play ever won the Pulitzer, genre bunnies might mutter.

—No shit, the straw literati might say in return.

In the SF Café, as we kvetch about the latest longlist or laurel-winner, at some point, eventually, the underlying assumption that empowers our sense of grievance will surface: the certainty of SF’s unwarranted marginalisation. This lack of respect has nothing to do with merit, we’re sure, and everything to do with the prejudices of the prize-givers, the elitism of the literary establishment, those to whom
literary fiction
and
genre fiction
are entirely different entities…and never the twain shall meet. The ones who’d say, in that elsewhen, that neither
Angels in America
nor
Prometheus Bound
should really be considered works of
Fantasy Drama
.

Weirdly, we buy into the idea that it’s all about the realism and unrealism; we buy into the bootstrapping rhetoric that sets mimetic
Literary Fiction
as the paragon of the literary, imagining that the non-mimetic is what the straw literati hate. We bemoan the dearth of imagination in this dreary stuff, the way the dreaded literary establishment reviles our strange fictions for the strangeness. Pah! Those mundanes think only
Kitchen-Sink Realism
and its siblings deserve respect! If an SF novel ever did win the Booker, we’re sure, those bastards at the Bistro de Critique would just say, well, that’s not SF. Poor us. Poor little genre bunnies.

—Ah, but wait, someone might say. That was then and this is now. If from Huxley back to Homer is of no consequence here, the mere fifty or so years since then is hardly more than…a parochial school prize-giving. An end of term assembly at which—oh noes!—the emo kid never gets to give a speech as dux. So fuck?

A paltry half-century of realism being the bees’ knees? All that proves is that the chic clique kids of the Bistro de Critique do actually change their tastes over time. So a certain label is out this season. That only makes it more likely that the flightiness of fashion will return us to that vast heritage stretching back from Huxley to Homer—to homunculi, to Hamlet’s spectral sire, to Yahoos and Houyhnhnm.

Let’s take a step outside the ghetto of Genre entirely, take the underground a few do
zen streets uptown and a score or so years into the future.

The Bistro de Critique sits in the uptown district of Literature, just round the corner from the Temple of Academia with its ivory towers and quiet cloisters. It’s been there for a long time, centuries rather than decades, a bastion of inte
llectualism. The arguments and affectations of its patrons down the years have formed the discourse through which the notion of a canon has been defined—this pantheon of recognised classics—amid the cocktail party chatter of book launches and literary festivals, the bluster and bile of snipewanking reviews and scuttlebutt.

Fashions have come and gone in the Bistro de Critique. Rationalist and R
omanticist aesthetics have been adopted and abandoned, replaced by (post)modernist flavours of the month. In the twentieth century the Bistro de Critique was the stomping ground where philosophers of fiction formulated the systematic approaches of
New Criticism
,
Structuralism
,
Deconstruction
, et al., these
Genres
of thought constituting the literary establishment that’s always been the bugbear of the SF Café genre bunnies.

There is no conspiracy of malice, of course, and never has been, most of the slights and injustices we suffer born of ignorance more than intention. In our talk of literary elites we fabricate coteries of sophisticates, sneering and scheming, working magics over the middlebrow to sustain their power; but this is not how establishments work. The priv
ilege and prejudice permeates the systems of articulation, the ideologies and the institutions, the
Genres
of thought. There are no individual enemies to point to as the Templars of this literary establishment, no secret sect of scornful power mongers, but there is nonetheless an organisation in the system itself, an emergent enterprise with principles, strategies and tactics that include the negation and marginalisation of a certain class of fiction, the proletariat of pulp. This is a discourse born of Europe’s colonial imperialist period; if you don’t, can’t, won’t see classism, misogyny and racism as institutionalised, Literature as an institution reifying those prejudices, Cock help you. It is not a matter of an elite sneering at us scum, but of an enterprise with privilege as its end and means to that end.

Or at least that used to be the case. This is the future, after all.

This is twenty years into tomorrow, and the Bistro de Critique has changed. A new critique has swept aside the Old Guard, declared an end to the Culture Wars, a critique we’ll call, in the spirit of futurological fancy,
Dynamism
. To sum it up in the crudest way possible,
Dynamism
is a critique focused on the suspension-of-disbelief as a base-line of balance in the reading experience, and on the disruption of that equilibrium as the fundamental and formative force within narrative. When we read, our suspension-of-disbelief is a pretence that the events recounted did happen, but what makes that reading an experience of narrative is when an event is introduced that fucks with this base-line modality, an event that should not, would not, maybe even could not happen. Taking its lead from Todorov’s theory of narrative equilibrium, expanding the notion of subjunctivity level advanced by Delany in his essay “About Five Thousand Seven Hundred and Fifty Words,” describing the protocols of narrative in terms of quirks of epistemic, alethic, deontic, and boulomaic modalities,
Dynamism
roots the very essence of fiction in the onward impetus born of the tensions such modalities constitute.

Comedy and tragedy can be understood as playing with—no, driven by—the bo
ulomaic modalities of
should
and
must
, intersecting with the deontic (i.e. of duty) modalities that bear the same labels, dancing into the alethic modalities of
could
and
would
that the strange fiction genres are all about, working also with the epistemic modality of
will
, the
impending
part of
impending doom
. Crime and mystery fictions play with epistemic modalities like
might
, with quirks of uncertainty.

Only the
Realist
genres predicate themselves on the absence of such strangeness—a denial that renders them inherently flattened in these dimensions, incapable of the deep dynamics generated by such disruptions of credibility and certainty. More fool them. For sure, such flat fictions can be affectively engaging, supremely so where they retain the quirks of desire/dread and duty, but like poetry stripped of metaphor, like a rock band playing unplugged, it has essentially limited itself. All it takes is an understanding of how narrative really works in terms of these modalities, and the straw literati’s scorn of the strange becomes a risible pretension, an intellectualism that is not at all as savvy as it postures.

Elsewhen in this sortie through New Sodom, you might be seeing glimpses of how that hypothetical critique might look, as we delve into the details of this so-called
Dynamism
, but for now let’s just take it as an imaginative conceit: that over the next twenty or so years, criticism actually comes to focus on the buttons pushed in narrative, on how a fiction is more than just some thick mimetic weft we trudge through, how it is powered by the warp of should not, would not, could not. Imagine that as this
Dynamism
repostulates narrative as a visceral rather than cerebral experience, it reinstates the sensational at the heart of reading, rejects the anodyne model of fiction as mere observation regurgitated and recombined. It overthrows the middle-class and middlebrow valuations and valorisations of an obsolete twentieth-century aesthetic that privileges faux reportage over honest figuration.

When this hypothetical
Dynamism
hit the Bistro de Critique, we must imagine, it shattered any illusion of a divide between Genre and Literature. One can only dream.

Exploitation and Estrangement

A work belongs in the genre of science fiction if its narrative world is at least somewhat different from our own, and if that difference is apparent against the bac
kground of an organized body of knowledge.

Eric S. Rabkin

Let’s look at that future narrative nursery rhyme in a bit more detail to try and trace exactly how it’s working.

There was an old woman in Mars City 2.

The first sentence dislocates us from the here and now, introducing the new subjun
ctivity of “could not have happened
now
” by positioning the events in an obviously invented place—Mars City 2—a simple combination of known terms which do not belong together in our world. There’s a cognitive dissonance here, an estrangement, but it’s mitigated by conventionality. On one level the convention is from the real world, the name-structure of the settlement being in a recognisable, traditional format—Kansas City, Sun City, Mexico City…Mars City.

On another level, we also recognise a fictive convention, the SF tradition of naming otherworldly colonies in that format. Given that there’s a Sun City in the real-world, there’s a vague possibility that we could read this as an alte
rnate narrative rather than a future narrative, assuming that this invented Mars City is still located on Earth…but this reading is pretty unlikely. Even if you’ve never read an SF book in your life, you’re more likely to map the relationship thus: Mars City is to Mars as Kansas City is to Kansas, as Mexico City is to Mexico. And just to seal the deal the extra SF convention of the numbered colony is thrown in—it’s not just Mars City, it’s Mars City
2
. And again this maps to a real-world convention—the numbering of military bases, scientific stations, rocket ships, and so on.

The result is that the sense of dislocation is balanced with a sense of
relocation
. A synthetic elsewhen which eases the estrangement can be easily constructed by the reader out of the very words that create the estrangement in the first place.

Normality Within the Strange

An aside: Compare how the original nursery rhyme sets up a similar e
strangement with the word “shoe,” but does not offer a counter-balance of interpretability. Compare also the parseable structure of “Mars City 2” with a name designed to signal a style of fantasy other than SF—where there might be clues in the linguistic roots of the name to the “location” of the city in a sort of conceptual space (e.g. “Katambuktu,” “Saint Beaucoup”) or not as the case may be (e.g. “Rakkasneru”).

In both we are offered a relocation to a synthetic elsewhere, but the els
ewhen of this other style of fantasy is positioned in a landscape of culture and language rather than an imagined future, the pataphor creating its own context. With such fantasy the dislocation might even be offered with no relocation whatsoever, or with a relocation to a synthetic elsewhere that lacks even the conventional signal of place which we’re offered in the capital
R
of Rakkasneru. I could easily imagine a writer like Jeffrey Ford, for example, beginning a surreal little fable with the first line of the nursery rhyme exactly as it stands:
There was an old woman who lived in a shoe
. This is why I referred to the “nascent fantasy” of the nursery rhyme. But I’m getting ahead of myself here. Back to the future narrative:

She had so many children she didn’t know what to do.

If the first sentence dislocates (and relocates) us, creating a sense of estrangement, the mimetic weft of the second sentence reassures us that, regardless of this estrangement, the story
does
still relate to our own experience, by focusing on the comprehensible relationship between a mother and her children; it sets up a completely recognisable situation and a completely recognisable problem. One might say that the writer is distracting the reader from the dissonance, forestalling any collapse of the suspension-of-disbelief by saying: don’t worry; this is about human beings just like you. But “distract” is the wrong word. Rather I think the writer is establishing a sense of normality
within
the strange, establishing the relationship between the elsewhen which is strange to us and the here-and-now we know. This is the sense in which SF is often said to be about the present rather than the future. Think of the sort of classic PKD novel where the elsewhen is a Mars colony in the future, but is portrayed by Dick with the mimetic weft of 1950s suburban America.

If estrangement is cognitive dissonance, we might call this quality of the mimetic weft
cognitive consonance
.

The Coalescence, The Collapse

She gave them some broth and chips in the head.

Moving on, the third sentence fuses the mundane and the strange, the old and the new, balancing the quirky novelty of “chips in the head” against the traditionality of “broth”; but it also, in following on from the first two, deve
lops the narrative. Attuned to the try/fail cycle of plot, understanding that the broth is an attempt to solve the narrative problem, we understand also that the chips in the head are to be read as a part of this story. Our interest is piqued. Are the chips in the head connected to the broth? Are they another attempt at a solution? Will they work? If so how?