Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions (7 page)

This is SF as it looks to me from my seat here in the SF Café. Does this strange fiction have its own risk over and above those inherited from all the other SFs? If those outside the ghetto tend to be scared that SF is just hac
kwork, that SF is just adventure stories, that SF is just maths stories, that SF isn’t relevant, that SF is incomprehensible, or that SF has nothing to say, do they also tend to be scared that SF is just too damn
strange
for them?

Probably.

So fuck?

Don’t tell anybody, but science fiction no longer exists.

Matthew Cheney

Welcome to the SF Café, in the ghetto of Genre, in the city of New Sodom. We call it the SF Café, only the letters
S
and
F
surviving of its original name, but look up now, look to the sign above the door, and you’ll find the full monicker still visible today,
The Science Fiction Café and Bar
, traced in the grime, outlined in the negative spaces left where the spelled-out sense of it has long-since fallen away.

The SF Café. It may look a bit shabby from the outside and there’s surely some weird gewgaws and gimcracks in the window to make you wonder what the fuck’s going on inside. But let’s step through the decades as we step through the door—

a rupture in reality,

a quirk of narrative created,

time travel as impossibility conjured, breach of

• known science,

• known history,

• the laws of nature,

• even the strictures of logic itself,

as a butterfly crushed underfoot at our step will never now distract dear Grandpapa into the turn that woulda shoulda coulda saved him from a stray bullet in a hunting accident that is, or will be, the inevitable paradoxical ou
tcome of our interloping, but fuck it, let’s do it anyway, step through the door

—and see the SF Café as it once was, the shining Formica of the counter-top, the sleek silvery steel of coffee machine and soda fountain, the Bakelite and plastic of the trappings, the decor all bright white and brilliant red, shi
ning, gleaming, with the ’50s promise of futurity. This is the SF Café as it was in the Golden Age, when Old Man Campbell owned it.

Emphasis on the
was
. (Or
might have been
would be more apposite,
coulda woulda shoulda
been. In stepping through a door into a conjured elsewhen, we’re always already entering a territory of argument. In that breach of the possible, we’ve always already sacrificed the actual for that quirk of narrative, for the sake of story. Still…emphasis on the
past tense
.)

Don’t misunderstand me. It’s not that I’m sitting down in a booth in the SF Café, fi
ring up my laptop, tapping out a grandiose proclamation on the “death of science fiction” as a start-point. It’s just that…the SF Café is a whole other scene to the Science Fiction Bar and Café that it once was. That elsewhen scene of then is gone, the territory so transformed over the years that I’m entering as an alien, infiltrator of a past that is another world.

From where I’m sitting now, I’d be a fool to say that what I’m talking about is the
science fiction
of that elsewhen. At best it might be classed as SF—the
S
, for me, simply standing for
strange
, while the
F
might even stand for
fictions
, plural, to cast it as non-generic a grouping as
queer readers
or
barking dogs
. And both words, for me, shrug off the upper case initial of a proper noun, a nominal label for this nation or that neighbourhood.

This is not a historical study of
science fiction
, not by a long shot; at best you can expect a figurative sociography of sorts, an exploration of the broader terrain by which I hope to navigate a course to the strange fictions I’m far more interested in. Nor should you expect a treatise on the nature of
science fiction
, not by that label, not a coherent and unbiased one; rather this is an argument with that label, a story of why I find it ultimately unsustainable.

There are two flavours of definition for this
science fiction
stuff, you see—open and closed. The former I’m okay with, the latter…not so much. By the time we’re done here, maybe you’ll understand why.

In the open definition, we take a laissez-faire approach. We might characte
rise this
science fiction
stuff as a family of works which do this or that, but we’re happy to admit that those features (whatever they might be) are neither essential nor unique to the genre; there are works which might be science fiction and might not. Hell, when we call it a genre, what we really mean is just…a field of fiction. Like indie music, right? Which could be anything from Arcade Fire to Adam Green, Zero 7 to the Zutons. At its most open, the definition is empty, in fact, all that’s left the two figurae of the label
SF
.

What is SF?

It is, as they say, whatever I point to when I say, SF.

In the closed definitions of
Science Fiction
, that thumbnail descriptor becomes a stamp of commercial or aesthetic identity, carved with clean edges—hence the capitals large and small to signal not just a proper noun but a brand. If the open definitions treat science fiction as a genre like indie music,
Science Fiction
is a
Genre
like the good old-fashioned Rock’n’Roll of the ’50s and ’60s. This is a family of fiction marked out by a combo of conventions unique and essential to it; clear boundaries are set over what is or isn’t
Science Fiction
.

What is
Science Fiction
?

Well, that’s the million dollar question.

Down in the ghetto at the SF Café, we do like to argue over what is or isn’t
Science Fiction
. The jukebox here has all those bands on it—because the clientele is pretty mixed these days—but there are a fair few customers who furrow their brows and frown sullenly when Adam Green comes on. Cause that just ain’t Rock’n’Roll. Old Man Campbell really wouldn’t have approved.

By ‘scientifiction’…I mean the Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story—a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision.

Hugo Gernsback

The first problem with the closed definition? There’s more than one. There are many definitions of
Science Fiction
. They are all right…for someone. They are all wrong…for someone. Here’s a rather basic one as an example:

Science Fiction
is a
Modern Pulp
genre which combines Romantic character types, plot structures and settings with a Rationalist focus on scientific theories and conjectures, requiring a degree of plausibility in the extrapolation of its hypothetical conceits.

This
Science Fiction
is scientific romance or Hugo Gernsback’s scientifiction, taken to its logical conclusion. Codified in the early twentieth century explosion of Boy’s Own adventure stories, it is essentially fantasia (fabrication, strange and marvellous:
could
this happen? oh, it
should!
) transformed as we source conceits in futurology (speculation, scientific and plausible… more or less). This
Science Fiction
is born in a binding at the deepest levels, where Gernsback’s “intermingled with” becomes “rooted in.” Old Man Campbell was pretty strict about what was on the menu at the SF Café.

To be science fiction, not fantasy, an honest effort at prophetic extrapolation of the known must be made. Ghosts can enter science fiction, if they’re logically explained, but not if they are simply the ghosts of fantasy. Prophetic extrapolation can derive from a number of different sources, and apply in a number of fields. Sociology, psychology, and parapsychology are, today, not true sciences; therefore, instead of forecasting future results of application of sociological science of today, we must forecast the development of a science of sociology. From there the story can take off.

John W. Campbell

Note the use of the term
prophetic
by both editors, with its complex of connotations quite at odds with the grounding in science—religion and rapture, voices and visions. An aspect of fantasia remains, and in it we cannot fail to see
fantasy
—albeit defined, for the moment, not in terms of literature but in terms of psychology: the sustained fancy; the ludic or oneiric imagining; from the Greek
phantasia
; a making visible. Where prophecy is the name of the game, we are faced with a fiction firmly of the
marvellous
and/or
monstrous
. Prophets do not speak of the routine.

The relationship of these two gestural terms,
SF
and
fantasy
, will be a theme here. Some readers may bristle at my use of the f-word. To be fair, I’m not that fond of it myself, its meaning similarly confused by a clash of open and closed definitions, in the conflation of strange fictions which eschew the sublime with the blend of the incredible, the marvellous and the monstrous which I term
fantasia
, skewed to the marvellous by default. But until we can get stuck into it, we are unfortunately stuck
with
it.

Anyway, the point is this: up to and during the Golden Age, born of the simple fact that futurology resulted in arguable fantasias, there was a tight-knit relationship between Rationalism and Romanticism which kept the form ae
sthetically coherent and commercially viable. Atom bombs and satellites, microwaves and mechanisation—the future looked exciting, rich with the all-important sense-of-wonder that is born where the incredible meets the marvellous. So this new
Genre
emerged for the Rocket Age, a popular form which, like the other pulp forms, had its own set of rules, its clear boundaries, a form delineated in steel and Formica, Bakelite and plastic, in Old Man Campbell’s Science Fiction Café and Bar, in a world of nuclear power and space flight just around the corner.

That shiny new
Science Fiction
didn’t come from nowhere, of course, but as long as we’re talking in closed definitions, let’s not pretend that it’s existed from the dawn of time.