Stories for Chip (28 page)

In the US from the 1920s through the early 1950s, SF was published chiefly in pulp magazines and comics. In his introduction to
Microcosmic God, Vol.2
of Theodore Sturgeon's collected stories, Delany quotes Sturgeon's account of how his stepfather, Argyll, reacted when young Ted bought his first SF magazine (a 1933 issue of
Astounding
):

I brought it home and Argyll pounced on it as I came in the door. “Not in my house!” he said, and scooped it off my schoolbooks and took it straight into the kitchen and put it in the garbage and put the cover on. “That's what we do with garbage,” and he sat back down at his desk and my mother at the end of it and their drink. (“Forward” xxii)

Delany attributes Argyll's attitude, that SF is trash, to the “moral rigidities” of the pre-World War II era, when pulp magazines and comics were viewed as a “pernicious influence of an evil antiart.”(xxiii) Delany notes that when in 1946, “on the other side of the Second World War,” his parents found him reading a Batman comic, although his father was appalled, comics “were allowed in the house with only comparatively minimal policing.” (xxiii)

The genre may have produced a significant number of what Jonathan Lethem calls “Great Books” in the decades since Argyll Sturgeon characterized SF as “garbage,” but for many, the attitude that SF is “trash” has apparently not altered significantly. When in early 2006 David Izkoff, the new science fiction reviewer for the
New York Times
, published his first review along with a reading list titled “Science Fiction for the Ages” that he said was a list of personal favorites, he expressed a sense of shame about being seen to read SF in public. What “truly shames me,” he writes, “is that I cannot turn to any of these people [fellow passengers on the subway], or to my friends, or to you, and say…you should pick up this new work of science fiction I just finished reading, because you will enjoy it as much as I did.” Shame seems a peculiarly strong choice of word, given the explanation he offers:

I cannot do this in good conscience because if you were to immerse yourself in most of the sci-fi being published these days, you would probably enjoy it as much as one enjoys reading a biology textbook or a stereo manual. And you would very likely come away wondering, as I do from time to time, whether science fiction has strayed so far from the fiction category as a whole that, though the two share common ancestors, they now seem to have as much to do with each other as a whale has to do with a platypus. (“Geek to Me”)

Although some welcomed the possibility that the
New York Times Book Review
actually intended to publish a regular SF column rather than the occasional short piece by Gerald Jonas the
Times
had previously allotted to SF, the language, tone, and underlying assumptions implicit in Itzkoff's first column provoked controversy in the SF blogosphere.
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SF writers, critics, and fans have an acute sensitivity to the anxieties attending ghetto status, and few missed the peculiarity of Itzkoff's use of the word shame, which rendered his apparent anxieties about being associated with the genre stark and—for some—even offensive. Mathew Cheney, for instance, not only mocks Itzkoff's anxieties—

I have a hard time mustering up much of a response beyond, “Boo, hoo,” because if the poor boy is wandering through the subways in search of “social standing” for the books he reads, there's no hope for him at all and he needs to get one of those expensive Manhattan shrinks to work through it with him. (Cheney, March 5, 2006)

but also parses the passage quoted above to expose the nature of Itzkoff's anxieties:

So there are two things in the world, “fiction” and things that are unreadable by people on subway cars. There is also this person called you, and you don't enjoy reading biology textbooks or stereo manuals. This is a marvelous move, because here the equation is “you = Dave Itzkoff” and so the insecure writer has turned the world into himself. Clearly, his inner child, disappointed with the world, is acting up.

The implication here is that you is not a “geek,” which is what a person who enjoys such novels as
Counting Heads
is. Geeks are outsiders, they are not normal, they exist on the margins, they are part of a freakshow, they have no social standing or political clout, and they don't read the
New York Times
. And they're taking over the world and making science fiction unsafe for the rest of us.

Except the thing Itzkoff calls “science fiction” (or “sci fi”) doesn't exist. It doesn't exist as an opposite to the ridiculous “fiction” category he creates (since that doesn't exist, either), and it doesn't exist because all sorts of things get published as science fiction…I'm not denying there isn't plenty of SF that is, well, geeky. It's not the stuff that appeals to me, but I actually admire it a lot…Why should it have to be as appealing to the masses as
The Da Vinci Code
? This is to confuse quality with popularity, and that's a deadly confusion. (Cheney, March 5, 2006)

Cheney goes on to examine Itzkoff's list of his ten favorite SF books, noting that it includes nothing “geeky” (or “hard”), and expresses amusement that “Itzkoff's choices and preferences suggest he is as crippled by nostalgia as the people who complain that SF hasn't been any good since the death of John W. Campbell.” To me, however, Itzkoff's list suggests something rather different (besides sexist ignorance of work by women writers). Apart from
The Twilight Zone Companion
, his list carefully selects titles that have the status of being “classics” or are written by authors who've achieved recognition in mainstream literary circles (works of the sort Delany characterizes as “borderline cases” in his
Diacritics
interview): Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s
A Canticle for Leibowitz
; Kurt Vonnegut's
Cat's Cradle
; Anthony Burgess's
A Clockwork Orange
; Thomas Pynchon's
The Crying of Lot 49
; Jonathan Lethem's
Gun, with Occasional Music: A Novel
; China Miéville's
Looking for Jake
; Philip K. Dick's
The Man in the High Castle
; Ray Bradbury's
R is for Rocket
; and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons'
Watchmen
. Rather than being simply non-“geeky,” Itzkoff's list reflects a desperate wish to exhibit sufficient distinction in his taste to disavow the very stigmatization Cheney mocks him for fretting over.

There's nothing novel in Itzkoff's tactic: it resembles another tactic deployed by SF critics to render SF legitimate, viz., that of drafting works of high literature that are “borderline” SF into the SF canon with the hope of redeeming it. Novels like Thomas Pynchon's
Gravity's Rainbow
, Kazuo Ishiguro's
Never Let Me Go
, Cormac McCarthy's
The Road
, Haruki Murakami's
Kafka on the Shore
, Margaret Atwood's
The Handmaid's Tail
, Aldous Huxley's
Brave New World
, Philip Roth's
The Plot Against America
, George Orwell's
1984
, though arguably science-fictional (especially when judged by the criteria of one or another formal definition of SF), are not usually shelved in the SF sections of bookstores and were not themselves written with reference to other works of SF. While it makes sense to consider such novels as works of genre to the extent that they bear an intertextual relation to works of SF, because such novels have high prestige and recognition value outside the genre, critics often tend to claim them as markers demonstrating the worth and value of works of science fiction regardless of their provenance or significance for the genre.

But just as SF critics wish to identify high literary work as SF to win respectability of the genre by association, so do high literary critics wish to identify brilliant works of SF as literary and dissociate them from the genre. Thus, when an SF author who has been clearly associated with the genre produces work that achieves recognition in the literary sphere, critics claim that the work “transcends” the genre. A typical example can be found in Steve Erickson's interview of Delany in
Black Clock
:

A lot of your work, particularly in the late Sixties and going into the Seventies, seemed intended both to transcend the conventions of science fiction and at the same time to embrace what we'll call, for lack of something better, the “mainstream.” But as your biographies have it, you grew up not necessarily reading a lot of science fiction but a lot of more classical literature. (Erickson, 73)

Erickson's question is clearly meant to prompt Delany to disavow not only his classification as an SF writer but also the influence SF has had on his fiction. Delany responds by talking about how emotionally powerful his experiences reading SF as a child were. A few questions later, Erickson tries again: “So you didn't feel caught up by a dual impulse to transcend the genre on the one hand and embrace it on the other.” This time Delany overtly attempts to set Erickson straight:

Transcending the genre? At best it's a conventional—and somewhat hyperbolic—way to refer to the writer's unusual contribution to the genre itself. But the SF novelist who wants to do something really good and new is no more trying to transcend the SF genre than the literary novelist who wants to write a really good and new literary novel is trying to transcend literature. In both cases it's a matter of trying to live up to the potential of the genre. (Erickson, 75)

Delany then expands on the notion of living up to the potential of the genre in which one is writing. Nevertheless, Erickson's anxieties about Delany's association with the SF ghetto apparently prevent him from grasping Delany's point, for he's unable to let the matter drop. So he tries once again:

OK. Let's give this dead horse one more whack. It doesn't seem such a coincidence that
Dhalgren
and
Gravity's Rainbow
were written pretty much during the same period of time. We could say the line between “science fiction” and “mainstream” was being attacked from different sides by both books. (Erickson 76)

Delany responds by agreeing with the last sentence, but insists, “To repeat myself, genre distinctions are fundamentally power boundaries.” And he goes on to note that “exclusionary attitudes are part of the history of science fiction….Those exclusionary forces rigorously shaped the space in which the rhetorical richness, invention, and genius of SF was forced to flower.” (76) In other words, a genre is a location with a history—and not simply a slot with a label.

Jonathan Lethem, who spent years working in the genre before “breaking out” into the mainstream, shares Erickson's interest in dismantling “the line” between “science fiction and mainstream.” In an essay first published in 1998, Lethem “dreams” of “utopian reconfiguration of the publishing, bookselling, and reviewing apparatus” that would dismantle the “barrier” between “genre” and “mainstream” fiction:

The 1973 Nebula Award should have gone to
Gravity's Rainbow
, the 1976 Award to
Ratner's Star
. Soon after, the notion of “science fiction” ought to have been gently and lovingly dismantled, and the writers dispersed: children's fantasists here, hardware-fetish thriller writers here, novelizers of films both-real-and-imaginary here. Most important, a ragged handful of heroically enduring and ambitious speculative fabulators should have embarked for the rocky realms of midlist, out-of-category fiction. And there—don't wake me now, I'm fond of this one—they should have been welcomed. (Lethem, 9)

“Speculative fabulation,” Lethem informs us, was “a lit-crit term both pretentiously silly and dead right,” conceived “in a seizure of ambition,” when SF “flirted with renaming itself.”(1) Lethem's principal complaint is that “SF's literary writers exist now in a twilight world, neither respectable nor commercially viable.” If SF can't be merged with the mainstream, then what is needed, he argues, is to find a way to make work that gets categorized as SF legitimate by keeping it from “drowning in a sea of garbage in bookstores,” by presenting “its own best face, to win proper respect.”
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(Lethem, 8)

A similar tactic to that of drafting literary works into the SF canon is that of inventing new labels designed to blur the genre distinctions Delany characterizes as “power boundaries,” with the aim of placing the more literary or “softer” SF within a boundary zone into which can be drafted literary work with fantastic or SFnal elements. The term “Speculative Fiction” or “Spec Fic” dates back to 1947, when first Heinlein used it, but began to be used in the 1970s to imply an SF work's superior quality to other science fiction; the US version of the term “New Wave” dates back to the mid-1960s; and the term “slipstream,” which many people say Bruce Sterling coined, became popular in the late 1980s and continues to be bandied about to this day. The late 1980s and early 1990s also saw an attempt to distinguish the “postmoderns,” which according to Michael Swanwick were comprised of a “natural division” between “humanists” and “cyberpunks”
⁵
; while in the late 1990s, a group of Fantasy writers led by Fantasy of Manners writer Ellen Kushner (who earlier coined the term “Mannerpunk”) attempted to create “a new literary movement” called the “Young Trollopes.” More recently, various cliques (or “tribes”) of fantasy and SF writers have attempted to create designations for their own use that inevitably fail through an inability to establish or control essential definitions. These include “interstitial fiction,” “the New Weird,” “infernokrusher,” “New Fabulism” and even “New Wave Fabulism.”
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While all these attempts to distinguish a few genre texts from all others do not necessarily aim to confer literary legitimacy on their beneficiaries, they are, like the oldest, most pervasive label—“hard SF”—manifestations of the anxieties of the genre's lack of legitimacy.