Triton (Trouble on Triton) (46 page)

I

“You know,” Sam said pensively, “that explanation of mine this evening—about the gravity business?” They stood in the warm semidark of the co-op’s dining room. “If that were translated into some twentieth-century language, it would come out complete gobbledy-gook. Oh, perhaps an s-f reader might have understood it. But any scientist of the period would have giggled all the way to the bar.”

“S-f?” Bron leaned against the bar.

“‘Scientifiction?’

‘Sci-fi?’

‘Speculative fiction?’

‘Science fiction?’

‘S-f?’—that’s the historical progression of terms, though various of them resurfaced from time to time.”

“Wasn’t there some public-channel coverage about ?”

“That’s right,” Sam said. “It always fascinated me, that century when humanity first stepped onto the first moon.”

“It’s not that long ago,” Bron said. “It’s no longer from us to them than from them to when man first stepped onto the American shore.”

Which left Sam’s heavy-lipped frown so intense Bron felt his temples heat. But Sam suddenly laughed. “Next thing you’ll be telling me is that Columbus discovered America; the bells off San Salvador; the son buried in the Dominican Republic ...”

Bron laughed too, at ease and confused.

“What I mean—” Sam’s hand, large, hot, and moist, landed on Bron’s shoulder—“is that my explanation would have been nonsence two hundred years ago. It isn’t today. The episteme has changed so entirely, so completely, the words bear entirely different charges, even though the meanings are more or less what they would have been in—”

“What’s an episteme?” Bron asked.

“To be sure. You haven’t been watching the proper public-channel coverages.”

“You know me.” Bron smiled. “Annie-shows and ice-operas—always in the intellectual forefront. Never in arears.”

“An episteme is an easy way to talk about the way to slice through the whole—”

“Sounds like the secondary hero in some ice-opera. Melony Episteme, co-starring with Alona Liang.” Bron grabbed his crotch, rubbed, laughed, and realized he was drunker than he’d thought.

“Ah,” Sam said (Was Sam drunk too ... ?), “but the episteme was
always
the secondary hero of the s-f novel—in exactly the same way that the landscape was always the primary one. If you’d just been watching the proper public channels, you’d know.” But he had started laughing too.
II

Everything in a science-fiction novel should be mentioned at least twice (in at least two different contexts).

Ill

Text and
textus?
Text, of course, comes from the Latin
textus,
which means “web.” In modern printing, the “web” is that great ribbon of paper which, in many presses, takes upwards of an hour to thread from roller to roller throughout the huge machine that embeds ranked rows of inked graphemes upon the “web,” rendering it a text. All the uses of the words “web,”

“weave,”

“net,”

“matrix” and more, by this circular ‘etymology’ become entrance points into a
textus,
which is ordered from all language and language-functions, and upon which the text itself is embedded. The technological innovations in printing at the beginning of the Sixties, which produced the present

“paperback revolution,” are probably the single most important factor contouring the modern science-fiction text. But the name “science fiction” in its various avatars—s-f, speculative fiction, sci-fi, scientifiction—goes back to those earlier technological advances in printing that resulted in the proliferation of “pulp magazines” during the Twenties.

Naming is always a metonymic process. Sometimes it
is
the pure metonymy* of associating an abtract group of letters (or numbers) with a person (or thing), so that it can be recalled (or listed in a metonymic order with other entity names). Frequently, however, it is a more complicated metonymy: old words are drawn from the cultural lexicon to name the new entity (or to rename an old one), as well as to render it (whether old or new) part of the present culture. The relations between entities so named are woven together in patterns far more complicated than any alphabetic or numeric listing can suggest: and the encounter between objects-that-are-words (e.g., the name “science fiction,” a critical text on science fiction, a science-fiction text) and processes-made-manifest-by-words (another science-fiction text, another critical text, another name) is as complex as the constantly dissolving interface between culture and language itself. But we can take a model of the naming process from another image: Consider a child, on a streetcorner at night, in one

*Metonymy
is, of course, the rhetorical figure by which one thing is called with the name of another thing associated with it. The historian who writes, “At last, the crown was safe at Hampton,” is not concerned with the metallic tiarra but the monarch who, from time to time, wore it. The dispatcher who reports to the truck-boss, “Thirty drivers rolled in this weekend,” is basically communicating about the arrival of trucks those drivers drove and cargoes those trucks hauled.
Metonymic
is a slightly strained, adjectival construction to label such associational processes.
Metonym
is a wholly-coined, nominative one, shored by a wholly spurious (etymologically speaking) resemblance to “synonymy/synonym” and “antinomy/antinym.” Still, it avoids confusion. In a text practically opaque with precision, it distinguishes “metonymy”—the-thing-associated (“crown,”

“driver”) from “metonymy”—the-process-of-association (crown to monarch; driver to cargo). The orthodox way of referring to both is with the single term.

of Earth’s great cities, who hears for the first time the ululating sirens, who sees the red, enameled flanks heave around the far, building
edge,
who watches the
chrome-ended,
rubber-coated, four-inch

“suctions” ranked along those flanks, who sees the street-light glistening on glass-faced pressure-meters and stainless-steel discharge-valves on the red pump-housing, and the canvas hose heaped in the rear hopper, who watches the black-helmeted and rubber-coated men clinging to their ladders, boots lodged against the serrated running-board. The child might easily name this entity, as it careers into the night, a Red Squealer.

Later, the child brings this name to a group of children—who take it up easily and happily for their secret speech. These children grow; younger children join the group; older children leave. The name persists—indeed, for our purposes, the locus of which children use and which children do not use the name is how we read the boundary of the group itself.

The group persists—persists weeks, months, years after the child who first gave it its secret term has outgrown both the group and its language. But one day a younger child asks an older (well after the name, within the group, has been hallowed by use): “But
why
is it a Red Squealer?” Let us assume the older child (who is of an analytical turn of mind) answers: “Well, Red Squealers must get to where they are going quickly; for this reason sirens are put on them which squeal loudly, so that people can hear them coming a long way off and pull their cars to the side. They are painted with that bright enamel color for much the same reason—so that people can see them coming and move out of their way. Also, by now, the red paint is traditional; it serves to identify that it is, indeed, a Red Squealer one sees through the interstices of traffic and not just any old truck.”

Satisfying as this explanation is, it is still something of a fiction. We were there, that evening, on the corner. We know the first child called it a Red Squealer out of pure, metonymic apprehension: there were, that evening, among many perceived aspects, “redness” and “squealing,” which, via a sort of morphological path—

of-least-resistence, hooked up in an easily sayable/ thinkable phrase. We know, from our privileged position before
this
text, that there is nothing explicit in our story to stop the child from having named it a Squealing Red, a Wah-Wah, a Blink-a-blink, or a Susan-Anne McDuffy—had certain nonspecified circumstances been other than the simplest reading of our fiction suggests. The adolescent explanation, as to why a Red Squealer
is
a Red Squealer, is as satisfying as it is because it takes the two metonyms that form the name and embeds them in a web of functional discourse—satisfying because of the functional nature of the adult episteme*, which both generates the discourse and of which, once the discourse is uttered, the explanation (as it is absorbed into the memory, of both querant and explicator, which is where the
textus
lies embedded) becomes a part.

Science Fiction was named in like manner to the Red Squealer; in like manner the metonyms which are its name can be functionally related:

Science fiction
is
science fiction because various bits of technological discourse (real, speculative, or pseudo)—that is to say the “science”—are used to redeem various other sentences from the merely metaphorical, or even the meaningless, for denotative description/presentation of incident. Sometimes, as with the sentence “The door dilated,” from Heinlein’s
Beyond This Horizon,
the technological discourse that redeems it—in this case, discourse on the engineering of large-size, iris apertures; and the sociological discourse on what such a technology would suggest about the entire culture—is not explicit in the text. Is it, then, implicit in the
textus!
All we can say for certain is that, embedded in the
textus
of anyone who can
read
the sentence properly, are those emblems by which they could recognize such discourse were it manifested to them in some explicit text.

In other cases, such as the sentences from Bester’s
The Stars My Destination,
“The cold was the taste of

*The episteme is the structure of knowledge read from the epistomological
textus
when it is sliced through (usually with the help of several texts) at a given, cultural moment.

lemons, and the vacuum was the rake of talons on his skin . •. Hot stone smelled like velvet caressing his skin. Smoke and ash were harsh tweeds rasping his skin, almost the feel of wet canvas. Molten metal smelled like water trickling through his fingers,” the technological discourse that redeems them for the denotative description/presentation of incident
is
explicit in the text: “Sensation came to him, but filtered through a nervous system twisted and shortcircuited by the PyrE explosion. He was suffering from Synesthesia, that rare condition in which perception receives messages from the objective world and relays these messages to the brain, but there in the brain the sensory perceptions are confused with one another.”

In science fiction, “science”—i.e., sentences displaying verbal emblems of scientific discourses—is used to literalize the meanings of other sentences for use in the construction of the fictional foreground. Such sentences as “His world exploded,” or “She turned on her left side,” as they subsume the proper technological discourse (of economics and cosmology in one; of switching circuitry and prosthetic surgery in the other), leave the banality of the emotionally muzzy metaphor, abandon the triviality of insomniac tossings, and, through the labyrinth of technical possibility, become possible images of the impossible. They join the repertoire of sentences which may propel
textus
into text. This is the functional relation of the metonyms “science” and “fiction” that were chosen by Hugo Gernsbach to name his new pulp genre. He (and we) perceived that, in these genre texts, there existed an aspect of “science” and an aspect of “fiction,” and because of the science, something
about
the fiction was different. I have located this difference specifically in a set of sentences which, with the particular way they are rendered denotatively meaningful by the existence of other sentences not necessarily unique to science fiction, are themselves by and large unique to texts of the s-f genre. The obvious point must be made here: this explanation of the relation of these two onomal metonyms Science/Fiction no more defines (or exhausts) the science-fictional-enterprise than our adolescent explanation of the relation of the two onomal metonyms Red/Squealer defines (or exhausts) the enterprise of the fire engine. Our functional explanation of the Red Squealer, for example, because of the metonyms from which the explanation started, never quite gets around to mentioning the Red Squealer’s primary function: to put out fires.

And the ‘function’ of science fiction is of such a far more complex mode than that of the Red Squealer, one might hesitate to use such metonyms—“function” and “primary”—to name it in the first place. Whatever one chooses to name it, it can not be expressed, as the Red Squealer’s can, by a colon followed by a single infini-tive-with-noun—no more than one could thus express the “primary function” of the poetic-enterprise, the mundane-fictional-, the cinematic-, the musical-, or the critical-. Nor would anyone seriously demand such an expression for any of these other genres. For some concept of what, primarily, science fiction does, as with other genres, we must rely on further, complex, functional explanation:

The hugely increased repertoire of sentences science fiction has to draw on (thanks to this relation between the “science” and the “fiction”) leaves the structure of the fictional field of s-f notably different from the fictional field of those texts which, by eschewing technological discourse in general, sacrifice this increased range of nontechnological sentences—or at least sacrifice them in the particular, foreground mode. Because the added sentences in science fiction
are
primarily foreground sentences, the relationship between foreground and background in science fiction differs from that of mundane fiction. The deposition of weight between landscape and psychology shifts. The deployment of these new sentences within the traditional s-f frame of “the future” not only generates the obviously new panoply of possible fictional incidents; it generates as well an entirely new set of rhetorical stances: the future-views-the-present forms one axis against which these stances may be plotted; the alien—