Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions Read online

  Rhapsody

  Notes on Strange Fictions

  Hal Duncan

  Lethe Press

  Maple Shade, New Jersey

  Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

  Copyright © 2014 Hal Duncan. all rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, microfilm, and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published in 2014 by Lethe Press, Inc.

  118 Heritage Avenue, Maple Shade, NJ 08052 USA

  lethepressbooks.com / [email protected]

  isbn: 978-1-59021-261-5 / 1-59021-261-4

  e-isbn: 978-1-59021-093-2 / 1-59021-093-x

  Earlier versions of some of this work first appeared on the author’s blog,

  http://notesfromthegeekshow.blogspot.com/

  Interior design: Alex Jeffers.

  Cover image: Stijn Windig, www.stijnwindig.com

  Cover design: Matt Cresswell.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Duncan, Hal, 1971- author.

  Rhapsody : Notes on Strange Fictions / Hal Duncan.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-59021-261-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  1. Science fiction, American--History and criticism. 2. Science fiction, English--History and criticism. 3. Fantasy fiction, American--History and criticism. 4. Fantasy fiction, English--History and criticism. I. Title.

  PS374.S35D86 2014

  813’.0876209--dc23

  2013049996

  To Delany and Disch; to all the cartographers of the strange, too many to mention, whose work has spurred this exploration.

  Table of Contents

  Table of Contents

  Introduction: SF Considered as a Subset of SF

  Part 1

  Down in the Ghetto at the SF Café

  The Marriage(s) of Science Fiction and Fantasy

  The Miscegenation of Science Fantasy

  The Scourge of Sci-Fi

  The Spelunkers of Speculative Fiction

  The Ghost and the Golem

  Part 2

  The Combat Fiction Bar & Grill

  The Booker and the Bistro de Critique

  The Kipple Foodstuff Factory

  The Secret Cuisine

  The Order of the Blue Flower

  The Tower of Mimeticists’ Bicuspids

  About the Author

  Introduction:

  SF Considered as a Subset of SF

  —of SF Considered as a Subset—

  If this appears that I am arguing for a deconstruction of our ideas of generic norms, returning us to a primal chaos of fictive forms in which all fictive forms are equally privileged; if this appears that I am arguing for the dismantling of the concept itself, “science fiction,” as more a barrier than an aid to reading; if this seems as if I am saying that all fiction worth examining is, one way or another, science fiction; it is because that is what I am doing.

  Frank McConnell

  There are countless definitions of SF, innumerable attempts to characterise the type of fiction read by the regulars of the SF Café, from the boundless generality of the laziest catch-all down to the most limited and limiting specificities of those who would claim that only their SF is really SF. I’ve never found the more specific definitions terribly convincing, and I’ve never found them terribly useful. If they ever held true at all, it was long before I stepped through the doors of the SF Café with a borrowed copy of Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot in my hand, expecting to find more of the same, only to find Philip K. Dick sitting at a table, obsessing over Gnostic demiurges and ersatz realities, Robert A. Heinlein across from him, spouting libertarian aphorisms but paying for Dick’s coffee. The talk at that table was as much philosophy as science, as much monsters and messiahs as spaceships and simulacra. Palmer Eldritch and Valentine Michael Smith fought, like Zoroastrian deities, over my soul.

  Framed cinema posters adorned the walls—for Forbidden Planet, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Star Wars, for A Clockwork Orange, Solaris and The Man Who Fell to Earth. On the TV set up on the wall in one corner, as the channels flicked through the decades, old serials like Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, King of the Rocket Men gave way to reruns of Lost in Space, Land of the Giants, The Time Tunnel, these replaced in turn by The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, Tales from the Crypt, by Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, by The Six Million Dollar Man, Knight Rider, Manimal, by The Lost Room and The Lost World and just plain fucking Lost. These last three seemed a little strange given that this was the 1980s and the series didn’t actually exist yet, but I was too overawed to notice the temporal anomaly.

  —What the fuck is this place? I asked.

  —It’s not Fantasy, said one old-timer, and it’s not Sci-Fi. Ignore those freaks over in the corner if they try to tell you different.

  Over where he pointed, Tolkien sat in one booth, surrounded by acolytes, droning on in Elvish. I’d read The Lord of the Rings, all one million pages of trees, fight, trees, fight, trees, fight, and all six billion pages of Frodo and Sam climbing up a mountain at the end. I’d read a few Shannara books too, and it wasn’t my bag. It was years since I’d read The Borribles and years until I’d read The Book of Sand, so I didn’t think twice about who was sitting in the other booths. So the SF Café wasn’t that Fantasy malarkey? I was down with that. At the end of the counter there wasn’t even a writer, just some actor signing autographs for a bunch of geeks in Halloween costumes—Vulcans and Klingons, Doctor Who and Davros, the entire cast of Blake’s 7. I was a typical teen, all too keen to abjure the puerile to prove my maturity, oblivious of how essentially adolescent that is, so I didn’t think twice about Patrick McGoohan’s Number Six, sat brooding at the other end of the counter, barking clipped defiance with Pinteresque subtexts. So it wasn’t this Sci-Fi business either? I could deal with that. But still…

  —So what is it? I asked.

  The old-timer shrugged and waved a hand to encompass everything surrounding us, the very ambience of the place.

  —SF, he said.

  So Fuck?

  Science Fiction is anything published as Science Fiction.

  Norman Spinrad

  What I would glean over the years was that, as far as I could tell, SF had long since become a marketing label more than anything, an arbitrary lumping-together of diverse works defying definition. For many readers, writers, editors and agents, that old-timer’s shrug seems pretty much the working (in)definition: SF is short for So Fuck? And I would discover that Fantasy could also be defined, if one so wishes, as whatever can be sold as fantasy, that Sci-Fi was a term equally arbitrary in its application. These are simply nominal labels, circularly defined; they can’t be argued with for that reason, but they also, for that reason, serve no real purpose, other than the obvious commercial and (sub)cultural ones—as banners to gather the faithful under or to strike fear into the hearts of unbelievers.

  Science Fiction is what I mean when I point to it.

  Damon Knight

  I sit here now in the SF Café, on my stool up at the counter, scribbling these notes from the city of New Sodom. It has occurred to me to begin an investigation, an enquiry into the nature of the forms and functions of this strange field of strange fictions. Perhaps a sociography of SF in some form, the life and times of the SF Café, to provide some context, but not so much historical as political, a bit of bolshie heresy, a shamelessly subjective polemic on the turf wars of pulp, woven through with the theory of what’s actually going on in the texts. Or perhaps another angle to start? Maybe an over
view of all the varied definitions, all the methods and modes of SF they represent. The ghetto is a complicated place. It has walls for all its different zones, some sealing their own little quarter off from the rest, many reinforcing the boundaries between the ghetto and the outside world.

  I should abjure the marketing labels, I think—Science Fiction or Fantasy—don’t want to risk the assumption that I’m talking, with any of these definitions, about some singular coherent Genre which these variant models could or could not, should or should not, be applied to. No, let’s instead invent a new label for each definition, or for each type of definition. The point is to examine the multiplicity of features, not to end up in pointless bickering over which of these features are required or forbidden if some work is to be called SF. For ease of reference, and for the sheer bloody-minded whimsy of it, let’s make all of these labels abbreviate to SF, each of these SFs to be considered its own SF, an SF which may not be yours and may not be mine, but which probably belongs to someone out there. Each could be considered a gateway out into the wider galaxy of SF that each sparkly gem of an SF is a subset of, each definition with its own guardians, those who would say this is SF.

  Let’s mark out those gates and gatekeepers on our map.

  Scientific Fancy

  The best definition of science fiction is that it consists of stories in which one or more definitely scientific notion or theory or actual discovery is extrapolated, played with, embroidered on, in a non-logical, or fictional sense, and thus carried beyond the realm of the immediately possible in an effort to see how much fun the author and reader can have exploring the imaginary outer reaches of a given idea’s potentialities.

  Groff Conklin

  This is, perhaps, the SF that existed before Old Man Campbell, the SF that Gernsback was looking for. In its weaker form, this content-based definition of SF simply requires the presence of an element of vaguely rational futurology, extrapolated out into background, plot, etc. The speculation need not be a locus of metaphoric or metonymic meaning; a fancy rather than a conceit, it may function as little more than a superficial justification for the Romantic adventure story structures. This SF is simply fantasy, some might say, with the fanciful element rationalised in terms of science or technology. A better term would be fantasia.

  Science fiction is a branch of fantasy identifiable by the fact that it eases the “willing suspension-of-disbelief” on the part of its readers by utilizing an atmosphere of science credibility for its imaginative speculations in physical science, space, time, social science and philosophy.

  Sam Moskowitz

  Sam Lundwall’s distinction between SF (with explanation) and fantasy (with no explanation) might also be considered here. Despite the differentiation, he focuses more on the “gimmick” of an explanation than on the actual rigour of the extrapolation, just as Moskowitz focuses on the “atmosphere of science credibility” and Conklin on the sense of play. Further, in his characterisation of the speculative element as one that might develop “from known science or from investigations of areas not yet quite explored but suspected,” that last clause provides the backdoor of a Paradigm Shift Caveat by which metaphysics and magic (e.g. FTL or ESP) can sneak into SF, with a wave of the hand and a mutter of hyper-space or untapped human potential. Working by this type of definition, the writer may play fast and loose with even the laws of physics. As long as the reader comes along for the ride, then it’s still seen as SF—scientific fancy, that is.

  There are pros and cons to this scientific fancy, as there are with any form of SF. In using extrapolation largely to build the environment in which the story takes place or to create some technological MacGuffin as a plot device in a Romantic adventure narrative structure (some planet-destroying Doomsday Machine to save the Earth from, an Unobtainium Drive to power a spaceship built in one’s back yard, a network of interstellar portals built by an ancient race), scientific fancy is all about the ripping yarn. Often this SF crosses over with YA and serves as excellent entry-level fiction for the new reader, seeing as it’s a whole lot of fun. The downside is that all too often the result is a shallow Boy’s Own Space Opera or Military SF that feeds the perception of SF being solely for teenage boys; and all too often it’s so deeply plot-oriented it neglects character and thus feeds the perception that SF has no depth and therefore is not literature. Romanticism has some neat tricks, but it also has a lot of…well…posturing adolescent bollocks.

  So, many people talk of “growing out of SF” when they’re really just leaving behind those juvenile power fantasies, never having got past the entry-level adventuring of scientific fancy.

  A different type of barrier might be why some readers never get past the entry-level, but this is better illustrated with the next type of SF…

  Scientific Fabrication

  [Science fiction] is fiction about the future of science and scientists.

  Isaac Asimov

  In its stronger form the content-based definition of SF specifically turns the whole focus of the story onto science in terms of character, background and plot, not only regarding the scientific speculation as essential but requiring its centrality and expecting a degree of rigour in its treatment.

  Fiction in which new and futuristic scientific developments propel the plot.

  Harper Handbook of Literature

  What is important to this SF is that the narrative itself must turn upon the science, not just as a plot device but as a driving force (the Three Laws of Robotics as the premises of the story’s logic, the von Neumann machines that run amok, the replicant that considers itself alive). The speculation is not a fancy upon which the story is built and from which it could ultimately be separated out. Rather, it is a fabrication—act and artefact, the process through which the story is constructed and the product which remains integral to the finished text, just as the investigation of a mystery is in the Mystery novel.

  Science fiction is the branch of literature that deals with the effects of change on people in the real world as it can be projected into the past, the future, or to distant places. It often concerns itself with scientific or technological change, and it usually involves matters whose importance is greater than the individual or the community; often the civilization or the race itself is in danger.

  James Gunn

  This scientific fabrication is perhaps what most within the community think of when they think of SF—the “what if” story formed by reaching out into the wilds of the hypothetical, the counterfactual, the metaphysical, grabbing a little (or not so little) seed of unreality, drawing it back into our world, planting it in the fertile soil of the imagination, and letting it grow. Pruning it back, wiring its branches, shaping its insanely accelerated development in the bonsai art of narrative.

  As an exercise in the logic of imagination, scientific fabrication is often valued more highly than scientific fancy, as a more intellectual approach, but it serves us well to remember that the “what if?” scenario might well lead to exactly the same Romantic adventure plot structure. What if there was a world-destroying Doomsday Machine the hero had to save the Earth from? What if the hero invented an Unobtainium Drive to power a spaceship built in their back yard? What if the hero was called in to investigate a network of interstellar portals built by an ancient race? Add the Paradigm Shift Caveat into the equation and allow that process of fabrication to be run as much by the logic of story as by the logic of reality, and we may well simply end up back at scientific fancy, with lightweight literature that will not be taken seriously.

  The term can be applied only to a story in which wherein removal of its scientific content would invalidate the narrative.

  Theodore Sturgeon

  A more important potential point of failure for this SF, though, is where the logic of reality is incomplete, where a focus on the intellectual appeal of the thought experiment, its results and ramifications, carries with it a neglect of other aspects of reality—human motivation, the logic of affect. A syllogism
is not a story. An algorithm is not an anecdote. What a reader of this SF finds intriguing in its exploration of an abstract idea, may seem far less intriguing to a reader more concerned with behaviour than biology, more interested in characters than chemistry, fascinated more by personal flaws than particle physics. Fiction that fails to engage an audience with the emotional intricacies of viable characters will, for many in that audience, simply alienate them with its profound irrelevance at the human level. If scientific fancy risks reading as if it were written by and for the adolescent, scientific fabrication also risks reading as if it were written by and for the precocious prepubescent, the pint-size Spock as yet oblivious to sex, death, and other such shitstorms of adult experience.

  Unfortunately, this risk is exacerbated by one attempt to deal with the first potential weakness—the Romantic nonsenses of scientific fancy—by rejecting the Paradigm Shift Caveat entirely, precluding the presence of any element in the story which breaches scientific orthodoxy. As understandable as it is, as an attempt to force a seriousness onto the form via rationality and rigour, this next definition of SF largely just pushes the uninitiated reader’s interest to breaking point.

  Scientistic Fabrication

  Realistic speculation about possible future events, based solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world, past and present, and on a thorough understanding of the nature and significance of the scientific method.