Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions (11 page)

The question of whether a certain story of imagination is a fantasy or a science fiction work would depend upon the device the author uses to explain his projected or unreal world. If he uses the gimmick or device of saying: “This is a logical or probable assumption based upon known science, which is going to develop from known science or from investigations of areas not yet quite explored but suspected,” then one could call it science fiction. But if he asks the reader to suspend his disbelief simply because of the fun of it, in other words, just to say: “Here is a fairy tale I’m going to tell you,” then it is fantasy. It could actually be the same story.

Sam J. Lundwall

Down in the ghetto of Genre, in the SF Café that is our literary salon, in this scene of zines and forums, conventions and clubs, there’s a Great Debate that kicks off every so often. The diversity of the clientele maps to a diversity of opinions—convictions, even—and few of these are as contentious as those addressing the differences or lack thereof between science fiction and fantasy. To be fair, the taxonomy of literary genres is a game that appeals to the geek in me as much as anyone, but the diversity we’re dealing with in the SF Café is obscured by the very word
genre
, its meaning muddled by a conflation of (1) openly defined aesthetic idioms with (2) conventional templates that are closely defined and (3) marketing categories that are all but empty of definition. That the latter two offer absolute authority in the fact of template fit and rackspace label while the former very much does not, that the first and last place no firm strictures on the works whatsoever, while the other is defined entirely by such strictures, is why we must distinguish the three as each quite different creatures, if we want to make any sense at all down in the SF Café, when whoever we’re talking to might be presuming any of the three as a baseline. So:

There’s genre and there’s
Genre
.

Across the city of New Sodom—and in the SF Café most of all perhaps—we’ve fo
rgotten that the word
genre
derives from the Latin
generis
, meaning family, that if a genre is a family of fiction, then a work can be a member of that family by marriage or adoption as much as by birth. Aesthetic idioms are constantly reshaped by writers marrying one technique with another, adopting unfamiliar aims, methods born in other idioms entirely. This is genre as one big open clan. I’ve joked that being a “Celt” is actually fuck-all to do with birth; all you have to do is drink with a Celt, and that’s you initiated into the clan whether you like it or not. It’s like Richard Harris becoming Sioux in
A Man Called Horse
, only less painful than hanging by your nipples. (Although the hangover the next day…)

But then there’s
Genre
. Buying into a bullshit of bloodlines, many are proud of the traits inherited with the tartan—so proud of their clan name they’ve forgotten that family can be openly defined, that the in-laws with different names are still family if we accept them as such. For certain feuding factions indeed that very notion is anathema. The clan name is everything, and a pox on any cur who slights it. Any pure-bred work of
Science Fiction
(or as they will call it,
science fiction
) is entirely unrelated, they’ll insist, to that damnable
Fantasy
(or as they will call it,
fantasy
). There’s Campbells and MacDonalds, and ne’er the twain shall meet. Works in one cannot fit the other’s template, because the templates are mutually exclusive.

But all we really have, an upstart contrarian might say, is a tartan of a ma
rketing category with an empty definition. The presentation of this stuff as a
Genre
of
Science Fiction
is just bagpipes-and-haggis branding. In truth, it’s an open idiom, a genre of works which may be in various
Genres
, an extended family of fictions better described as
Hard SF
,
Space Opera
,
Cyberpunk
,
Technothriller
, and so on.
Fantasy
is in the same position, a tartan label slapped on a box containing the closely defined forms of
Epic Fantasy
,
Swords & Sorcery
,
Urban Fantasy
,
Paranormal Romance
, etc.

These are not subgenres, but
Genres
in their own right, and the tartan labels that adorn these works are simply branding, their purpose to position a book in front of this audience or that. And you know, our upstart contrarian might continue, that latter brand was only schismed off from
Science Fiction
in the 1970s, when Ballantine established their Adult Fantasy line to target the growing market for Tolkien, his direct ancestors and descendants. Look at all the works branded as either which ignore the strictures of
Genre
altogether. Forget the clan names and tartan; forget the templates which often fit loosely at best; the only sensible way to talk about science fiction or fantasy is as aesthetic idioms. If genre is a matter of familial relationships, what we have here is not two distinct clans with a feud going back longer than living memory. Science fiction is not Clan Campbell, fantasy is not Clan MacDonald, and the ghetto of Genre is not the blood-stained battleground of Glen Coe. The feud begins in 1971; before then science fiction and fantasy were happily married and raising Bradburys together.

And hell, someone else will say, when you look at them as idioms, science fiction is r
eally just a branch on the family tree of fantasy.

This is when the Great Debate inevitably kicks off.

I write, not for children, but for the child-like, whether they be of five, or fifty, or seventy-five.

George MacDonald

Across the city of New Sodom, there are a lot of cafés and bistros, each with its own menu but all serving sandwiches and soda. Downtown in the ghetto of Genre or uptown in the chi-chi neighbourhood known as Literature, there are joints where the food is bought in ready-made from the Shit Sandwich Co
mpany, and behind the counter is a squirt-gun dispensing Coca-Cola, Fanta or Sprite. Dr Pepper? Irn Bru? Maybe, maybe not. But you can guarantee the most populist tastes are catered for in these joints, that the most generic product is on offer. And many are happy with that; all they want is their local greasy spoon with the jukebox they know off by heart, or the franchise with free wifi and coffee that’s the same in every outlet. The sign outside is the genre label, the promise of what you want, how you want it, every time, in the same way and in the same place—and for many that doesn’t mean a wholemeal bagel and a fruit smoothy or any such frou-frou crap; it means a Shit Sandwich and a Diet Coke, thanks.

And yet…the SF Café has Shit Sandwiches and Diet Coke on tap like all the rest, but it also (again like all the rest) has its own menu of hamburgers and hot dogs, fresh off the hot plate from the fry cook in back. And a fridge stocked full of all those weird soft drinks you won’t get elsewhere. We got that Shinola Cola you won’t get most anywhere else. (Weird yellowy-blue colour, tastes a little strange at first, but a few cans and you’re hooked.) That’s because a marketing category offers more than is promised by the label, those red and white signs for Coca-Cola and the Shit Sandwich Company that adorn the front. As a marketing category it’ll stock whatever the fuck it can sell to its punters. And even if most punters want a
Genre
, “more of the same,” there’s always some who want “something different,” want the wider menu of a genre as an openly-defined idiom rather than a closely-defined template.

The menu in the SF Café tells an interesting tale. See, regardless of what some punters might maintain, the SF Café was always under joint ownership. Old Man Campbell never ran the place on his own. Those who remember far enough back can still recall an old guy you’d see pottering around, name of George MacDonald. Some would say he was the senior partner, others that he was just hired help, but whatever his role in things he stamped his mark on the menu, made sure that the SF Café was serving the chicken nuggets of fantasy right from the start, as well as the hamburgers of science fiction. A nasty r
umour surfaces from time to time, that he’s
that
McDonald, the clown who ripped the soul out of soul food, made it junk-food, fast-food, a factory-line product of sugar, salt and fat, identical in every franchise around the world. Pabulum for those with the taste-buds of a child. The quote from him above may go some way to explaining the source of this rumour and the subsequent attempt by one faction of patrons at the SF Café to assert their superiority of taste.

Science Fiction
is not
Fantasy
, they say. It’s not for the child-like, never mind for children. No,
Science Fiction
is for the adolescent at least! So there!

Welcome to the clan gathering at the SF Café. The feuds are great fun.

The Campbells and MacDonalds of science fiction and fantasy have been intermarried and interbred from the get-go, fucking and fighting, coming together at the SF Café’s drunken wakes and weddings, bickering over who belongs where and who doesn’t. Resentments bubble. Alliances are made and broken. Curmudgeons insult their second cousins. Black sheep flirt across the barricades. But for all the broadsides and back-stabbing, the talk of this side of the family and that, the gene pool is too mixed to talk about different genres on any level other than loyalty. Genres? We can talk about
Space Opera
,
Technothriller
,
Epic Fantasy
,
Swords & Sorcery
, the Campbells of the West Side, the MacDonalds of the Left Bank, and vice versa. There are the Three Sisters over here: Aunties Asimov, Heinlein and Clarke. There are the Twins over there: Cousins Leiber and Howard. And there’s Crazy Uncle Lovecraft in the corner (the corner that doesn’t look…quite right). But many of us these days are bastards and step-kids, our lineages too mixed-up for us to give a fuck about some old fart’s obdurate insistence on a dichotomy that just doesn’t exist:

Science Fiction
is not
Fantasy
?

Yeah, whatever. I’m more interested in the naked lunch that is the cold bu
ffet. In the SF Café, because it is the
SF
Café, there are those who look at that naked lunch and say:

The Buck and the Bottom Line

—Who cares? It’s just a fucking marketing label, anyway.

The shrug is appealingly simple, I admit, and it short-circuits all the essentialist strictures my thrawn experimentalism rebels against. If SF is just a label slapped on a book to position it in the marketplace then ultimately a work “is” SF only because the publisher/bookseller has decided so. I don’t have to worry about it. You don’t have to worry about it. As an attitude, this “So Fuck?” indefinition of SF is pragmatic, but it drops us into a circularity comparable to the oft-repeated maxim that
if it’s SF, it can’t be good; if it’s good, it can’t be SF.

Why is it SF? Because it will sell as SF.

Why will it sell as SF? Because it is SF.

The field is thus established as a zone of commercial viability, with the most popular (and therefore
exemplary
) at the centre and the most unpopular (and therefore
exceptional
) at the margins.
Popular
and
unpopular
don’t necessarily map to
shit
and
shinola
, of course, but in the world where Dan Brown sells fuckloads and Guy Davenport is largely out of print (to name two writers of an imaginary rackspace label of
History Fiction
), is it any wonder that outsiders buy into a vision of SF with shit as the exemplar and shinola as the exception? Writers and readers pass the buck to publishers and booksellers, the buck stops at the bottom line, and the bottom line is the lowest common denominator, savvy?

So let’s ditch that So Fuck indefinition, take the emptiness of the two fi
gurae as carte blanche, a
Get Out of Genre Free!
Card, and see if we can make sense of the
stuff
. That circularity seems awkward anyway, in the context of a field where works
not
sold as SF are often claimed as SF by readers, while works sold as SF are often rejected as
not proper science fiction
. Works like
Nineteen Eighty-Four
continue to cause arguments over whether or not they’re SF, regardless of how they’re sold, with works like
Dune
sparking similar disputes over whether they’re
really fantasy
.

The question then: whether a work being SF (not
Science Fiction
, but SF,) is a matter of criteria or characteristics—i.e. is it a generic form or a mode of the medium?

Is it a sonnet or a poem?

Characteristics, Conventions, Consensus

We can offer any text as a poem.

We can only truly offer a text as sonnet if it has fourteen lines and a volta; those crit
eria are non-negotiable. It doesn’t matter if a reader has never heard of sonnets, doesn’t know he’s reading one, and simply thinks of it as a “poem”; it’s
still
a sonnet. Hell, even if
the writer
has never heard of sonnets and doesn’t know they’re writing one, if it has fourteen lines and a volta, if it fits the conventional template, then it’s a sonnet. If it doesn’t, then it isn’t. We can offer any text as a poem though.

We can offer any text as a poem; while a poem will dance to keen eyes e
xpecting a display of certain characteristics, those characteristics are ever reforged by the very texts which are presented as poetry, concrete word collage shenanigans of verbal jauntes having abolished strictures of tradition, freed the field of forms to a mode: exploration of the capacities of expression in the medium of language itself, spoken or written; no more, no less; an exploitation of the raw dynamics.

We can offer any text as a poem.

Not that everyone will appreciate such liberties, such license. Take a chunk of prose, chop it into lines, perform it as a poem; some will accept it as such, but others may well argue from two centuries ago. Though unrhyme and weirder have been poetry for years, decades, centuries, millennia, though other cultures ever worked other songs than the sonnet from the dynamics of their argot, you’ll still find nay-sayers.

—This doesn’t rhyme, they’ll say.

—Poetry doesn’t have to rhyme, you’ll say.

—Yes, it does, they’ll say.

And here now, in the elsewhen of the SF Café? It’s not so different, I think, but behind the times, the strictures of tradition still holding sway, the nay-sayers stuck with a nominal label, an empty definition, that allows for the wildest riff to be offered, verbal jauntes in a pulp paperback, as SF, forced to stand their ground: that the characteristics are conventions, a granfalloon of generic forms in a fuzzy set of poetry considered as a subset of poetry: sonnet; rondel; ballade; villanelle; sestina; haiku; and so on. Here now, in the elsewhen of the SF Café, we’ve had the shenanigans going on for decades, but we haven’t yet adjusted to the idea of SF as a mode, still search for ways to parse it all as one big generic form, one big conventional template, bound in negotiated strictures albeit abstract.

We can offer any text as SF.

—These works are SF, we shrug, because those who partake in the decision-making—the readers, writers and publishers—are all on some deeper level in agreement that we know it when we see it and
this is it
.

Well, pretty much in agreement.

Most of the time.

Sometimes, I guess.

Okay, hardly ever.

But hey, it’s only where the consensus breaks down that we have to judge who has the final say.

And then it’s just a matter of who wins the day.

So, say some New Wave writer comes along and does some weird-ass shit riffing off sociology instead of physics, calls it SF. The argument kicks off, with a whole host of nay-sayers arguing that it’s not SF. Others dig this New Wave stuff, accept the offer of this narrative
as
SF, defend it. When the dust finally settles, you have a new consensus, a genre (re)defined in terms of (re)negotiated conventions.

We can offer any text as SF.

Not Proper Science Fiction

Problem is, there’s little coherence, never mind consensus, only a bunch of camps—scientific fancy, scientistic fabrication, soul fiction, scientific fabulation, symbolic formulation…and so on. Within each of these, there’s generally a coherent idea of what does and does not constitute SF, but these camps are often deeply antipathetic to each other’s views. While renegotiation of conventions may take place
within
those camps, the talks between them in the SF Café break down into stalemates as positions ossify and negotiable conventions are proclaimed non-negotiable criteria, as if one were to demand metre and rhyme for a poem to be a poem. A reader of scientistic fabrication, for example, might reject the work of a writer of scientific fancy as
not proper science fiction
.