Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions (20 page)

The distinction between
Science Fiction
and
Sci-Fi
is by no means universal within the community but for those who hold to it that term is loaded. For some the label
sci-fi
is just a shorthand for
science fiction
, an alternative to
sf
gesturing at…you know, that stuff we like. But for some that label signifies the pernicious influence of—fuck it, construct your enemy to blame with a scatter of
and/or
as you will:

Wherever the term
sci-fi
is reserved for the visual media or the pabulum in print, wherever the blame is placed, the distinction serves to segregate out “proper”
Science Fiction
from formulation. Coined by überfan Forrest J Ackerman, the term has been reviled by writers from its origins. As a diminutive and a pun, it’s a bit too cute and clever. It hints, perhaps, at a sort of baby-talk whereby Samuel R. Delany could be referred to as Sammy-Wammy, while Harlan Ellison would find himself saddled with Harley-Warley as his moniker. When I first started hanging out with other would-be writers at the SF Café, back in the early nineties, as a member of the GSFWC, I quickly realised how that term raised hackles. By 1995, when Worldcon hit the home town, the local rag headline was “Sci-Fi Freaks Beam Down to Glasgow.” ’Nuff said.

The irony is that many down in the SF Café have forgotten its origins; every so often you’ll hear grumbling about how literary fiction (or
Literary Fiction
, rather,) doesn’t suffer the indignity of a similarly demeaning diminutive. Aside from ignoring the (ghetto Creole?) coinage of
lit-fic
, (or the common
pomo
abbreviation for postmodernism), this illusion of victimhood is disingenuous. It would be nice to imagine the label as an act of semantic trivialisation perpetrated by the elitists of Literature and mundanes of Mainstream, a hostile Othering like the twist of
genre
to
Genre
, with its roots in the Culture Wars; but this is simply not the case. The label was created by us, taken up as a membership badge, printed on black T-shirts to be sold over the counter at the SF Café, worn with pride. We forget that we brought it on ourselves.

It caught on, it spread, it seeped into the public consciousness, and now there’s that bristling irk sparked when we hear it in the mouths of naïfs who don’t know their Asimov from their Ellison. Why? Because from them it comes with an arched brow at the garish façade of the SF Café, the mass-market eye-candy filling its windows: racks of media tie-ins, franchise novels, lurid art books, t-shirts; merchandise, merchandise, me
rchandise; posters for conventions, clubs, cosplay; role playing furry filk knows what.

It comes with a superior smirk at this superfice out on display and the u
nseemly squee it speaks of, the enthusiasms so excessive they short-circuit everyday decorum when unleashed, and sometimes social skills, and maybe even simple common sense, the zeal of a subculture jonesing at the privilege of being advertised to with OMG! the new trailer for the reboot of the reboot of crap from a director whose entire oeuvre is set in a cosmos where the fundamental particle is not the quark but the shark.

We twitch that they’re looking at the SF Café and seeing a
Genre
, a marketing category, because that means formulation for a market that sustains it, demands it,
celebrates
it, throwing money at any hack who can put a lurid patina of hyperkitsch on the clunk-click plots and card-board characters, power-fantasies and happy endings that are, and have always been, characteristic of a junk fiction indulgence.

From the mouths of the incognoscenti, that term conjures the stigma of what they e
xpect to see inside the SF Café: the stereotype of sweaty-palmed geek-boys with a hard-on for gadgetry, scarfing down sub-literate comfort food, venting furious unreason at the affront of factory-line crap being factory-line crap,
duh,
and always going back for more, more, more. Why, we wonder, can’t they imagine us all connoisseurs who relish the haute cuisine and know exactly where to find it? Why can’t they just
see past
the All You Can Eat sign on the door that screams unbridled appetite rather than educated palate?

We forget that we brought it on ourselves not just by the coinage, but by our consumption, all those years as slack-jawed kids pressing noses to the SF C
afé’s windows of wonders. Come on. Is it any wonder when your aged Aunt Agnes sees Delany’s
Dhalgren
on your shelf and asks,
Is that some of your
Sci-Fi
?
what she’s thinking isn’t New Wave?

It’s the same as when she hears you playing your Sonic Youth album and complains that “all of that Heavy Metal stuff is just noise.” Her understanding of rock music formed by fragmentary horrifying glimpses of Mötley Crüe, Whitesnake and Slayer on MTV back in the ’80s, when you loved that shit, she hears those loud guitars and has no idea that there’s a difference between Heavy Metal and rock in general, that there’s punk rock, prog rock, post rock and more. It’s all just Heavy Metal to her, the shriek of guitars evoking an i
mage in her mind’s eye—crude self-caricatures of posturing adolescent moppets in spandex and mullets. To aged Aunt Agnes, similarly,
Sci-Fi
is a strange unfathomable spectre, a patchwork of fleeting impressions stitched loosely into a fuzzy notion, something she can only imagine as the literary equivalent of spandex and mullets.

So we cringe at her question.
It’s not
Sci-Fi
,
we wince.
It’s
Science Fiction
.
Or,
It’s science fiction.
Take your pick. What we’re trying to articulate in the first response is simply that the fiction in question doesn’t fit the conventional template(s) she imagines, that her image of our
Genre
is wrong. What we’re trying to articulate in the second is a bolder claim, that the fiction of this aesthetic idiom doesn’t fit
any
conventional template(s) she might imagine, her image wrong because ours is not a
Genre
at all. As much a disingenuous denial of plain fact as a sincere proclamation of upstart agenda (and vice versa), it’s a quixotic task, this defensive correction, doomed to failure, the distinction as impenetrable to her as it is imperceptible in the two statements spoken aloud.

It’s not
Sci-Fi
,
we say, asserting a genre in stark opposition to
Genre
, its very antithesis, with all the indefinable diversity that entails, an equal to Literature, if not
better
, because it’s not constrained by the dictates of
Realism
.

It’s not
Sci-Fi
,
we say, meaning our fiction rocks as wild and complex as Sonic Youth, must not be boxed in with a cutesy little monicker. And off we strop down to the SF Café, where everyone’s calling it
skiffy
.

So maybe this is a good place to deal with quirks of illogic.

The Mundane and the Absurd

As we’ve set out what Lake terms a private narrative, the alethic modality of “could have happened” appears, at first sight, to remain unchallenged. The events recounted, the images and phrases, are entirely mundane in two ways: they are entirely possible within the laws of nature and in terms of known science; and they are of such small scope that the pretence of them is not a clash with the reader’s knowledge of recorded facts—c.f. the limitations of our knowledge of the private life of some youth named Holden Caulfield. The term
mundane
is not meant to imply
boring
here, simply that the events are “of or pertaining to our world; common, ordinary, everyday, domestic,” and that the limitation of our knowledge in terms of scope means the fiction does not contradict our awareness of how things work.

Or so it seems, at first sight.

If we’re tempted toward a shallow division here that conflates the mundane with the mimetic and yet situates the strange wholly in those incredible narratives we call
fantastic
(thereby implying chimeric and marvellous), there are narratives that complicate matters with events that are not so much impossible as simply preposterous, so vastly implausible as to beggar belief. They may not breach the workings of reality the same way as the quirks of SF and fantasy, but if we understand the laws of nature we are dealing with as something less formal than the laws of physics, then we can include that point where the laws of human behaviour are cast as part of that “natural order.” What are we to make of narratives, I mean, that breach the strictures of logic not in terms of inherent contradiction but in terms of a reasonable flow of action?

In comic narrative, we find behaviours and reactions exaggerated to a point where the suspension-of-disbelief is strained to breaking point. If it is stretc
hing a point to say that an actual alethic modality of “could not have happened” is introduced in the sort of sentence that an elicits an amazed “you can’t be serious,” we can nonetheless say that a new alethic modality has been introduced:
would not have happened
. A breach of known science or the laws of nature is a relatively straightforward thing; when it comes to the strictures of logic however…well, there are inherent contradictions, but there are also absurdities.

The picaresque and the humorous anecdote play with our credulity in this manner, asking us to suspend disbelief in the ludicrous. Often as not an ane
cdote, perhaps true, perhaps told as true but with a twinkle in the eye, gains its power from the sheer tension between the absurdity of the assertion and the claim of actuality, in a clash of modalities—where this “could not have happened (surely?)” but it “could have happened (really!)” and in fact it “did happen (honestly!)”

…and it was only when I got through Customs and out of the airport, when I went to roll a cigarette, I put my hand in my tobacco pouch and found the hash!

No way, man. You’re shitting me.

I shit you not.

If our alethic quirk comes in four flavours according to whether it breaches known history, known science, the laws of nature or the strictures of logic, as we look at the latter, at the absurd in contrast with the mundane, what we mean by
strange fiction
bleeds out far beyond any waffling blather of science versus magic.