Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions (34 page)

She ripped their meme-patterns, installed them in Teds.

In the fourth sentence we’re given the solution in a double-whammy of quirks. We can discern an instantly recognisable feature of SF here in the worldbuilding effect of language, whether it’s actual technological jargon (“ripped,” “installed”), pseudo-scientific portmanteau (“meme-pattern”), or a known word recontextualised as the signifier of an invention (“Teds”). Again we see situational estrangement, in the idea of a “meme-pattern” and in the implication that these can be recorded.

The important thing, however, is that the linguistic innovation is not just si
tuationally estranging; it is
structurally integral
. The resolution of the problem and the fusion, the coalescence, the
collapse
, of these…estrangements into the singular supposition of “chips in the head which allow us to rip a person’s meme-patterns and install it elsewhere” are inseparable. At the point where we grasp just what those chips in the head can do—when we realise that a mind, having been recorded, can be downloaded into a robotic teddy-bear so that the mother no longer has all these hungry kiddiewinks’ flesh-mouths to feed—we are being given not just a (novel, strange) suppositional premise but a solution of the problem, a resolution of the plot.

The Novel Novel

So we can see here an example of the cognitive estrangement Suvin sets as characteri
stic of the novum. What we’re looking at is an overload of linguistic strangeness, coinages piled on top of one another, heaped around the core idea of “chips in the head” until the conceptual mass is sufficient for that accumulation of suggestions of innovation to collapse into a singular idea. This novum is not the same thing as a trope, not at all—though most nova will eventually be recycled by later writers, and a trove of tropes derived from the process of conventionalisation, symbolic formulation. Even when a novum is constructed in a fiction which plays with existing tropes, familiarity is of less import than the estrangement, the peculiar novelty it capitalises on.

Suvin’s novum is a “genre device” if ever there was one, but what co
nstructs his SF as a subset of SF, a genre of cognitive estrangement, is less the quirk per se than a specific approach to it, an approach of exploitation. If the comic narrative exploits the absurd sutura and the tragic narrative exploits the monstrum, this particularly conceptual type of future narrative exploits the novum. Strictly speaking, rather than
future
, the term
novel
would sit better beside
absurd
and
monstrous
, but it would be rather confusing to talk of novel narratives or novels that exploit the novel, so we’ll have to live with it.

These nova work, and make the story work, make us take it seriously, b
ecause they function as conceits that are both original and meaningful. The reader enters the story with a willing suspension-of-disbelief. The writer deliberately fucks with that, introducing a quirk. But that quirk is neither mere thought-experiment (which may lack meaning) nor mere fancy (which may lack originality). Rather it integrates plot
and
theme, glues the story together around it, its power resting in the peculiar relationship of literal untruth and non-literal veracity—albeit that the veracity is multiplicitous and reader-generated, pataphoric rather than metaphoric, if the narrative is truly exploiting the quirk rather than co-opting it to crude allegory.

Okay, the writer says, if you’re happy to believe my plausible lies, let me give you an
implausible
lie. Let me give you the absurd, the abject, the surreal—or the novum. Let me give you a strange conceit, a quirk. Yes, it’s patently unreal. Yes, it’s going to throw you out of that cosy alethic modality of “this could happen.” But it’s an integral part of the story without which the story would not function, would not be a story at all. And if you just keep your disbelief suspended, with that lie I’m going to try and tell you something true. Or rather, I’m going to give you a figuration you can apply to whatever facets of the world you will, and hopefully find, in seeing those facets defamiliarised, their truths.

Those Old Equations

There is a conflict that emerges here between the first two strategies of e
xplication and excuse and the third strategy of exploitation, since the latter is geared towards
challenging
that suspension-of-disbelief. If the strangeness is excused or explicated doesn’t that make it less strange? This is especially problematic with the novum. If the android is an utterly familiar trope, or rationalised to the most rigourous degree, or both, surely it can’t continue to function as a
novum
, surely that dissipates its
novelty
. Doesn’t it just become another tired variable in those old equations?

Well, yes…but…

The trope trove of SF has been constantly replenished over the decades by writers generating new nova in their work precisely because novelty is essential to the novum. The power of the old nova is dissipated as they are conventionalised into tropes, but as we exhaust the strangeness of the spaceships, aliens and robots, we add cyberspace, singularities and posthumans. There is a disenchantment with the Rocket Age, to be sure. Scientific advance now feels more commonplace and our world is so techno-whizzy anyway that the sense-of-wonder which drives SF may well be less intense for many. We’re harder to futureshock too. But we haven’t yet, to my mind, entirely run out of strange new scientific ideas—strange enough to test our suspension-of-disbelief, and new enough not to be conventional.

Also, over and above the replenishment of the trope trove with new nova, there is a constant détournement of those tropes in order to defamiliarise them. So you have the robot as genre convention—a mechanical worker, occasiona
lly treated as sentient but more usually a mindless drone—and in order to make a good SF story you have to add your own twist. Asimov gives us (the logical permutations of) his Three Laws of Robotics in
I, Robot
. Bester gives us the AI psychosis of “Fondly Fahrenheit.” Sladek gives us the put-upon child robot of
Roderick
. Each is, in his own way, using the conventionality of the trope as something to kick against, to confound expectations. A genre using conventions to excuse implausibility creates expectations around those conventions. A writer can either meet those expectations or go out of their way to fuck with them.

As a Grenade

Does that reimagined trope then become a novum itself, or is the novum within those stories located in the twist—the Three Laws, the psychosis, the childhood? I don’t know. We should not cling too hard to the articulation of a shift in narrative modality as an object in the text; the notion of the quirk it is a useful encapsulation but let’s not be too literalist about it; sometimes the novum will be better seen as a more abstract effect that is generated by the work rather than an item of content, a thing which the work co
ntains. Rather than a noun, the novum of an SF narrative, as a form of quirk, as a matter of modalities, is a narrative itself, boiling down to a noun-verb statement with a modal auxiliary hue (if you can even reduce it that far); that’s what distinguishes it from a trope.

In its deliberate inversions and subversions, this type of SF can read as pa
rody, pastiche or satire, or it can read as something more serious, more pointed, a sort of fictive critique of conventions, a sort of anti-genre. As should be obvious from the examples of Asimov and Bester, this has been going on in SF from
way
back. If there is a danger that even the new twists will be exhausted, the trove is not yet all played out. Every so often you see even the hoariest old cliché transfigured by some cunning subversion. Writers take this as a challenge.

And if explication can declaw the strange, this is not the whole story. A writer may build the most rationally explicated world through the details and then throw a novum right into the heart of it as a grenade. Indeed, in som
ething like
2001
you have the futurology of the human spaceship (no artificial gravity, no hyperdrive, and it takes a long time to get to Jupiter) but with the monolith as a huge big novum at the core of the story. The remake of
Solaris
might be another example where you have a backdrop that’s not wildly weird, that’s made acceptable by its visual extrapolation from our time (in terms of technology, style, culture, etc.), and then the novum in the middle of that, the utterly inexplicable alien consciousness of the planet. In some senses, you could say, the verisimilitude and authenticity of the human culture only heightens the strangeness of the alien other in both of those fictions.

So, if you can then, theoretically, put these all together you end up with…what? Ma
ybe Bester’s
The Stars My Destination
. There you have some of the classic tropic conventions—space travel, asteroid miners. These are treated with some level of scientific theory and extrapolation (though I’d have to say, not much). The story itself, as we all know, is straight from
The Count of Monte Cristo
. How Romantic do you want to get? But Bester fucks with the conventions, makes Foyle an anti-hero, an Everyman. He treats jaunting and PyrE as nova, weaves all these elements together into something that combines the best of all three approaches to SF.

Their Unrealised Potentialities

Bringing it all back to the idea of suspension-of-disbelief, the game SF plays, more often than not, is to play the alethic modality of “could have ha
ppened” off against the alethic modality of “could not have happened.” It’s rare for an SF work to simply collapse back into the pathetic narrative by explaining
everything
, and rare (though maybe less rare—and quite common in the visual media) for it to excuse itself as formulaic Romanticism where
anything
goes. But it’s also rare, I’d say, for an SF work to not utilise excuse or explanation at all, to remain purely conceptual. Rather, those excuses and explanations become mechanisms for sustaining the tension, for offering little releases here and there, little placations which mitigate the sense of incredibility enough that the reader gets drawn into a more intense state without suffering incredibility-overload and getting kicked out of the story.

If you look at some of the most novum-saturated SF—like
Neuromancer
, say—the denseness of the environment is mitigated heavily by borrowings from the noir idiom, by constantly reminding the reader that this is a thriller, so it’s okay, ’cause this sorta wild adventurous hokum is acceptable in a thriller. And by reigning the time scale in to a very near-future, extrapolating low-level computing and information technology rather than space travel and immortality and other such Grand Science, Gibson achieves a hard edge, an illusion of plausibility. This is perhaps one of the reasons why cyberpunk took off so well; it was able to utilise all three techniques of dealing with the incredible—to excuse, to explicate and to exploit—with incendiary results. Hell, look at that opening line about the sky being the colour of a TV set tuned to a dead channel. Its voice is noir (excuse,) its description is bleak naturalism (explication,) and it’s simultaneously the opening statement of the conceit that permeates the novel, artificial reality (exploitation.)

We could break the field down into subsets of SF narrative which
only
explicate,
only
excuse, or
only
exploit, but in truth all three techniques may be present in any one narrative. More importantly though, if the hypothetical novum is only a particular type of quirk that can be exploited in a certain way this raises the question of its comparison with other types of quirk exploited the same way. What about the complementary counterfactual and metaphysical quirks which offer us deviations other than innovation? If these errata and chimerae lack novelty they have their own power in the resonance of their unrealised potentialities. We can expect to find them explicated and excused too, and we can expect to find them, like the novum, thoroughly and gorgeously exploited.