by Duncan, Hal
The Mundanes say:
That this dream of abundance can encourage a wasteful attitude to the abundance that is here on Earth.
Good! The more waste there is, the more there is to KRUSH! We will shovel the shit of our squandered resources into trash compacters and furnaces. Old tropes and tired techniques will be torn down and scattered to the winds. We will KRUSH the abundance of it and then we will KRUSH the dream of it. That which is waste must be burned in the pretty flames of the INFERNO! That which does not burn must be KRUSHED! The INFERNO of the KRUSHED old is the crucible we dream of.
The Mundanes say:
That there is no evidence whatsoever of intelligences elsewhere in the universe.
Intelligence does not concern us, only rampant destruction, preferably with MONSTER TRUCKS. And that is everywhere! What matters is, are there GIANT ROBOTS elsewhere in the universe? AI will begin as Artificial Idiocy. Who cares if a computer can play chess or take control of cyberspace? Can it trash Tokyo, huh, huh? Intelligences elsewhere? What does intelligence matter in the INFERNAL heart of a planet, a sun, a nova? What use is reason in a black hole, where all things—even logic itself—are KRUSHED? If we are the solitary spark of awareness in a cold, dark cosmos, then we will be a son-et-lumière, a fireworks display, an INFERNO raging in the night. We don’t care if no-one’s watching. Explosions are pretty.
The Mundanes say:
That absence of evidence is not evidence of absence—however, it is unlikely that alien intelligences will overcome the physical constraints on interstellar travel any better than we can.
We say these physical constraints are there to be overcome. They will KRUSH us if we do not KRUSH them first. Will you be KRUSHER or KRUSHEE? No! No, we say. No! We will smash them with our GIANT ROBOTIC FISTS! We will drive over the wreckage in our MONSTER TRUCKS! Our imagination is a veritable JUGGERNAUT, burning rubber as it conquers its own inertia. We will blast our way through all physical constraints, shatter them to SMITHEREENS, if we have to use the stars themselves as wrecking balls!
The Mundanes say:
That interstellar trade (and colonisation, war, federations, etc.) is therefore highly unlikely.
We say there will be great galactic empires, worlds KRUSHED militarily and economically, native populations KRUSHED by human slave masters, alien overseers, by warmongers and industrialists…or by the BURNING, existential angst of simply being alone in the universe with nothing else to KRUSH! We say empires will rise because how else could they FALL! Rome will burn again, we say, and we will play the fiddle as the INFERNO rages around us!
The Mundanes say:
That communication with alien intelligences over such vast distances will be vexed by: the enormous time lag in exchange of messages and the likelihood of enormous and probably currently unimaginable differences between us and aliens.
We say KRUSHING is a universal language. All sentience understands destruction. All life that BURNS with the fire of feelings, the INFERNO of intellect, all those who know what it is to live, know what it is to die. Besides, who cares about time lag when your message is a Molotov cocktail? We have too many things to KRUSH to wait for a reply!
The Mundanes say:
That there is no evidence whatsoever that quantum uncertainty has any effect at the macro level and that therefore it is highly unlikely that there are whole alternative universes to be visited.
Then we will KRUSH reality to SMITHEREENS until there is no macro level! We will hammer at the atoms, the protons, neutrons and electrons, with a child-like glee! We will reduce EVERYTHING to bits and bobs so small that their quantum uncertainty means each one is a universe in itself, space-time twisted around the awesome energy they might just have! Forget the “world in a grain of sand” stuff. We’re talking whole realities in one bubble of quantum foam.
The Mundanes say:
That therefore our most likely future is on this planet and within this solar system. It is highly unlikely that intelligent life survives elsewhere in this solar system. Any contact with aliens is likely to be tenuous, and unprofitable.
That the most likely future is one in which we only have ourselves and this planet.
We say that the most likely future is one in which we have NOTHING! Because everything we had is KRUSHED and thrown into the INFERNO! We will KRUSH and BURN the planet, KRUSH and BURN ourselves, KRUSH and BURN any life we find within the solar system, KRUSH and BURN the solar system, KRUSH and BURN any life we find outside it.
We will KRUSH and BURN the very future.
Because we wanna. Because it’s fun.
This is my SF.
No, fuck that shit! (And fuck consistency!) It’s this:
Strange Fiction
A representation which estranges is one which allows us to recognize its subject, but at the same time make it seem unfamiliar.
Bertolt Brecht
Science fiction is the literature of cognitive estrangement.
Darko Suvin
Is there another way to define SF, not with the vague wave of an all-encompassing hand, not with a finger-pointing to some single corner, not as this Babelesque tower of languages, rising high in an artificed unity of abstraction or fallen into the chaos of countless tongues, a conflict of manifestos and movements?
Perhaps a notion of strictured fantasia might serve as a starting-point, if we strip away the redundant strictured but leave it to one side for later consideration—and strip away fantasia too, this term signifying a closed definition of fantasy, one in which the incredible is also the marvellous and/or monstrous, albeit not yet the generic Fantasy of elves, orcs and magic swords. If we cannibalise a dictionary definition, maybe we can glean a more neutral label from the notion of the fantastic as: “quaint or strange in form, conception, or appearance…unrestrainedly fanciful…extravagant…bizarre, as in form or appearance; strange…based on or existing only in fantasy; unreal…wonderful or superb; remarkable.”
How else might we label this fiction of the quaint, the fanciful, the extravagant, the bizarre, the unreal, the wonderful, the remarkable? How else might we label this strange fiction of the strange?
Now there’s a thought.
[Science fiction is] a new way of reading, a new way of making texts make sense—collectively producing a new set of codes. [SF writers invented the genre] by writing new kinds of sentences and embedding them in contexts in which those sentences were readable.
Samuel R. Delany
Elsewhen, in his essay, “About Five Thousand Seven Hundred and Fifty Words,” Delany outlines a continuous correction process involved in reading a simple sentence:
The red sun was high, the blue low.
Being Delany, he does this at great length and in the most fascinating way. Starting the essay with a proposition that it is meaningless to talk of style in opposition to content—that it is all, in fact, form (or as I like to put it: words are the only substance), that meaning is best considered as a thread of memory we follow from word to word through a text—he gives us a reconstruction of the reader’s path through this particular sentence, leading us eventually into a discussion of the role of subjunctivity level in relation to genre.
Suppose a series of words is presented to us as a piece of reportage. A blanket indicative tension informs the whole series: this happened. That is the particular level of subjunctivity at which journalism takes place… The subjunctivity level for a series of words labelled naturalistic fiction is defined by: could have happened… Fantasy takes the subjunctivity of naturalistic fiction and throws it into reverse. At the appearance of elves, witches, or magic in a non-metaphorical position, or at some correction of image too bizarre to be explained by other than the supernatural, the level of subjunctivity becomes: could not have happened.
Samuel R. Delany
So when a strange image, a fanciful, fantastic image, appears in a story or novel, Delany says, we’re kicked out of the naturalistic subjunctivity level—this could have happened—and into anot
her—this could not have happened. Delany distinguishes this from the subjunctivity level of his SF, speculative fiction:
[W]hen spaceships, ray guns, or more accurately any correction of images that indicates the future appears in a series of words and marks it as s-f, the subjunctivity level is changed once more: These objects, these convolutions of objects into situations and events, are blanketly defined by: have not happened.
Samuel R. Delany
One of the most interesting things about Delany’s essay is that he thereby places both naturalistic and fantastic fiction as subsets of his SF, with the subjunctivity levels of events which have not happened (but could) or which have not happened (and could not). He says this explicitly about naturalistic fiction in the notes to the essay. He doesn’t actually say the same about fantastic fiction, but this seems to be a ramification of his idea.
There is a slip here though. Until such time as we can stand on a planet in a binary system, if a narrative presents us with two suns in the sky, the level of subjunctivity becomes: could not have happened, not yet. As described, Delany’s SF in fact sits as a subset of fantastic fiction; the impossibility we’re presented with in that series of words simply comes with a caveat that at some point it might become possible.
Call it the Contingency Slip Fallacy: where a temporal (i.e. technical or historical) impossibility can be viewed as contingent, we can persuade ourselves that it is an actual possibility, hold firmly, even passionately, to a belief that the subjunctivity level has not shifted, that our SF is remaining in the realm of the possible.
But I’m not talking about Delany’s SF here—speculative fiction—but about strange fiction, which is defined not by one or other subjunctivity level but rather by the challenge itself. The subjunctivity of this SF is, in the first instance, undecided, conflicted.
Here’s a sentence, modelled on Delany’s own:
The crescent sun was high, the moon low.
When a strange image appears in a story or novel, we cannot immediately rule out the possibility of an explanation emerging later in the text. There is a moment of subjunctive indefinition here which is crucial to how all strange fiction works.
The crescent sun…
In reading the start of a sentence such as the one above, when we read “The crescent sun” we are faced with an impossibility which requires interrogation. Does the sun only appear to be a crescent, being in partial eclipse perhaps? Is the crescent sun an image rather than an actuality, a symbol on a flag perhaps?
The crescent sun was high…
When we read further, from “The crescent sun” to “was high,” the question becomes more pressing. Is the writer using the symbol on the flag to represent the flag itself, or perhaps the ideology represented by the flag? Is this to be read literally, or is it some metaphoric or metonymic figure of speech we should be parsing to its ulterior meaning?
The crescent sun was high, the moon…
When “the moon” appears we might abandon the idea of the flag, our reading corrected by the parallel of sun and moon. We might decide that, yes, this is a description of the sky. Any moment now we’re going to get stars in a darkened sky, the shadow covering the earth, and so on. But we still have a moment of interrogation to go through. “The crescent sun was high, the moon”…was what? Eclipsing it? That would make sense.
The crescent sun was high, the moon low.
With the last word, “low” the sentence resolves into impossibility. We’re asked to accept that the moon is not in fact eclipsing the sun but is in another place entirely. In the sky? In the real world, our world, where this is a physical impossibility?
We might say that, at this point, the subjunctivity level becomes that of fantastic fiction: this could not happen. But what we actually have is subjunctive indefinition, indecision—neither this could happen nor this could not happen, not a statement but a challenge: could this happen? It is this tension of subjunctivities that is the core of SF, the characteristic feature of all strange fiction.
Later in the story or novel in which that sentence appears we might be offered a resolution. The hero removes his VR goggles and we realise this is what Delany calls speculative fiction. Or he wakes up in bed and we realise this is what Delany calls naturalistic fiction. Or he meets an elf and we realise this is what everyone insists on calling fantastic fiction. We realise, that is, how we would classify it as one or other of the above according to our personal taxonomy of the aesthetic forms. But SF is defined, I would argue, more by the moments of indecision than by the moments of decision: all fiction requires the suspension of disbelief; strange fiction is that which actively challenges suspension-of-disbelief, throwing at the reader images, situations, which are dissonant with our knowledge of, as Wallace Stevens puts it, “things as they are.”
The differentiation of strange fiction into science fiction, fantasy and horror? I say this is largely a matter of how we personally respond to those situations. Can we rationalise them? Do we desire them? Do we fear them? In our moments of subjunctive indecision, other questions are fired off by that basic question of could this happen? With curiosity we ask ourselves: how, where, when could this happen? With fear and desire we ask ourselves: would this, could this, should this happen? would it, could it, should it not?
None of these are mutually exclusive. And these are the defining questions of strange fiction, of wish-fulfilment dreams and dread-filled nightmares, plausible or implausible. We have already suspended our disbelief, I should note, so it may be less a matter of whether an event described is possible than where and when it might be, what kind of elsewhen we must construct in our imagination, in order to sustain the pretence, as with reading any work of fiction, that these events are happening, right now, in simulation. Still, with the challenge to subjunctivity level offered by either Delany’s example or mine, there can only be a sense of strain on the suspension-of-disbelief, a frisson at the conjuring of what surely could not have happened.
With naturalistic fiction there is seldom any question that these events have not happened but could have—in an elsewhen that is so close to our own it’s virtually indistinguishable. With strange fiction, though, that elsewhen, as we reconstruct it in the reading, is rendered, quite literally, incredible. Add a little desire and/or fear, in our state of suspended disbelief—that the incredible might somehow be made real, and you have the sense-of-wonder or future shock which permeates an SF driven not by plausibility, scientific or otherwise, but by implausibility, by incredulity.
This is SF as it looks to me from my seat here in the SF Café. Does this strange fiction have its own risk over and above those inherited from all the other SFs? If those outside the ghetto tend to be scared that SF is just hackwork, that SF is just adventure stories, that SF is just maths stories, that SF isn’t relevant, that SF is incomprehensible, or that SF has nothing to say, do they also tend to be scared that SF is just too damn strange for them?
Probably.
So fuck?
Part 1
Down in the Ghetto at the SF Café
The Science Fiction Café and Bar
Don’t tell anybody, but science fiction no longer exists.
Matthew Cheney
Welcome to the SF Café, in the ghetto of Genre, in the city of New Sodom. We call it the SF Café, only the letters S and F surviving of its original name, but look up now, look to the sign above the door, and you’ll find the full monicker still visible today, The Science Fiction Café and Bar, traced in the grime, outlined in the negative spaces left where the spelled-out sense of it has long-since fallen away.
The SF Café. It may look a bit shabby from the outside and there’s surely some weird gewgaws and gimcracks in the window to make you wonder what the fuck’s going on inside. But let’s step through the decades as we step through the door—
a rupture in reality,
a quirk of narrative created,
time travel as impossibility conjured, breach of
•
known science,
• known history,
• the laws of nature,
• even the strictures of logic itself,
as a butterfly crushed underfoot at our step will never now distract dear Grandpapa into the turn that woulda shoulda coulda saved him from a stray bullet in a hunting accident that is, or will be, the inevitable paradoxical outcome of our interloping, but fuck it, let’s do it anyway, step through the door
—and see the SF Café as it once was, the shining Formica of the counter-top, the sleek silvery steel of coffee machine and soda fountain, the Bakelite and plastic of the trappings, the decor all bright white and brilliant red, shining, gleaming, with the ’50s promise of futurity. This is the SF Café as it was in the Golden Age, when Old Man Campbell owned it.