Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

by Duncan, Hal

  These are not “what if” stories but “what is” stories. What is reality? What is society? What is humanity?

  And slowly but surely they approached the question, What is fiction?

  Fusion Cuisine in the SF Café

  Science fiction is the search for a definition of man and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science), and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or post-Gothic mould.

  Brian Aldiss

  In the SF Café, the beatniks had moved in, poncy artists and pretentious intellectuals, poets and (post)modernists, God bless ’em. The very sciences that Campbell excluded—sociology and psychology—were at the core of their interests. And when it came to literary aspirations, they saw no reason why science fiction should be any less innovative, any less rich than the mainstream in terms of style and form. It wasn’t just that they wanted all-day breakfasts with eggs-over-easy instead of a burger and fries; they wanted Eggs Benedict. They didn’t want a Diet Coke; they wanted an espresso so black and so strong it blew the roof of your head off. Screw the sugar rush and the fatty satiation of comfort food; they wanted you to feel the jitters of a caffeine overload along with the exquisite tang of a perfect Hollandaise sauce. They refused to recognise (or recognised as irrelevant) the territorial politics of rival aesthetics. The sublime, the logical, the ephemeral, the absurd—these were just the salt, sweet, sour and bitter flavours to be thrown into the mix, and fuck any purist’s proscriptions and prescriptions that set one against another, forbidding miscegenations. If fiction is food, they wanted to be eating and cooking the finest fusion cuisine.

  One could say that in their zeroing in on the desire for “something different,” on novelty as a key ingredient, these writers were simply reinventing the Genre of Science Fiction each time they “transcended” it, keeping the conventions under constant revision. One could equally say that they were creating exemplary (rather than exceptional) works within an idiom predicated on change by manifesting that change in the idiom itself, in an act of recursion. Either way, in a subculture of writers looking for that “something different,” it was only a matter of time before that search progressed to the next level, before those writers began to search for, find and offer difference in the very language and structure of the narrative itself.

  So soon there was Delany’s Dhalgren, Moorcock’s Cornelius Quartet, Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. There was Aldiss and Ballard and Crowley and Disch and Ellison and Farmer and so on, some more experimental than others, but all of them bringing their own new twists to the form—looped and fractured narrative, metafictional and intertextual narrative. The fourth alethic quirk, that which ruptures the strictures of logic itself, packs the biggest punch of them—when the absurd goes beyond illogical human behaviour, at least, when it trumps even the chimera with a breach of physics that creates an inherent self-contradiction. (Hell, even when it doesn’t, it can be a taste too rich for some.) Children’s fiction and whimsical humour will play with words to take us over this threshold, e.g. where Alice, in Wonderland, has to run to stay in one place, such that her motion is not motion. But it’s in the New Wave where we see a full-on explosion of this most confrontational of quirks, in disruptions of the very fabric of sense, continuity cut and spliced with hard suturae.

  It is difficult to think of a more (post)modern project in any of the arts than that of speculative fiction where it turns its gaze upon itself in this way. Genre is inherently self-aware in its impulse towards formulation, its recognition of story as the unifying agency of a narrative; it is continually exploring its own boundaries, reifying or reshaping them. But this so-called speculative fiction was not simply self-aware but self-critical, analysing itself, reckoning the relationships between story and narrative, deconstructing and reconstructing its own nature from first principles.

  The pastiche of Genre found in the work of Moorcock or Farmer is not simply referential play; it is speculation as to the nature of fiction itself. And without the cop-out of ironic distance, this (post)modernism spits on the High Art / Low Art distinction with a sincerity few in the ivory towers ever really had the balls to emulate. With Moorcock, or in Delany’s The Einstein Intersection, we have a fiction (already a science of fiction) which takes fiction as its experimental subject, its focus of conjecture. How, it asks, are we ourselves made by the stories we make, by the language in which those stories are told, the semiotics and semantics? This was fiction tearing itself apart to understand how it worked, how all narrative worked, including those narratives of identity we call human beings. If it inhabited worlds and cities shattered by catastrophes—real or imagined, Dresdens or Bellonas—no doubt much of this was a mark of the turbulent times the fiction was born in, but more than anything else this is, I think, a marker of…the alterior perspective at the heart of what was termed speculative fiction, a clearing away of artificed structures (which is to say strictures) in order to expose the dynamics of deeper connections.

  In the SF Café, in the ghetto of Genre, in the City of New Sodom, a trap door had been discovered. In the cellar that it led to was a door, and beyond that door a system of secret tunnels—subways and sewers that led throughout the city and beyond it, across the nation, around the entire world. And everywhere they came up in the city of New Sodom.

  Those who discovered those tunnels, who used them, realised that being part of a subculture did not simply mean being a member of some component culture within the system as a whole, a community sealed off by its boundaries of identity, walled-in within a ghetto. Rather a subculture was that which existed beneath the culture as a whole, permeating it as a mycelial network of interstices. That subculture might reflect the culture in negative (an oppositional counter-culture), as the sewers of Paris map precisely to the streets above, or it might be completely different (an entirely alternative culture), as the tube in London links the nodes of places in a pattern utterly unlike the streets above.

  Either way, the underground discovered by speculative fiction linked all the important points in this world of New Sodom into one big city-system as ruptured in continuity as Dresden or Bellona, explored freely at this level

  —of the ghetto of Genre—meant fuck all—a writer could go anywhere they fucking wanted—did— fair game for the spelunkers of speculative fiction every corner of the city of New Sodom’s tunnels—found the power cables gas pipes words images colourless green that linked it all—linguistic innards of a living thing— meant fuck all—kindred spirits in potholers from the uptown district of Literature—the Burroughses and the Burgesses exploring “our” terrain as we explored “theirs”—gourmet chefs check out the menu in the SF Café—going homeward to cook up fusion food in bistros—a buffet froid of a naked lunch—duck à la orange clockwork orange and colourless green—shook hands with them in the urban netherworld—ideas slept furiously and made sense—under the eldritch yellowy-blue glow of glow of glow of biophosphorescent slime seeped through the cracks in ancient brick walls—built mechanical minotaurs whose hollow roars echoed all through the underground—passer-by standing near a ventilation shaft the mushrooms that grew down there—audible even on the surface—a staple on the menu of the SF Café—fuck the territorial politics at street-level—now the walls—

  Hal Duncan, Rhapsody

  So they wandered far and wide, the Young Turks of speculative fiction; still, they did keep returning to the SF Café to tell their tales. It was their home. In the Bistro de Critique, in the uptown district of Literature, stuffed shirts still baulked at the unseemly strangeness offered by those (post)modern compatriots, reviled it as obscene pornography or revered it as intellectual play, declawing it with concepts like irony, or “irony,” or even ““irony,”” rendering it safe by herding it off towards the Temple of Academia. In the ghetto of Genre, the writers lived free of the constraints of decency and decorum. In the ghetto of Genre, anything goes, man. When you live in the gutter it doesn’t matter if you’r
e filthy.

  In theory anyway.

  The Surrender to the Spectre

  It is ironic that where Heinlein’s coinage of the term speculative fiction was intended as a better specification of the form, a marker of the extrapolative rather than technological focus of the genre (i.e. requiring the act of extrapolation rather than the mere presence of science-based conceits and plot devices), it has been adopted largely as a descriptor for the field at its most inchoate, used as a default term for works defying easy categorisation within the tribalist rhetorics that stand in place of any coherent taxonomy. But in this explorative and experimental fiction-of-science, science-of-fiction, fiction-as-science, it seems apt as a reaction to the ossifying conflict of territorial nonsenses, as a rejection of the whole tired discourse of science fiction versus Science Fiction versus Sci-Fi versus science fiction versus Fantasy versus fantasy. It’s what the doohickey does that matters, not whether it comes under the heading of gadget or gimcrack. In the SF Café:

  —Is it science fiction, fantasy or horror? you ask.

  —Yes, answers the speculative fiction writer.

  For all that this answer is apparently unacceptable to some turf war partisans in the SF Café, it is largely their insistence on closed definitions of these idioms as Genres that makes it inevitable. Lurking in that label is a recognition that this fiction has, as far as many are concerned, stepped beyond the conventions of Science Fiction in a fundamental way. Aesthetically, the Young Turks of the New Wave were at odds with the most traditional aspects of the field and quite aware of it, as the title of Ellison’s Dangerous Visions anthologies makes clear. But rather than argue with the reactionary writers and readers still seeking to bind their work to the closed definition of Science Fiction, the radicals of the New Wave in the USA simply adopted Heinlein’s monicker and made it their own. And insofar as their chosen term has come to signify a broad aesthetic idiom of strange fictions—the superset of all the inextricably interpenetrating commercial Genres of strangeness, and pretty much anything of comparable approach in its use of pataphor, regardless of rackspace label—they’ve largely succeeded in establishing a less restrictive model.

  Still, when I look back for a branch-point, I see a long history of narratives that had ceased to be futurological fantasias even long before the New Wave. I see writers offering the novum as a source of futureshock rather than sense-of-wonder, conjecturing on the basis of angst rather than argument; I see writers for whom the aesthetics of the sublime and the logical are largely irrelevant as they work on projects quite at odds with Romanticist and Rationalist agendas—Delany’s Dhalgren, Moorcock’s Cornelius Quartet, Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Zelazny’s Roadmarks, Silverberg’s The Book of Skulls. But when you’re faced with those who predicate Science Fiction on the abjection of Fantasy and/or Sci-Fi, to point to these sort of projects and their core qualities and say, this is science fiction, can be a fast route to a flamewar.

  —No, that’s really, properly fantasy.

  —No, that’s really, properly horror.

  It seldom seems worth arguing.

  As I see it? The estrangement effect of the alethic quirk (erratum, novum, chimera, sutura) is powerful, and the affective disruption that goes with it is not limited to the dread (monstrum) or desire (numina) that might slide a story over some imaginary border, “out of” proper science fiction and “into” Horror or Fantasy. We’re talking about conceits that can provide the foundations for tragedy or comedy as easily as for a Romantic adventure or a Rationalist thought-experiment—or for the sort of satire that is both tragedy and comedy, as where the dark absurd of Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle belongs with Heller’s Catch-22 more than with Heinlein’s Space Cadet or Asimov’s Foundation.

  Where those quirks function pataphorically—as any conceit may—as the unbound vehicles of metaphor and metonym, we begin to deal, in fact, with the figuration of modernity in all its strangeness. Whatever label we apply to this fiction, I see in it a staggering range of narrative grammars and an openness to using all the various flavours of conceits. I can only be talking here about a fiction that plays not just with known science and known history, but with the laws of nature and the strictures of logic. I am not fucking innarested in limiting my scope, either in story or in study, in accordance with definitions closed to cordon off this territory from that, the fiction within my field of vision not being rigidly parametered and perimetered thus. So, if the flexibility I cleave to renders much of the stuff of which I speak improper in the eyes of a whole slew of label-arbitrators I can’t be arsed arguing with, renders it illegitimate as Science Fiction, well, maybe another name is a good idea.

  Down in the SF Café, of course, this is when the double-bind of the territorial rhetoric kicks in. To many, speculative fiction seems a coy and euphemistic evasion, a craven attempt to gain literary credibility by distancing one’s work from Genre…and hence a betrayal of one’s ghetto comrades in favour of the dreaded literary elite. In all honesty, this may not be entirely unfair; many of the more literate writers who adopted the label made no bones about the taint of trash that they were trying to escape, their disdain of the generic product that defines the field not just to the outside world but even in the community of uncritical devotees. Through the act of abstraction denoted, speculative fiction signifies an intellect and intellectualism divorced from the dirty physicality of science, from any slack-jawed wonder at gadgets and gimcracks. It claims a cerebral rather than visceral effect, adopts an attitude of aloofness to the very Genre it resides within. As much as it might denote the entire field of science fiction, fantasy and horror, it also connotes (or signals oneself to be a member of) a specific subset of that field—that which has “literary aspirations.”

  But I can’t say this strikes me as a mortal sin. One thing to bear in mind: this is not an act of abjection as that meted out to Fantasy and Sci-Fi. If there’s a rejection of that which is a part of oneself, a recoiling from the generic, it is not a marginalisation of that formulaic product as alterity, as Other. On the contrary, this is a redefinition of self as alterity, as Other. Rather than fight a losing struggle against commercialism and conservatism, rather than battle for the broken banner of science fiction, for the right to carry an empty label and claim proudly, we are it! while expelling the Enemy as something else, it seems to me that many of the New Wave and their inheritors, to all intents and purposes, simply shrugged and walked away. As a marker more of literary intent than of aesthetic form, the term speculative fiction was and is a disavowal of the dross, but this renunciation was and is more surrender than betrayal.

  If anything it is the desolate retreat of the defeated in the face of the intransigents’ animosity, the abandonment of rhetorical ground to the reactionary. It’s the slow dismal trudge of refugees down into the tunnels beneath the city, leaving the SF Café to its taxonomic turf wars, surrendering it to that hoary spectre of Science Fiction that haunts it still, rattling the shackles of its closed definition angrily as the dogfights rage on.

  So it goes, as a wise man once said.

  The Ghost and the Golem

  SF as a Superset of SF

  What SF writers write is SF.

  Orson Scott Card

  So Science Fiction is dead; but the death of Science Fiction is not the end of the story. Rather it’s the beginning of it. Torn apart in the struggles of its factions, deserted by the blood and breath of its most explorative writers, the carcass of that old Genre still sits in the SF Café, a leg here, an arm there, novitiates of this cult or that gnawing on its bones, sucking on what’s left of the marrow. It’s a grisly scene, but if these devotees only looked around them they’d see the ghost that dwells in every corner of the diner.

  Everywhere in the SF Café you can still see the stains, still hear the echoes of that ghost—the closed definition reopened to a strange and subtle essence that defies all prescription. And for all that its blood was spilled out, the dying breath of Science Fiction was guttered i
nto a golem. The spelunkers of speculative fiction mining phosphorescent filth from the bowels of the city of New Sodom, the Sci-Fi freaks scraping kipple and kack from the bins of decades-old shit sandwiches out back, composting it to grow shrooms, we have built this thing to take its place.

  This is the legacy of generations of writers who’d rather tackle adult themes than pander to puerile power-fantasies, whose interests lay with the soft sciences and humanities as much as with the hard sciences and technology, for whom the fiction was always more important than either the fantasia or the futurology. It is also the legacy of those who simply don’t give a fuck about anything other than either fantasia or futurology. This is fiction in which the envelope has been pushed so far out, from ambition or expedience, that all descriptions and definitions—Science Fiction, Science Fantasy, Sci-Fi, even speculative fiction—can only be, at best, nominal labels for it. It is the fiction that abandons those labels for a negation of description, an indefinition—the acronym SF, which might mean any or all of those things.

  Arguably, where the term speculative fiction was, and still is, successful (to an extent) with readers, writers, editors, publishers, etc., for whom the intrinsic diversity of the field is a given and a glory, it is so in part because it abbreviates easily to SF. Hence it translates to the label of science fiction through that acronym, if and when required for the ease of communication; it is backwards compatible. Look at it from another angle and you see the power of SF as a nominal label.