by Duncan, Hal
That acronym reanimates the dead Science Fiction in the stains and echoes that pervade the SF Café. It binds it to the golem of speculative fiction and Sci-Fi all mashed together, this clay-made, über-malleable monster of fictive clay. In it the dichotomy of Science Fiction and Fantasy is resolved into a unity utterly in contrast with the riven notion of Science Fantasy. We can even extend the F, echo it, to include both the closed-definition Fantasy and/or the openly-defined fantasy in SF/F, remove the dividing slash entirely in SFF, elide the one into the other as in SFWA, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.
If we want to be all poncy and academic about it, we might even expand that acronym to structural fabulation. (Yeah, like that’ll catch on.)
This is the beauty of the SF acronym, in fact, the beauty of the SF Café, that it offers a neutral zone where all the factions can communicate even if they do so in the most argumentative fashion. And as abbreviations go, where Sci-Fi is cringe-inducingly cute and clever, SF is short and snappy, no nonsense, like the utilitarian acronyms of soldiers and businessmen.
That all the writers of a myriad subset SF methodologies are grouped together, SF as a superset of SF, is a mark of the indefinable nature of the field. Forget: the futurology; the Rationalist ideal of the logical; the Romantic wonders of the Rocket Age; the ’60s and ’70s fears of Future Catastrophe; the counterculture of acid visions and sexual revolution; every abandoned zeitgeist; the codified conventions of puerile pap; the cobbled combinatory systems of pulp plots, characters, settings, themes. Forget those illusions of SF as the innumerable permutations of an ever-changing set of tropes filched from deconstructed templates.
Or remember them, but remember them all.
This is a confusion of contradictions that can only be made sense of by cutting the Gordian Knot, by saying, like Spinrad, that SF is whatever is sold as SF, or like Knight, that it’s what I point to when I use the term.
Paring the label down to these two little figurae, we make it stand for whatever narratives we throw at it; we use the fiction to define the model. It allows for any narrative to be written as SF, because we are applying the label after the fact, saying: this is SF because it can be sold as SF, because it can be bought as SF—not just literally but conceptually, bought not just in the purchased sense but in the sense of admitted, swallowed, accepted, as one buys an idea. In this vector of definition, in fact, in place of a model of SF, what we have is instead a method of reading a narrative, most any narrative, as SF.
Realism, after all, the Genre that cleaves to that which could have happened, which actually fits the subjunctivity level Delany ascribes to his speculative-fiction, is a relatively recent thing, an ideological aesthetic that sets itself apart from the bulk of strange fictions, under rackspace labels or otherwise, to use Clive Barker’s metaphor in a BFS awards ceremony a few years back: an island versus the continent of literature.
To take one example, we might use this as a way of interpreting The Epic of Gilgamesh, look for a reading of the story as SF. This is a different thing altogether from laying claim to the work as an example of a genre; and it’s entirely possible; we can understand this Sumerian poem of a hero’s journey, in the context of its culture of origin, as embodying the cosmological conceits of his day, the speculations of the Bronze Age rather than the Rocket Age. John Gardner, as I recall, cites scholarly opinion that it was read as fiction; we should not presume naïve belief with our forebears, no more than with a fan of Star Trek or Joyce’s Ulysses.
We can read Enkidu, Humbaba and the scorpion-men as cryptids, as exotica, as alethic quirks of geography rather than technology, of an era when the Great Beyond was spatial rather than temporal, the known world their analogue of our known science, the Cedar Forest and the imagined lands beyond the sunrise a terrestrial deep space. We can read the Deluge, the Plant of Immortality as hypothetical arcana of deep time, these metaphysical quirks in terms of the current workings of the world not requiring an alterior reality, only an earlier one. Adding this SFist reading methodology to the arsenal of Marxist and feminist readings has scope; insofar as SF is rooted in fantasia and futurology, an SF reading of a narrative constitutes an interrogation of its dynamics of passion and reason. Insofar as SF goes beyond this to unpack the full potential of its quirks, such a reading for the narrative modalities becomes an inquiry into the dynamics of narrative itself.
In the Fabric of History
In alternative narrative, as outlined in Lake’s taxonomy, there is a different type of challenge to the alethic modality of “could have happened.” Where in private narrative the events are on a personal level, a domestic level, remaining within the confines of a family or a group of friends whose lives would never impact on our own, in an alternative narrative the events are on a scale where we would surely notice. They may be mundane in terms of possibility but not in terms of scope. With Jett Rink, the James Dean character in the movie Giant, for example, we would know of his existence in the world, remember him as another Howard Hughes. This great industrialist would be written via reportage into known history.
We know for a fact that the events in this sort of fiction “could not have happened,” because the world would be different than it is. So that conflicting alethic modality is introduced into the narrative, an erratum. With Giant we simply sustain Rink as a conceit, an elseworld analogue of Howard Hughes, as with every Hollywood movie or TV show set in the present with a POTUS who isn’t the current incumbent. We barely notice. In the more pulp forms of strange fiction, another approach sets that conceit as its focus, makes a quirk of what “could not have happened now.” That is to say, if we could rewind time to before the 1950s and replay history, this temporal impossibility might be undone. Then there could have been a Jett Rink. Then the events of Giant “could have happened.” The resultant history would diverge from ours, branch off from it, continuing forward into an alternative reality we can envisage in a spatial metaphor, as a sideways step away through a second lateral dimension of time, the resultant present being another “now” where Jett Rink is remembered by the world as another Howard Hughes.
We’re already playing the game of suspending disbelief, accepting these events as taking place in simulation, accepting for the sake of the story an ersatz world of ersatz people performing the drama represented in the sentences, so it is only a small step to tweak that ersatz world into another now, set apart from our own in some lateral dimension of unrealised potentialities. All worlds of fiction are alternative realities.
It should be noted, however, that both the degree of challenge and the degree of difference may be minimal. In this example, the counterfactual is no great stretch of the imagination and therefore no great challenge to the suspension-of-disbelief. We’re not asked to accept sweeping historic changes with the story of Giant, and the simple fact that it is fiction is enough for us to swallow this minor revision in the fabric of history. Conversely, one might argue that the private narrative of a Peruvian multiple infanticide could be expected to impact on our lives were we, for instance, Peruvian; we would know of the old woman from news reports, remember her as a real-life Medea. The boundaries between private narrative and alternative narrative, by this reasoning, must be highly fluid and subjective. But in truth again we can see the old woman as simply an analogue of any infanticidal mother in reality, the ersatz murders a substitution for any number of real examples.
In the pulp form though, the conceit of difference becomes the point, as the narrative doesn’t simply perform a substitution in known history, as when we switch in Rink for Hughes or an ersatz POTUS for the real one, but rather it posits alterations in the recorded events, breaches that conflict with known history just as the novum conflicts with known science or the chimera with the laws of nature. Remake Giant today but keep it set in its own time, portray Jett Rink using his oil money to run for President of the USA, and winning no less, and what we have is an alethic quirk. As the list of corrections to mistakes slipped in
at the back of a book rewrite the text, so these counterfactual quirks, these errata, rewrite the mundane worldscape.
Now, let’s introduce some errata into our nursery rhyme:
There was an old Nazi who ran the US.
She had so many children to listen to her address.
She gave them some TV without any truth.
She whipped them up wildly, a new Hitler Youth.
The Genre of Alternate History (which rather proves the emptiness of nominal labels in its misuse of alternate in place of alternative) can be positioned here as a form of alternative narrative which quite clearly does stretch suspension-of-disbelief in a way Jett Rink does not. If the Nazis had won WW2, if the South had won the American Civil War, if the Roman Empire had not fallen, and so on—these counterfactual conceits are revisions of known history, alterations that reshape the ersatz world of the narrative to something quite unfamiliar. All worlds of fiction are alternative worlds, but some are more alternative than others. Rewritten in the act of supposition, transfigured by the core quirk and any number of smaller quirks cast as ramifications, the ersatz worldscape comes to constitute what we might call an elsewhen.
There are narratives that use nova to storify the transfiguration itself; they render the alteration (as mistake, or correction, or both), within the narrative, via actual time-travel, presenting us with the jump back to change the course of history then the jump forward into the rewritten reality, e.g. Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder,” which changes the very basis of history—prehistory—with the death of a butterfly. Sometimes, however, the reader is simply thrust into the elsewhen and faced with the strange details that “could not have happened,” individual errata from which they must reconstruct the core quirk, the underlying supposition, the counterfactual premise by which such fallout quirks might have come to pass (or would have come to pass, some Alternate History buffs are prone to argue, in their variant of the Contingency Slip Fallacy).
It’s by no means certain, in fact, that even this will be offered. In the example offered above, there’s little to indicate what small but significant change might have led to an old Nazi ruling the US. The focus is instead on developing the dystopian scenario of media control and the indoctrination of a generation born into fascist dictatorship.
Another Different Now
We find an equivalent approach in Lake’s future narrative, where novum takes the place of erratum. Again we have the “could not have happened (now)” alethic modality introduced by quirks in the text, events we know for a fact to be impossible. The “could not have happened yet” alethic modality is simply another form of that: as errata breach known history, nova breach known science, expanding on it, extrapolating, speculating or simply fabricating in fancy; they breach temporal possibility simply by being hypothetical: by definition, any event set in the future could not have happened, the have indicating past tense. But that future setting, even if it’s only twenty seconds into the future, makes for a get-out clause: where the alternative narrative can take a step to the side, the future narrative can take a step ahead, setting its quirks as artefacts of another different now, displaced frontally rather than laterally in the phasespace of potential realities.
Big Brother, humanoid robots, colonies on Mars—such hypothetical conceits are as temporally dislocating as the counterfactual conceits of Alternate History, rendering the worldscape a different now, an ersatz reality as an elsewhen twenty seconds, twenty years or twenty centuries into the future, where things have changed enough that the impossible could have come to pass. Why, under the Paradigm Shift Caveat even the laws of nature may have been revised.
Where some Alternate History stories will show their workings, so to speak, so there are Science Fiction stories which explicate their nova with infodump (the original intro to Bester’s Demolished Man, for example, laying out a whole future history as a foundation before the story even begins). But as with Alternate History, that elsewhen may be simply given as a fait-accompli, any underlying hypothetical premise left to the reader to reconstruct from the details, if indeed it is there to be reconstructed at all. We can illustrate this with another variant of the nursery rhyme, transforming its genre by changing a grand total of one noun and four pronouns:
There was an old robot who ran the US.
It had so many children to listen to its address.
It gave them some TV without any truth.
It whipped them up wildly, a new Hitler Youth.
The power of the alternative and future narratives resides in the way these errata and nova test suspension-of-disbelief: the alethic quirk is always already incredible. For some readers though, for these narratives to work they cannot simply be incredible. Here the “could not have happened” alethic modality is not allowed to really fuck with suspension-of-disbelief; the tension is not built up to a peak or crisis-point as it is with the absurd or the abject. In fact, where comic and tragic narratives exploit the tension between alethic modalities, the alternative / future narratives may well seek to resolve them as best they can.
Just Run With It
The Contingency Slip Fallacy and the Paradigm Shift Caveat go a long way to dewarping the alethic quirk, undoing the tension, but there’s an extent to which these aren’t even required. In the pulp tradition, the resolution of incredulity as a strain is partly inbuilt, where the conceits at their heart, counterfactual in one, hypothetical in the other, are so conventional as to be clichés—Nazis winning the Second World War, robots taking over the world.
We recognise these as tropes, idiomatic fancies that we accept for the sake of a good yarn—like those of Noir, Swashbuckler, Western. We know the trench-coat-wearing detective is unrealistic. We know pirates were not actually like Captain Jack Sparrow. We know the portrayal of the Wild West on screen is mostly tosh. But we accept the popcorn quirks as tropes of idiomatic fantasias because it’s more fun that way. Forget the history and futurology, the idea of rigour or even arguability. It’s not really a matter of setting up a “what if,” counterfactual or hypothetical, and extrapolating forward from that, finding a story in the ramifications. As often as not the story comes out of the tropes and those tropes are only bolstered with argument afterwards…if at all.
How did the Nazis win World War II? They just did. How do you get a robot that can think and act just like a human? You just do. They’re tropes. Just run with it.
When it comes to known history and known science, if we’re brutally honest, we need to accept that the alternative and future narratives of the pulp traditions posit, as often as not, counterfactuals and hypotheticals that are barely even subjectively plausible, never mind objectively possible. A subjective perception of greater possibility is not an objective reality of greater possibility, simply a matter of what the reader is willing to believe; and there are many strategies for persuading a reader, only one of which is to limit the strangeness to the temporal impossibilities of errata and nova, and only one of which is to argue plausibility. With the quirk of jaunting, for example, the reader is offered no theoretical basis. Bester walks roughshod over the laws of physics here, kicking thermodynamics to one side, pushing the dirt over it and saying, Look, it’s the Goodyear Blimp! as he points in the other direction.
How does jaunting work in terms of conservation of energy? It just does. It’s a trope in the idiomatic fantasia that our future elsewhens have become by Bester’s time, with tropic features of asteroid mines, etc.; or it’s a quirk offered as such, framed in an elsewhen constructed of tropes so that it’s always already a legitimate move in the game of make-believe; it’s a fresh entry into a shared mythos. If others have used the quirk before us then the conventionality it accrues as it becomes a trope situates it in its own ersatz nomology—hence the acceptance of FTL as a tradition of how the laws of nature work within Space Opera (versus in reality), and hence the popularity of quirks like wormholes, stargates and jump-points as the tropes of a more recent tradition of Space Opera.
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p; Ultimately, there’s a neat symbiosis: as quirks reused to cliché become tropes, they become tired, dewarped, no longer marvellous, but that very idiomatic familiarity makes the entire mythos a pre-accepted conceit, one we slip into as an idle play, with not a hint of credibility warp; mean-while, fresh quirks that do actually test suspension-of-disbelief provide the crucial eyeball kick, the thrill of the marvellous that is the point of the game, with no more risk of the reader being kicked out of the story than there is of a soccer player suddenly thinking it’s all just silly, so why not just pick up the ball and chuck it into the goal. The fantasia is idiomatic. Just run with it.
If some readers want more of a sugarcoating to make the alethic quirk easier to swallow, there are other strategies of excuse. With the general applicability of the Paradigm Shift Caveat, a chimera may be masked as a novum simply by offering it as future reality, as Bester gives us jaunting in the future rather than the present. A bit of worldbuilding, and jaunting can be sold as another natural facet of an elsewhen of spaceships and asteroid mines. Working a little pseudo-scientific explication into that worldbuilding doesn’t hurt, so Bester and a score of other writers present a magical power of ESP or jaunting as a “next stage in human evolution.”
We can literalise the paradigm shift, present the quirk as a product of an entirely alien culture, with a conceit of visitors leaving behind technology beyond our understanding. That conceit may be a startpoint for the Strugatsky Brothers in Roadside Picnic to mine the strange for everything it’s worth, but it can as easily be a way to sell one’s snake-oil. Where we cast those aliens as ancient and extinct, I can’t help but see an echo of the arcanum, as if the alethic quirk of Gilgamesh’s era persists, a legacy of strange fictions past. From Stargate to Prometheus, we do seem drawn to mythic antiquity as an elsewhen strode by titans who claim novum status on the basis of pure grandiosity: they are too vast and ancient to be bound within our laws of nature.