Stories for Chip

by Nisi Shawl

  Transcending the genre? At best it’s a conventional—and somewhat hyperbolic—way to refer to the writer’s unusual contribution to the genre itself. But the SF novelist who wants to do something really good and new is no more trying to transcend the SF genre than the literary novelist who wants to write a really good and new literary novel is trying to transcend literature. In both cases it’s a matter of trying to live up to the potential of the genre. (Erickson, 75)

  Delany then expands on the notion of living up to the potential of the genre in which one is writing. Nevertheless, Erickson’s anxieties about Delany’s association with the SF ghetto apparently prevent him from grasping Delany’s point, for he’s unable to let the matter drop. So he tries once again:

  OK. Let’s give this dead horse one more whack. It doesn’t seem such a coincidence that Dhalgren and Gravity’s Rainbow were written pretty much during the same period of time. We could say the line between “science fiction” and “mainstream” was being attacked from different sides by both books. (Erickson 76)

  Delany responds by agreeing with the last sentence, but insists, “To repeat myself, genre distinctions are fundamentally power boundaries.” And he goes on to note that “exclusionary attitudes are part of the history of science fiction….Those exclusionary forces rigorously shaped the space in which the rhetorical richness, invention, and genius of SF was forced to flower.” (76) In other words, a genre is a location with a history—and not simply a slot with a label.

  Jonathan Lethem, who spent years working in the genre before “breaking out” into the mainstream, shares Erickson’s interest in dismantling “the line” between “science fiction and mainstream.” In an essay first published in 1998, Lethem “dreams” of “utopian reconfiguration of the publishing, bookselling, and reviewing apparatus” that would dismantle the “barrier” between “genre” and “mainstream” fiction:

  The 1973 Nebula Award should have gone to Gravity’s Rainbow, the 1976 Award to Ratner’s Star. Soon after, the notion of “science fiction” ought to have been gently and lovingly dismantled, and the writers dispersed: children’s fantasists here, hardware-fetish thriller writers here, novelizers of films both-real-and-imaginary here. Most important, a ragged handful of heroically enduring and ambitious speculative fabulators should have embarked for the rocky realms of midlist, out-of-category fiction. And there—don’t wake me now, I’m fond of this one—they should have been welcomed. (Lethem, 9)

  “Speculative fabulation,” Lethem informs us, was “a lit-crit term both pretentiously silly and dead right,” conceived “in a seizure of ambition,” when SF “flirted with renaming itself.”(1) Lethem’s principal complaint is that “SF’s literary writers exist now in a twilight world, neither respectable nor commercially viable.” If SF can’t be merged with the mainstream, then what is needed, he argues, is to find a way to make work that gets categorized as SF legitimate by keeping it from “drowning in a sea of garbage in bookstores,” by presenting “its own best face, to win proper respect.”4 (Lethem, 8)

  A similar tactic to that of drafting literary works into the SF canon is that of inventing new labels designed to blur the genre distinctions Delany characterizes as “power boundaries,” with the aim of placing the more literary or “softer” SF within a boundary zone into which can be drafted literary work with fantastic or SFnal elements. The term “Speculative Fiction” or “Spec Fic” dates back to 1947, when first Heinlein used it, but began to be used in the 1970s to imply an SF work’s superior quality to other science fiction; the US version of the term “New Wave” dates back to the mid-1960s; and the term “slipstream,” which many people say Bruce Sterling coined, became popular in the late 1980s and continues to be bandied about to this day. The late 1980s and early 1990s also saw an attempt to distinguish the “postmoderns,” which according to Michael Swanwick were comprised of a “natural division” between “humanists” and “cyberpunks”5; while in the late 1990s, a group of Fantasy writers led by Fantasy of Manners writer Ellen Kushner (who earlier coined the term “Mannerpunk”) attempted to create “a new literary movement” called the “Young Trollopes.” More recently, various cliques (or “tribes”) of fantasy and SF writers have attempted to create designations for their own use that inevitably fail through an inability to establish or control essential definitions. These include “interstitial fiction,” “the New Weird,” “infernokrusher,” “New Fabulism” and even “New Wave Fabulism.”6 While all these attempts to distinguish a few genre texts from all others do not necessarily aim to confer literary legitimacy on their beneficiaries, they are, like the oldest, most pervasive label—“hard SF”—manifestations of the anxieties of the genre’s lack of legitimacy.

  If all of these labels have a history of running aground on the rocks of definitional disputes, that is likely because, as Delany points out, definition is associated with mastery. “Genres, discourses, and genre collections are all social objects,” he declares, drawing on Lucien Goldmann’s Philosophy and the Human Sciences, and social objects resist formal definition:

  Social objects are those that, instead of existing as a relatively limited number of material objects, exist rather as an unspecified number of recognition codes (functional descriptions, if you will) shared by an unlimited population, in which new and different examples are regularly produced…. And when a discourse (or genre collection, such as art) encourages, values, and privileges originality, creativity, variation, and change in its new examples, it should be self-evident why “definition” is an impossible task (since the object itself, if it is healthy, is constantly developing and changing), even for someone who finds it difficult to follow the fine points. (“Politics” 239)

  In “The Politics of the Paraliterary” Delany focuses on Darko Suvin as an example of the misguided critic hellbent on establishing a formal definition of science fiction, but in his “Exhortation to SF Scholars” Delany generalizes this insistence on establishing a formal definition of SF as a preoccupation of many of the academic critics who choose to study SF. What all the attempts have in common, he observes, “is a bottom-line absolute, a zero-degree of authoritative empowerment—the credential that allows the master to speak and that authenticates its speech—that drops out of the bottom of the argument, as it were, and ‘grounds’ it, without ever actually entering into it.” (“Exhortation,” 4)

  Not surprisingly, those anxious to preserve SF’s “purity” set the definitions narrowly, so as to exclude (or make tenuous) fiction that is not sufficiently “hard” enough,7 while many at the “literary” end of the SF spectrum, anxious to have their work read without the prejudice of the SF label, frequently invent new terms in the hope that their work’s affinity with literary texts will help it stand out from the genre’s “sea of garbage” (as Lethem puts it). Both of these tactics, though fundamentally at odds, seem to be driven by the same sense of frustration and the same impulse to take control of a messy situation through semantic mastery.

  The third point of controversy pervading the stories that critics, writers, and fans tell about SF is the search for origins and the establishment of lineage, centering on the questions of who wrote the first texts of science fiction and how the field was subsequently shaped. How a critic answers these questions usually hinges on how the critic defines science fiction. While the need to create a monumental history typically involves investing the genre with the cultural capital of widely recognized literary ancestors, doing so is usually of more importance to the genre’s critics and writers than to its fans. According to Delany, science fiction writers

  have been proposing origins for our genre since the late thirties, when the game of origin hunting became important to early critics first interested in contemporary popular culture. The various proposals made over the years are legion: Wells, Verne, and Poe, in that order, have the most backers. There were more eccentric ones (my personal favorite is Edward Sylvester Ellis’s The Steam Man of the Prairies, a dime novel from 1865, who
se fifteen-year-old inventor hero builds a ten-foot steam-powered robot, who can pull a horseless carriage along behind him at nearly sixty miles an hour…and more conservative ones (Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis, 1629; Joannes Kepler’s Somnium [written 1609, published 1634]; Savinien Cyrano’s [de Bergerac] Voyage to the Moon and The States and Empires of the Sun[1650]), and slightly loopy ones (Shakespeare’s Tempest; Dante’s Commedia), and some classical ones (Lucian of Samosata’s True History, from the second century A.D., which recounts a voyage to the moon)…. When Brian Aldiss’s history of science fiction, Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction, first appeared from Doubleday in 1973 (from page one of Chapter One: “As a preliminary, we need a definition of science fiction…”), one might have assumed that the argument filling its opening chapter, proposing Frankenstein as our new privileged origin, was another eccentric suggestion among many—and would be paid about as much attention to as any of these others. (“Politics” 263)

  But Aldiss’s new definition of SF and new origins story had legs, for it was regarded by “academics who saw their own fields of literary study rocked by the advent of theory” as

  a weighty sandbag on a breakwater against the rising theoretical tide. For the rest, they tended to accept the argument simply because it received a certain amount of attention from these others. Among writers and those not directly concerned with the theoretical debates, there was still a vague presentiment that such singular origins somehow authorized and legitimated a contemporary practice of writing, or that its feminist implications made it attractive. (“Politics” 266)

  The origins controversy did not die with Aldiss’s proposal of Mary Shelley as the Founder of Science Fiction. As recently as 1998, In The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of, Thomas Disch claimed Edgar Allan Poe as the first SF writer. Certainly most US writers and critics prefer not to trace SF’s lineage back to someone who is a Brit, a woman, and a romantic. For as Delany insists: “The origin is always a political construct.” (“Politics,” 266) And so the battle rages on.

  The fourth point of controversy attending the stories told about SF, one which arises virtually daily in the blogosphere and more and more frequently in published reviews, is the failure to integrate the work of women into the genre’s stories of itself. Women had a presence in the genre’s early pulp magazines. But as Justine Larbalestier’s Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction shows, for decades, the very presence of women in the genre caused controversy. Many fans (including the young Isaac Asimov) argued vociferously that even women characters had no business intruding into the sacred male precincts of SF. The domination of the genre by brilliant work by women in the 1970s, however, as well as effective feminist organization in fandom, eventually silenced overt protests against the presence of women in the male-dominated clubhouse. But although women are now fully accredited members of the genre’s community, the position of women continues to demonstrate a failure to integrate the work of women into the genre, thus assuring their continuing marginality. This failure usually takes the form of reducing women writers to an exceptional or token presence by offering a separate account of them that relegates them to the margins and overlooks their contributions to the genre’s main stories. This last issue concerns mainly women writers and critics and the men who make an effort to support them. Since the presence of women in the field has expanded enormously over the last couple of decades, I believe it is an issue that will become increasingly visible and vexing to everyone. Lately I’ve been struck by just how many men in the field would genuinely like to see the problem solved—even as they express incomprehension for why it should still be a problem when outright expressions of sexism have become rare.

  Certain of Delany’s insights and analyses, taken to their logical conclusion, would require the creation of a radically different story of SF, one that would fully integrate the work of the genre’s women even as it dismisses, for good, the preoccupation with legitimacy, the search for a definitive story of SF’s origins and lineage, and the obsession with establishing a monolithic definition of SF texts for patrolling the genre’s borders. Although the issue that concerns me most is the seeming impossibility of the genre’s fully integrating science fiction by women into the stories it tells about itself, Delany’s take on these four issues has persuaded me that they are intertwined and perhaps even inextricable.

  ◊

  In 1987, during an interview with Delany, Takayuki Tatsumi proposed a reconstruction of “American SF history” reflecting the momentary dominance of the field by cyberpunk.8 His reconstruction sketches a patrilineal narrative that begins with Bester (who produced his best work in the 1950s), proceeds to Delany (who began publishing in the early 1960s and whose most widely admired works of SF appeared in the 1970s and early 1980s) and Varley (whose best work appeared in the late 1970s and early 1980s), and culminates with William Gibson, the 1980’s SF heir apparent. Shortly before Tatsumi proposed this reconstruction, Delany cited Jeanne Gomoll’s “Open Letter to Joanna Russ” and asserted that the “feminist explosion” of the 1970s had “obviously influenced” the cyberpunks and had done so “much more than the New Wave” had.9 Although this was an utterly astonishing contention, Delany’s 1987 interlocutor not only ignored it, but even went on to confer patriarchal status on Delany. Whatever Tatsumi’s reason for doing so might be, this move elicited a fascinating reply from Delany.

  Rather than allowing the interviewer to make an end-run around his refusal to play along with a boys’ own narrative of cyberpunk SF family relations, Delany expanded on his astonishing idea of feminist influence by countering the interviewer’s proposed patrilineage with a completely different narrative of family relations. He started by zooming in on a certain preoccupation he calls the “anxious search for fathers”:

  When you look at the criticism cyberpunk has generated, you notice among the male critics this endless, anxious search for fathers—that finally just indicates the general male discomfort with the whole notion of paternity. Which, in cyberpunk, is as it should be. Cyberpunk is, at basis, a bastard form of writing. It doesn’t have a father. Or, rather, it has so many that enumerating them just doesn’t mean anything. (“Mothers,” 177)

  In the more than twenty years since Delany characterized cyberpunk as “a bastard form of writing,” this “anxious search for fathers” continues. Critics continually propose this father or that for defining, placing, and—if Delany is correct—legitimating cyberpunk. A recent version can be found in John Clute’s chapter describing SF from 1980-2000, in The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction (2003); Clute names Vernor Vinge as the “godfather” of cyberpunk and describes Vinge’s “True Names” and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner as the “mulch of influences” from which Gibson created the particular metaphor of cyberspace. Mulch, like fertilizer, enriches the soil. And fathers, as we know, provide sperm that is said to “fertilize” eggs. Surely the metaphor of fertilization is a rather strange way of describing the joining of gametes that results in the recombination of genetic material, but then many of the metaphors that dominate biological discourse are similarly strange. “Mulch” is a more discreet choice of metaphor than “godfather,” though it suggests a more material connection than “godfather.” A “godfather” is, strictly speaking, a spiritual—as opposed to biological—father, but as a compound, to the ear, anyway, it seems to mix up paternity with godhood.

  Interestingly, the anxiety about fathers that Delany cites differs markedly from that of Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence,” which depicts literary sons as in an oedipal relation to their literary fathers. The “endless, anxious search” for the fathers of cyberpunk that Delany talks about bears little relation to Bloom’s theory of an anxiety involving a single literary father. I suspect this is because oedipal relations arise from a distinctly bourgeois psychological formation in which legitimacy is not at issue. As Delany characterizes cyberpunk as a “bastard form of writing,” so I would suggest that science fiction generally
is a bastard form of writing—and for the same reason Delany gives: it has too many fathers.10 And having too many fathers, Delany says, means that enumerating them “just doesn’t mean anything.”

  Well, perhaps it is also the case that the concept of paternity doesn’t mean a thing for science fiction as a whole, either. Just consider how irrelevant Bloom’s anxiety of influence is for figuring generations of SF writers. Who are the patriarchal figures of the field? Not Wells. Not Asimov. Not Clarke. Not Sturgeon. Not even Heinlein, who has inspired both rebellion and devotion yet simply does not constitute a credible embodiment of the Law. The patriarchs, if there are any, would have to be Gernsback and Campbell, both editors, and however powerful, editors cannot, as editors, figure in the kind of lineage Tatsumi proposes.11 To my mind, the sibling model has always dominated relations among science fiction writers, such that influence is often lateral. And this, too, marks a difference from the Bloomian model. Perhaps more importantly, the texts of science fiction are so constantly in conversation with one another that the welter of relations involved is simply too promiscuous to be reduced to a lineage. I love this aspect of science fiction myself, but I suspect that for all those who prize the values of monogamy and the model of the heteronormative nuclear family, this is a sorry state of affairs that generates the very anxiety Delany attributes to the early critics of cyberpunk. Such anxiety might well explain why critics of science fiction in general spend so much of their energy trying to establish the true patrilineage of the field.

  After declaring that cyberpunk has too many fathers so that “enumerating them just doesn’t mean anything,” Delany further unfolds his figure of family relations:

  What it’s got are mothers. A whole set of them—who, in literary terms, were so promiscuous that their cyberpunk offspring will simply never be able to settle down, sure of a certain daddy. (“Mothers,” 177)