Under the title “Notes from New Sodom”, Hal Duncan considers the failed old opposition of fantasy to sf, & describes the history of f/sf as a perpetual collapse of those categories. For instance, “Ray Bradbury’s entire ouvre exemplifies the crumbling of Science Fiction into the open interplay of science fiction, fantasy and horror.” A sort of ongoing explosion in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart, he believes, is what has produced the powerful & exploratory aesthetic of f/sf. Genre categories are an attempt to control this aesthetic as they piece it up & market it out, but though it’s “a riven thing–we could hardly expect two or three hundred years of division between Romanticism and Rationalism to be healed in a few decades”, it is a thing. Something is there–
That thing is, in essense, modernism. We might brand it Pulp Modernism — cheap, populist, balls-to-the-wall modernism, out to entertain more than an elite of aesthetes and intellectuals, but still modernism. It uses mimesis on the one hand, semiosis on the other, rationalising magic and romanticising science, combining the strange and the mundane, constantly experimenting with literary elements. The integrity we project on it, the unity we impose upon it with our so-well-formed definitions, is only that of a family which, in truth, extends as far as we decide it does. There is no genre of Fantasy, only the fantasy of genre. This isn’t the fiction of science; it’s the science of fiction. What we have is one confused clusterfuck of conventional forms ripped apart and rebuilt as an aesthetic idiom, a mode of fiction in which we take conceits, fantastic ideas, and put them to the test with literature as the laboratory.
I love this, & I will be grateful to Hal Duncan for expressing it this way as I go back into the big mad orbital laboratory with Pearlant & try to graft AE Van Vogt’s left leg onto a Bauhaus chair. & yes, make it speak. Or, more probably, refuse to speak.
Why is anyone having this discussion? I cannot conceive anyone for whom it is of potential benefit, or, really, much interest.
There is a class of readership that conditions its acquisitions on a cover label specifying a particular genre, and which expects the contents of those acquisitions to largely comply with the conventional expectations excited by those labels; that class is catered to by many authors and publishers, to the mutual benefit and pleasure of both producers and consumers, and I daresay neither is much concerned with the niceties of the labelling unless the contents grossly disappoint those ritual expectations.
There is another class that has wants and needs somewhat other; and I daresay few of them pay any attention at all to labels, much less feel any primal urge to sort out what the implications may be of the labelling. They typically manage to locate works to their taste with little recourse to labels.
It’s a game anyone can play. Speculative fiction is fiction set where one or more important rules work differently than they do in current or prior human existence, in a way that allows the author to use that difference or those differences to better spotlight what it is that he or she has to say about the human condition. (The first, absent the second, though common, is simply curtains and wallpaper: cowboys and indians in outer space, or cops and robbers, or whatever.) That is scarcely a deep insight, nor one likely to be notably controversial.
But genre division, then, is simply division by the nature of the rule or rules that differ. If they are laws of nature, it’s science fiction; if laws of magic, it’s fantasy; if neither (as in, say, Islandia), it’s a grey area–or one could establish, as some propose, a parallel category, “alternate history”, though it’s not the difference in history that matters (else it’s simply Ruritania) but the resultant society, by definition having some social or behavioral rule or rules notably different than any before encountered.
It is incidentally amusing that a number of works supposedly relying on “magic” are in reality science fiction, in that the magic set forth is perfectly regular–that is, susceptible of discovery, analysis, and employment by the scientific method. But’s that’s a different joke.
I think Hal Duncan is more concerned to demonstrate, by a lively & interesting new argument, that these distinctions can’t be supported. I would put it that there’s no difference between imaginary things; they share the over-riding quality of not being real. That frees me to do what I like, both as a writer & as a reader. Actually, writers were never not free to do that, & I think Hal Duncan is trying to remind us of that, too.
“…there’s no difference between imaginary things; they share the over-riding quality of not being real.”
I like this reformulation but I also wonder; I think of Frye’s Secular Scripture, and his division of the mythical vs. the fabulous. The difference of authority and social function between genre(s) and ‘literature’ is real–if not always accurate on bookstore shelves–and has deeper grounding than maximizing market niches.
Duncan’s description sounds like a postmodern analysis of a modern production method. I’m not suggesting that the author should be burdened with this perspective during creation, but rather pointing out that the creative will is not sufficient to define the structure of its own consumption, try though it might.
“[T]here’s no difference between imaginary things; they share the over-riding quality of not being real.” That is certainly so, and–as is to be expected–aptly put. But, as noted, it is an insight not experienced by all, and those who don’t experience it remain bound by their ritualized expectations, a lack of enlightenment not obviously distressing to them.
The observation also sidesteps a point that Duncan mentioned, the old saw that all fiction consists in imaginary things. You will know far better than I, but I assume–ever-dangerous word–that writers undertake speculative fictions, as opposed to any other sort, for some fairly definite purpose. I’m not sure Duncan directly addressed that point, which to my mind is critical, perhaps crucial.
What sorts of laws an author chooses to bend for his purposes, and in what ways, are, I agree, immaterial, and not pondering on them saves both writers and readers, enlightened or not, time better spent writing and reading the sorts of fiction they prefer.