Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions
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Authors: Hal Duncan
Rhapsody
Notes on Strange Fictions
Hal Duncan
Lethe Press
Maple Shade, New Jersey
Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions
Copyright © 2014 Hal Duncan.
all rights reserved
. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, microfilm, and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Published in 2014 by Lethe Press, Inc.
118 Heritage Avenue, Maple Shade, NJ 08052 USA
lethepressbooks.com / [email protected]
isbn
: 978-1-59021-261-5 / 1-59021-261-4
e-
isbn
: 978-1-59021-093-2 / 1-59021-093-x
Earlier versions of some of this work first appeared on the author’s blog,
http://notesfromthegeekshow.blogspot.com/
Interior design: Alex Jeffers.
Cover image: Stijn Windig, www.stijnwindig.com
Cover design: Matt Cresswell.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Duncan, Hal, 1971- author.
Rhapsody : Notes on Strange Fictions / Hal Duncan.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-59021-261-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Science fiction, American--History and criticism. 2. Science fiction, En
glish--History and criticism. 3. Fantasy fiction, American--History and criticism. 4. Fantasy fiction, English--History and criticism. I. Title.
PS374.S35D86 2014
813’.0876209--dc23
2013049996
To Delany and Disch; to all the cartographers of the strange, too many to mention, whose work has spurred this exploration.
Introduction: SF Considered as a Subset of SF
Down in the Ghetto at the SF Café
The Marriage(s) of Science Fiction and Fantasy
The Miscegenation of Science Fantasy
The Spelunkers of Speculative Fiction
The Combat Fiction Bar & Grill
The Booker and the Bistro de Critique
SF Considered as a Subset of SF
If this appears that I am arguing for a deconstruction of our ideas of g
eneric norms, returning us to a primal chaos of fictive forms in which all fictive forms are equally privileged; if this appears that I am arguing for the dismantling of the concept itself, “science fiction,” as more a barrier than an aid to reading; if this seems as if I am saying that all fiction worth examining is, one way or another, science fiction; it is because that is what I am doing.
Frank McConnell
There are countless definitions of SF, innumerable attempts to characterise the type of fiction read by the regulars of the SF Café, from the boundless generality of the laziest catch-all down to the most limited and limiting spec
ificities of those who would claim that only their SF is
really
SF. I’ve never found the more specific definitions terribly convincing, and I’ve never found them terribly useful. If they ever held true at all, it was long before I stepped through the doors of the SF Café with a borrowed copy of Isaac Asimov’s
I, Robot
in my hand, expecting to find more of the same, only to find Philip K. Dick sitting at a table, obsessing over Gnostic demiurges and ersatz realities, Robert A. Heinlein across from him, spouting libertarian aphorisms but paying for Dick’s coffee. The talk at that table was as much philosophy as science, as much monsters and messiahs as spaceships and simulacra. Palmer Eldritch and Valentine Michael Smith fought, like Zoroastrian deities, over my soul.
Framed cinema posters adorned the walls—for
Forbidden Planet
,
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
and
Star Wars
, for
A Clockwork Orange
,
Solaris
and
The Man Who Fell to Earth
. On the TV set up on the wall in one corner, as the channels flicked through the decades, old serials like
Flash Gordon
,
Buck Rogers
,
King of the Rocket Men
gave way to reruns of
Lost in Space
,
Land of the Giants
,
The Time Tunnel
, these replaced in turn by
The Twilight Zone
,
The Outer Limits
,
Tales from the Crypt
, by
Star Trek
,
Battlestar Galactica
and
Buck Rogers in the 25th Century
, by
The Six Million Dollar Man
,
Knight Rider
,
Manimal
, by
The Lost Room
and
The Lost World
and just plain fucking
Lost
. These last three seemed a little strange given that this was the 1980s and the series didn’t actually exist yet, but I was too overawed to notice the temporal anomaly.
—What the fuck is this place? I asked.
—It’s not
Fantasy
, said one old-timer, and it’s not
Sci-Fi
. Ignore those freaks over in the corner if they try to tell you different.
Over where he pointed, Tolkien sat in one booth, surrounded by acolytes, droning on in Elvish. I’d read
The Lord of the Rings
, all one million pages of trees, fight, trees, fight, trees, fight, and all six billion pages of Frodo and Sam climbing up a mountain at the end. I’d read a few Shannara books too, and it wasn’t my bag. It was years since I’d read
The Borribles
and years until I’d read
The Book of Sand
, so I didn’t think twice about who was sitting in the
other
booths. So the SF Café wasn’t that
Fantasy
malarkey? I was down with that. At the end of the counter there wasn’t even a writer, just some actor signing autographs for a bunch of geeks in Halloween costumes—Vulcans and Klingons, Doctor Who and Davros, the entire cast of
Blake’s 7
. I was a typical teen, all too keen to abjure the puerile to prove my maturity, oblivious of how essentially adolescent that is, so I didn’t think twice about Patrick McGoohan’s Number Six, sat brooding at the other end of the counter, barking clipped defiance with Pinteresque subtexts. So it wasn’t this
Sci-Fi
business either? I could deal with that. But still…
—So what
is
it? I asked.
The old-timer shrugged and waved a hand to encompass everything su
rrounding us, the very ambience of the place.
—SF, he said.
Science Fiction is anything published as Science Fiction.
Norman Spinrad
What I would glean over the years was that, as far as I could tell, SF had long since become a marketing label more than anything, an arbitrary lum
ping-together of diverse works defying definition. For many readers, writers, editors and agents, that old-timer’s shrug seems pretty much the working (in)definition: SF is short for
So Fuck?
And I would discover that
Fantasy
could also be defined, if one so wishes, as whatever can be sold as
fantasy
, that
Sci-Fi
was a term equally arbitrary in its application. These are simply nominal labels, circularly defined; they can’t be argued with for that reason, but they also, for that reason, serve no real purpose, other than the obvious commercial and (sub)cultural ones—as banners to gather the faithful under or to strike fear into the hearts of unbelievers.
Science Fiction is what I mean when I point to it.
Damon Knight
I sit here now in the SF Café, on my stool up at the counter, scribbling these notes from the city of New Sodom. It has occurred to me to begin an invest
igation, an enquiry into the nature of the forms and functions of this strange field of strange fictions. Perhaps a sociography of SF in some form, the life and times of the SF Café, to provide some context, but not so much
historical
as
political
, a bit of bolshie heresy, a shamelessly subjective polemic on the turf wars of pulp, woven through with the theory of what’s
actually
going on in the texts. Or perhaps another angle to start? Maybe an overview of all the varied definitions, all the methods and modes of SF they represent. The ghetto is a complicated place. It has walls for all its different zones, some sealing their own little quarter off from the rest, many reinforcing the boundaries between the ghetto and the outside world.
I should abjure the marketing labels, I think—
Science Fiction
or
Fantasy
—don’t want to risk the assumption that I’m talking, with any of these definitions, about some singular coherent
Genre
which these variant models could or could not, should or should not, be applied to. No, let’s instead invent a new label for each definition, or for each
type
of definition. The point is to examine the multiplicity of features, not to end up in pointless bickering over which of these features are required or forbidden if some work is to be called SF. For ease of reference, and for the sheer bloody-minded whimsy of it, let’s make all of these labels abbreviate to
SF
, each of these SFs to be considered its own SF, an SF which may not be yours and may not be mine, but which probably belongs to someone out there. Each could be considered a gateway out into the wider galaxy of SF that each sparkly gem of an SF is a subset of, each definition with its own guardians, those who would say this
is
SF.
Let’s mark out those gates and gatekeepers on our map.
