Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions (16 page)

Or, indeed, the story might well
never
actually resolve into one or the other, instead utilising
the tension between
conflicting subjunctivities of “could have happened” and “could not have happened” (in which case we probably hum and haw and mutter something about “slipstream” when we reach the end).

In Bester’s novel the metaphysical impossibility of the quirk of jaunting is obscured by its context within a whole worldscape of quirks that are only n
ova rather than chimera. SF novels like
The Stars My Destination
demonstrate that we’re a lot more lenient as readers than the definitions we impose, that there’s a lot more of “could not have happened” than we claim. There is always the Paradigm Shift Caveat, of which “the next stage in human evolution” as used by Bester is a blatant example. (Because, yes…the next stage in human evolution is going to give us the power to twitch our noses, click our heels three times, say, “There’s no place like the asteroids,” and teleport ourselves away from impending death. For sure.) And if a flagrant metaphysical impossibility is not
quite
so outrageous as a crescent sun, if the chimera is on its own rather than being in a huge heap of such impossibilities, or if it’s simply such a cool idea we
want
it to be feasible, we can quite often just shunt the “could not have happened” alethic modality to the back of our minds and read the work as SF regardless. There’s the “one impossible thing per story” rule too, a First Offence Caveat which along with the Paradigm Shift Caveat renders all sorts of spurious pseudo-science acceptable.

So, not only is the quirk of a crescent sun operationally identical to the quirk of jaunting in disrupting the suspension-of-disbelief with a metaphysical i
mpossibility; it is or can be
functionally
identical to the quirk of a dilating door in the effect of such a disruption, regardless of the type of impossibility. It is only the addition of that “yet” to the “could not have happened” alethic modality which distinguishes the two, and this SF rationalisation has its complement in fantasy.

But we’ll get to that.

For now, if we add in a requirement to not breach
epistemic
modality with events that would necessarily, because of their scale of impact, be on the historical record as fact, we have an effective definition of Lake’s private narrative as that which cleaves to a “could have happened” alethic modality, versus the strange narrative, as that which introduces a “could not have happened” alethic modality. We have a fundamental difference between private narratives that exclude quirks in favour of the mundane and those strange narratives that introduce them as notes of dissonance in the mimetic weft, whatever the flavour of quirk, and whether they rationalise them or not.

To put a personal perspective on this, in
Vellum
and
Ink
there are two big-ass conceits that, for many people I’m sure, render them fantasy rather than science fiction. In the SF Café I’ve been asked enough times what category I’d place them in to know that it’s a matter of doubt for some.

First, there’s the idea of the Vellum itself, a 3D time-space where the “fo
rward and back” of future and past aren’t the only direction to travel in. There are temporally alternative realities (i.e. sharing the same basic physics but with different histories) treated as “parallel” worlds off to this “side” or that. There are also metaphysically alterior realities (i.e. worlds working with different physics entirely) treated as “higher” or “deeper” strata. Time has three dimensions, frontal, lateral and residual. Though it’s not explicit in the books, I’ve always imagined the last dimension to be that through which the laws of nature evolve, from the sort of crude, chaotic cosmological principles found in myth to the intricate order of forces described in physics.

In this systematising approach to the multiverse idea, the fact that characters are able to move between realities doesn’t make it, for me, any less science fiction than Zelazny’s
Roadmarks
. But I do present one of the “folds” of the Vellum—shock, horror—as a realm of what, to all intents and purposes, are dwarves and elves and orcs, fairies and all that
Fantasy
malarky. In Ian McDonald’s
King of Morning, Queen of Day
a similar approach is applied to the idea of Faerie, positing it as a distinct reality that can and does sometimes intersect our own.

Second, there’s the idea of the Cant, the magic of a language which can be spoken to reprogram this multiverse and which therefore endows the user with the ability to perform metaphysical causations, manipulations of reality. Rif
fing off the idea that the most basic principle in the universe is information, that maybe all we’re made of, when it comes down to it, is data, this is a wild speculation that makes the whole kit and caboodle as malleable as a Phildickian consensus reality…but that’s kind of the point. If it was science fiction for Dick to warp reality itself with drugs in
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
, then it’s science fiction for me to do it with words. Hell, the magic here even works within the strictures of thermodynamics; it requires energy, and that energy has to come from somewhere.

So in
Vellum
and
Ink
you basically have a whole underlying schema in which elves and magic are treated as speculation rather than fabrication. If you want to argue that this schema isn’t plausible I’ll just shrug and say, yeah, so what? FTL isn’t plausible. Jaunting isn’t plausible. Time travel isn’t plausible. They require cosmological rather than technological paradigm shifts. They don’t just breach known science, they breach the laws of nature. And if the Paradigm Shift Caveat works to excuse your fabrications as speculations, then it works to excuse mine, on the exact same basis that the history of science is one of apparent impossibilities being shown to be actually quite possible. Either we apply that caveat objectively or we ditch it entirely in favour of the hard-nosed rigour that says FTL, ESP, time travel, jaunting,
anything
which plays so fast and loose with the laws of physics, is all just spurious fabrication. The only alternative is a shamelessly subjective application of the Paradigm Shift Caveat—or rather a refusal to accept the validity of its application—on the basis of personal incredulity.

If that personal incredulity kicks in when you see a dragon on the cover, that’s fair enough. But don’t come crying to me when the
Hard SF
geeks or the
Realist
snootcockers write you off as a spinner of spurious fabrications because
their
personal incredulity kicks in at the sight of your FTL spaceship. And really, if you’re putting the mask of a novum on a chimera, you’d do well not to fool yourself with it, not to trumpet your supposed plausibility too loudly. If you’re arguing that your chimera is just as possible as a novum because you’ve convinced yourself that it’s possible it might
become
possible, combining the Paradigm Shift Caveat with the Contingency Slip Fallacy, you’re
far
more of a fantasist than those with no illusions about their chimera being a complete breach of the laws of nature.

A case might be made that the quirks must be made arguable by a specul
ative approach, that fantasy does not do so and rather
becomes
science fiction when it makes its magics arguable (as cosmology rather than futurology), and that my speculative approach to the chimerae in
Vellum
and
Ink
does render them works of science fiction rather than fantasy. Cool, I’d say. I can live with an open definition of science fiction that encompasses the grand conceits of
The Demolished Man
,
The Stars My Destination
and
Roadmarks
, happy to see myself as working within that tradition. But the fact it’s in question…well, this brings us back to the turf war politics underpinning the term
Science Fantasy
, where it is, in part, exactly this Paradigm Shift Caveat that led to the use of the term for works like
Dune
.

We talk a lot about science fiction as extrapolation, but in fact most sc
ience fiction does not extrapolate seriously. Instead it takes a willful, often whimsical, leap into a world spun out of the fantasy of the author.

H. Bruce Franklin

Down in the ghetto at the SF Café, even with Old Man Campbell in charge, the menu had expanded to include dishes that, as far as some were concerned, didn’t belong there at all. The SF Café, they said, is a burger joint, a place for burgers and nothing but bur
gers. Chiliburgers, cheeseburgers, chickenburgers, even goddamn
chimp
burgers are fine. But those chicken nuggets belong in some Science Fantasy Diner, not in our Science Fiction Café. Chicken nuggets are not halal
Science Fiction
. Chicken nuggets are not kosher
Science Fiction
. Chicken nuggets are impure and unclean. They pollute the menu, corrupt the genre. They carry with them the taint of fantasy.

The territorial roots of this stance become obvious when we examine the common r
esponse amongst even those
Science Fiction
writers who use the Paradigm Shift Caveat freely to any assertion that science fiction is essentially a branch of fantasy.

—No, it’s not, they say. No fucking way.

Here’s the thing:

The perennial argument over whether or not science fiction is a branch of fantasy as often as not comes down to an unrecognised and unarticulated dis
agreement over which of two models applies to the field. What we have, as a baseline, is a set of strange fictions using quirks of the impossible—breaching known science, known history, the laws of nature or the strictures of logic. These quirks are taken as conceits, the fanciful accepted for the sake of the story, propagated through it. That much is simple; beyond it, we can go one of two ways.

If both science fiction and fantasy deal with quirks of the impossible, and science fiction is distinct from fantasy because it
also
requires a level of rationality in approach, a degree of theorising that renders the conceit an act of arguable speculation rather than inarguable fabrication, then unless fantasy
also
requires a secondary aspect which is either incompatible with this or at least
different
, then science fiction is a branch of fantasy. It is simply the subset of strange fictions which adds rationalisation to the mix, while that set of strange fictions is itself simply what we more commonly call fantasy. Only if fantasy has some specific feature rendering it a subset can the two be distinct branches in their own right.

Either: we have a Parent-Child Model: the superset of fantasy with its subset of science fiction, where X = “rationalise its conceits”:

Within fantasy as the set of strange fictions

• science fiction is the subset of fantasy that does X

Or: we have a Sibling-Sibling Model: the superset of strange fictions with two sibling subsets,
Science Fiction
and
Fantasy
:

Within S as the set of strange fictions

•
Science Fiction
is the subset of S that does X

•
Fantasy
is the subset of S that does Y

Note the overlap here with the split between upper-case and lower-case, between
Genre
and genre. This is not a coincidence. Personally, I’d be quite happy to go with the first model, slap the word
fantasy
down where I might write
field of strange fictions
and accept an openly-defined science fiction within it: a fantasy with an additional rationalised quality achieved by various strategies, none singularly essential and/or sufficient, but each providing grounds for a work to be subjectively judged as such. To articulate the territorial dispute(s) though, we need to accommodate the arguments of outright incompatibility, and those necessarily close the definitions of each mode to exclude the other.

The argument that science fiction is a branch of fantasy is an assertion of the latter model in which there is no extra criterion, no Y, required to further d
efine fantasy. Here fantasy is simply the field of fantastic fiction, fiction which uses quirks of the impossible, incredible conceits, which means it includes
everything
from the most generic sub-Tolkien product to the most respected literary tome. This is fantasy in its open definition, a mode of fiction that includes the work of Franz Kafka, Mikhail Bulgakov and Angela Carter, never mind Ray Bradbury, Mervyn Peake and Kelly Link. Here science fiction is just a subset of that field, one with an additional requirement of rationalisation. This is not at odds with the Campbellian closed definition of
Science Fiction
given above.
Science Fiction
is a subset of that science fiction.

The argument that science fiction is
not
a branch of fantasy is an assertion of the former model in which there is an additional quality, a Y, by which the definition of fantasy is closed to that of
Fantasy
. Here all fantasy
is
Fantasy
, fiction which uses
specific
conceits in a
specific
way and is inherently limited by those specifics, a
Genre
of fantasia which excludes the sophisticated writers mentioned above (classed as mainstream, magical realism, slipstream, SF or fantastic fiction by some other name), or within which those writers are at best marginal (fantasy considered as impure
Fantasy
). Here
Science Fiction
is incompatible with that genre because the specifics of Y are irreconcilable with the rationalism required in
Science Fiction
’s X.

Indeed, for many proponents of this model, it seems that X is not defined positively, as the rationalisation of conceits, so much as it’s defined
negatively
, as the avoidance of Y. That’s to say, for some, it’s the eschewal of the Y that makes a work of strange fiction
Fantasy
that is required to make it a work of
Science Fiction
.