Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions (4 page)

Stories and spectacle are what command attention in the cultural commons—which is just to say that the exploration of the representational power of language is where the real power is at. (And there’s no social or aesthetic canvas better, I personally think, than epic fantasy).

R. Scott Bakker

The misconceived conflations of fantasy with
Epic Fantasy
and of
Epic Fantasy
with the formulated regurgitations of the Hero’s Journey born from derivations and degradations of soul fiction obscure the centrality that the epic form has its place in SF as much as in fantasy. If we ignore the content-based definitions that lump distinct aesthetic idioms together as “fat fantasy” while disregarding the equivalent “fat SF,” we are in a better position to build a picture of a type of SF with its own processes and purposes, akin to those we have identified but distinguishable in its own right. This epic SF (or SF/F) is what I term spectaculist fabrication.

The spectaculist fabrication of epic SF is functionally identical to that of
Fantasy
or
Alternate History
, the difference being largely in the nature of the conceit—hypothetical as opposed to metaphysical or counterfactual—rather than in how or whether the conceit is utilised. Whether excused by convention, explicated via exhaustive worldbuilding, or some mixture of the two, the conceits of this mode serve to fabricate an elsewhen in which story-as-spectacle can be unleashed. That process of fabrication is more obvious in the secondary world fiction drawing on the extensible chivalric romance tradition of works like
Amadis de Gaula
, building marvellous backdrops, CGI grandiosities of castles, mountains and battles against which the human-level drama takes place. But it is there to be found also in the serial
Space Opera
form.

In this kind of story the pseudo-scientific apparatus is to be taken simply as a “machine” in the sense which that word bore for the Neo-Classical critics. The most superficial appearance of plausibility—the merest sop to our critical intellect—will do. I am inclined to think that frankly supernatural methods are best. I took a hero once to Mars in a space-ship, but when I knew better I had angels convey him to Venus. Nor need the strange worlds, when we get there, be at all strictly tied to scientific probabilities. It is their wonder, or beauty, or suggestiveness that matter.

C. S. Lewis

In spectaculist fabrication, the Paradigm Shift Caveat breaks down any real distinction between scientific and non-scientific conceits, the fabricated worlds becoming simply elsewhens. If the past is another country, so too is the future—the broad canvas-cosmos of Herbert’s
Dune
series, Banks’s Culture novels, and so on, mapped in the details of political fault-lines and technological territories, details of individuals and factions and city-state worlds and federation nations, material and ideological diversity. In some respects, people do things differently there; in others, they don’t. There is worldbuilding and window-dressing in spectaculist fabrication, in the structural and superficial detailing of the environment in which the narrative takes place, out of which it emerges (or under which it is submerged, swamped, stomped.)

What distinguishes this from scientific fancy is not the structural nature of the conceit in terms of plot, but rather the structural nature of that conceit in terms of
mode
, the way in which the overload of detail serves to establish the epic scale of the narrative. Tragic and comic narratives are companions to this epic form insofar as they exploit the monstrous and the absurd, building to crises of horror or hilarity; similarly, this epic form exploits the incredible, building to a crisis of awe, of spectacle, the detailed backdrop an intrinsic aspect of this, import magnified by the widescreen CinemaScope environment, the scale of the drama elevated.

Ortega y Gasset says that the epic is the genre that is about other times and which is completely distant from our lives. To its own, one will want to say. What a lack of imagination. How does he not see that the epic is there continually in life; how he doesn’t describe it in the Spanish Civil War.

Jorge Luis Borges

The epic narrative is one in which the importance of spectacle cannot be overstated. This is not merely the extensible episodic formulae of Romances in which the dramatic climax may be spectacular but doesn’t really function as a
crisis of spectacle
; the extensibility of the episodic formulae predicate against spectacle as structural component in this way, making it more difficult to scale up the spectacle as required with each point of resolution. What defines this mode is the apotheotic climax where the drama dwarfs all that has come before—Spartacus on his cross at the head of that long road of crucifixions, or El Cid on his horse, riding into battle even in death, the ultimate crisis of spectacle being, of course, the hero’s death. So, in this epic spectaculist fabrication we find the Doomsday Devices, the Destroyers of Worlds. If these are themselves averted at the last minute you can be sure they will go out with a bang. In spectaculist fabrication, the cardinal rule is Shit Blows Up.

The risk of this mode of SF is simple: that it blows its wad too early. The first
Star Wars
trilogy may serve as a good example in that respect, the attack on the Death Star and Luke’s showdown with Vader serving well as crises of spectacle for each movie, and as seeming steps towards a supreme crisis in the final instalment. The Luke-Vader showdown may seem to be on a smaller scale than the Death Star attack, but its symbology is a ramping up of spectacle, raising the stakes with revelations, mutilations and virtual annihilation of the hero (both physically and mentally) in a good old-fashioned Fall into the Abyss. The third movie fails however, collapsing from epic mode into the episodic formulae of Romance in its regurgitation of the previous two crises together, with the introduction of the Emperor into the showdown failing to provide any substantial raising of the stakes. With the spectacularity levelled off, the viewer is left with a dramatic climax but not the full-on
crisis
of spectacle actually required, like raising a foot to take a step and finding that the step isn’t there.

The fourth movie, we might add,
Episode None: The Phantom Plot
, collapses completely into formulaic Romance in its failure to provide anything even remotely resembling a crisis of spectacle. It has no sense whatsoever of spectacularity building, as I recall—insofar as I
can
recall, that is, something so instantly forgettable. It is simply the enaction of a Romantic adventure against marvellous backdrops, the CGI grandiosities of little import in dramatic terms.

What it becomes is what Lucas is pastiching, the generic formula fiction of the next mode of SF.

Science fiction will always offer easier alternatives. Science fiction will always be slanted, by definition, to taking its readers out of the world. Only weak people, however—pat Freudianism and the great cult psychology movements of the seventies have taught us—want out of the world. Strong people want in. Strong people want to, must deal with life as it is presented. Science fiction is a literature for the weak, the defenceless, the handicapped and the scorned. Panacea and pap.

Barry N. Malzberg

SF, we are told, is all about the tropes, the conventions of structures and symbols. This is what
genre
is, how it works, through conventions born of copying (conventions changed, perhaps, subverted by alterations introduced during the process of copying, but essentially still copies of copies). SF is recognised as SF by these conventions, sold as SF on the basis of these conventions, and bought as SF for these conventions. It is identified by these tropes of character, background and other such trappings, and by the plot-structures which these tropes are fitted into like symbols in a formula, variables in an equation. This is SF as symbolic formulation, the form that many who do not read deeply within the field are most familiar with.

To talk of this symbolic formulation as distinct from other genres is mi
sleading however. Functionally speaking, the formulae of one
genre
can be utilised with the symbols of another, and vice versa. They often are. Symbols may even be mixed and matched in order to simulate originality by offering an unexpected hybrid form. Again this is often the case. The heroic gunmen, hard-bitten detectives and villainous cads of
Western
,
Crime
and
Romance
are shamelessly filched. Frontier idylls collide with the city streets of
Noir
. The noble heroes of
War Fiction
die on the battlefields of elsewhens. The
New Weird
may have already been declared dead, but it’s not unlikely, I’d suggest, that some editor is right now reaching into the slush pile to find some symbolic formulation masked as it, with mushroom people and cactus people clicked into place in old equations.

This symbolic formulation uses formulaic plots and tropes generated by ev
ery genre imaginable, deriving itself from its antecedents, codifying the iconographies of dragons and spaceships, hackers and computer viruses, rendering these so familiar in movies and television that for the general public they define the genre. The movies and TV are, of course, generally a few steps behind. If this type of fiction grabbed its tropes from cutting-edge works in the other SFs it might be incomprehensible to readers unfamiliar with those tropes. So Hollywood is still appropriating the 1950s vision of the Rocket Age and the 1970s vision of Future Catastrophe, utilising the marvellous and/or monstrous imagined fruits of scientific advance to offer the viewer that roller-coaster ride they want. (Michael Crichton seems to be on a mission from God in this respect.) Cyberpunk tropes had to filter into the cinematic zeitgeist before
The Matrix
could be made. In five years’ time or so we might expect to see some crappy Hollywood schlockbuster using the Singularity, but at the moment, I think, it would run up against a “not an instantly graspable trope” barrier. Otherwise, however, this type of “brain out, sponge in” fiction is done so well in movies that it may well be poaching customers from the written media. Why should we read a book when we can
see
the gosh-wow SFX on a silver screen?

Symbolic formulation may take its prefab plans and components from di
fferent suppliers but they are still taken off-the-shelf. There is a craft in putting the formulation together, picking and choosing the right set of symbols, knowing what will work with what—and the process of formulation may be both analytic and synthetic, not simply following the codified structures of a known formula but rather actively formulating them, codifying those structures from a genuine understanding of what this or that individual work have in common, how they work in the same way, how that can be replicated—but at the end of the day if the symbols are basically interchangeable, if others could be used without affecting the basic structure, then symbolic formulation is using its conceits in a largely cosmetic manner.

One might, however, argue that the definition of this process of SF does not specify failure of that process. Nor does it specify the exclusion of effects or processes definitive of other modes of SF as parallel and related activities within a single text. Many works of this SF, we might argue, utilising the most familiar tropes and the most formulaic plots, may nevertheless function simu
ltaneously on other levels by
also
applying the features which characterise the other SFs. Symbolic formulation may be derivative hackwork but it is only so in the absence of any real creative activity. Add the joy and novelty of fancy, the architecture and texture of fabrication, the significance and resonance of fabulation, and you have something meatier. Add a little science, a little soul, a little spectacle and you have something juicer. Add any of the features of these other SFs to the most basic symbolic formulation and you are adding flesh and blood to its skeletal frame.

The inverse is also true, however. All of the other SFs stand the risk of d
escent into symbolic formulation where these features are neglected. Michael Moorcock, in
Wizardry and Wild Romance
, comments on the creation and the reuse of incredible imagery, as metaphor or as mere symbol:

A writer of fantasy must be judged, I think, by the level of inventive intensity at which he or she works. Allegory can be nonexistent, but a level of conscious metaphor is always there. The writer who follows such originals without understanding this produces work which is at best superficially entertaining and at worst meaningless on any level—generic dross doing nothing to revitalize the form from which it borrows.

Michael Moorcock

Still, copying is not an inherently doomed approach, is even perhaps a ne
cessary part of learning how to write well. And the problems of this pulp product are so obvious that maybe a little devil’s advocacy is in order here. After all, by taking apart the SF work that’s gone before and putting it together in new ways, the symbolic formulation which can result in mechanical and derivative formulaic hackwork if the writer has no drive to understand and to improve, can and does also feed into the processes of these other SFs, when the writer’s aim is not simply to replicate the familiar in order to exploit the market for “more of the same,” but instead to recast it.

Here copying becomes critique—pastiche or parody. It may be used to sati
ric ends as with Sladek’s take on Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics in his novel
Tik-Tok
, clearly a world away from the Hollywood formulation of
I, Robot
where the familiar MacGuffin of the Three Laws is co-opted into a standard “Mad Computer in Control of the House” story—c.f.
Demon Seed
,
2001
, and so on down to episodes of both
The X-Files
and
The Simpsons
. Where the Hollywood adaptation clicks a maverick cop firmly into place in the formulated “Discover What’s Going on and Stop It” plot, Sladek decides to give us the robot’s point of view, and formulation is transformed to fancy, fabrication and fabulation.

Symbolic formulation is a part of SF, one of many processes at work in what we typify as SF, but this mechanical reuse of the old equations is by no means as characteristic of the diverse field of SF as the general public pe
rceives it to be. SF is an intrinsically eclectic field, a magpie’s nest of a bookshelf where the A-Z of authors runs from Aldiss to Zelazny. And as the symbolic formulation sloughs off into the Media section or the cinemas or the TV screens, what we are left with as the heart of written SF may well be best described in terms of these approaches rather than in terms of conventions.

This is where the next definition may be a little contentious.