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INTRODUCTION

Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System

The basic premise of this study is that science fiction and the other genres usually associated with so-called genre fiction, such as the detective story, the modern romance, the western, horror, and fantasy, collectively compose a system of genres distinct from the preexisting classical and academic genre system that includes the epic, tragedy, comedy, satire, romance, the lyric, and so on; and that this more recently formed genre system is an important historical phenomenon worthy of, and in need of, further study. Because this newer genre system can be firmly associated with large-scale commercial production and distribution of narrative fiction in print, film, and broadcast media, I call it the mass cultural genre system.

For the most influential members of the first generation of scholars of SF,¹ legitimizing the study of the genre entailed separating the best, most literary examples of SF from the more familiar, popular, and supposedly inferior versions of it that predominated in mass culture. Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System is written on the premise that not only has this strategy of academic legitimization long ago run its course, but that the mass cultural genre system and the contemporary academic-classical genre system are best understood in relation to one another, so that twenty-first-century literary history needs to recognize and study both. The overriding thesis is that the field of literary production and the project of literary studies cannot be adequately conceptualized without taking into account the tensions between these two genre systems (or we should say, at least these two) that arise from the different modes of publicity—that is, the interwoven and codependent practices of production, distribution, and reception that are the “ground” or environments for those different systems.

This book is an exercise in literary history based on the implications of taking a historical, rather than formalist, position on genre theory. Although the careful reading of individual texts forms an important part of its methodology, the fundamental challenge presented to the literary historian is here conceived as understanding systemic change rather than locating and appreciating individual innovation. Perhaps the best approximation in contemporary scholarship to narrating a transformational episode in the history of genre systems within such a framework are the various accounts of the rise of the European novel in conjunction with revolutions in the technology of print and the emergence of the middle class. Early theories of the novel that sought to understand it as modernity’s version of the epic contrast sharply with those more recent ones that instead track its emergence out of a dense eighteenth-century milieu of genres including travel writing, biography, memoir, the conduct manual, and others. It is this confusion and repurposing of genres that characterize the transformation of the genre system itself so as to allow the new form, the novel, to emerge into recognizability. A similar situation attends the emergence of science fiction, as it is gradually constructed out of different permutations of the marvelous voyage, the utopia, lost-race adventures, stories of time travel, and the future war.

As Michael McKeon remarks in the introduction to The Origins of the English Novel, the novel as a generic designation is an abstraction that came to be formulated only when the process of its emergence was complete: “‘The novel’ must be understood as what Marx calls a ‘simple abstraction,’ a deceptively monolithic category that encloses a complex historical process” (20). Its “deceptively monolithic” character indicates something of its force as an intervention in the reception of those fictional works that came to be identified with it as definitive examples. Furthermore, the tendency, already evident in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, to make the novel into the descendant or heir of the epic traded upon the prestige classical literature enjoyed because of its central place in the educational curriculum. In the twentieth century, as the modern national literatures took the place of classical literature in the schools, construction of the “great tradition” of realist fiction—that is, of the realist novel—no longer needed to refer to the novel’s affinity with the epic.² But even before this the novel’s cultural prestige was being redefined by its difference from the commercially ascendant periodical and serial publications that ushered in mass distribution and mass culture.

The emergence of SF, like the rise of the novel that precedes it and is one of its preconditions, also needs to be understood in the context of a large-scale transformation of the system of genres. Too often the history of genres, and SF is no exception, has been overly fascinated with the appearance of master texts that encapsulate moments of influential innovation. A history of genre systems attentive to the power that generic attribution exercises upon distribution and reception is one just as emphatically punctuated by watersheds in the technology of publication, the distribution of reading material, and the social production and distribution of literacy itself. Thus the influence of the great innovators like Shelley, Verne, and Wells takes place within the context of “cultural and historical fluctuations in the composition of generic systems,” and close attention to the reception of any of the three (as I demonstrate in chapter 3 with respect to Shelley’s Frankenstein) will show that “the same texts may be subject to different generic classifications in different social and historical contexts” (Bennett 101).

This variability is not simply a matter of applying different sets of terminology to the same story, but rather of using entirely different sets of criteria to identify genres. There is certainly a good argument to be made, for instance, for reading Sophocles’s Oedipus the King as a detective story, as some eminent critics have done (e.g., Bloch). The main character is a famous solver of puzzles. He learns of a horrible crime and is tasked with solving it. He collects evidence and interrogates witnesses. Gradually he unravels the truth, and he exposes and punishes the criminal. But here is the catch: none of this has any bearing on whether or not the play is a tragedy. One could just as easily imagine a play featuring a famous solver of puzzles, the unraveling of a crime, and the punishment of the wrongdoer that would be a comedy, or a satire. Oedipus the King is, of course, Aristotle’s prime example of the genre of tragedy in the Poetics. But the features that distinguish it as a tragedy, rather than a comedy or a satire, have nothing to do with the features that distinguish it as a detective story, rather than, for instance, a piece of science fiction or a western (and it very clearly does not resemble either of those genres).

These semiotic variations in what counts as significant to genre identification point to more profound differences in the social uses of narrative. More than merely sets of interrelated genre designations, the systems are composed of the values, not always explicit or simple, that direct competent users to recognize genres, perform them, and enforce or resist their boundaries. If genre categories do not come to us in isolation but always in some sort of relational matrix, then we need to ask, what sort of relations form these matrices? What are the social underpinnings of the mass cultural genre system, and what are those that keep the classical-academic system in place? For the classical-academic and mass cultural genre systems each have a history that has entered into the production, distribution, and reception of texts, and that often forms substantial connections between the systems themselves and the history and significance of a given text. Thus, while it is certainly possible to read the Oedipus as detective fiction, its historical relationship to the genre of tragedy, and to the system of genres and literary values elaborated in relation to classical tragedy, is a good deal more consequential. By the same token, texts that are usually considered SF could be read simply as examples of satire, romance, comedy, tragedy, and so on—and the assimilation of SF to satire, in particular, has been a practice employed by some of those who have wanted to argue for taking such texts seriously in an academic context—but this strategy of canonization by assimilation to the classical genre system strips them of an important aspect of their historicity. What I hope to do here is to respect the literary values and historical substance embedded in both systems, not by giving them equal time, but by trying to understand how the tensions between the two have become part of the structure of the contemporary field of cultural production.

Those tensions are all too evidently the basis for the major flaws in Darko Suvin’s influential theorization of SF as “the literature of cognitive estrangement” (see Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, chapter 1, and “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre”). The enduring strength and usefulness of Suvin’s conceptualization of the SF “novum” and the critical power of its estrangement of cultural norms have been convincingly argued recently by Rhys Williams, who urges that “the radically ethical and utopian demands that shape the true core of the Suvinian paradigm should not be diluted but instead renewed, retooled, and readied to once again join battle” (618). I entirely agree, and I applaud the way those “ethical and utopian demands” continue to be energetically forwarded in a work like Philip E. Wegner’s Shockwaves of Possibility (2014). However, the limitations of Suvin’s paradigm have to do with some basic issues of genre theory that this study hopes to address.

The first is simply a matter of basic assumptions. For Suvin a genre is defined by formal strategies, not by common usage. In its common usage, “science fiction” is for Suvin an incoherent bundle of conflicting generic tendencies trundled together for commercial purposes. “The literature of cognitive estrangement” is, in contrast, a precise formal definition. Chapter 1 of this book will address the question of generic definition at much greater length, but let me preface that discussion by saying that “the literature of cognitive estrangement” is what Tzvetan Todorov would call a theoretical genre rather than a historical one (Fantastic, 13–15). Unfortunately for the Suvinian paradigm, what we might call really existing SF is not a theoretical entity but rather a historically situated, and therefore ever-changing, set of practices, so that the historical ground of the really existing genre continues to shift under the theory’s feet. This is what yields the situation described by Williams:

Sf strictly defined is no longer capable of estranging us from the hegemonic discourse for which it operates as ideological cheerleader [because] … the authority of specifically capitalist science and rationality and its promises of progress are falling into doubt…. It is for precisely this reason that the creative and utopian energy in genres of the fantastic is currently manifesting itself in erosion and destruction of the false, self-crowned purity of that discourse…. “reality” and “fantasy” … have changed value over the years, and with them have necessarily changed the meaning and character of “scientific progress,” “rationality,” and even “utopia.” The problem with the Suvinian paradigm lay in his creation of a universal abstraction of exactly the type he sought to dismantle. (626)

Williams’s historical analysis is on the mark, but the theoretical issue here has to do with basic assumptions. One cannot have it both ways: either the genre is indeed a “universal abstraction,” an enduring possibility in some eternal grammar of narrative forms, or it is the work of historical agents, subject to the contingencies of history, and therefore always liable to shift its ideological and formal moorings in response to those contingencies.³

Attending to the contingencies of history brings us to the second problem, the question of what exactly is at stake in genre theory. However robust Suvin’s analysis of the formal strategies that impart critical power to the best examples of SF, his analysis nonetheless manages to simultaneously trivialize and exaggerate what is at stake. The trivializing consists in the tendency to nitpicking distinctions between what is and is not SF, best (or rather worst) exemplified in the “Annotated Checklist of Books Not to Be Regarded as SF, with an Introductory Essay on the Reasonable Reasons Thereof,” in Victorian Science Fiction in the UK (86). The exaggeration comes when Suvin presents the ability to make these distinctions as immediately and drastically consequential in ways that certainly do not correspond to any sort of common sense—for example, the mere confusion of the genres of SF and supernatural fantasy is called a “pathological” phenomenon “stimulated by irrational capitalist conditions of life” (91). The key to this overvaluation of generic difference is the loaded term “cognitive logic,” which SF has and other proximate genres such as supernatural fantasy do not, making a failure to tell the difference between the genres (or to care about it) tantamount to a general failure to exercise one’s critical capacities.

There are two ways to respond. The first, which has been forcefully argued by China Miéville in his essay “Cognition as Ideology,” and which Williams builds upon, takes the strategy of accepting Suvin’s description of SF as the literature of cognitive estrangement and then working through the consequences to demonstrate that Suvin’s privileging of cognition over ideology is itself ideological. The crux of the argument is that where Suvin asserts the operation of form and reason, Miéville sees rhetorical acts of persuasion that aim for power and authority. Thus, according to Miéville, Suvin’s insistence on correct taxonomy depends on his identifying himself with the charismatic authority of the authors who deploy the “cognition effect”: “This is a translation into meta-literary and aggrandizing terms of the very layer of technocrats often envisaged in SF and its cultures as society’s best hope” (239).⁴

A second approach to Suvin’s deployment of “cognitive logic” is to see it from outside Suvin’s paradigm. This is a matter of asserting first of all that every theoretical genre is also historical in the sense that it is a construction put in place at a specific time and place under specific circumstances, and therefore always constitutes taking a position within a field of possibilities or, as Pierre Bourdieu puts it, the field of cultural production. The distinction between Todorov’s historical and theoretical genres is not between genres that are formed in a historical process and others that are not, but rather between genres constructed in the academy by an identifiable theorist (and, for Todorov, along certain rigorously formalist lines) and genres constructed more or less anonymously in a collective process. What is at stake in the definition of SF as a species of “literature” with an ancient lineage is the difference between the cultural prestige associated with the academic-classical genre system, with its deployment in higher education, and the mass cultural genre system and its commercial milieu. The fairly obvious point is that Suvin’s definition is a way of assimilating SF into the classical-academic genre system and gaining for it a share of the cultural capital invested in that system—this in spite of Suvin’s aggressive assertion of SF’s political resistance to the status quo. I think that this understanding of Suvin’s pugnacious defense of SF’s genre boundary against its noncognitive neighbors might put him in a more forgiving light than that afforded by Miéville’s ideology critique. He was in a fight of sorts, though it was not really with those who pathologically intermingle SF and fantasy, but rather with those—and they were the majority of literary scholars when Suvin did this work—who simply would dismiss SF as unworthy of academic study. Suvin’s animosity toward the fantasists could actually be read as a kind of peace offering to the powers that controlled the gates of academic legitimacy.

To insist on holding the academic-classical genre system and the mass cultural genre system separate from one another rather than trying to conflate them or to turn one into a subset of the other draws upon a rich vein of genre theory devoted to connecting specific media, venues, and purposes with sets of genres tailored to them. John Frow is the theorist of literary and narrative genres who draws most ably upon this rhetorical tradition that stretches back to Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on speech genres. Citing Carolyn Miller’s argument that genres are “typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations” (Miller 31), Frow stresses that “genres have to do with the strategic work accomplished by texts in particular circumstances” (Genre, 115). In chapter 2 I will draw on Clay Spinuzzi’s ideas about the way entire ensembles of genres are integrated with one another into what he calls sets, repertoires, systems, and ecologies. The notion of a narrative genre system, however, derives more directly from the work of Rick Altman and Jason Mittel on film and television genres, respectively. As Frow puts it, “We should perhaps not speak of a single system. Rather, we could posit that there are sets of genres organized by domain, those of film or television or literature or architecture…. Indeed, it may be the case that there is not, or no longer, a single system of film genres or literary genres; there may be only relatively disconnected sub-systems representing relatively disconnected organizations of value” (Genre, 124–25). Indeed, I think it is clearly the case, if one thinks for a moment of the world and not of a single nation or a single language, that there has never been a single system of narrative genres, a thesis that could be abundantly supported by examples from the history of translation of indigenous narratives in colonial settings (see for example Bacchilega, Naithani, and Owen). The issue that needs to be explored as regards academic and mass cultural genre systems, however, and which this book makes some attempt to open up, is how disconnected those “relatively disconnected sub-systems” of value are from one another, and what kinds of pressures they continue to exert on one another.

John Cawelti’s work on what he calls formula fiction represents an important approximation toward the distinction between the academic and mass cultural genre systems. According to Cawelti, “popular story types such as the western, the detective story, or the spy adventure … are embodiments of archetypal story forms in terms of specific cultural materials…. Formulas are ways in which specific cultural themes and stereotypes become embodied in more universal story archetypes” (6). Cawelti’s distinction between formula and archetype turns out to correspond to the difference between modern, popular genre categories and ancient, classical ones. “Many film scholars and critics use the term ‘popular genre’ to denote literary types like the western or the detective story that are clearly the same as what I call formulas…. Another usage of genre involves concepts like tragedy, comedy, romance, and satire…. Since such conceptions clearly imply universal or transcultural conceptions of literary structure, they are examples of what I have called archetypes” (6–7). A different way to put this is that the classical genre system is very much older and more prestigious than the mass cultural one, and it has been relatively stable for long periods of time. There is no question that many a television sitcom employs devices that one can find in Roman comedy. This does not justify turning comedy or tragedy into a universal category, as Cawelti does. But interestingly, Cawelti’s distinction between formula and archetype depends entirely on context: “If one thinks of a western in comparison to other westerns one is using a ‘formula-genre’ … [but if you] relate this same western to some more universal generic conceptions such as tragedy or romance … [you] would be employing an archetype-genre” (8). In other words, one system of classification works for commercial production, another for the academy; the hierarchical relation between them is entirely obvious in the terms “formula” and “archetype.” That hierarchy of values deserves to be reexamined in the light of the forty years’ worth of cultural studies work that Cawelti helped make possible.

Although the subsystems of value set at play in the relation of the two genre systems to one another are central to the arguments of this book, the topic is a single genre, science fiction. My primary thesis regarding SF is that it is an organic genre of the mass cultural genre system. I draw the term “organic” here from Antonio Gramsci’s distinction between traditional intellectuals, whose roles in the social system are residual effects of past cultural formations, and organic intellectuals who rise spontaneously to perform the work of organizing production and politics within the contemporary formation (5–17). I suggest that the same distinction one would apply to the intellectuals working within the entertainment industry and the academy can usefully be applied to the genre systems that in significant ways help to organize their labors. The relation between the genre system organic to mass culture and the traditional genre system, lodged primarily in the schools, produces effects of stratification that pervade the entire field of modern literary production. I contend that instead of merely being manipulated by those effects, literary and cultural studies scholars in general, and science fiction studies scholars in particular, ought to be making them part of the object of their inquiries into the workings of contemporary culture and the powers exercised by various forms of narrative within it.

The thesis that science fiction is an organic genre of mass culture does not imply that mass cultural practices necessarily or inevitably included the development of this specific kind of fiction. I am not arguing that SF expresses the essence of mass culture or that the political economy of mass culture is expressed by or reflected in SF. The argument advanced here is simply that since SF takes shape within the milieu of mass culture, its generic form is “determined” by mass culture insofar as generic form is itself the cumulative effect of economic and ideological pressures upon artistic production. If SF developed within the set of artistic and commercial opportunities and constraints afforded by the emergence of mass culture, then understanding these constraints and opportunities is crucial to an account of how the genre came to be recognized and practiced. We should expect to find that genre construction both follows the channels of least resistance and registers the traces of collective desire.

To assert that SF is organic to mass culture is also to highlight the way constructing, maintaining, and contesting the category of SF actively intervenes in promoting the distribution of a certain kind of fiction. It names that fiction, in the first place, bringing it into visibility and constituting it as an object. The generic category subsequently acts as a matrix for communicating practices of writing and reading among artists, editors, and readers (modes of participation that overlap heavily in the culture of the SF pulp magazines), involving them in ongoing debates about the genre’s boundaries and protocols that feed back into artistic practices while constructing the genealogies and canons of a “selective tradition” subject to continual reinvention.

The term “selective tradition” appears in quotation marks because I draw it from Andrew Milner’s Locating Science Fiction, a book that in its project and ambitions seems to me quite consonant with this one. “Selective tradition” is a term Milner borrows from Raymond Williams, who explains it as “an intentionally selective version of a shaping past and a pre-shaped present, which is then powerfully operative in the process of social and cultural definition and identification” (Milner 39, quoting Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, 115). Milner argues in Locating Science Fiction that because SF is a selective tradition it is therefore “essentially and necessarily a site of contestation” (39–40). But first it has to be the site of some agreement about generic identity; otherwise there would be nothing to contest. The key term for me in conceptualizing this basic agreement is the community of practice. As I will argue in chapter 1 and elaborate more fully in chapters 5 and 6, the genre of SF is the product of multiple communities of practice whose motives and resources may have little resemblance to one another.

Before explaining the plan of the book, let me acknowledge some of its limitations, however briefly. It is a sketch of the history of SF, but only a sketch and a very selective one at that. I am under no illusion that the several dozen texts I write about in this book constitute some sort of representative sample of the entire genre. My narrative focuses on English-language SF and mostly American SF. I do not think or mean to imply that the influence of mass culture or the dynamics of cultural prestige attached to literary traditions and popular entertainments in America is a model or prototype for the rest of the world. The book is entirely devoted to the analysis of print and film SF to the exclusion of digital media or games, even though I am quite aware of how important they have become both commercially and culturally. Similarly, although there are two chapters about communities of practice, I have hardly brushed the surface of what could be said about SF fan cultures or contemporary participatory cultures. I can only hope that scholars who know more than I do about other national traditions of SF, digital media, fan cultures, and the rest of SF’s myriad array of venues and practices can make some use of my work in those areas of research.

Here, then, is the plan of the book. Chapter 1 is a minimally revised version of an essay published in Science Fiction Studies in 2010 under the same title. It is devoted to basic issues of genre theory in relation to the problem of defining the genre of SF. Chapter 2 picks up the theoretical issues of chapter 1 in order to elaborate a description of the mass cultural genre system as a whole. The rest of the chapters explore some problems in writing the history of SF based on the theoretical groundwork laid in the first two chapters. Chapter 3 takes up the question of generic origins by arguing that the genealogy of SF is better approached in terms of systemic changes than the influence of individual texts. Chapter 4 is devoted to the issue of SF’s status within the traditional literary canon via an extended reading of the novels of Philip K. Dick. Chapters 5 and 6 turn to more recent SF to examine some of the effects of homogeneity and heterogeneity corresponding to the genre’s mass cultural and subcultural communities of practice. Here, as in the chapter on Dick, I am also concerned with the kind of critical and anti-hegemonic power SF narratives often exercise. This critical power does not depend on SF’s formal grammar, but rather on the way some narratives appropriate and recode the genre’s resources. I am especially concerned in chapters 5 and 6 with their doing so in order to resist a given subculture’s inclusion within, and often erasure by, mass cultural homogeneity. In the conclusion I offer a periodization of SF’s history that attempts to support the claim, argued throughout the book, that the cultural and ideological power of SF is best understood when questions about it are set in the systemic context of its dialogue with other proximate genres and the tension between different genre systems based on their different venues and modes of publicity.