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Some Presumptuous Approaches to Science Fiction

“Do you think science fiction should be taken seriously as literature?”

Over the past handful of years, I’ve found—what with teaching various SF courses at various universities and giving talks on science fiction to both formal and informal groups—that this question threatens to oust, “Where do SF writers get their ideas?” from the number-one position on the list of baroque unanswerables that plague an SF writer’s life.

What makes such questions so difficult is that they presume a set of conditions that any accurate answer could not possibly fulfill. For example, the question, “Where do SF writers get their ideas?” presumes that there is a place, or a number of places, where ideas exist quite apart from writers, and that the writers can go there to obtain them. The question has the same grammatical/logical form as, “Where do restaurant chefs get their steaks?” But there is no answer of the grammatical/logical form, “From the better West Side meat packing plants below 14th Street,” that can answer it. And an answer in that form is what the question demands.

If, however, we change the form of the question from, “Where do SF writers get their ideas?” to “By what process do science-fictional ideas come up in SF writers’ minds?” then the answer is fairly simple:

By and large, SF writers get their ideas through having quirky and imaginative responses to the everyday, the ordinary, and the humdrum.

An example? My friend Luise is driving down the thruway, and I’m sitting beside her, reading a magazine. At one point I glance out the window just as three billboards go by. But I return to my magazine even before they’ve passed. Five minutes later, again I look up … as two more billboards pass. But I go right back to my magazine. Another five minutes, and again I look up … to see still another billboard! Now during the time I was actually reading, there may or may not have been other billboards beside the road. I know this perfectly well. Still, over a ten-minute period, every time I happened to look up I saw some. Suddenly I think: Suppose the whole side of the road were filled with billboards—along its entire length! Suppose both sides of the road were walled in by advertisements … ! And if I had happened to be Frederik Pohl or C. M. Kornbluth, I would have stored that idea away for my 1952 SF novel The Space Merchants, where you can still find it doing impressive duty (among myriad other ideas) today. In general, science-fictional ideas generate when a combination of chance and the ordinary suggests some distortion of the current and ordinary that can conceivably be rationalized as a future projection. Now for what it’s worth, I suspect that for every fifty such ideas occurring to an SF writer, forty-nine are discarded as trivial or silly. And once several, or several hundred, good ideas are collected, putting them together into a story is another game entirely. But like most habits of thought, this one comes more easily with practice. Also, I think it’s safe to say that, in general, this is probably not the way that writers of present-day mundane fiction get their ideas, or that writers of drama get their ideas, or that writers of historical fiction get their ideas, or that writers of poetry get their ideas—unless the idea gotten happens to be a specifically science-fictional one.

Try to recall this the next time Jean-Luc Godard’s “science fiction” film Alphaville comes on television. The visuals in the film are all from the ordinary, everyday world: elevated trains moving at night above a Paris suburb, men in identical business suits, fluorescent-lit halls in office buildings after hours, window fans turning behind their wire grills. The voiceover on top of it, however, is all about spaceships moving through intergalactic night, supertrained inhuman spies, superscientific institutions, and monstrous futuristic machines. In short, the visuals are composed not of science-fictional ideas, but rather of the current and ordinary things that inspire science-fictional ideas, whereas the dialogue (and action) are about the science-fictional ideas these ordinary things might inspire. The film is about nothing but the way SF writers (or film-makers) get their ideas!

This should explain something I’ve been saying (and writing) for over ten years now: Science fiction is not about the future; it uses the future as a narrative convention to present significant distortions of the present. And both the significance of the distortion and the appropriateness of the convention lie precisely in that what we know of present science does not deny the possibility of these distortions eventually coming to pass. Science fiction is about the current world—the given world shared by writer and reader. But it is not a metaphor for the given world, nor does the catch-all term metonymy exhaust the relation between the given and science fiction’s distortions of the given. Science fiction poises in a tense, dialogic, agonistic relation to the given, but there is very little critical vocabulary currently to deal with this relationship of contestatory difference the SF figure establishes, maintains, expects, exploits, subverts, and even—occasionally, temporarily—grandly destroys.

Science fiction is about the contemporary world; and the possibility of its futuristic distortions gives its side of the dialogue its initial force. Sympathetic critics of science fiction run aground, however, when they try to show that the significance of science fiction lies in the much more limited area of things that will probably come to pass, should come to pass, or must not come to pass.¹ This mistake Julia Kristeva has called, in another context, the “positive trap.”

But what of our initial question:

“Should science fiction be taken seriously as literature?”

What’s presumed here?

First, there is the presumption that the way literature is traditionally taken seriously is a good thing and has grown up historically as an accumulation of right knowledge in an appropriate response to the innate worthiness of the literary text.² This means that what’s really being asked here is this: Is science fiction, like literature, innately of value? Second is the much vaguer and more general presumption that science fiction and mundane fiction work along the same general lines to produce their respective plays of meaning, so that they might be considered in the same way productively.

The first presumption, that the way literature is traditionally taken seriously is a good thing, has been under a general, if somewhat halfhearted, attack since the spread of public education from the middle of the nineteenth century on; but the attack has been for primarily pedagogic reasons. The general exhortation of the pedagogue to “know what the text means,” along with the varied repertoire of interpretive techniques by which this is accomplished, have been neither effective nor popular with the run of students, despite the efforts of the best-intentioned teachers. More recently, in the literary studies falling under the doublenamed debate “poststructuralism/semiotics,” the attack has been renewed on a theoretical level that leaves the pedagogic reasons standing at the gate.

Following the critical and philosophical studies of Jacques Derrida, it is evident that practically any text, if read carefully enough, generates both denotations and connotations that contradict each other, that subvert each other, that interfere with each other in such a way that the very concept of “knowing what the text means” begins to fall apart—becomes “highly problematic,” in Comp. Lit. jargon. Unpacking these multiple and contradictory denotations and connotations from a text and then undoing the distinctions between them in some informal way is called, in the same jargon, “deconstructing” the text.

Although today one hears a great deal about “structuralism,” “semiotics,” and “deconstruction,” the truth is that critics who actually explore textual plays of meaning from this point of view are rather rare. To do it in any truly productive way takes much skill, tremendous acuity, endless patience, and great critical inventiveness. And none of these virtues are particularly rampant in the run of university English departments. Despite the new disciplines, most English departments go on doing what they have been doing all along: teaching the standard repertoire of ways to know what the text means, whether it can be done (in theoretical terms) or not.

Which brings us to our second presumption: that the SF narrative works on more or less the same lines as the mundane narrative, so that they might both be dealt with profitably by the same interpretive repertoire.

The play of meanings, contradictory or otherwise, that makes up the SF text is organized in a way radically different from that of the mundane text.

I’ve discussed the nature of the unique organization of meanings in the SF text in some of the essays in my collection The Jewel-Hinged Jaw and, on a much more technical level, in my book The American Shore, in which I have taken a sixteen-page SF story, “Angouleme,” by Thomas M. Disch, and examined the way we read it as an SF story from beginning to end. When we read science fiction carefully, we can see that practically any rhetorical figure operates differently in an SF text from the way the same, or similar, figure would operate in a text of mundane fiction. Catalogues, exaggerations, historical references, descriptions of the beautiful, parodic figures, psychological speculations, even the literal meanings of various sentences and phrases are all read differently in science fiction from the way they are read in mundane fiction. The details do take a book to explain. But the general lines along which the differences are organized are easy enough to see.

The writer of mundane fiction tells a story set against a more or less vividly evoked section of the given world. I say “given world” rather than “real world” because the world of the most naturalistic piece of mundane fiction is a highly conventionalized affair; and these conventions, when one studies them, turn out to have far more to do with other works of fiction than with anything “real.” The SF writer, however, creates a world—which is harmonized with (or contrasted with, or played off against) both the story’s characters and the given world in a much freer way. Certainly this way follows its conventions too; still, rather than simply recognize which part of the given world the mundane writer is highlighting in a particular mundane story, the reader of the SF story must create a new world that operates by new laws for each new SF story read. The various verbal devices SF writers use to lay out, sketch in, and color their alternate worlds, as well as the verbal constructs that direct the play between the world and the story, constitute the major distinctions between the SF and the mundane text, altering the reading of the various rhetorical figures that appear in both texts and generating the different rhetorical figures for each kind of text.

Universities are filled with people who simply won’t read science fiction. These folks suffer from nothing worse than snobbism, and their affliction doesn’t really interest me. But there are many people, both in and out of universities, who honestly can’t read science fiction—which is to say they have picked up a few SF stories and tried to read them, only to find that much of the text, to them, simply didn’t make sense. Frequently, these are very sophisticated readers of literary texts, too.

Several times now I have had opportunities to read some SF texts with such readers, to read an SF text slowly, phrase by phrase, sentence by sentence, checking on what has been responded to and what has not been. When you read an SF text this way with such readers, it becomes clear that their difficulty is almost entirely in their inability to create the alternate world that gives the story’s incidents all their sense. Although these readers have no trouble imagining a Balzac provincial printing office, a Dickens boarding school, or an Austen sitting room, they are absolutely stymied by, say, the contemporary SF writer’s most ordinary “monopole magnet mining operations in the outer asteroid belt of Delta Cygni.”

But the failure is not so much a failure of the imaginative faculties as it is a failure to respond, word by word, to the text. Let’s examine that failure with this particular textual fragment.

monopole magnet

First of all, most of the readers I worked with had no idea what monopole magnets might be. Monopole magnets happen not to exist, at least as far as we know. All magnets that we have ever discovered or created on Earth are dipoles: they have two poles, a “north” and a “south.” If you put like poles together, they push each other apart. If you put unlike poles together, they draw one another. And this is true of every magnet known. For this reason, the very mention of “monopole magnets” means that in this universe a completely new kind of magnet has been discovered; this suggests, in turn, that there may be a whole new branch of electromagnetic technology at work (any electric motor, electric generator, or transformer is an example of current electromagnetic technology), which has reorganized things in the world, or worlds, of this SF text’s universe.

monopole magnet mining operations

I had one reader who, besides not knowing what monopole magnets might be, assumed that, whatever they were, the mining was done with these magnets rather than for these magnets (i.e., according to the schema of strip mining operations or pellet mining operations), even though a phrase like gold mining operations or even uranium mining operations would not have created such confusion. Needless to say, this reader would be perfectly lost in any further mentions of the goings-on in these mines.

monopole magnet mining operations in the outer asteroid belt

Another reader, already as confused as the others over monopole magnet mining, thought an asteroid belt was “a ring of stones around a world.” Well, if you substitute sun for world, you might describe it that way. But when I questioned this reader further, I discovered that the mental picture the reader had was that the stones “were not very big, maybe a few feet or so across” and that they were “packed together” so that they were only “a few feet or a few inches apart.” For this reader, the mines were “probably tunnels that went from stone to stone…. Maybe the stones are even inside the tunnels … ?” And what about the word outer? Over half of these readers thought outer meant that the mining took place on the outside of this wall of stones, rather than inside it. And Delta Cygni? Maybe that was “an area of space” or “a planet.”

Patiently and repeatedly I had to explain to these readers (several of whom, incidentally, had published books or articles on various literary subjects) that the asteroid belt in our own solar system is “a ring of stones” that circles the sun at a distance greater than our Earth’s orbit; and that, although a few of the stones are as large as a mile or even hundreds of miles in diameter, most are much smaller: pea-sized or dust-sized. I also had to reiterate that even the dust-sized ones are miles apart, and the pea-sized or larger ones, hundreds or even thousands of miles apart. (“But then how do they build mine tunnels from one to another?”) They had to be told that Delta Cygni is a star—a sun—in the constellation Cygnus the Swan, and that it was the fourth star named. (“How do you know it was the fourth one … ?” “Because delta is the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet and there’s an astronomical naming convention that says….”) Nor was it a matter of simply saying these things once. They had to be repeated and questioned and repeated again. (“What do you mean, ‘a sun?’”) They had to be told that “outer asteroid belt” was the writer’s shorthand way of first reminding you that our sun has only one asteroid belt while suggesting that Delta Cygni might be a star with two asteroid belts, one farther out than the other. (“Well, how much farther out?” “There’s no way to be sure, of course, but one can make a safe guess that it would be many millions of miles.” “Many millions of miles?”) They had to be told that it was in this outer asteroid belt, rather than in the inner one, that these mining operations were going on.³ (“But how does the writer know there are two? How do you know?”) These readers were all capable of negotiating the nineteenth-century novel, whether it was written by a Russian count on a family estate outside Moscow; or a tubercular parson’s daughter living with her sisters on the edge of an English moor; or an ex-printer in Paris who, having penned nothing but potboilers till age thirty, had decided to try his hand at something more ambitious.

Yet for these same readers a sentence like The stars are suns, many with planets like our own does not call up a clear, concrete visualization, laid out to the proper scale, of the planetary, stellar, and galactic organization of the universe. Rather, it is a muzzy and confusing statement associated with the vast and impossible complexities of “all that scientific stuff” they have tried to avoid all their lives.

In the nineteenth century Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose “Dr. Challenger” stories are some of the clearest examples of proto-science fiction, was surprisingly aware of the problem. He talked about it in, oddly enough, one of his Sherlock Holmes tales.

In one Holmes story (the same one, incidentally, in which we learn that Holmes takes cocaine) Dr. Watson is astonished to learn that his friend Holmes, who can infer so much from cat hairs, heel prints, and plaster scratchings, does not know that the Earth moves around the sun—that he is ignorant, in Dr. Watson’s words, “of the entire Copernican theory of the solar system.”

Holmes explains (however disingenuous that explanation sounds today) that, while cat hairs, heel prints, and so on, affect his current life and livelihood, it makes absolutely no difference to him whether the Earth moves around the sun or the sun moves around the Earth. Therefore he doesn’t have to know such facts; and what’s more, even though Dr. Watson has informed him of the truth of the matter, he intends to forget it as quickly as he can. If Holmes is right about himself, we can say with fair certainty that he would be as lost in the monopole magnet mining operations of that outer asteroid belt as any of our 19th-century novel readers—although one is equally sure that Watson (just as Doyle was a born SF writer) would probably have been a born SF fan—had he ever read any of his creator’s proto-SF stories.

But the inability to visualize scenes on the astronomical level does not exhaust the “imaginative failure” of these readers. These readers, who are perfectly comfortable following the social psychological analysis of a Balzac or an Austen, or even a Durkheim, Marx, or Weber, are at sea when they come across a description of a character who, on going to the drugstore to purchase a package of depilatory pads, “inserted his credit card in the purchasing slot; his bill was transmitted to the city accounting house to be stored against the accumulated credit from his primary and secondary jobs.”

To the SF reader, such a sentence implies a whole reorganization of society along lines of credit, commerce, computerization, and labor patterns. Certainly from a single sentence no one could be expected to come up with all the details of that reorganization; but by the same token, one should be able to see at least a shadow of its general outline. And that shadow should provide the little science-fictional frisson that is the pleasure of the plurality of the SF vision. The readers I worked with, however, responded to such a sentence: “But why didn’t he pay for it with the money in his pocket?” and were very surprised when I told them the character probably carried no money. (“But how do you know … ?”) Such readers, used to the given world of mundane fiction, tend to lay the fabulata of science fiction over that given world—and come up with confusion. They do not yet know that these fabulata replace, displace, and reorganize the elements of that given world into new worlds. The hints, the suggestions, the throwaways, and even, sometimes, the broadest strokes by which the skillful SF writer suggests the alternate world do not come together for them in any coherent vision, but only blur, confuse, and generally muddy the vision of the given world they are used to.

Reading SF texts with these readers, I was able to bring them to a point of understanding—for the particular texts we read. But the feeling that they were better prepared to read more SF texts was about equally mixed with the feeling that the real complexities of science fiction were even more daunting than they had dreamed till now.

One reason for the pedagogic problems literature has been having for the last century and a half is a simple phenomenon anyone who has ever traveled in another country must understand: Once one knows a language, it is almost impossible to imagine someone else’s not knowing it. No matter what indications a person gives they understand us not at all, on some deep level there remains in us the insistent suspicion that they’re only fooling—or are lazy, or malicious. The conventions of poetry or drama or mundane fiction—or science fiction—are in themselves separate languages. Once you learn one of these languages and are comfortable with the texts employing it, it is very hard to conceive of someone else’s not knowing this language, especially when the texts are written in English, presumably the language you both speak. Like most languages, the SF language is best learned early and by exposure. Some of my adult readers found it a bit deflating, however, to realize that their twelve-year-olds were frequently at home in both the monopole magnet mines and the computerized credit economy in ways that their parents were not.

At this point, however, it is time to return to our initial question:

“Should science fiction be taken seriously as literature?”

By now we should be able to see that we are really presuming two questions with opposite answers.

First is the question, Should science fiction be taken seriously?

For me, the answer is an unequivocal yes. It is a fascinating language phenomenon, and its intricate differences from traditional “literary” language sustain its interest.

Second is the question, Does science fiction work in the same way as other, literary categories of writing? Here the answer is no. Science fiction works differently from other written categories, particularly those categories traditionally called literary. It works the same way only in that, like all categories of writing, it has its specific conventions, unique focuses, areas of interest and excellence, as well as its own particular ways of making sense out of language. To ignore any of these constitutes a major misreading—an obliviousness to the play of meanings that makes up the SF text.

1. One could make a somewhat fanciful argument that science fiction has grown up to compensate for the fact that, unlike ancient Greek and Sanskrit, modern Western (and Oriental) languages no longer have an optative mood, optative being the Greek grammatical term for the verb mood of a whole tense system from which we get the modern term options—which, as critic Ihab Hassan has suggested, is what science fiction is all about.

2. The French scholar Michel Foucault has suggested that most current critical interpretive methods are simply based on habits of thought left over from the verification procedures once applied to writings suspected of having been authored by saints and thus suspected of being Holy Writ. See “What Is an Author,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley et al., vol. 2 of Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984 (New York: New Press, 1998), p. 205ff.

3. Astronomical studies of extra-solar objects and the Oort Cloud have revised much of this over the last thirty years.