Miso Soup at Midnight

It’s night in the city of Writing. A librarian sits in the SF Café, looking out on the ghetto of Genre. The whole place has become a little chi-chi over the years, beatnik artists moving in above the brothels and the crack dens. Might almost forget it’s the ghetto, if that avant garde street theatre troupe out on Mass Market Square didn’t blend in with the hookers and hustlers, make it all look like just one big sensual experience for sale. And whenever she swings by the Bistro de Critique, friends shudder at where she hangs: that dive? The librarian takes this in her stride. There’s no point whining about your area being badmouthed when your next door neighbour runs a crack house and, well, you do like a bit of a puff on the old hash pipe now and then.

A status update scrolls across the lenses of her mayashades: epistemic modality detected — is not happening. Curious. This is meant to be non-fiction, she knows, reportage. She can suspend her disbelief, pretend an epistemic modality of is happening is at play here — just like she would with any fictive narrative in present tense — but it’s unsettling to realise she’s just a figurative device. But so it goes.

So it goes indeed. Fact is, Genre is a dirty and disreputable part of town but it’s that way for a reason, and at the end of the day, the librarian kinda likes it. This is a place where freaks and weirdos feel at home. The bars here are more fun. The rent is cheap. And Mass Market Square is infinitely more dynamic, exciting, and relevant than the uptown galleries full of middle-class bores clinking champagne glasses and droning on about how jejune the latest wunderkind is really, darling, just so trite, really, overhyped. There’s a trade-off between the social stigma and squalid trappings of the Genre ghetto and the freedom that it gives to work outside the tight-ass strictures of “proper literature” which generally also means the tight-ass strictures of contemporary realism.

Besides, a change is in the air.

She looks out at the Kipple Foodstuff Factory that dominates the skyline, but sees also, through her mayashades, hints of a future screamed of by a time-traveler in the Bistro de Critique — the fallen walls of the ghetto, gourmet guerrillas from the slums pouring out into the city. And beyond maybe.

As a traveler once, she remembers walking into a Japanese restaurant in a little town in North Carolina. Cool, she thought. Japanese: miso soup; tempura; ramen; noodles hot and spicy; tang-rich food to make your taste buds tingle. But no. No miso soup on the menu here. Swear to Cunt what you had was:

Beef in soy sauce with rice.
Prawns in soy sauce with rice.
Chicken in soy sauce with rice.
Beef & Chicken in soy sauce with rice.
Prawns & Beef in soy sauce with rice.
Chicken & Prawns in soy sauce with rice.

Or, hey, wow, the Special…

Beef & Chicken & Prawns in soy sauce with rice.

Fucking awesome.

Here now, in a booth of the SF Café, she sips the miso soup she couldn’t get that day. The exact miso soup she couldn’t get that day. It’s a quirk, you see, a little rupture in the mimetic weft of her mundane narrative, the stream of stuff that she’s pretending is happening. This now… this is an event that could not be happening. Fuck the epistemic modality; this is alethic modality we’re talking now, not factuality but possibility.

She could be sitting in a booth, looking out a window, but to be sipping the actual miso soup she couldn’t get that day, here now at midnight in the SF Café… that’s an impossibility of level… what? She’s not sure if it’s known history, known science, the laws of nature, or the strictures of logic itself that have been ripped apart to drag that miso soup out from the nowhere to the here now.

Frankly, she doesn’t give a fuck what level impossibility it is though. She’s got miso soup at midnight and it’s fucking tasty.

*

On Adamantium Pinions

We imagine genres as delimited by formal constraints — like the sonnet’s fourteen lines and volta. This need not equate to formulation any more than Oulipo constraints do, but we can’t deny it does. As the librarian looks out on the Kipple Foodstuff Factory, she’s looking at the impact of mass-production in the 20th century, the pulp boom that was built on formulation. All of the genres boxed and shipped as category fiction did become codified with constraints of form by which more of the same could be churned out, schlockburgers made to recipe from Soylent Brown.

(Soylent Brown? It ain’t people, but it comes from them.)

Still, from the start there was an insatiable demand for ongoing detournement, soon even the bricolage of tropes stolen from Western, Noir, Romance, and who knows what else, the result a hydra-headed hybrid of formulae — the collage, homage, pastiche and parody cooked up by the likes of Farmer and Moorcock, yes? We imagine this to be what makes the menu in the SF Café so peachy keen: New Wave Chilli; Cyberpunk Pad Thai; New Weird Rogan Josh; New Space Opera Bolognaise. We imagine it’s the ceaseless recombination of recipes.

The librarian glances at the menu on the window that don’t have none of them fancy foreign words. All it says is:

1) SF Special Hamburger (However You Want It)
2) Fantasy Special Fried Chicken (Just How You Ask)

The librarian can’t remember if she ordered the miso soup she couldn’t get that day in North Carolina as a Number One or a Number Two. It doesn’t really matter to her, not half as much as the local rag’s food critic at the next booth over, who just described his Coq au Vin as “transcending the genre.”

Every time we use the phrase “transcends the genre,” she knows, we surrender to the corollary of positing genre on formal constraints — that our fiction essentially made to formulae must become other than itself to become good. We invite the literati of the Bistro de Critique to sneer, as if we were poets touting our sonnets as “genre poetry,” trite doggerel made to the fourteen lines and one volta formula unless — aha! — one sonnet throws off its shackles, transcends those constraints, becomes great. It is a vacuous valorisation of novelty over substance to imagine a missing line or an extra volta is what makes a sonnet great. It’s also wrong, an insult to the genre that fails to understand — to write a sonnet should be to eschew formulation anyway.

This is how genre becomes a dirty word, indeed, how it comes to carry the stench of puked up schlockburgers, overflowing the gutters, filthing the sidewalks, trodden underfoot and carried everywhere we walk. How can we bitch about the snootcockers of the Bistro de Critique when we ourselves laud our exemplary works as rising on adamantium pinions, unchained from the Augean mire we’ve made. Behold the dark horse, loosed from stables of writers shitting!

For the love of Cock, she thinks, we hail the works of Aeschylus and Euripedes as Greek Tragedy. We don’t extol them as transcending genre, as if to write a Greek Tragedy back in the day would obviously have been derivative hackwork.

*

The Secret Cuisine

To understand what’s actually going on in any idiom, any genre, we need to turn this model inside out. Forget the notion of genres as delimited by formal constraints. The constraints are techniques. With a volta this is obvious, but even the number of lines is not a limitation; it is a technique of economy and of structural patternings — two sevens, two sixes and a two, three fours and a two, four threes and a two. Those techniques are core components, conceits around which individual works develop an entirely original articulation, not boundaries on what that articulation can be.

You can make anything with the core components used in the SF Café — those quirks. They are no more than a breach of the ongoing possibility of the narrative, after all, the injection of an alethic modality of could not happen. That is the technique at play in the SF Café’s cooking, the secret ingredient that could be anything that could not be — by history, science, laws of nature, rules of logic.

No, there are no constraints on what you can do with the alethic quirk, only tribes of taste — look, see them now, as the librarian turns her head — raging for burgers only in the booths, fried chicken only at the tables, tribes of taste raging for proper burgers, proper fried chicken, tribes of taste raging against each other and against the chefs, with the insufferable petulance of the entitled. We do have our favourite recipes and the right, we think, to expunge all else from our café. We are a plethora of follies, not least in the fervour with which we howl injustice that the sating of our demands for “more of the same” should lead to derision.

Still, as the turf wars of the clans carry on, the librarian wouldn’t give it up for the world. She has the miso soup she couldn’t get that day. She might wonder why the chef doesn’t head uptown to the district of Literature, but she asked him fifteen minutes ago and he simply smiled.

– The secret cuisine, he said.

So she’d ordered a Number One or a Number Two. It doesn’t really matter because she didn’t even specify how she wanted it, just gave a shrug: surprise me. And so, five minutes ago, he came out with the miso soup.

Truth is, the ghetto of Genre, every dive bar and greasy spoon in the neighourhood itself, is a substrate that nurtures truly refusenik writers too. Sure there are those who sneer at miso soup. What the fuck, they say, is miso anyway? Some kind of animal? But they do buy a lot of burgers. So publishers piggy-back off the sales of formula fare to support the secret cuisine that is the true heart of every genre. They know the demand for works which treat a technique as core component, as mere conceit around which the articulation is developed, prized precisely for its originality.

To deny this is simply ignorance of the historical reality and of the underlying mechanisms by which literature evolves. It’s an ignorance born of blind desire among the tribes of taste. Among the literati it’s born of the fact that when they do come slumming in the ghetto and end up in the SF Café, they see a menu of hamburger and fried chicken, and a host of culinary clansmen fighting over it, wordspittle flying at how the enemy’s recipes are all schlock. And maybe while they’re there, they’ll turn to see the chef bring out a bowl of miso soup to the woman sat looking out the window at the Kipple Foodstuff Factory, and a plate of Coq au Vin to the man with the notebook at the table.

– This transcends the genre, they’ll hear him say.

This is why the cuisine is secret.

That menu promising SF Special Hamburger (However You Want It) doesn’t help. Miso soup is not hamburger whether it’s served in a fancy uptown Japanese restaurant or in the SF Café. It’s not Hamburger, Hamburger/Frankfurter, New Grill, Burgerpunk, Hamfurter or Flipgrease. It’s fucking miso soup. And the literati slumming it in the SF Café, watching the librarian sip her miso soup, they’ve seen it served as miso soup in that fancy new Japanese joint, Pomo, in the uptown district of Literature. They know it ain’t a fucking burger. Must be a little quality cuisine slipped in, or some sly sleight-of-hand disguising of the dreck. They speak of miso soup served by some uptown chef, food critics raving of Ishiguro’s NEVER LET ME GO. Which definitely isn’t burger, they say a little too loud.

The atmosphere in SF Café flips in an instant. It irks that they deny this is a burger. It irks that Ishiguro must have tasted the miso soup here, reconstructed the recipe. It irks that he failed to properly follow the formal constraints. It irks that Ishiguro gets kudos where our chefs don’t. It irks that he didn’t come from the ghetto of Genre, didn’t sprout from the cracks in the literary sidewalk, struggle up out of gutters thick with filth. It irks that he didn’t learn his craft in Mass Market Square, hasn’t paid his dues. And now he’s out there making miso soup just like our boys, denying that it’s hamburger and getting lauded by the critics. How come he gets the kudos and our chefs don’t?

The simple answer: because he didn’t call it fucking hamburger.

The complex answer: this is not about burgers and recipes, constraints and kudos, struggles and dues; or it is in a way, but at the heart of it, where it matters, it’s really about the secret cuisine, about the quirks that you can do anything with, that anyone, anywhere, anywhen can do anything with.

*

The Great Eggs Benedict Scandal

The librarian remembers the Great Eggs Benedict Scandal which made this clear to her — Bradbury’s FAHRENHEIT 451 versus Huxley’s BRAVE NEW WORLD. Back while the New Wave writers were learning to read, never mind write, Bradbury was chef at the SF Café, serving up his own secret cuisine while the place was still as greasy spoon as they come. So one day a customer comes in and takes a seat at one of the tables. She’s in her usual booth, not far away, can’t help but hear when he asks for a burger… maybe sort of like that eggs-over-easy malarkey but… not quite… something different. Surprise me, he says.

So out comes Bradbury with Eggs Benedict to put the fancy bistros uptown to shame, beats Huxley’s hands-down, everyone agrees, as they all come to try it over the next few weeks. But does he get kudos for it in the Writing City Journal’s food column? Does the SF Café get kudos for this dazzling dish of dystopia? Or do those bastards at the Bistro de Critique just ignore this instant classic, keep blathering on about Huxley, even denying that when he does Burger a la Eggs Benedict, it’s actually burger. In the Temple of Academia, rituals are enacted in celebration of Saint Huxley, but Bradbury…?

The architect Francois Truffaut just built a motherfucking monument to his dish, the librarian remembers reading in the paper one day, as she sat in the SF Café, listening to the kvetching. A skyscraper in midtown.

Still, around her the culinary clansmen raged of the literati’s unjust hatred of all burgers… and raged of the literati’s love for this Huxley’s burger. They raged that the twisted literati turned a blind eye to the bacon and relish of Huxley’s burger, had no idea of the greater glory of the bacon and relish in Bradbury’s.

One slumming literati frowned, perplexed. Bradbury’s dish is great, for sure, but it’s Eggs Benedict, not burger. Burgers have ground beef in them.

The clansmen howled! The bistro bastard was insisting it’s all formulation. Every clansman knew you could have eggburger! Couldn’t he see the bacon and relish that prove there’s more to burger than mere formulae! See?! See the Hollandaise relish?!

But the librarian, she knew. This Burger a la Eggs Benedict, this dystopic dish, it wasn’t ground beef. It was eggs, and not just any old eggs — the eggs of a cockatrice from the next century. Like Huxley’s were the eggs of a harpy from a next century two steps to the right. And it was that special ingredient that really mattered, the thing that could not be, not here and now.

And should not be, she realised.

She looked down at the Eggs Benedict on her plate. Her mayashades scrolled instant analyses, coded in glyphs of light, across the lenses: negative boulomaic modality (translation: desireability) detected — should not be; negative deontic modality (translation: duty) detected — should not be; positive alethic modality (translation: possibility) detected — would be if; impossibility + contingency > possibility.

This is dystopia, she realised, as the quirk of a monstrous egg that could not be unpacked to contingencies that meant it could be if, if, if… not here and now, but one day. Wireframe edge detection traced the substructure of narrative logic, the dynamics blossoming from a single conceit. No recipe, no formulae, just… a core component around which articulation unfolded by the deep drive of narrative itself, in an articulation original and unconstrained.

She saw the quirk at the heart of it, the egg wireframed to abstraction: flense specificity; abstract to base form. Neither cockatrice nor harpy egg, origin unknown, nature unknown, the ovoid collapsed to sphere, the sphere collapsed to singularity, a point of pure potential from which anything impossible could hatch. It hatched.

– You see the secret cuisine? said the chef at her side as the true form of the alethic quirk fillsed her vision — novum, erratum, chimera, sutura.

– Why the fuck do we call this burger? she said.

– Eggs Benedict?! some clansmen snarled. Who the fuck is called Benedict anyway? Faggot intellectuals, that’s who! Ben maybe, but fucking Benedict? That’s a name for traitors and Catholics. It’s just a fuckin hamburger.

– Ah, said the librarian.

*

The League of Fusion Fry-Cooks

The librarian gazes out the window. The shadow of the Kipple Foodstuff Factory still hangs over us, but at least we know it’s there. Truth is, the junk fiction is everywhere. The Mob makes every eatery in the city carry those KFF schlockburgers. Truth is, the Bistro de Critique carries them too. So it goes.

We call it all burger, wonder why it gets no respect, when even before the New Wave broke the “boundaries of genre,” chefs like Bradbury were cooking whatever the fuck they wanted to. Truth is, the Mob sends goons round every other day to strong arm our boys into hackwork. We’re just lucky some goons love them Eggs Benedict, shrug as we serve them up: guess we all like a little something different now and then; just… keep it on the QT, call it burger, don’t make out that you ain’t scum like us. Besides, the Boss Man hangs in the Bistro de Critique, and it’s important to him that he’s got “class.”

But the secret cuisine can’t hep but evolve. The more the tribes of taste try to impose their formulae, the more the result is simply dialectics — thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Change. So food fads come and go in the SF Café — New Wave, Cyberpunk, New Weird — the menu changing with the times, each new fry-cook doing brave new things with a million variants of burger and fried chicken, crafting bizarre creations of fusion cuisine, adding a signature dish wholly original, unique, exquisitely crafted from raw conceit. Detournement. Bricolage. Quirks.

At some time in the past — nobody knows when — a secret society was formed, a League of Fusion Fry-Cooks, dedicated to the art of fast food haute cuisine, sharing recipes and raw ingedients, tricks and techniques, their motto Miso Soup for the Soul. They have plans to storm the Bistro de Critique, it’s said, schemes the librarian knows will one day come to fruition… if the tales of a traveller in time are true. The project is graffitied across the ghetto of Genre, written in invisible ink right here, if you only read between the lines. Yes, they walk amongst us in the streets, meet in the back-alleys. They wear harlequin masks and dance to disguise themselves as street performers. Maybe you’re one of them. Maybe I am.

Out on the streeets of the ghetto, a masked harlequin (maybe you, maybe me) walks by, in their hand a Molotov cocktail of mixed metaphors — fry-cooks and fusion cuisine, schlockburgers and cafés, ghosts and golems. This is the strategy of our strange fictions, quirk upon quirk, conceit upon conceit, extended and involuted till they all shear off from a simple coherent sense, the vehicle of metaphor unmoored from its tenor, defying reduction to mere allegory. This is how we see the world through our mayashades: a quirk with a cosmos of chaos inside, all that could not be.

The librarian takes another scan of her surroundings, orients herself from another angle of vision. She’s out on the street now. This could not be, but if you can sip the miso soup you couldn’t get that day in North Carolina, you can do anything.

*

Pornographia dell’Arte

The librarian taps a smoke off Kid Pulp, offers a light.

Kid Pulp is working the same corner as per usual, busking and hustling, offering wild songs and ten dollar blowjobs, dancing in a red leather miniskirt or denim cut-offs, selling limber feats as pole dance peep shows improvised with lampposts and blindfolds. The strumpet stripling slinks round a pimp, a bookstore buyer in fur coat and gold rings, diamonds in his grin bought with monies made by mining star dreck. Prissy passers-by who took a wrong turn from uptown gasp as punters splash out cash for the harlequin’s masque, a Pornographia dell’Arte that might well end in blood and tears instead of spunk these days.

This is the vision through the librarian’s mayashades, of course, filtered through the figurative, view skewed towards the sordid. It’s how society sees the sensational, painted lurid by the streetlight’s glow, painted lurid with boulomaic and deontic modalities, quirks of desire and duty. We seldom see what is, too busy projecting onto it what should be and what should not be.

Kid Pulp, fully paid-up member of the League of Fusion Fry-Cooks, will have none of that should not be. Kid Pulp was suckled at the paps of a harlot dam known as Romance, does not deny her. No defensive twitch when this harlot/hustler’s heritage is thrown back in Kid Pulp’s face by those brought up on the right side of the tracks. No shame, no sham of fierce certainty that Kid Pulp is not that kind of girl. No shoving that honest working girl into a closet, starving Momma to a skeleton. A whirl, a twirl, and the sparkly logo on Kid Pulp’s crop top comes clear, the brand name of SF.

Dressed in such gaudy duds of glossy packaging, Kid Pulp figures, why get your knickers in a twist when the literati sneer? The sideshow sells well when it’s painted pretty colours and comes cheap on the street-corners, so we shill ourselves as Sci-Fi, wear the label in a wild and willing deal with the devil. Through the single-setting mayashades that most don’t even know they’re wearing, it sure looks like we’re just following the family trade (rough trade, that is,) as we stand out there beneath the streetlight, touting cheap thrills to sad johns.

– Show you a good time, if ya want it, honey. A tasty treat. Fresh, juicy meat.

It all began, you know, with self-righteous prigs reviling whores and faggots, proles and primitives, as slave to base sensation. With Romance as an unmarried mother, whore with a bastard in her hysterical womb, kicked out, no mercy but the workhouse or the madhouse. (It would be nice if a less sexist figuration of Romance could be found here, but it would be a denial of the semiotics at play, which is sexist; the discourse of the sensational is inextricable from the discourse of the hysterical.) Her recent history is starvation and desparation, the brothel trucks and army whorehouses of the Culture Wars. Kid Pulp was born of the Joy Division of fiction, and I don’t mean the fucking band.

Kid Pulp is not a hooker/hustler because of some moral degeneracy, is not fallen, just a fall guy. Bastard offspring of Romance and Frankenstein’s monster, Kid Pulp grew up hustling that sweet ass, knows it’s hard to scrape a living any other way, knows other ways are more degrading in the end. The propriety of polite company finds quirks a little uncouth, see, the cocks and cunts of narrative. The sensational is the sexual, shockingly gauche. The secret cuisine is a naked lunch to the petit-bourgeoisie: genre fiction; pulp fiction; penny dreadfuls; dime novels; sensation novels; Gothic; Romance. The Pornographia dell’Arte is a pandering Grand Guignol of all emotions.

So Kid Pulp got real, faced the facts. You made your bed, says Kid Pulp, now you’ve got to spread your legs on it, bite the pillow and think of England. Kid Pulp is Babylon and Sodom, our Woman of the Ghetto, our Boy for Sale. Elsewhen, Kid Pulp would have been a faggot whore priestess prince black madonna in scarlet and purple drag, offering entry into sacred mysteries of flesh and spirit, eros and logos. Elsewhen, Kid Pulp would have been none of this, more than the idealised and demonised metaphors emergent from a history of abstraction and abjection. So those snooty literati see a slapper in these Bacchic revels? So fuck? Deal with it.

Kudos comes at a price, Kid Pulp knows: ditch the mini-skirt and cut-offs, move uptown; or join the fucking revolution.

*

The Idiom of the Ascetic

In the Bistro de Critique, Orwell and Huxley serve dystopia, a taster of the secret cuisine that remains unseen. They’re spared the sneers, suited up in pinstripes — no red leather miniskirts or denim cut-offs here. No turning tricks each night, sating sense-of-wonder-lust, ten dollars a pop. No formulae here for churning out potboilers by the pound. No pimps hawking hackwork product in Mass Market Square. They are members of the League of Fusion Fry-Cooks — they and others like them; but these chefs of the quirk were spared that whole grotesque and glittering scene, the garish spectacle of sensation that turned Sci-Fi into a slight.

Brooding in the ghetto for nigh on half a century, bitter at the literati, clansmen stalk the dark. Beware, the unwitting wanderer from uptown who says the wrong thing in the ghetto. The tribes of taste are seasoned warriors of the flame, and they know insult when they hear it.

They howl at midnight on the streets of Genre. The works they love are reviled while worthy (wearisome) “mainstream” fiction garners all accolades, as if the idiom of the ascetic were the only way to tell the truth. Worse, much of it is no longer “mainstream,” not mundane but strange, miso soup for the soul. Still, the literati laud Ishiguro’s dish by its supposed distinction from SF, constructing the root cause of failure ultimately, in any novel, as not eschewing the essential nature of one’s genre. As if to work in an idiom other than the ascetic could only mean to be bound by formal constraints. As if they are still working in the idiom of the ascetic simply by not being trite. The writers themselves speak in these terms. The secret cuisine is so secret even some of its greatest chefs don’t know they’re practising it, don’t know it exists, how it works. And so they buy into that same grand folly, abjuring the very idioms their best works are in. With this, they win the kudos of the literati, lose out on all the infamy and fun.

– No SF novel ever won the Booker, growls a prowling clansman on his way into the SF Café.

The librarian swings a shotgun from inside her longcoat, blasts the bullshit axiom from the air. Screw the Booker, she thinks. She’d rather have a hookah.

She stands in the doorway of the SF Café, past and future glimmering in her mayashades. She sees Kid Pulp working uptown in the theatres, other harlot/hustler harlequins crashing gallery openings and cocktail parties, noising up the regulars at the Bistro de Critique, hustling a little ass now and then to pay the rent, or dancing — prancing, entrancing maniacs blowing flutes instead of johns. For all the abjurations, every Ishiguro is another sleeper agent of the League of Fusion Fry-Cooks slipped in to open up the bistro’s back door, let the slumdogs in, slavering and savage.

But that’s tomorrow. She looks round, sees them here now, more and more by the day, her fellow agents, talking the Pornographia dell’Arte in the SF Café or on some corner of Mass Market Square. They talk of the kudos and cash success stories of 20th Century literature, the canon of writers that includes Joyce alongside Hemmingway, Faulkner alongside Steinbeck, writers such as Rushdie, Bulgakov, Carter, Calvino, Marquez, Pynchon, Vonnegut, and so on. They talk of modern classics that don’t sit any better in the contemporary realist’s tower block than in the SF flophouse. They talk of that scene, the flavours of the month, the lists and prizes, the slow assimilation of contemporary realism, its descent into formulation. They know formulation when they see it, living in the ghetto. They talk of a spotlight wearing thin for the idiom of the ascetic. Kelly Link was in Time Magazine a whiles back, they say, Top Five Books of the Year.

Change is in the air. There are always choices, chances.

The secret cuisine cannot be contained.

*

A Water Feature in the Gardens of Literature

The librarian heads out across Mass Market Square, towards the subway, checking in with the League of Fusion Fry-Cooks over her aether uplink, telling them all about the Bistro de Critique’s strange visitor from twenty years into tomorrow, how he told of a Dynamism sweeping in to overturn the tables. Her contact listens with great interest.

Here is a secret of the secret cuisine. The “mainstream” of literature is only what is in the main stream, and this is not the contemporary realism of the kitchen sink. That idiom had a brief boom in the 1960s, as angry young men roared for realism in the name of relevance, no frills, no nonsense. It was an egalitarian agenda, born in a backlash against elitist artifices of the modernists, eschewing the strange and sensationalist quirks, seeing deceit in all conceit — but in an honest and passionate dream of telling stories of the common man for the common man. They saw the unreal as irrelevant, the fantastic as mere fancy; they could not parse the strange to its meaning.

(Their attitude is not entirely unfamiliar. We have our own realists, our own rationalists, down in the ghetto of Genre, in the SF Café, dug into their little corner, behind a barricade of tables, muttering darkly about the death of Science Fiction.)

It had a brief boom in the 1960s, this idiom of the ascetic, this genre, but it never made the mainstream, which is and always will be populist, commercial… Genre. The League of Fusion Fry-Cooks have more than a little sympathy for those angry young men, and a smart of sadness that they failed to see the Molotov cocktail in the quirk… more so that their battleground could only be lost to the bourgeois. Because they had walked away from the mainstream in the abrogation of quirks, diverted into the sidestream of “proper literature” where taste becomes a class marker, where appreciation serves to signify status, where that sidestream is therefore reduced to a water feature in the Gardens of Literature.

It was never about the mainstream, but about the manners of the Bistro de Critique, what was a la mode today, what was “proper.” Three hundred years ago or so, two oppositional aesthetics were well-matched in their struggle for legitimacy as they clashed head-to-head. Romantic and Realist genres were the tribes of taste among the middle-class and middle-brow, back in the day, constructing modernity in a dialectics not unlike that to be found today in the SF Café. Oh, but one aesthetic was that of the vulgar proles and of “women’s fiction.”

It was infantile, unsophisticated, this aesthetic of mere storytelling, fanciful as folklore and fable, primitive as the superstitions of the savages. It was then — and remains now — the mainstream that feeds the bulk of water fountains across the city of Writing, but this very fact was enough to damn it in the end. A true gentleman — not a vulgar prole, not a hysterical woman, not a child, not a savage — surely knew that these gushing fountains of quirk were… unseemly. Only in the Gardens of Literature might one find that shallow birdbath with a china cup from which to sip the refined liquidity of edifying art. Why, one could see just how refined it was, absent those quirks!

It was inevitable that the petit-bourgeois would latch on to the legitimacy of egalitarianism to justify what is really a scorn of the popular. Mass Market Square. The Pornographia dell’Arte. This is what they really hate, the impropriety of it all. The bourgeois were only too happy to co-opt contemporary realism, formulate and commercialise it with formal constraints on the acceptable use of quirks. Transform it to the faux reportage of the social observer, enlightened, educated, edified and edifying. So it became about the impropriety of the sensational, what art must not be if it was to be serious, worthy, intellectual. Some literati may be held accountable, but many were — and are — as much casualties of the Culture Wars as anyone; when one is raised within the rhetoric of abjection, it is often invisible, not least to those most privileged by it.

The abjection is unsustainable though; the impetus of art is always against propriety, and so the reactionaries will always be revealed, by their own words, as antagonists to art. They say the china cup is necessary, but every now and then a writer comes along to smash it with contempt, show it up for the genteel nonsense it is. And some literati nod appreciatively even as others slip a fresh cup back in place. They say the liquid in the birdbath must be pure, but every now and then a writer comes along to pour just a hint of quirk into it, maybe more than a hint. And after decades of art refined to bland banality, melodrama watered-down to mundane crises, trite epiphanies, some literati hail the tang of strange conceits even as others grumble at the taint. They say the flow of it all must be kept subtle, slow and delicate, never a spectacle. But writers who see how this is all in the name of etiquette and the status it affords will feel the heft of a sledgehammer in hand, and grin as they smash that decorative folly, let the fiction come fountaining forth in a great geyser. And if some literati flap their hands in outrage, others will dance barefoot in the mud.

And the League of Fusion Fry-Cooks will move among them, handing out hors-d’ouevres of pure quirk, peachy keen articulations conjured out of raw conceit, rich delicacies one cannot help acquire a taste for. Scotch eggs of a basilisk from a yesterday that never was. Whether they call it burger or fried chicken is irrelevant; it is the secret cuisine.

It may not remain secret for much longer.

Of Polls and Poles

It’s polling day here in the Royal Borough of Kentigern, in the nation of Grand Albion — my country of origin back before I became a fully-naturalised citizen of New Sodom. It’s all terribly tense, with Labour terribly unpopular, but the Conservatives in a bit of a mess and the Liberal Democrats on the rise. To be fair, I don’t have a lot of faith in either of the two that aren’t, well, right-wing fucks, and the internationalist ethos of New Sodom draws me to a less bounded outlook when it comes to political borders anyway, but I do still have a soft spot for the old country, so I’ll be watching the election with some interest. Hell, I may dwell in this New Sodom of the soul in virtual terms, in this artifice constructed of cliques on the internet, conversations in pubs, movements in this field of the arts or that, but yeah, in practical terms, sadly, my meat body still abides in my scuzzy bachelor pad in Kentigern, so I have no choice but to pay attention to the politics it’s going to be saddled with for the next four years.

Where do my own politics lie these days, in this particular election? It’s hard to say. A little bit socialist, a little bit liberal maybe. I’ve some sympathy, I’ll admit, with those Caledonians who advocate independence when it comes to Albion, but only where that’s paired with strong support for a presence in a federal Europe; it’s a sort of Caledonian internationalism that resonates with me. I’m not immune to the whole tribal pride thing, so there’s part of me that admires the Red Clydesiders who fought with the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. It’s the part of me that’s proud of that heritage but paradoxically proud because it’s all about an outward-looking spirit recognising greater territories than those drawn on a map. A man’s a man for a’ that, as a wise man once said. Or the gender-neutral equivalent.

Of course, this is the same part of me that hears Little Englanders railing against the Germans and the French, against the EU in general, and thinks maybe we should just give those johnny-come-lately Anglo-Saxons their independence. Fuck it, we could just ditch England and invite other Celtic nations in — the Irish, the Cornish, the Manx, the Bretons. (Maybe invite in Liverpool and suchlike as city-states given their Irish-immigrant communities.) Call it a Federal Union of Celtic Kingdoms! Or a Celtic Union of National Territories! (I like the acronyms.) And if that sounds horribly ethnocentric, I should say that I work on the principle that membership of a Celtic clan is merely a matter of the correct initiation ritual a la Richard Harris in A Man Called Horse getting hung by his nipples. Only we replace the nipple-pain with the hangover that results from a night on the tiles getting shit-faced with a Celt. If you can hold your own with us in a pub, you’re in. Internationalism and inclusiveness, that’s what it’s all about, I say. Fuck blood-ties and birthplaces. Will you get the round in when it’s your turn? That’s what I want to know, brother.

Still, my pipe dream of an international supernation of beery bleary bletherers is not, I recognise, a particularly pragmatic approach to politics. So I’m stuck with the mainstream parties and their policies as they are. Don’t worry though; this isn’t going to be about which I’ll be voting for and why. Rather this is going to be about the exact opposite — what I won’t be basing my vote on. And it’s less about party politics per se than it is about a subject relevant to this column in general — the power of words.

For the benefit of those outside Albion, you see, there are two gaffes I want to explore, one on the part of the Conservative leader, David Cameron, and another on the part of the Labour leader, Gordon Brown. The former fell apart during what he thought was going to be a puff piece interview with Gay Times, when the reporter challenged him on actual facts. This clip speaks for itself. The latter was caught in his car after a meeting with a member of the public, describing her as “just a sort of bigoted woman.” Their full encounter here is… more interesting. Go on and watch them; I’ll wait. If you want to skip to the chase with the Brown/Duffy encounter, around two and a half minutes in she comes out with a few comments on immigration — about how you can’t talk about it, how there’s all these Eastern Europeans and, to quote: where are they flocking from?

(Um… Eastern Europe? I say.)

Anyway, the rhetoric embedded in that question is really the subject of this column. So yes — be warned — it’s going to be a bit political, but what it’s about more than anything else is the import of one little word, the power of metaphor particularly when it comes to matters of opinion and ethnicity. Of polls and Poles, so to speak.

*

Unleash the Behemouth!

Let’s get the Cameron interview out of the way first, cause it’s really only here as a comparison. I’ll make no bones about it: I’m deeply fucking worried about a country where Cameron’s utter fucktardery is forgotten in a televisual instant. The man basically admits to not even attempting to do his job of running his party — which includes things like, you know, being aware of how his MEPs are voting. Actually controlling how his MEPs are voting when it comes to fundamental human rights issues, matters that have not been left to the discretion of ministers for decades in mainstream UK politics. And I’ll happily admit that I see Cameron’s flailing as proof of the emptiness of his words; to me this is pure weaseling bullshit from the party that gave us Section 28, the party still full of fuckers who support discrimination by B&B owners (who just, you know, want to go back to the good old days of “No Blacks, No Irish, No Gays,”) the party that’s got a rising star, Phillipa Stroud, who prayed for gays to be cured.  It’s mildly entertaining to see Cameron squirm like a worm on a shitty stick, but my laughter turns hollow at the thought that this arsehole could actually get into power. Never mind the gay rights issue that makes it personal to THE…. Sodomite Hal Duncan!! (as I’m proud to have been dubbed in hatemail.) That interview exposes him as just plain fucking incompetent.

But here’s the real point: does that cock-up by Cameron become a serious shitstorm? No, instead everyone gets in a days-long fucking tizzy about Brown… um… referring to a woman he thought was a bit bigoted as — shock fucking horror! — “a sort of bigoted woman”. What the fucking fuckety fuck?! When someone throws out some deeply dubious rhetoric about immigration that you think is bigoted, and you refer to them in a private conversation after the fact as “sort of bigoted,” this is a Terrible Outrage requiring amends to be made? I repeat: what the fucking fuckety fuck?!

Bollocks to that. It’s time to unleash the Behemouth, methinks.

Fuck Brown’s apology. Fuck it with a pneumatic drill up the jacksie.  That apology was bullshit fucking moral pressure in action — not individual ethics guided by empathy, attempting to navigate the existential quandaries of the human condition, but rather the knee-jerk pre-programmed societal groupthink that deems this and that action to be subject to absolute “Thou Shalts” and “Thou Shalt Nots,” with little thought for the genuine rationality of such sweeping dicta.  The Behemouth doesn’t like such moral dicta. These are like red rags to a bull as far as the Behemouth is concerned. The Behemouth is inclined to roar with unbridled fury and charge full speed at such moral dicta.

Sometimes these moral dicta seem harmless, beneficial even, maybe even downright obviously so: Thou Shalt Not Cause Needless Offense. It’s hard to argue with that, right? But sometimes those moral dicta are precisely as unethical as they are moralistically “righteous”: Thou Shalt Not Miscegenate, say.  There’s your fucking morality for you.  It’s 100% accurate to call this moral, by the way, even if you think its dead wrong, as I hope you do; it was one of the mores in place in various (sub)cultures at various times.  Technically, it is r was a moral judgement even if we now deem it beyond the pale. But this is a key distinction the Behemouth makes as regards morals and ethics, the former being societal injunctions, the latter being a matter of individual judgement. Just cause it’s a moral dicta doesn’t mean it’s a fucking ethical judgement.

So what moral dictum did Brown run up against?  A sound one or a dodgy one?  Well, we’ll come to that. The Behemouth needs to break some shit first.

*

The Might of the Moralistic Gaze

First, let’s be crystal clear about how such mores work: Such dicta are the ethically retarded wank of those who can’t think past what psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg called the law-and-order level of moral development, can’t think past the notion of social order and essential transgressions, black and white lines in the sand that must never be crossed.  It’s neither unnatural nor uncommon. It’s even functional as a stage in developing one’s autonomous ethical faculties. We all, so the theory goes, progress from infantile understandings that if we get caught we’ll be punished, through comparative models of what constitutes a “good boy/girl” and a “bad boy/girl,” to a notion of a sort of abstract social order which wrongdoing breaches, transgresses. So far, so good.

The problem is that this infantile authoritarian mindset has a nasty tendency to institutionalise prejudice in the guise of “right and wrong,” arbitrarily condemning acts that spark bigotry-based revulsion as transgressions of the Laws of God, Man and/or Nature. Where it does not take the entirely logical step of incorporating a moral dictum that Thou Shalt Scrutinise All Moral Dicta For Injustice, where it in fact incorporates a dictum that Thou Shalt NOT Question ANY Moral Dictum, it becomes absolute anathema to a mature ethical judgement. No matter how many of those moral dicta function as workable ethical rules-of-thumb, the entire mindset is ethically bankrupt. Ethically fucking bankrupt.

Why so? Because it not only allows the unethical dicta to arise — e.g. prescriptions on “miscegenation” or “homosex” or whatever — it actively pressures for them. Because the generation, propagation and punitive imposition of rules — no matter how arbitrary — is deemed virtuous in and of itself. Condemn someone else for their transgression and that renders you a defender of the social order.  Teach a child to hate faggots and you’re a fucking pillar of the community.  Worse, with that Thou Shalt NOT outlined above this mindset pressures against reform, rules out challenges to unjust mores on the grounds that these constitute some sort of dread destabilisation of that social order, a preliminary to wholesale collapse. This is why arguments for gay marriage and such are always met with the rhetoric of “the moral fabric of society,” dig?

So, the Behemouth growls at this fucking infantile moralism. It engenders dodgy dicta and it outlaws the very ethical judgements that challenge them. It fosters prejudice and then defends it against progressive thinkers who’ve stopped, thought for a whole millisecond and come to the conclusion that… uh… lynching a black guy for having sex with a white woman is fucking abhorrent, you fuckwits! The Behemouth would very much like to bite the fucking heads off those who seem themselves as valiant defenders of the social order, and would like to do so, actually, whether or not they happen to be railing against miscegenation or something the Behemouth actually does consider generally wrong, because operating with that mindset means you won’t fucking miss the head you’re not fucking using. To the Behemouth, Thou Shalt Scrutinise All Moral Dicta For Injustice is pretty much the only moral dictum that really matters, and denying that is the action of a child clinging to a rulebook, refusing to think for itself.

“Miss!  Miss! Gordon called Gillian a bigot, miss!”

Fucking grow up, growls the Behemouth.

But the Behemouth hates the effects of that mindset too, the way it all too often plays out in the forced capitulation of the offender in a public recanting of their own individual — and potentially ethical — judgement.  We’re living in the fucking Society of the Spectacle, and morality in that system seems to have become a way for the media/mob to exact a petty desire to see the denounced offender jump through flaming fucking hoops of apology.  It’s like the bite of a million gnats on the Behemouth’s skin to see the press and public playing the shame game, to see Brown pressured by misplaced shock into the posturing of abject penitence. It loathes such sideshows of self-reproach with the same bile and venom that once rose in it, many years back, when we saw Lizzie Windsor forced to proclaim her grief over Diana on the telly just because a bunch of hysterical cretins didn’t think she was putting on a good enough fucking show of sorrow. Remember that?  The Behemouth is as hardline anti-monarchist as you get, but Mrs Saxe-Coburg had all its sympathy that day, as a victim of vituperation on the part of a public who Her Regal Mummery should have been telling to go fuck themselves.

But let’s drop the Behemouth conceit, cause the Behemouth is, of course, just me. You want to understand how deeply I revile the might of the moralistic gaze? How profoundly I hate this notion that the individual should kowtow to an arsewipe consensus of what constitutes “propriety,” of what makes up an acceptable performance of regret or remorse, sorrow or shame? At my brother’s funeral, many more years back than that of Crazy Dazy Di, my family deliberately did not wear black, decided that in this ceremony of remembrance we wanted to reflect the positive aspects of that life now lost. Some time afterwards, a friend confessed that he’d been shocked to see us spurn the customary colour of despair. It seemed a breach of the protocols of bereavement, a transgression of societal mores.

It was.

We’d rejected black garb in order to make the day an affirmation of what my brother brought to our lives, rather than an empty ritual of abandoning what was gone into some conceit of a happy-ever-after. Or at least that’s how I thought of it; I won’t speak for my folks. My mate, bless him, was gobsmacked at the impropriety of us not wearing black. He didn’t condemn us for it, right enough, wasn’t a fuckwit about it.  But imagine he had. Imagine society in general did. Imagine a baying mob of self-righteous fucktards crying out that we weren’t following the correct protocols as regards grief, weren’t playing the bereaved family the way society ordained.  Imagine the sheer fucking wrath with which I’d meet such arrant fucking presumption.

That’s what I feel when I see the Society of the Spectacle make its selected miscreants perform their pirouettes of penitence, whether it’s Mrs Bettie Saxe-Coburg or Mr Gordie Brown. That’s what makes the Behemouth roar.

*

When Is a Spade Not a Spade?

But all of this is just groundwork so you (hopefully) understand where I’m coming from here. Let’s look now at this specific crime, at words condemned for their import and words tacitly deemed acceptable even as they shape a metaphor of the most dubious nature. Cause spitting and snorting at morality itself is all very well, but no matter if you consider the reaction against Brown to be motivated by petty moralism and avarice for a carnival of contrition, wasn’t Brown still, ethically speaking, open to critique? Cause, you know, he did call a wee old lady “bigoted”!  And that words have deep import is precisely my point. It’s a recurring theme of these columns in general, these Notes from New Sodom, that the words with which we shape our stories of this reality do actually impact on this reality in ways we should be aware of. Calling a spade a spade is all very well as a straight-talking principle, but what happens when the term is coming from the mouth of a racist in reference to a person of colour?

Put it another way: which version of “calling a spade a spade” best fits Brown refering to Duffy as a bigot and which version of “calling a spade a spade” best fits Duffy referring to Eastern European immigrants as “flocking”? When is a spade not a spade? When is a literal word so charged with negative import that applying it to someone undeserving is a gross insult? When is a word that doesn’t literally fit at all, an idiomatic usage so charged with import not just negative but dehumanising that I know I’d find it pretty fucking offensive… when is it fine to just gloss over such an application as entirely acceptable?

Yes, Brown called that wee old lady “bigoted.” In the privacy of his car, after the event, after being slammed on various fronts by this woman — who had plenty of points to make but was too busy scoring them in a full-on assault to give him a chance to respond — he went away muttering about how he’d been forced to deal with a woman he felt was bigoted. And so the media/mob condemned him for the heinous crime of thinking ill about a poor wee old lady. For the crime of speaking his mind in private, dismissing her as “sort of bigoted” because… let’s see… she struck him as sort of bigoted.

I’ll say it again: What the fucking fuckety fuck?

I mean, given that he said goodbye to her with all manner of pleasantries, this is certainly hypocritical.  No contest.  Given that she was nailing him on all sorts of counts and only spoke of immigration in a sentence or two, I’d even go so far as to say his focus on that one part of her attack comes across as self-serving, an expedient way to dismiss the validity of her other arguments by putting her in the pigeonhole of “bigot”.  But you know what? The former is the hypocrisy of daily etiquette, in which you show people respect even if you find them utterly objectionable, and the latter is just the natural tendency of human beings to shroud reality in denials that validate their own viewpoint. So he remained civil to the end even as she was lambasting him. So, one might presume, caught off-guard by the force of her ire and scattershot venting, he latched on to the anti-immigrant rhetoric as a marker of illegitimacy. Licking his wounds, he focused on that rather than the challenge(s) to his policies.

Wow.  What an outrageous affront to common decency.

Not that I’m going to defend his conventional but insincere civility or his defensive dismissal.  Bollocks to that.  But I find it abhorrent that the backlash wasn’t really about either of these things; it was about him having the audacity to call this little old lady “bigoted” when she’d proven her value to society through decades of good works. Cause, you know, little old ladies couldn’t possibly be bigoted.  People who’ve served a community all their lives just can’t conceivably be prejudiced about those who they see as not properly belonging in that community.  It seems to me that this is what was deemed so offensive — that Brown labeled as a bigot someone who people saw as deserving of respect for her altruistic deeds, someone who was perhaps expressing the frustration(s) they themselves feel in the current climate, someone who was seen as representing the general public — a pillar of the community, an elder, and a woman to boot.  A widow! A grandmother! How dare he!

Fuck that shit. His real gaffe was not calling her a bigot to her face.

*

People Call You Racist!

Go back to that BBC report and listen to her words again. It’s not a terribly venomous statement, by any means, but neither is it entirely innocuous.  You can’t talk about immigration, she complains, because you’re saying… and she trails off into mumbles, changes tack.  And there’s all these Eastern Europeans flocking into the country, she says.  That’s pretty much the entirety of it, but if you’re attuned to subtext, it’s not hard to hear in that the rhetoric of the bigot.  The “not allowed to say what one thinks” argument is a classic conceptual maneuver in which the person espousing prejudice casts themselves as victim when they’re slammed for it, and it rather seems as if Duffy can’t complete her statement because the only way to complete it would be to acknowledge the accusations of bigotry that are the so-terrible, so-unwarranted repercussions of, well, venting angry anti-immigrant sentiments.

But, wait. Unwarranted? Really? When one wants to talk about “immigration” it seems it’s nothing to do with, say, a good friend of mine who happens to come from Australia but live and work in the UK. No, it’s not those sort of immigrants we’re talking about in the discourse of immigration constructed by the media and the mob. It’s that specific group of immigrants delimited as Other by their Slavic heritage. It’s those Poles and Romanians and Moldavians and whatnot, those Eastern Europeans. The lumpen mass of them, the de-individualised, dehumanised throng of them, coming into Grand Albion in veritable droves. Flocking.

Now maybe this is simply a bad phrasing on the part of someone who doesn’t truly, in her heart, harbour the classic racist animosities that previous generations in the UK directed against Asian immigrants, Afro-Caribbean immigrants, Irish immigrants, Jewish immigrants and so on. Maybe she does just think one specific aspect of immigration — that resulting from the entry of ex-Soviet countries into the EU — has concomitant problems that must be dealt with, but with no blame or aspersions to be cast on those individuals who’ve simply come to the UK in the hope of making a better life for themselves — immigrants who, the statistics show, are of a net benefit to the nation. Maybe it’s reading too much into her words to see the same old same old: that bitter bile about all those “pakis” and “spades” and “micks” and “kikes” coming into the country and “taking our jobs” and blah blah fucking blah, and how, you know, you can’t even complain about it, because if you moan about how all the bus drivers are darkies these days, people call you racist! Maybe it’s not entirely fair to judge this sort of statement by the associations it has with classic UK-style anti-immigrant racial prejudice.

But it is a statement taking its terms from that discourse. It is a statement couched in the rhetoric of abjection, accepting the profoundly dubious Othering strategy coded into the term “flocking,” a word that recasts individual human beings, each with their own skillset, their own contribution to make, as an unthinking animal mass that constitutes little more than a problem be dealt with.  A herd to be penned.  A flood to be curtailed.  Words have import, and make no mistake, the import of Duffy’s words is far from innocent; they tacitly accept and espouse a thoroughly ugly-minded metaphor that abjects those Eastern Europeans just as countless Roma, say, were and still are abjected here or elsewhere.  Without any statement to the contrary, without any specific complaint about practical issues, Brown was perfectly fucking entitled to take that word “flocking” as an indication of bigotry, I reckon. That is the import written into it.

That’s why he should, I think, have called her on it then and there. I can’t blame him for not doing so, because it was in the midst of a full flow of complaint upon complaint.  But in the context of a political culture in which anti-immigrant racism is undergoing a visible resurgence, in which the BNP and UKIP present an “acceptable” face to fucking fascism while bootboy factions like the fucking English Defence League are recruiting their latter-day SA street-thugs from the ranks of football hooligans, in which that mungmunching gleetlicker Cameron is happy to let his MEPs ally themselves with fucking far-right factions in Europe, I like to think that if I’d been in Brown’s position, if I’d had the wherewithal to cope with the tonguelashing, I’d have told her to stop right fucking there.  Back up a minute, Mrs Duffy. Baby, if you want to talk about immigration, go right ahead. Cause I’d really like you to clarify exactly what you mean by characterising Eastern Europeans as flocking into the country.

Like, would “swarming” be equally acceptable to you there? How about if we talk about them “pouring” in? Or “flooding”? If a good old-fashioned Biblical “deluge” metaphor would work, maybe a “plague” conceit would express the same sentiment more cogently, no? A “plague”, a “pestilence”, an “infestation”? On you go, don’t be afraid to… call a spade a spade, as they say. Don’t be afraid like the woman in Enoch Powell’s infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech who, “[w]hen she goes to the shops, she is followed by children, charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies. They cannot speak English, but one word they know. ‘Racialist’, they chant. When the new Race Relations bill is passed, this woman is convinced she will go to prison.”

I know, I know, you can’t even talk about immigration because… well, you know, but don’t be scared to say what you really think, baby. Enquiring minds want to know.

*

Nil Paseran

Nil paseran, amigos. Nil fucking paseran. With the islamophobia and anti-Asian bigotry that’s come in the wake of 9/11 and the War on Terror, with a decade of tabloid bullshit turning “asylum-seeker” into a pejorative term, with political groups that are fucking Nazis in all but name pushing their way into the mainstream here in Grand Albion, with the media and the mob buying into that bullshit, regurgitating it in the sort of casual fucking racism that belongs in the 1930s rather than the 2010s, we should not be castigating Brown for muttering the word “bigoted” into a mic he didn’t know was still on. We should be asking why any politician with an ounce of backbone and an iota of social awareness, when confronted with such rhetoric, isn’t hauling out a fucking mirror and saying, back the fuck off off, motherfucker; and take a good look at how ugly you’re coming across here. If Mrs Duffy isn’t bigoted, calling her on that rhetoric would at least serve to establish the fact. But the horrible possibility that sprung to my mind on hearing about the encounter, and that remains in my mind after viewing it, is that Brown was fucking right. And if he was… the country just raked him through the coals for it.

Little old ladies are not immune to bigotry.  People who’ve worked for a local council for 30 years are not immune to bigotry.  People who’ve cared for children with or without disabilities are not immune to bigotry.  Pillars of the community are not immune to bigotry. Widows and grandmothers are not immune to bigotry.  They are most especially not immune to that subtle and pernicious bigotry that exploits working class privation particularly well, where the general inequities of a shafted capitalist society make one’s own life hard, and the blame for that is slowly, through a discourse of abjection, laid at the door of a scapegoat ethnic group perceived as a strain on societal resources… regardless of the reality.

You don’t have to look far in the UK to find someone struggling to get by in a financial crisis and all too ready to sound off about those who’re “coming in just to sponge off benefits.”  You don’t have to look far to find people who see themselves as fundamentally decent and upstanding — little old ladies even! — who may well be seen by others as particularly decent and upstanding, but who nevertheless have marked out a certain sub-group of society as outsiders, as illegitimate uncitizens who’re getting the benefits of the system without contributing their due, who don’t belong or don’t conform, don’t pull their weight, don’t give back what they take. Oh, those Romanian beggars!  Oh, those Roma thieves! Oh, those Jewish Shylocks! And if there’s a rhetoric of abjection underlying a complaint about all those Eastern Europeans flocking into the country, damn straight I think the veil of reasonable grumbling should be ripped off it, the bigotry exposed and challenged.

Or would we rather let it take fucking root?  Again?

And again and again and again and again and again and fucking again?

See, this is where my “what the fucking fuckety fuck?” reaction really kicks in, because we’ve actually — I mean, genuinely, seriously, for fucking real — just seen the fucking Prime Minister of our country cowed into apologies both public and private for having the fucking temerity to condemn a little old lady as bigoted in a private fucking conversation. For the terrible thought crime of reading a potentially 100% accurate subtext of bigotry into a dubiously phrased complaint about immigration.

Are you fucking shitting me, Albion?

What’s next? Cameron gets caught bitching about how the history of homophobia in his party, particularly via such policies as Section 28, utterly undermined his electioneering attempts to court gays, and is forced into a public apology to Margaret Thatcher for daring to call her beliefs homophobic? Cause, hey, a little old lady couldn’t be bigoted, could she?  Or maybe some BNP fucker trots out Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech verbatim and when Nick Clegg, say, is caught on tape calling him a nazi, Clegg is the one denounced by the media and the mob because, you know, voicing concerns with immigration is perfectly reasonable but hey, it’s just not on to insult the BNP guy by calling him a nazi, when — by golly, look! — he’s spent twenty years caring for a sister in a coma?

In a private fucking conversation, Brown can’t make an offhand dismissal on the basis that a comment implicitly dehumanising Eastern European immigrants was, in his opinion, bigoted? So the Prime Minister isn’t fucking allowed to have that sort of opinion now? Or is it that he’s just not allowed to fucking express it about someone the media and the mob deem right-on, not without having to make grand remonstrations of repentance?  Cause, yeah, the media and the mob have always been fucking great arbiters of what’s “not really” racist. Yeah, I trust the Telegraph and the Sun and the innumerable fucktards who’ve used the phrase “I’m not racist but…,” trust them to decide which bestial metaphors are valid to apply to ethnic groups. Hey, if they think “flocking” like sheep or birds is fine, fair enough.  And if they think “infesting” like rats is fine too, well, whatever. Hey, the media and the mob have really proven themselves in that department, haven’t they? It’s not like we want to be on our guard against the subtle and insidious type of racism that’s articulated in idioms accepted as just everyman plain-speaking, in metaphors taken for granted in news stories and editorials, in populist rhetorics of abjection that lump entire ethnicities together as some sort of non-human mass we need to find a solution for.

That’s never gone wrong before, has it?

No, let’s not question the import of a word like “flocking.” Let’s challenge the usage of a word like “bigoted.” Let’s condemn a politician because his ethical judgement of what constitutes bigotry is… too strict for our liking, too harsh in its rejection of our perfectly justifiable resentments, too mean to that nice little old lady who’s simply voicing the word on the street. Why, it’s a moral outrage that he’s not reflecting our animosities the way she is! It’s a travesty of all that’s good and decent that he sees prejudice where we see righteous indignation! How are we expected to come up with a reasonable (to us) way of dealing with this pox of benefits-sponging immigrant thieves and beggars when the Prime Minister himself is scurrilously dismissing our xenophobia as “sort of bigoted”? Oh, wait. Did I say “pox”? I didn’t mean to. Cause you can’t even talk about the immigrant scum in those terms these days without… um… the media and the mob savaging the Prime Minister for calling you a bigot. In private.

Oh, yes. Words have power. If you don’t think a word like “flocking” has an import to be concerned with in a context like this, just look at the import afforded the word “bigoted,” the real power struggle that’s just taken place over when using that word is not just inappropriate but an outright crime against mores. Look at the Prime Minister who didn’t even make an effort to justify it, just accepted his defeat, that this struggle against media and mob was one he couldn’t win. Whatever the results of the election, look at that political struggle for the language and see the face of the future mores we’re establishing for ourselves, in which politicians are to be raked over the coals for daring to call “bigoted” what the media and the mob deem just and true. See the face of the future mores we’re establishing, in which the leader of the country must beg forgiveness for saying it’s “sort of bigoted” to speak of an ethnic group as a flock of sheep, a herd of swine, a pack of rats, a nest of vipers.

And weep for Grand Albion. Fucking weep.

A Rejection of Definition

“What SF writers write is SF.”
Orson Scott Card

So Science Fiction is dead; but the death of Science Fiction is not the end of the story. Rather it’s the beginning of it. Torn apart in the struggles of its factions, deserted by the blood and breath of its most explorative writers, the carcass of that old Genre still sits in the SF Café, a leg here, an arm there, novitiates of this cult or that gnawing on its bones, sucking on what’s left of the marrow. It’s a grisly scene, but if these devotees only looked around them they’d see the ghost that dwells in every corner of the diner. Everywhere in the SF Café you can still see the stains, still hear the echoes of that ghost — the closed definition reopened to a strange and subtle essence that defies all definitions — science fiction. And for all that its blood was spilled out, the dying breath of Science Fiction was guttered into a golem. The spelunkers of speculative fiction mining phosphorescent filth from the bowels of the city of Writing, the Sci-Fi freaks scraping kibble and kack that from the bins of decades-old shit sandwiches out back, we have built this thing to take its place.

This is the legacy of generations of writers who would rather tackle adult themes than pander to puerile power-fantasies, whose interests lie with the soft sciences and humanities as much as with the hard sciences and technology, for whom the fiction is always more important than either the fantasia or the futurology. It is also the legacy of those who simply don’t give a fuck about anything other than either fantasia or futurology. It is fiction in which the envelope has been pushed so far out, from ambition or expedience, that all the descriptions and definitions — Science Fiction, Science Fantasy, Sci-Fi, even speculative fiction — can only be, at best, nominal labels. It is the fiction that abandons those labels for a negation of description, a rejection of definition — the acronym SF, which might mean any or all of those things.

Arguably, the term speculative fiction was, and still is, successful (to an extent) with those readers, writers, editors and publishers aware and accepting of the intrinsic diversity of the field, simply because it waves in the general direction of a meaning and, better still, abbreviates easily to SF. Hence it translates to the label of science fiction through that acronym, if and when required for the ease of communication; it is backwards compatible. That acronym reanimates the dead Science Fiction in the stains and echoes that pervade the SF Café. It binds it to the golem of speculative fiction and Sci-Fi all mashed together, this clay-made, uber-malleable monster of fictive clay. In it the dichotomy of Science Fiction and Fantasy is resolved into a unity utterly in contrast with the riven notion of Science Fantasy. We can even extend the F, echo it, to include the closed-definition Fantasy (and the openly-defined fantasy,) in SF/F, remove the dividing slash entirely in SFF, elide the one into the other as in SFWA, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

If we want to be all poncy and academic about it, we might even expand that acronym to structural fabulation.

This is the beauty of the SF acronym, in fact, the beauty of the SF Café, that it offers a neutral zone where all the factions can communicate even if they do so in the most argumentative fashion. And as abbreviations go, where Sci-Fi is cringe-inducingly cute and clever, SF is short and snappy, no nonsense, like the utilitarian acronyms of soldiers and businessmen.

That all the writers of a myriad modes and methods are grouped together as SF is an assertion of the indefinable nature of the field. Forget futurology. Forget the rationalist ideal of the logical. Forget the Romantic wonders of the Rocket Age. Forget the 60s and 70s fears of Future Catastrophe. Forget the counterculture of acid visions and sexual revolution. Forget every abandoned zeitgeist. Forget the codified conventions of the puerile pap. Forget the cobbled combinatory systems of plots and characters, settings and themes. Forget those illusions of SF as the innumerable permutations of an ever-changing set of tropes. Or remember them, but remember them all. This is a confusion of contradictions that can only be made sense of by cutting the Gordian Knot, by saying, like Norman Spinrad, that SF is whatever is sold as SF, or like Damon Knight, that it’s what we point to when we use the term.

Paring the label down to these two little figurae, we make it stand for whatever narratives we throw at it; we use the fiction to define the model. It allows for any narrative to be written as SF, because we are applying the label after the fact, saying: this is SF because it can be sold as SF, because it can be bought as SF — not just literally but conceptually, not just purchased but… admitted. In this vector of definition, in fact, the model becomes a method of reading a narrative, any narrative, as SF.

To take one example, we might use this as a way of interpreting THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH, look for a reading of the story as SF. This is a different thing altogether from laying claim to the work as an example of a genre; and it’s entirely possible; we can understand this Sumerian poem of a hero’s journey, in the context of its culture of origin, as embodying the cosmological conceits of his day, the speculations of the Bronze Age rather than the Rocket Age. We can read Enkidu, Humbaba and the scorpion-men as cryptids and sports. We can read the Cedar Forest, the Deluge and the Plant of Immortality as hypothetical exotica of terrestrial deep space. Adding this SFist reading methodology to the arsenal of Marxist and feminist readings might not be worthless; in so far as SF is rooted in fantasia and futurology, an SF reading of a narrative constitutes an interrogation of its dynamics of passion and reason.

*

The Form=Formulation Syllogism

But if this expulsion of meaning is a refusal of constraints, it also disacknowledges any distinction between genre as aesthetic idiom and Genre as conventional form and/or marketing category, collapsing them all together into this empty symbol of SF. It’s little wonder then that others who look at that vacuity see only a signpost to the market where it’s sold, see only the outer decor of the SF Café and its environs, the ghetto of Genre. In accepting that SF’s nature is that of a discrete sub-domain of Genre, in allowing SF to be treated as SF, we invite a logical extrapolation from the common understanding of how marketing categories function, how Genres work, the syllogistic a priori reasoning by which SF is rejected as sub-literate scribbling. The argument that damns us, this Form=Formulation Syllogism runs thus:

1. Genre labels signal that a work conforms to a set of aesthetic criteria prescribed as Genre conventions;
2. These conventions are designed for producing works of a certain stereotypical Genre form;
3. Genre forms have inherent flaws due to their commercial imperatives and counter-literary value-systems;
4. Therefore: works conforming to those conventions will have those flaws;
5. Therefore: works published with Genre labels will have those flaws.

It should be obvious to any SF reader that this is a gross misrepresentation, but judging by some of the talk you hear down in the SF Café I’m not sure it is. So let’s spell it out point by point. This is the essence of the distinction between genre as aesthetic idiom and Genre as conventional form / marketing category:

1. Genre labels signal that a work conforms to a set of aesthetic criteria prescribed as Genre conventions.

No, there are works which get a Genre label without conforming to the conventions. THE TRANSMIGRATION OF TIMOTHY ARCHER is neither a “let’s pretend” adventure nor a “what if” thought-experiment. It has next to nothing of Gernsback’s “charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision” in it, not in the sense of futurology and fantasia. It is not Campbellian Science Fiction by a long shot. And this is not to say that it merely stretches the conventions by applying the Paradigm Shift Caveat to excuse lack of rigour, or by directing its speculation towards the soft sciences. Where it breaks with tradition in utilising religious conceits — transmigration, visions in the irrational revelatory rather than rational predictive sense, etc. — it establishes a new set of aesthetic criteria by integrating those conceits into what is otherwise a work of contemporary realism.

The publication and reading of this work as SF simply expands the zone of indefinition, asserts that however we conceive of this Genre we must now allow for the incorporation of this type of novel. The Genre label signals only this then: that something about a work has been deemed sufficient justification for any adjustments to aesthetic criteria required to accomodate it under that label. Personally, I take this work as proof that sufficient justification may entail no more than a smidgeon of metaphysical strangeness and an author established within the field.

2. These conventions are designed for producing works of a certain stereotypical Genre form.

No, for every reader there’s a personal set of constraints and characteristics they see as sufficient justification to label a work SF. When that reader is also a writer, they may well set out to write a work that reads as SF to them by treating those as a set of aesthetic criteria. While some of these are commercially standardised so that stereotypical Genre forms can be produced to order, but many are not. Some are no more than… the 2D outline of a work’s base, so to speak, with its greater structure entirely freeform. Still others do little more than describe the general contours of the broad terrain on which the work is to be formed.

Compare, in poetry: the conventions of the stereotypical Limerick as a Genre, fun but formulaic; the constraints and characteristics of the sonnet as a genre, based on a shape of fourteen lines and a volta but on any subject, in any tone; and the wildly notional aesthetic criteria of the poem, any work within that vast domain. Similarly, in SF, we have: the conventions of the stereotypical Cyberpunk story, as it stands now; the much wider range of constraints and characteristics back when the genre of cyberpunk was exemplified by the MIRRORSHADES anthology; and the wildly notional aesthetic criteria of SF in general.

Delany’s DHALGREN is not a product of conventions designed for producing works of a certain stereotypical Post-Apocalypse SF form. The ruined cityscape and social collapse of Bellona that lead us to label it post-apocalyptic fiction are at most the contours of its foundation and arguably no more than the gradiant of the territory it inhabits.

3. Genre forms have inherent flaws due to their commercial imperatives and counter-literary value-systems.

This means precisely nothing if the marketing category maps to an aesthetic idiom rather than a conventional form. If a lack of thematic depth is inherent in the form of the Limerick, this is irrelevant as a critique of poetry. If a lack of thematic depth is inherent in the form of the stereotypical Cyberpunk, story this is irrelevant as a critique of SF. So the formulation of Genres leads to works produced to fit standardised aesthetic criteria (e.g. plot-structure, worldscape development and futurological novelty). So commercial imperatives may pressure for a neglect of non-required features such as depth of character and theme, may even embody a counter-literary value-system, preferencing crudely bodged prose that “doesn’t get in the way of the plot” over “style” that foregrounds its own craftedness. Applying only to the Genres contained within the genre’s broad terrain, this is exactly as irrelevant as a critique of SF as a critique of poetry based on the flaws of the Limerick.

4. Works conforming to those conventions will have those flaws.

Again this now means nothing. Works fitting the aesthetic criteria that define the sonnet as a genre need only fourteen lines and a volte. Formulation of a stereotypical Shakespearian Love Sonnets might lead to flaws of neglect (e.g. a lack of originality) and counter-literary value-systems (e.g. saccharine romantic sentiments), but the genre of the sonnet is distinguishable from this Genre precisely by its opposition to formulation, its literary imperatives to exceed minimum requirements, to build a multi-dimensional structure upon that outlined base. Formulation of a stereotypical Cyberpunk within SF may lead to flaws of neglect or counter-literary value-systems, but SF is distinguishable as a genre precisely by its opposition to formulation.

There are many Genres within SF, and many exhibit the flaws that go with formulation: concerns with plot and worldscape built from futurology and fantasia overshadow concerns with character and theme; complexity and subtlety is deprecated as “pretension”. An assertion that SF necessarily has these flaws because it is a Genre are like an assertion that poetry necessarily has the flaws of the stereotypical Shakespearean Love Sonnet, articulating only the ignorance and presumption of the speaker.

5. Works published with Genre labels will have those flaws.

The application of an ignorant and presumptious judgement on the basis of marketing category is not only false and misrepresentative; it’s superficial, quite literally judging a book by its cover (the image, the imprint, the copy and blurbs, the label on the back), reducing a work to the brand image. Countless works within the genre of SF disprove that judgement by counter-example, works by writers such as Aldiss, Ballard, Bradbury, Bester, Butler, Cherryh, Clarke, Delany, Disch, Dick, Ellison, Farmer, Gibson, Harrison, Heinlein, Hopkinson, Jakubowski, Keyes, Le Guin, Lem, Moorcock, Niven, Norton, Orwell, Priest, Russ, Ryman, Spinrad, Sladek, Tiptree, Vinge, Willis, Zelazny.

Not that we really need to list these; the Form=Formulation Syllogism is demonstrably flawed on every count, largely because it fails to differentiate genres from Genres, assuming a universal process of formulation when the reality is the familial development we find as aesthetic criteria are simply adjusted in order to accommodate THE TRANSMIGRATION OF TIMOTHY ARCHER or whatever work is married into the clan, taking this nominal label as its name.

*

Transcending the Genre

Sadly, in our own conflations and confusions we invite these misperceptions by accepting the framework of logic in which “genre” means an aesthetic territory of formulation (as in “genre work”) rather than an aesthetic idiom (as in “the genre of a work”). This ghetto of Genre we ally ourselves with is defined precisely as the region where marketing categories and conventional forms collude to insist on formulation, in contrast to “non-genre” where they do not. Genre fiction versus non-genre fiction? All fiction is in a genre, even if that genre is only the novel or the short story.

When we talk of works as “transcending the genre”, position them as exceptional rather than exemplary, we tacitly accept: that the Genre label indicates some set of aesthetic criteria shared by Genre narratives, sought after by a certain target market; that the commercial impetus of those criteria constrain the form at a deeper level than the constraints of a sonnet, create a limitation of quality; that a narrative needs to circumvent those demands of form not by ignoring them (because then the narrative would cease to be Genre) but by some shift into a more elevated sphere of abstract action. We accept that the idiom we signify with the Genre label is a stereotypical Genre form that has to be transcended in this way.

If transcendence is our metaphor then truly SF is an incorporeal spectre, a ghost, slipped free of the flesh and bone forms long ago.

Of course, the fuzziness of the whole notion is expedient, allowing us to wave a hand towards the aesthetic idiom(s) we like, in the form of a shelf labeled SF, referring to this as genre, while simultaneously waving away the conventional forms we hate, happily referring to these as generic. When an outsider challenges us on this slapdash clumping of works, we might be able to articulate that SF as a marketing label is bound to a set of aesthetic criteria too diverse to pin down with precision, diverse enough that they allow for a “literary SF” with its definition lost somewhere among all the arguments. What we generally fail to articulate is that SF is not a Genre at all, but rather a vast high-level genre made up of myriad idioms and forms, a dynamic family of genres and Genres, the most ambitious and innovative craft wed to and at war with the most formulated and derivative crap.

So it goes.

The ghost haunts the café, animates the lumbering golem of the field in its physical form. The name is sustained in our speech, the inchoate idea reiterated in every sibilant and fricative utterance of SF, because it offers a subtle strand of identity even in its indefinition; it is enough for us, as a community of fiction readers, writers, editors and critics to congregate around. In the spectral apparition and the material shape there is enough rough semblance of Genre that these monsters might frighten the citizenry if they stepped out into the city at large; and both are bound to the SF Café by their shared history anyway, by their loyalty to a beloved heritage. And as long as the SF Café is sustainable as a commercial enterprise, as long as it keeps drawing in the punters with the promise of pulp thrills and spills, the promise of exciting entertainments, of Genre, the ghost and the golem have a home.

I love and am loyal to that home myself — it’s been fucking good to me — but I think it’s always worth being aware of the double-thinks we apply, as when we talk of transcending the genre. The relationship between genre and Genre is a weird balance of symbiosis and mutual parasitism, and it seems to me that our unadmitted recognition of that only leads to bitching about lack of respect on the one hand while, on the other, extolling works with a phrase that damns SF as derivative in its essence. The deal with the devil doesn’t seem… well, that big a deal to me any more. Commercial pressures toward formulation have a corrosive effect on literary quality; but the market for the most conventional forms subsidises the most literate and ambitious aesthetic idioms — works that might well be unpublishable outside the ghetto, without the security of a guaranteed market. The literary imperatives of the whole aesthetic idiom degrade the efficiency of formulaic products with their narrowly-defined utilitarian function as entertainment; but the continual influx of originality counteracts the Law of Diminishing Returns in a set of SFnal Genres where “more of the same” paradoxically means more novelty.

The ghost and the golem could not survive without the SF Café, but without them the SF Café would quickly become an empty shell.

*

The Model and the Machine

A moment. Ghosts, golems — these metaphysical tropes of fantasy are incongruous in a study of SF surely. Ah, well, let’s just employ the Paradigm Shift Caveat here. Let’s hypothesize that the parapsychologists are right, that in the future our empirical observations of some truly strange phenomena forces a radical revision of our physics. No ectoplasm here though, no spiritualist mumbo-jumbo of the soul as some aetheric substance. We’ll call it the Quantum Interconnectedness Principle, say that reality is information and the universe a hologram, that every fragmentary particle of our cosmos contains an image of the whole implicate order, the urgrund.

In the SF Café every patron wears mayashades that reconstruct the urgrund from the fragment-forms immediately perceptible. In part a forensic analysis of reality, in part a data-mining of the urgrund, what is offered is, in essence, a heads-up display of information we could not otherwise have access to. Gaze into the eyes of another patron and the mayashades scroll their thoughts across your vision. Gaze out of the window and the mayashades flash glimpses of the future on the streets outside — a joy-rider ploughing his car into a bus-stop queue you might be standing in five minutes from now. That sort of information is useful, after all; if we had not (hypothetically) developed the technology to access and utilise it we might even (hypothetically) have evolved a natural capacity, some sort of Externalised Simulatory Processing of the world we have to live in, some sort of… “ESP”.

Phil Dick sits in a corner, his mayashades on the blink, showing him the SF Café as a tavern in AD 70, a secret community of Christians hiding from the Roman Empire; his mayashades are communicating an analysis of society in metaphoric form, the ghetto of Genre as the Black Iron Prison of the Gnostics. They flash words in koinos Greek across his vision, a language he cannot know but which these wondrous gadgets can use freely in their access to that urgrund. They offer him a reinterpretation of the world in which he is not Phil the SF writer but Thomas the early Christian. This is not a transmigration of souls, but rather reincarnation as retro-incarnation, as a downloading of the data that defined a long-dead psyche, a simulation of another’s memories.

The ghost of SF is no supernatural spirit, just the simulacrum of an essence, the abstract agency we glimpse as we gaze round the SF Café with our mayashades scanning for hidden meaning, a wireframe model reconstructed in a purely virtual medium. As for the golem? Let’s make the monster a machine, a robot made of muck instead of metal. We’ll say its clay is carbon, the grey goo of nanotech devices, millions of miniscule mechanisms fused into one lumpen mass, given identity in the name projected onto it, SF as its logos and its logic.

Hey presto! Magic becomes science. Fantasy becomes SF.

For the benefit of this who care about that shit, you know.

*

Genre and the Generic

It’s not that hard to see SF’s relationship with Genre, I think, to critique it with clarity and objectivity, picking out juvenile tropes and themes from adult treatments — as Spinrad does, say, in his classic “Emperor Of Everything” article, showing Bester’s smart and mature inversion of the heroic rags-to-riches power fantasy in THE STARS MY DESTINATION. But resisting critical analyses that recognise the aesthetic idiom for what it is makes it easier to excuse generic twaddle such as The Matrix or Independence Day, to forget why these are twaddle because, well, they’re enjoyable twaddle. Both are juvenile. Both are formulaic. Both are Genre in precisely the way that the Form=Formulation Syllogism damns it. We only need to compare them to, say, Gibson’s NEUROMANCER or Stephenson’s SNOW CRASH — to pick two works that are hardly lacking in the good old-fashioned plot-driven dynamics of the thriller or action/adventure genres they inhabit — to judge them pretty much derivative hokum. But if we like these two movies and hate another two — Minority Report or War of the Worlds — we can simply wave our hands, say that the former are genre, the latter generic.

This distinction between genre and generic is a wonderfully expedient sophistry. Both “genre fiction,” as we all too often use the term, and generic fiction are defined by the familiarity of their forms; more, they are fictions which exploit that familiarity. What they offer the reader, we say, what the reader requires of them, is a narrative composed of conventional elements — plots and characters, settings and themes. There may be originality in the treatment, but too much originality, not enough familiarity, and that novel ceases to be generic; it ceases to be genre. Or at least, this is the conventional wisdom — that it’s all a matter of conventions. The marketing categories have become ghettoised as Genre because the Genres bound to them exist to be generic in this way, to provide the reader with “more of the same”, all gathered together in one place, under a certain branding.

But, of course, what we have is all this fiction gathered together under that branding, the works that we love because they’re genre but not generic. And the ones we hate because they’re generic, reviling them even to the extent sometimes of denying that they’re really SF, refusing to recognise them as being valid examples of the genre on the basis that they’re too generic. In contrast to the canon of definitive works that we describe as transcending the genre.

Run that by me again?

Personally, I think I’d like to see the word “genre” die if it’s going to be overloaded with meanings and skewed to double-thinking purposes. Even Campbellian Science Fiction might be best not considered a Genre if that’s going to tangle us up in the morass of genre and the generic. Its key stricture of futurology works more like the arbitrary constraint of an Oulipo writer than the conventions of form that mark out fiction as generic. Where Gernsback’s definition sets out distinctly standardised aesthetic criteria in requiring the plot structures of Romantic adventure, Campbell’s allows for entirely non-generic plot-structures as long as the fiction employs this strange Oulipo-style constraint of grounding its fantasia in futurology.

And as for the ghost and the golem, the model and the machine, the stuff that’s out there now? As for SF, or speculative fiction, or whatever you want to call it? Construct the narrative with MacGuffin devices and stock plots, and the SF novel or story may become generic, as much SF undeniably is. There is a mode of Epic SF which all too closely parallels Epic Fantasy with its exotic settings, noble heroes, quests as archetypal psychodrama, more Joseph Campbell than John W. Campbell. But SF as a whole, which delights in offering unfamiliar forms… is it really generic enough that we’re happy to call it a “genre,” when to do so is inevitably to call it Genre — cause it’s not like the bolding and capitalisation I’m using here works in speech? Bearing in mind that every time we dismiss some formulaic dreck as generic or extoll the latest masterpiece with the rhetoric of transcendence we’re reifying the notion of genre at the heart of the Form=Formulation Syllogism?

Fuck, if only “aesthetic idiom” didn’t sound so damn poncy.

Thing is, if we examine other marketing categories — Crime, Western, Romance — it seems SF is not alone in being essentially an openly defined aesthetic idiom damned by the formulation it’s inextricably bound to. Crime, for one, is in a similar position to SF, with as much originality twisting and tearing at its orthodoxy of familiar tropes and tricks. All these marketing categories have their deconstructions and subversions, parodies and pastiches, reinventions and restorations, non-generic works that might be better understood as Anti-Genre in so far as their categorical imperative is to bring something new into the family, to force the adjustment of aesthetic criteria required to accommodate them and thereby counteract the impulse to formulation. It’s the paradox of the ghetto of Genre, that the canonical works are exemplary because they are exceptional, not just another iteration of THE MACGUFFIN DEVICE, but rather, like THE TRANSMIGRATION OF TIMOTHY ARCHER, freaks and sports.

*

A Fabulous Formless Starkness

But holding fast under a flag of pedantry in which genre means simply family, trying to unravel the conflations of aesthetic idiom, conventional forms and marketing categories that make the word, in a phrase like “genre fiction” synonymous with formulaic, seems to be pissing in the wind. For all that the term genre might be applied to an aesthetic idiom as openly defined as the novel, for all that it may be applied, as a label slapped on a book shelf, to a marketing category that amounts to little more than “that stuff over there, that stuff I’m pointing to,” I’m not sure we can redeem it from the abjection by which it is applied to that which is most commercially conventional and conventionally commercial, that which is Genre rather than Literature. So fuck it.

From here on in, in these columns, when I talk of SF, I’m talking of a field and the various forces that comprise it. I’m talking of SF as a mode of fiction, an approach in fiction, a telling of tall tales with strange elements, where those elements are integral to the dynamics of the story, where the process of the story is generated from the strangeness of the idea, where the story is an event enacting strangeness. This is SF not as a singular form but as, at best, a loose federation of forms, a field so diverse that you can throw a hundred different definitions at it and none of them will stick. All genre definitions will fail, I think, because they attempt to describe the field as this form or that, and all those forms are actually, I’d argue — even the most conventional — better understood as forces, the illusion of delimitation (in terms of plot and character, setting and theme) ultimately a trick of perspective, these types and tropes of “genres” and “subgenres” mere snapshots of whorls in cigarette smoke, emergent from and embedded in a wider process: carving the fabulous in the reader’s mind in an experience as sharply-defined as the “genre” is inchoate. This is SF as a fabulous formless starkness of effect(s), bound only to an acronym that acknowledges its own emptiness of meaning in its rejection of specificity.

If the field is as definitionally circular as Spinrad’s statement asserts it to be, this seems only right; the empty signifier of SF is far more apt as a label than science fiction. As Cheney said in his Strange Horizons article, quoted in the first of these columns, the genre of science fiction no longer exists. As we have declared right here, Science Fiction is dead.

SF, on the other hand, seems to be alive and well — for a ghost.

Or maybe it’s not a ghost at all. Maybe that simulacrum of an essence we see as we gaze through our mayashades at the SF Café, that wireframe model of an abstract agency… maybe it really only wore the skin of Science Fiction the same way it now wears the golem’s clay. Maybe it was there all the time, this field of forces, and simply took that form as a response to the time and place.

But that’s a topic for another column.

The Scalpel and the Cigarette

“In fact, one good working definition of science fiction may be the literature which, growing with science and technology, evaluates it and relates it meaningfully to the rest of human existence.”
H. Bruce Franklin

When you watch enough of the daily dogfights down in the SF Café, you can get a bit jaded with it all. It’s science fiction versus Science Fiction versus Sci-Fi versus science fiction versus Fantasy versus fantasy — and all of these labels simply tags on one collar of a single Hydra-headed hound, our rabid Cerberus unbound, trying to rip its own throat(s) open. And all too often it’s the same fight underneath it all; clear away the rhetoric (e.g. “magic” and “science”) and what you find is Romanticism and Rationalism going at it yet again, the ideal of the sublime versus the ideal of the logical.

Was a time when they were partners, and they still tag team occasionally, to be sure, but the old alliance of fantasia and futurology, that Rationalist Romance of Science Fiction? Its spectre may still haunt our favourite… well, haunt, but the coherence of a Campbellian closed definition has been shattered. Where we might once have pinned the term science fiction to a conventional form in which fantasia and futurology were partners, the term now applies to a discourse far better characterised by the conflicts of these two than by their alliance. And the dialectic of Romanticism and Rationalism is so engrained in the discourse, in fact, we sometimes talk as if no other aesthetics even exist, as if there is only this binary choice: the sword or the spectacles.

The reality is far more gnarly though, because while Romanticism and Rationalism square up against each other in mutual hostility, each has… another opposite. Where one sets Passion against Reason, and the other sets Reason against Passion, there are aesthetics which refuse to play that game, twistier approaches, strategies that set reason against Reason, passion against Passion. Every so often those dogfights take an interesting turn when the aesthetic of the logical finds itself up against the aesthetic of the absurd, or the aesthetic of the sublime comes up against the aesthetic of the domestic, those two twisty aesthetics being basically the fifth columns of intellectualism and sensationalism, out to rip them apart from the inside.

The absurd is not the fantastic as many think of it, see; it’s not about the wow factor of the weird. Nor is the domestic about social realism as we might consider it, in terms of observational objectivity. The aesthetic of the absurd we find in Kafka or Pinter is not the sensationalism of the Romantics, but Rationalism turned against itself, a cold blooded murder/suicide of reason. No tawdry melodramas play in the operating theatre of cruelty; there are no frilly cuffs here, just surgical gloves. Where Romanticism wields the strange, the impossible, as a sword in a hero’s hand, for the surrealist it is a scalpel with which to dissect the psyche. Likewise, the aesthetic of the domestic we find in Dickens or Calvino is not the intellectualism of the Rationalist, but Romanticism turned against itself, a devouring of fancy, the impassioned assault on imaginative fripperies that begins where the soulful scribbler knows in their heart that what really matters is the cigarette in your hand, lit by a stranger outside a bar, or lit by a friend outside a funeral home.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend, as they say, and it’s no different here in the SF Café. Those dogfights sometimes take an interesting turn when the sword and the scalpel pair up against the spectacles, or the spectacles and cigarette piar up against the sword. To put a grossly superficial gloss on it, we could say that the two warring clans, the Campbells and the Macdonalds of Science Fiction and Fantasy, sometimes find strange bedfellows in the black sheep of each other’s families. The intellectualists find themselves fighting side-by-side with realists who might hold little faith in Reason, who might have little real respect for the mechanistic process of logic, but who despise the grandiose glamours for perverting honest passion. The sensationalists find themselves fighting back-to-back with surrealists who might hold little faith in Passion, who might have little actual interest in the emotional dynamics of the sublime, but who reject wholesale dogmatic meta-narratives that deny disorder rather than investigating it.

The point is, of course, for those who want to fit everything into a neat dichotomy of Reason versus Passion, these twistier aesthetics fuck with that, fighting on the wrong side goddamnit, ruining the taxonomic purity. In the SF Café, the cigarette is all about the sensation of smoking, not the science, and the scalpel is wielded by writers who believe in Godel, not gods.

But even that is, as I say, a grossly superficial gloss. If you look around the SF Café what you see is actually a whole lot of writers and readers with a cigarette in one hand and a scalpel in the other. Thing is, these two aesthetics are not opposed to each other, do not cast themselves as opponents locked in mortal combat. So with this writer the domestic becomes a key concern as they spurn the dishonest passion of Romanticism. So with that writer the absurd is employed to attack the inflexible unreason of Rationalism. Neither strategy entails a rejection of the other, so those two writers need not see each other as their hated foe. They may well be the same writer, the sort of obstinate, opinionated, downright thrawn motherfucker who looks at the aesthetic of the sublime and the aesthetic of the logical — and the whole tawdry turf war they’ve had going for two centuries or more — and sees them both as failing to do justice to the passion and the reason they idealise.

And that’s where it gets really interesting, I think.

*

If I Bring Back the Ashtray…

It’s those thrawn motherfuckers I see when I look at science fiction. Sure, there’s the Campbellian closed definition of Science Fiction that was, in essence, a sort of Rationalist Romanticism. And now there’s the schism between those two aesthetics that plays out in endless teacup tempests where one is set against the other. But looking into that gaping rift reveals the true core of the field as pulp modernism, I think, even from its earliest days. In many of the canonical novels or short stories of this field of strange fictions, what we see is not futurological fantasia, not an adventure with the sublime bound within a logical rationale, but rather writers striving to balance the sublime with the domestic and/or to violate the logical with the absurd. I’m not talking about the New Wave here, mind — Ballard’s catastrophe worlds of banality riven by the irrational or Moorcock’s non-linear narratives of Jerry Cornelius degrading the hero to a spotty adolescent in a London flat. Not yet, at least. I’m talking about Bradbury’s “The Veldt,” published in 1950, a tale as domestic as you can get and one where the irrational irrupts out of a viewscreen with all the scientific rigor of Freddy Krueger. It eats the main characters.

Yes, down in the SF Café, in the ghetto of Genre, there is, always has been, and probably always will be an audience looking for “more of the same,” where “the same” is basically a Campbellian Science Fiction. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But in this “literature of ideas”, born from the fusion of the intellectual and the sensational, futurology and fantasia, originality is an imperative that’s been countering formulation from the start, novel or stories prized for having their own killer concept as a Unique Selling Point. And that means — has always meant — a sort of evolutionary pressure for novels or stories in this idiom to offer not “more of the same” but “something different”, a pressure that doesn’t sit well with any closed definition.

For all the fiction designed to cosset the reader in conventions, that pressure within the field supported — if not demanded — a more exploratory fiction, one which sought to challenge the reader with subversions and outright breaches of those same conventions, which strove to serve as more than just consolatory fantasia and/or compelling futurology. The aesthetics of the domestic and of the absurd are only to be expected as emergent features of a genre focused on the sublime and the logical but one where “transcends the genre” has been code for “what we want to read” since forever. I seem to recall hearing somewhere that the cover of an early edition of Bester’s THE DEMOLISHED MAN sports that plaudit in its copy. Or possibly THE STARS MY DESTINATION. Admittedly this is a titbit snatched from a faulty memory of a casual conversation that took place in the SF Café sometime… well, more than a minute ago. Anyway… over the decades, writers pushed the envelope continuously in a quest for novelty, carrying on into new territories, constantly challenging and overturning Genre cliches, turning their tricks to satire (c.f. Frederick Pohl & Cyril Kornbluth or John Sladek), to semiotics (Samuel R. Delany), to whatever idiosyncratic interest they wanted to explore.

For a prime example of how orthodox this unorthodoxy is, how inadequate a simple closed definition in terms of fantasia and futurology is, we need only look at the late fiction of Philip K Dick, where the domestic and the absurd are often far more important than any sense of either the sublime or the logical. Asimov, Heinlein and Clarke may have been the Big Three who ruled the pantheon of pros back in the day. Hell, even for a kid coming to science fiction in the early 80s it was those three who benchmarked my entry-level experience of the field — Asimov’s I, ROBOT the first proper sf novel I read, Heinlein the first writer I obsessively collected, Clarke’s 2061 the book that revealed to me the Law of Diminishing Returns. But Dick is the Dionysus to their Zeus, Poseidon and Hades, and it’s his wild rites many are pointing to when they talk about science fiction. See VALIS or THE TRANSMIGRATION OF TIMOTHY ARCHER for science fiction which is neither Romanticist nor Rationalist at all, not remotely. On the back of my copy of VALIS, a simple quote from the book reads, “If I bring back the ashtray, can I have my prefrontal?” That’s the cigarette and the scalpel in action right there.

If this type of science fiction focuses on science, it is to use it as a metaphor, a mechanism through which to explore humanity and modernity. The questions that concerned Dick were not scientific but philosophical: what it is to be real; what it is to be human. Science, for Dick, is only one of the many forces which reshape the world into the strangeness of what might as well be a waking dream. While Thomas Disch was pointing accusingly at the fantasia of the futurology when he titled his book of essays on science fiction, THE DREAMS OUR STUFF IS MADE OF, we can point to Dick as an emblem of another sort of dreams we might be dealing with, in his 60s suburban worldscapes ruptured by psychotic breakdowns of reality itself. These aren’t fantasias of flight, but freaky visions of finding the kiosk you were buying a hot dog from replaced by a slip of paper with the word kiosk on it. Disch’s own “Descending” is a similar blend of the mundane and the irrational, as are many of Ellison’s short stories, “Repent, Harlequin, Said the Tik-Tok-Man,” for example, (and of course Bradbury’s,) but where a dedicated Science Fiction partisan might mutter about all those Twilight Zone style fictions being “really horror,” Dick’s fiction is as often as not more strange than uncanny, not frightening so much as just plain weird.

The point is, Dick’s animatronic presidents and AI suitcases, ersatz realities and government conspiracies are less about plausible wonders than they are about the paranoia and neurosis inspired by the late 20th century, the era of McCarthy and Nixon, the Communist Witch-Hunt and the Sexual Revolution, Vietnam and Watergate… and serious drugs of course. And he was far from alone, in the SF Café, in following the cultural shift from Rocket Age rapture through the Cuban Missile Crisis of the soul towards a Cold War detente of the banal and the bizarre. It was in this context, where the concerns were less the material aspects of technology and more the abstract potentials of modernity for good or ill — if not the strange actualities of modernity itself, the futureshock of living in the present — that the term speculative fiction began to be taken up.

Note the absence of capitals, by the way.

*

The Solidity of the Stuff

Ask anyone in the SF Café what science is, and many will tell you it’s a method, an approach, but just as many will, in all probability, describe it as products rather than process, as stuff. Maybe they’ll describe it as a domain of knowledge, as the facts and principles accrued within that domain. Maybe they’ll point to the theories and experiments, the sundry instances of the scientific method in action. Or maybe they’ll just hold up some technological doohickey forged in the application of those theoretical principles and experimental procedures. Hey, man, check out my new iRobot! Now that’s what I call science!

There’s always been a tendency for the science in Science Fiction to focus on the latter, on the gadgetry and gimcracks, but this is not really surprising. The futurological fantasias the label was slapped on were largely structured round conceits that this or that technical impossibility had been rendered possible in some fictive elsewhere and/or elsewhen, in Outer Space and/or the Future. The literary device that Darko Suvin terms the novum, the unit of novelty written into the narrative for the protagonist (and by proxy the reader) to confront, is essentially a fancy of a techne that does not exist, (not yet, not quite.) It is the imaginary technique which does what cannot actually be done, not here and now. It’s only natural for that mechanism to be figurated in the fiction as a mechanism in the concrete sense: where the impetus to Romantic adventure creates a pressure for that conceit to function as a MacGuffin, a Maltese Falcon style plot device, well, a physical object is much easier to fight over; and even where conceits were offered as more than just the basis of “let’s pretend” fun, where there’s an intellectual game of playing through the “what if” scenario in action, where working the conceit has become an end in and of itself, anchoring that conceit in an object offers the reader a focal point. The solidity of stuff is useful, and so writers of Science Fiction turned to robots and aliens the way another writer might turn to, say, cigarettes and scalpels.

Still, the substitution of speculative for science is more accurate even at this level, because the novum is not science, no more than the erratum of Alt History — the historical impossibility to science fiction’s technical impossibility — is history. Those two Genres are characterised by the liberties they take with the domains of knowledge they play around in. There is a historical fiction which does not emply errata, but this is a quite distinct idiom from that of alternate history. We can easily imagine a scientific fiction which does not employ nova, one which instead utilises actual science the way war fiction utilises war; but this just isn’t what we point to when we say science fiction. We’re not dealing with facts but with conceits. A cloned alien brain in a robotic body is not science but fancy, however arguable we consider its (meta)physical possibility. It’s a conjecture, a speculation that tickles our “Cool!” response precisely because it breaches the mundane reality of what is technically possible. Calling it speculative fiction makes more sense, right?

But the substitution of speculative for science also reflects a logical development of the novum itself, from the concrete to the abstract, from the mechanisms of unobtanium cogs, handwavium gears and spuriotronic circuits to the mechanisms of individuals and societies. The Campbellian closed definition of Science Fiction explicitly excluded “[s]ociology, psychology, and para-psychology” as “not true sciences”, but if the most instantly recogniseable nova of the fictions were (and probably always will be) physical objects — Heinlein’s dilating door, Bradbury’s nursery with viewscreens for walls — the writers were often just as interested in the invented social structures that went with them. The group marriages of THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS, the “firemen” of FAHRENHEIT 451 — ironically, if science fiction can be said to actually use real science, it is the soft sciences it employs more than anything, attempting to apply real principles of psychology and sociology to model the impact of a conceit on humanity, how we could respond to what could not actually happen.

To talk of speculative fiction rather than science fiction is to shift the focus from the solidity of the stuff to the impact of that stuff on humanity, from the mechanics of gadgets and gimcracks to the dynamics of psyches and societies. If we might tend to think of science in terms of its products, speculation is explicitly a process, and so the word serves as a banner of intent. This is about working the conceit, it says. And again, it seems a natural evolution for this approach to turn inwards. Working the conceit had become a core concern of Science Fiction with its Rationalist hat on, and even with Campbell dismissing the soft sciences, the field was quite open to conceits wherein humanity was not just confronted with concrete nova but directly altered by them, not just biologically (Frederick Pohl’s MAN PLUS), but psychologically (Theodore Sturgeon’s MORE THAN HUMAN), intellectually (Daniel Keyes’s FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON), linguistically (Samuel R. Delany’s BABEL-17). Through conceits of biological evolution and chemical augmentation, writers side-stepped Campbell’s strictures (which weren’t exactly the Word of God anyway, not in a field where Horace Gold was publishing Bester’s tales of ESPers and jaunting,) and got their teeth into science as soft as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. The questions being asked in those four books — all sitting on my shelf in the Gollancz Classics editions from the 80s as core members of the canon — are questions of identity, of the relationships of human beings to themselves, to each other, and to the world around them.

These are not “what if” stories but “what is” stories. What is reality? What is society? What is humanity?

And slowly but surely they approached the question, What is fiction?

*

Fusion Cuisine in the SF Café

“Science fiction is the search for a definition of man and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science), and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or post-Gothic mould.”
Brian Aldiss

In the SF Café, the beatniks had moved in, poncy artists and pretentious intellectuals, poets and (post)modernists, God bless em. The very sciences that Campbell excluded — sociology and psychology — were at the core of their interests. And when it came to literary aspirations, they saw no reason why science fiction should be any less innovative, any less rich than the mainstream in terms of style and form. It wasn’t just that they wanted all day breakfasts with eggs-over-easy instead of a burger and fries; they wanted Eggs Benedict. They didn’t want a Diet Coke; they wanted an espresso so black and so strong it blew the roof of your head off. Screw the sugar rush and the fatty satiation of comfort food; they wanted you to feel the jitters of a caffeine overload along with the exquisite tang of a perfect Hollandaise sauce. They refused to recognise (or recognised as irrelevant) the territorial politics of rival aesthetics. The sublime, the logical, the domestic, the absurd — these were just the salt, sweet, sour and bitter flavours to be thrown into the mix, and fuck any purist’s proscriptions and prescriptions that set one against another, forbid miscegenations. If fiction is food, they wanted to be eating and cooking the finest fusion cuisine.

One could say that in zeroing in on the desire for “something different”, on novelty as a key ingredient, these writers were simply reinventing the Genre of Science Fiction each time they “transcended” it, keeping the conventions under constant revision. One could equally say that they were creating exemplary (rather than exceptional) works within an idiom predicated on change by manifesting that change in the idiom itself, in an act of recursion. Either way, in a subculture of writers looking for that “something different,” it was only a matter of time before that search progressed to the next level, before those writers began to search for, find and offer “difference” in the very language and structure of the narrative itself.

So soon there was Delany’s DHALGREN, Moorcock’s CORNELIUS QUARTET, Vonnegut’s SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE. There was Aldiss and Ballard and Crowley and Disch and Ellison and Farmer and so on, some more experimental than others, but all of them bringing their own new twists to the form — looped and fractured narrative, metafictional and intertextual narrative. It is difficult to think of a more (post)modern project in any of the arts than that of speculative fiction where it turns its gaze upon itself in this way. Genre is inherently self-aware in its impulse towards formulation, its recognition of story as the unifying agency of a narrative; it is continually exploring its own boundaries, reifying or reshaping them. But this speculative fiction was not simply self-aware but self-critical, analysing itself, re-evaluating the relationships between story and narrative, deconstructing and reconstructing its own nature from first principles.

The pastiche of Genre found in the work of Moorcock or Farmer is not simply referential play; it is speculation as to the nature of fiction itself. And without the cop-out of ironic distance, this (post)modernism spits on the high-art / low-art distinction with a sincerity few in the ivory towers ever really had the balls to emulate. Here, or in Delany’s THE EINSTEIN INTERSECTION, we have a fiction which takes fiction as its experimental subject, its focus of conjecture. How, it asks, are we ourselves made by the stories we make, by the language in which those stories are told, the semiotics and semantics? This was fiction tearing itself apart to understand how it worked, how all narrative worked, including those narratives of identity we call human beings. If it inhabited worlds and cities shattered by catastrophes — real or imagined, Dresdens or Bellonas — no doubt much of this was a mark of the turbulent times the fiction was born in, but more than anything else this is, I think, a marker of… the alterior perspective at the heart of this fiction, a clearing away of artificed structures (which is to say strictures) in order to expose the dynamics of deeper connections.

In the SF Café, in the ghetto of Genre, in the City of Writing, a trap door had been discovered. In the cellar that it led to was a door, and beyond that door a system of secret tunnels — subways and sewer that led throughout the city and beyond it, across the nation of Art, around the entire world of Culture. Those who discovered those tunnels, who used them, realised that being part of a subculture did not simply mean being a member of some component culture within the system as a whole, a community sealed off by its boundaries of identity, walled-in within a ghetto. Rather a subculture was that which existed beneath the culture as a whole, permeating it as a mycelial network of interstices. That subculture might reflect the culture in negative (an oppositional counter-culture), as the sewers of Paris map precisely to the streets above, or it might be completely different (an entirely alternative culture), as the tube in London links the nodes of places in a pattern utterly unlike the streets above. Either way, the underground discovered by speculative fiction linked all the important points in this world of Culture into one big system that could be explored freely at this level without concern for the territorial politics at street-level.

The walls of the ghetto of Genre meant fuck all. A writer could go anywhere they fucking wanted, and they did. For the spelunkers of speculative fiction every corner of the city of Writing was fair game. And in those tunnels they found the power cables and gas pipes of words and images that linked it all, the linguistic innards of this living thing. They found kindred spirits in potholers who lived in the uptown district of Literature, the Burroughses and Burgesses who explored “our” terrain as we explored “theirs,” these gourmet chefs who were checking out the menu in the SF Café and going home to cook up their own fusion food in their own bistros, serving up a cold buffet of a naked lunch, duck a la clockwork orange. The writers of Genre shook hands with them in the urban netherworld, under the eldritch glow of biophosphorescent slime that seeped through cracks in ancient brick walls. Together they built mechanical minotaurs whose hollow roars echoed all through the underground, audible even on the surface to some passer-by standing near a ventilation shaft. The mushrooms that grew down there became a staple on the menu of the SF Café.

But if they wandered far and wide, the Young Turks of speculative fiction did keep returning to the SF Café to tell their tales. It was their home. In the Bistro de Critique, in the uptown district of Literature, stuffed shirts still baulked at the strangeness offered by those (post)modern compatriots, reviled it as obscene pornography or revered it as intellectual play, declawing it with concepts like “irony”, rendering it safe by herding it off towards the Temple of Academia. In the ghetto of Genre, the writers lived free of the constraints of decency and decorum. In the ghetto of Genre, anything goes, man. When you live in the gutter it doesn’t matter if you’re filthy.

In theory anyway.

*

The Surrender to the Spectre

It is ironic that where Heinlein’s coinage of the term speculative fiction was intended as a better specification of the form, a marker of the extrapolative rather than technological focus of the genre (i.e. requiring the act of extrapolation rather than the mere presence of science-based conceits and plot devices), it has been adopted largely as a descriptor for the field at its most inchoate, used as a default term for works defying easy categorisation within the tribalist rhetorics that stand in place of any coherent taxonomy. But in this explorative fiction-of-science, this experimental science-of-fiction, this innovative fiction-as-science, it seems apt as a reaction to the ossifying conflict of territorial nonsenses, as a rejection of the whole tired discourse of science fiction versus Science Fiction versus Sci-Fi versus science fiction versus Fantasy versus fantasy. It’s what the doohickey does that matters, not whether it comes under the heading of gadget or gimcrack.

Is it science fiction, fantasy or horror? someone asks a speculative fiction writer.

Well, yes, answers the speculative fiction writer.

For all that this answer is apparently unacceptable to some turf war partisans in the SF Café, it is largely their insistence on closed definitions of these idioms as Genres that makes it inevitable. Lurking in that label is a recognition that this fiction has, as far as many are concerned, stepped beyond the conventions of Science Fiction in a fundamental way. Aesthetically, the Young Turks of the New Wave were at odds with the most traditional aspects of the field and quite aware of it, as the title of Ellison’s DANGEROUS VISIONS anthologies makes clear. But rather than argue with the reactionary writers and readers still seeking to bind science fiction to the closed definition of Science Fiction, the radicals of the New Wave in the USA simply adopted Heinlein’s monicker and made it their own. And in so far as their chosen term has come to signify a broad genre of fantastic fictions, the superset, in fact, of all the inextricably interpenetrating fantastic genres, they have largely succeeded in establishing their less restrictive model.

Still, when I look back for a branch-point, I see a long history of narratives that had ceased to be futurological fantasias even long before the New Wave. I see writers offering novelty as a source of futureshock rather than sense-of-wonder, conjecturing on the basis of angst rather than argument; I see writers for whom the aesthetics of the sublime and the logical are largely irrelevant as they work on projects quite at odds with Romanticist and Rationalist agendas — Delany’s DHALGREN, Moorcock’s CORNELIUS QUARTET, Vonnegut’s SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE. I see Zelazny’s ROADMARKS, Silverberg’s THE BOOK OF SKULLS. But when you’re faced with those who predicate Science Fiction on the abjection of Fantasy and/or Sci-Fi, to point to these sort of projects and their core qualities and say, this is science fiction, can be a fast route to a flamewar.

No, that’s “really” fantasy. No, that’s “really” horror.

It seldom seems worth arguing.

As I see it? The estrangement effect of the novum is powerful, and it is not limited to the dread or desire that might slide a story over some imaginary border, “out of” science fiction and “into” horror or fantasy. We’re talking about conceits that can provide the foundations for tragedy or comedy as easily as for a Romantic adventure or a Rationalist thought-experiment — or for the sort of satire that is both tragedy and comedy, as where the dark absurdities of Vonnegut’s CAT”S CRADLE belong with Heller’s CATCH-22 more than with Heinlein’s SPACE CADET or Asimov’s FOUNDATION. Where those nova function — as any conceit may — as the vehicles of metaphor and metonym, we begin to deal, in fact, with the figuration of modernity in all its strangeness. Whatever label we apply to this fiction, I see in it a staggering range of narrative grammars and an openness to using all the various flavours of conceits, not just technical and historical impossibilities but metaphysical and logical impossibilities too. If that flexibility isn’t allowed in your Science Fiction, well, maybe another name is a good idea.

Down in the SF Café, of course, this is when the double-bind of the territorial rhetoric kicks in. To many speculative fiction seems a coy and euphemistic evasion, a craven attempt to gain literary credibility by distancing one’s work from Genre… and hence a betrayal of one’s ghetto comrades in favour of the dreaded literary elite. In all honesty, this may not be entirely unfair; many of the more literate writers who adopted the label made no bones about the taint of trash that they were trying to escape, their disdain of the generic product that defines the field not just to the outside world but even in the community of uncritical devotees. Through the act of abstraction denoted, speculative fiction signifies an intellect and intellectualism divorced from the dirty physicality of science, from any slack-jawed wonder at gadgets and gimcracks. It claims a cerebral rather than visceral effect, adopts an attitude of aloofness to the very Genre it resides within. As much as it might denote the entire field of science fiction, fantasy and horror, it also connotes (or signals oneself to be a member of) a specific subset of that field — that which has “literary aspirations.”

But I can’t say this strikes me as a mortal sin. One thing to bear in mind, I’d say: this is not an act of abjection as that meted out to Fantasy and Sci-Fi. If there’s a rejection of that which is a part of oneself, a recoiling from the generic, it is not a marginalisation of that formulaic product as alterity, as other. On the contrary, this is a redefinition of self as alterity, as other. Rather than fight a losing struggle against commercialism and conservatism, rather than battle for the broken banner of science fiction, for the right to carry an empty label and claim proudly, we are it! while expelling the Enemy as something else, it seems to me that many of the New Wave and their inheritors, to all intents and purposes, simply shrugged and walked away. As a marker more of literary intent than of aesthetic form, the term speculative fiction was and is a disavowal of the dross, but this reunciation was and is more surrender than betrayal.

If anything it is the desolate retreat of the defeated in the face of intransigent animosity, the abandonment of science fiction to the reactionary. It is the slow trudge of the refugees of speculative fiction down into the tunnels beneath the city, leaving the SF Café to its taxonomic turf wars, surrendering it to that hoary spectre of Science Fiction that haunts it still, rattling the shackles of its closed definition angrily as the dogfights rage on.

So it goes, as a wise man once said.

The Autonomous Archipelago of Åthorland

It was Friday night in the city of Writing when the shit hit the fan. I didn’t make it down to the SF Café myself till Saturday afternoon or so, having been off at a gig that Friday night; so when I finally stumbled in, somewhat worse for wear, to grab my daily brunch of coffee and a cigarette over the Twitter Gazette, the kerfuffle was already in full swing.  It’s war! people were saying. War! The neighbouring states of Amazonia and Macmilland have gone to war! Even the poor citizens of Åthorland have been dragged into it, much to their chagrin! Chagrined? They were downright pissed, those Åthorlanders. Since there’s a rather sizeable contingent of them who hang out at the SF Café, it was hard not to notice their impassioned speeches from their counter stool pulpits, the conversations going on in the booths.

For those of you who don’t know, the tiny autonomous archipelago of Åthorland lies off the coast of this fair nation of Art. Just a spattering of craggy islands, it is, each with little more than a stony croft inhabited by a wild-eyed Åthor, with only their herd of kittens for company and inspiration. Each Åthor is a creative anchorite, you see, hoping to scrape a living for themself through their strange cottage industry — which we’ll come to in a minute. Most fail to do so, in truth, subsidising their… well… survival with summer-jobs as barnacle polishers or starfish attendants. A few  manage to scrape by without this additional income to bring them up to the breadline. A tiny few — like Good King Stephen, for example, or the renowned Jakie Rowling — make such a success of it that the fame of their wealth spreads around the world; but their coral palaces and caviar-and-cocaine banquets are a far cry from the pitiable poverty of most Åthors, huddling in their stone-built shacks, living off the bacon harvested from their cats, drowning their sorrows in alcohol and (occasionally) the odd hit of of the hard drug they call kudos. Still, they’re a hardy people, the Åthors, and downright thrawn in their commitment to the Åthorlandish craft of kitten hair rug design.

This is the primary industry of Åthorland. If the islands of the archipelago can be a little barren, to say the least, what they do have going for them is the wealth of strange shellfish to be gathered from the beaches, or prised from the rocks; for from the ground shells of these crustaceans and molluscs come the myriad of powders with which the kitten-hair yarn spun from their looms can be dyed in every colour imaginable… and then some. It’s not perhaps the most practical skill, granted, but it’s certainly unique, the way these Åthors seem able to invent wholly new shades — and just when the rest of us least expect it, when we’ve convinced ourselves that we’ve seen every shade of blue under the sun, even that one Hume was so bothered about. In and of itself, that would be… a nice feat but not terribly commercial, but it’s what they do with all those threads of many colours that’s important, weaving them into intricate patterns that make the Persians look like amateurs, every kitten hair rug a weaveworld one can virtually walk in never mind on.

Back in the old days, so it’s said, every summer, the Åthors would come over to the mainland in their coracles, and hike from city to city. Arriving in the agora of each, they’d find a corner and spread their exquisite artifices upon the dusty ground, taking a groat or two (or more) from any who wished to tread that kitten-soft fur between their toes, to gaze into the whirling curlicues and lose themselves in the articulation of sensation for half an hour, an hour, a day, a week. Rich lords would act as patrons, buying rugs to furnish their marble floors, relishing the chance to walk on them any time they wished, sometimes appreciating them more each time they did so, sometimes becoming bored with the repeat experience. So it goes.  This was long ago though, and now one doesn’t even have to be a rich lord to experience the joy of an Åthorlandish kitten hair rug. In each of the continental principalities or kingdoms within a day or so sailing of Åthorland, a mass weaving industry has emerged. So, in the summer, instead of traveling from market to market, the Åthors cart their wares from manufactory to manufactory, hoping to sell the kitten hair rug they have hand-crafted, thread by thread, as a prototype — or to license its design, to be more accurate, for mass-production.

*

From Prototype to Product

This is where the Kingdom of Macmilland comes in. There are a handful of others, but they’re not important here; all you need know is that each of these little sovereign territories stands proud as a Phoenician city-state and every bit as mercantile (and often, yes, every bit as mercenary because of that). To say that kitten hair rugs are Macmilland’s major export doesn’t do it justice. In each nation — Macmilland, Hachettia or wherever — the weaving industry is nationalised. Trade and Industry, Church and State, all are bound together into a great metropolis of a corporate entity, walled like ancient Jericho, gated like old Jerusalem, ruled over by an oligarchic board of the bourgeois, presided over by some latter-day Melchizedek of a merchant-king.

Faced with the scale of this Behemoth, the average Åthor might be forgiven for feeling a little awed, all too aware that the only real leverage they have is their ownership of an original kitten hair rug. If they’re lucky they’ve recruited a good rug-hustler to tout their new design though, ensure a good deal for it. Even so, sometimes those city-states will try and take advantage of their might. (As the dreaded Disneyóna, for example, is notorious for its cruel “shafting” of unwitting Åthors.  Those “shafts” are pointy.) Largely though, that might is of great benefit to the Åthor. Macmilland doesn’t just buy a design, chuck it onto the production line and pump out a bazillion identical copies. All the expertise of a city-sized system is brought to bear, not just the savvy of a cunning vizier but often the creative wisdom of a score of visionary craftsmen. Is this truly the best shade here? Is that knot intentional? You might be surprised at the amount of sheer finishing put into the production of an actual batch of rugs from the original prototype. There are people whose job it is simply to perfect the texture by ascertaining the optimum proportion of breeds in the kitten hair — 80% Persian to 20% Siamese? Or maybe 15% Siamese with a 5% dash of Turkish Angora? And so on.

For the Åthor who manages to sell their first kitten hair rug, it’s often a revelation to see so many people spend so many months taking their work from prototype to product. It’s kind of a weird experience in a whole host of other ways too — being paid with a six months supply of cat-food and cabbages, for example, (a supply that can all too easily be traded in at the nearest market for a weeks-worth of caviar and cocaine,) having a promise of “some” (entirely unpredictable) further payments, at six month intervals down the line, if and when the rug “earns out” this “advance” (with the naive Åthor often not quite hearing the loud emphasis on the if). We can put these to the side though; I mention them only as a reminder that, after all is signed and sealed, done and dusted, the Åthor will be rowing their coracle home to their island croft, with a copy of the slick finished article under one arm, to a winter they are now better equipped to survive, but not much more of a guaranteed future than that. Meanwhile, Macmilland will be exporting their rugs, sending them out to every rug shop within their legally-contracted domain.

And so, from its humble beginnings as a hand-crafted artefact on a desolate island, the Åthor’s kitten hair rug will arrive en masse in the People’s Republic of Amazonia. And across Amazonia, in the InstantStuff4U retail outlets that spring up in an instant on every street-corner at the blow of a whistle, (but we’ll come to those presently,) the kitten hair rug is stuck up on a shelf, with a price tag slapped on it.

*

The Value of a Kitten Hair Rug

Now, the thing is, there have always been those who don’t particularly want to play the rich lord, adorning the floors of their homes with kitten hair rugs. Some of us love that furry feeling betwixt our toasty toes, but for many it’s just about admiring the visual pattern. They do really admire that pattern for as long as it takes to admire it fully — a half an hour, an hour, a day, a week — but they don’t particularly care for the rugs as home furnishings, not least because one doesn’t always have space in one’s home for a few thousand rugs. Where a rug collector would hate to lose their most precious specimen, (“It really tied the room together,” they might say,) these folks might appreciate a chance to gaze into this or that rug’s intricacies again at a later date, but it’s not such a big dealio.

This doesn’t mean they don’t appreciate the Åthor’s work, mind. Some will wait in line for hours in front of their nearest rug store, to snap up some new design the very moment it becomes available, if they haven’t put an order in for it even before it is available. Sure, there are others who will happily just pop down to the local flea market, pick up a second-hand rug that looks intriguing, and trade it in for another when they’re (rather quickly) done with it. But it’s not that they’re dismissing the rugs by treating them as disposable pleasures. It’s just that it’s really more the leisure activity they enjoy than the thing in and of itself. It’s a little like buying a tankard or two of ale for them: you’re buying the beer to drink, and once it’s drunk it’s gone; you don’t particularly want to hang on to the glass; more likely, you just want a refill.

Actually, back in the day, when Åthors would sit in the corner of a market and ask a few groats from passers-by for the chance to enjoy their kitten hair rug, this was the standard metric of value — booze. With rugs pretty much coming in four or five sizes, it’s not even hard to calculate: there are the small and extra small ones that you might spend an hour or less on; there are the standard size ones, that really take a day to fully dig — a five to ten hour stint or more; and every so often some crazed Åthor will come up with a monumental epic size rug that’s a veritable odyssey of an experience, a rug that you could stand on and gaze into for months. It seemed only obvious, in days of yore, in the era of taverns and bazaars, to convert time into tankards — an hour of rug-time for an hour of drinking-time, a tankard’s worth of ale. Keep me in ale for as long you’re on the rug, the Åthor would say, and we’re trading like for like, your entertainment for mine. A fair exchange, no?

At two groats a tankard, we can even translate that into cold hard cash: one or two groats for a little rug; ten to twenty groats for the standard size. It’s really quite simple. Or at least it was.

*

The Happiness That Comes of Haggling

The reality is, of course, that the industrial revolution changed all that. As the merchant-kings of city-states came in, with their manufactories built to mass-produce a plethora of Åthorlandish kitten hair rugs, these canny traders and industrialists saw that just as some were ready to pay more for a truly fresh beer while others would take their beer stale if it halved the price, just as some would pay more for speedy service while others would rather wait and pay less, the different attitude of different customers to kitten hair rugs translated to a different valuation, a different worth.

A cheaper version of the rug could be produced down the line, woven from common-or-garden tabby fur, sold for a mere five groats, and far more would buy this “mass-market” variant. The standard version became, in effect, a luxury commodity, a high-end edition for those willing to pay full cost, whether because they preferred the higher quality or, more likely, because they simply wanted it hot off the loom, the instant it was available. As that demand tailed off, the trade emissaries of Macmilland realised, it was even sensible to gradually discount those high-end rugs over the months following their release, to be flexible with one’s prices, sell at whatever the market will bear. It wasn’t long before the flea markets selling second-hand rugs had competition from stalls with “bargain bins” full of unused premium-quality kitten hair rugs that cost fifteen groats on their release, now selling for a mere three.

Many an Åthor gives a little meep when they see their work in such stalls, but such is business. Ultimately, the technology has benefited all concerned. The Åthor is able to provide their service — that exquisite experience of immersion in the sensual spectacle that is a finely-crafted kitten hair rug — to nigh on anyone and everyone. Macmilland and their ilk earn a fair cut, on the whole, given that they are, contrary to common opinion, a whole lot more than mere go-betweens. And the customer can toddle down to any number of stores or stalls within reach, and most probably pick up a nice new (or newish) rug that, measured in terms of the hours they’ll spend on it, will cost them a damn sight less than if they were to spend that time quaffing ales in their local tavern.

This is the happiness that comes of haggling, and though few realise it, it is the customer who is essentially setting the price, by deciding what to buy and when to buy it.

But this is where Amazonia comes in.

*

The Kerspindle and the Kerfuffle

We could go into all the innovations brought to the system by the transportation revolution out of which Amazonia emerged, but it’s a story we all know, surely. We all remember seeing our first ornithopter flutter through the sky. We all remember the little tin whistles floating down on their parachutes. We remember unrolling the leaflets, realising that we simply had to give a toot to summon a salesman — and within seconds! — a salesman who could supply us with any rug in their whole inventory. You want it by tomorrow? We can do that. If you’re happy to wait a little longer, we’ll even do it for free. Tell you what, we’ll even do you a three-for-two deal like the brick-and-morter rug stores are doing. We’ll do a better deal. The zealous citizens of the People’s Republic of Amazonia — every one of them a salesman ready to spring into action — built their new nation almost overnight by such strategies. Those strategies are, of course, far from altruistic, cannily designed to undercut the existing competition so as to establish and consolidate their own, shall we say, lebensraum; but international politics is a cut-throat business and when the customer gains so much from this sort of ruthless savvy, we tend to have little sympathy for the Principality of Borders, say, who would happily use similar tactics to try and drive their competitors out of business, crush and swallow them, aiming for the nearest thing to a conquest of the world they can get away with under the Treaty of Monopolis.

Anyway, all of that’s old hat.  And you probably don’t want to hear about the more idiosyncratic features of the new world order born with Amazonia, from an Åthorlandish perspective. Like, say, the arcane art of Amazonomancy, by which Åthors lean out the window of their croft each afternoon to toot their whistle, not to buy rugs themselves, but to scry the complex ornithopter formation flying displays for “signals” of how well their own rug is doing, how sales are going in the Amazonian InstantStuff4U outlets that spring out, whirring and click-clacking, wherever one of those ornithopter lands — on any corner of any street in any city, town or village, pretty much across the world. Amazonomancy is probably the single most important aspect of it all to an Åthor but, well, the neurotic behaviour patterns of obsessive hermits aren’t really pertinent. No, there’s only really one innovation that matters here, and that’s the Kerspindle that caused the big kerfuffle last weekend. And by “kerfuffle” I mean “Cuban Missile Crisis level hostilities between Macmilland and Amazonia.” Or, simply speaking, “war.”

It all began with tapestries.

Who exactly came up with this new idea, it’s hard to say, but the idea itself is simple: some people, (as I say,) are happy to just look at that kitten hair rug design, aren’t really bothered about the feel of kitten-fur between the toes, and might actually even prefer to have it somewhere easier to look at — like right in front of their face; so what if we use this crazy new tech that’s just been developed to make tapestries instead of rugs? You could take that same basic kitten hair rug design and turn it into something that goes on your wall rather than your floor. If you don’t have to make them sturdy enough to be walked on, that makes them a bit cheaper to produce because it cuts out one stage of the finishing process. It makes them a whole lot more delicate, means you need to buy this special doohickey to hang them from, but the tapestries are so thin you can store oodles of them in this doohickey. There are other pros, other cons, but the most important thing for many gadget-oriented rug afficionados is the convenience: if all you want to do is admire the intricacy of the design, the collapsible, portable doohickey can offer that experience anywhere you can find a place to hang it; and new designs are available at the toot of a whistle with Amazonian salesmen waiting at your beck and call.

It’s hard not to see the appeal. Those kingdoms and principalities whose industry is based on rug manufacturing and export were a little slow on the uptake, but even they soon realised this was a demand they’d be fools not to supply.

Here’s where it gets gnarly though.  With their nationalised retail industry, their merchant airforce aiming for commercial air supremacy, the People’s Republic of Amazonia really sees the appeal, because they quickly come up with a neat new strategy. They produce their own brand of doohickey — the Kerspindle — and sell that the same way they sell rugs. (They’ve always sold a whole lot more than just rugs anyway.) To encourage people to buy their brand of doohickey rather than anyone else’s, they strike a deal with the Kingdom of Macmilland and suchlike — who agree to supply them with tapestries that can’t be hung on any other type of doohickey. And to close the circle into a feedback loop of positive reinforcement, Amazonia set a price for tapestries that undercuts the high-end, new release rug version of the same design — ten groats, give or take a plinkle, where the average brand-new premium rug is fifteen.

But, wait! Remember how that cheaper “mass-market” version was produced down the line. Remember how this is based, in part, on the idea that some will pay more for a speedy service while others would rather wait if it means they pay less. Doesn’t it kind of throw a spanner in the works if you release the ten groat tapestry on the self-same day the rug comes out for fifteen?

Well, that’s where the kerfuffle kicks in.

*

A Declaration of War!

So at some point in the preceding weeks, The People’s Republic of Amazonia and the Kingdom of Macmilland entered into a trade dispute. The details of this appear to be rather complicated and dull — like all that bollocks that’s going on at the start of Phantom Menace, you know? — but it boils down to a basic disagreement, as I understand. The way it stands at the moment, Amazonia buys tapestries from Macmilland for twelve groats or so and sells them to the punter for ten. Yes, they’re selling them at a loss.  But it’s not that they learned their business strategy from Milo Minderbender, and they’re not selling them at a loss out of the goodness of their hearts; they figure more people will buy their Kerspindles if the hot-off-the-loom tapestries are a cushty deal. And when the hot-off-the-loom rugs are fifteen groats, they are.

Only thing is, the Kingdom of Macmilland just heard a big presentation by a delegate from the United States of Apple, suggesting a whole nother approach that’s actually a lot like the traditional way of selling rugs: price them high when they’re new releases, and drop the price in steps over the subsequent months. Weirdly, Macmilland would get less groats here, but this is what they’d prefer; they want new tapestries to be released at fifteen groats or so, which would mean selling them to Macmilland for ten rather than twelve. And over months, bear in mind, the price would drop until Amazonia could actually be selling those tapestries for as little as six, so those of us punters who don’t want to pay through the nose for our pretty little patterns in kitten fur could hang on for a more reasonable deal. Again, Macmilland isn’t doing this out of the goodness of their heart; they just think this strategy is more sensible in the long term.

Now, Amazonia and Macmilland just can’t see eye-to-eye on this, and in closed meetings, we must imagine, diplomats become a bit less diplomatic than they should be. Eventually Macmilland lays its cards on the table. If Amazonia insist on sticking to the current terms, Macmilland will just have to release the tapestry versions later — like it does with the cheaper “mass-market” rugs. If it didn’t, why it might as well just put the “mass-market” rug on sale at the same time and have done with it — and sit back and watch as everybody but a few obsessive collectors bought that Åthor’s design in kitten fur at knockdown prices.

At the point when I was trying to get my head around this part of the situation on Saturday afternoon, I figured a little grub might help. Now you can get full table service in the SF Café, a good hairy steak brought right to your table, and the best thing is, the chef in back is psychic, so he’ll have it ready for you at the point you actually order it. Fricking awesome, right? But this costs extra because, well, it’s an extra service. For folks who’re happy to slum it, there’s the cheaper option: wander up to the counter and give your order in to Old Mac; wait for him to call out your number when it’s done; then go up to collect it. You save money, but it’s slower; you don’t get that… instant gratification.

Table-service or self-service. Paying more to get treated like a prince among men, or sucking it up to save a few groats cause it’s not that big a deal.  Hardly a radical notion, eh?

Only what do I notice when I pick up the menu to see what takes my fancy? Fuck me, if there’s not a whole new “no linen” option. With table service, they bring linen napkins, see, not that cheap-ass paper shite. That’s not why the table service is more expensive, mind — the terribly burdensome overhead of them having to wash all those cloth napkins — but for some reason the “no linen” option is priced like it is. The chef in back still uses his psychic powers to take your order before you decide. He still has it ready for you at the very point you decide. They still bring it right to your table. But if you go for the “no linen” option it costs pretty much the same as self-service. Fuckin’ A, as they say.

– How the hell can you afford to do this? I ask Old Mac when he brings my steak.

– We can’t, says Old Mac. We make the bulk of our running costs back on table-service. Self-service racks up more customers because it’s more affordable, but it’s more affordable because it’s a minimal profit per person. The “no linen” option doesn’t break even, and since we started offering it, it’s undercutting both those parts of the business.

– So why the fuck are you offering it?

– That’s what I’ve been asking myself, says Mac.

At this point I began to see why the Kingdom of Macmilland might want to revise their contract with Amazonia, why they might want to negotiate better terms for tapestries, why they might see only two viable options for themselves: to release high-end rug and tapestry at the same time, and have people pay more for the instant gratification, less if they’re willing to wait, regardless of which version they go for; or to wait and release the lower price tapestry when it won’t undercut a crucial part of their business, just as they do with the “mass-market” rug.

At this point, however, is pretty much where The People’s Independent Republic of Amazonia stormed out of negotiations and declared war.

*

The Blockade versus the Blogosphere

On Friday, without warning, Amazonia closed its borders with Macmilland. In the tiny autonomous archipelago of Åthorland, wild-eyed anchorites leaned out of their windows and tooted their whistles, only for Amazonian ornithopters to swoop low over their crofts and drop bombshells that left them stunned and horrified. Leaflets fluttered down from the skies, catalogues of Amazonia’s vast inventory with every Macmilland product — not just tapestries but rugs as well — stricken from them. Not for sale. Not for sale. Not for sale. Nowhere on those leaflets was there an explanation. No Amazonian diplomat held a press conference. The Amazonian premier made no statement. Instead, every Åthor whose kitten fur rug was mass-produced and exported to the world via Macmilland simply found themselves subject to an instant blockade with not a word as to why.

The King of Macmilland was quick off the mark though, summoning the radiovision cameras to relay his speech to all the Åthors who had contracts with Macmilland, laying out what exactly had happened and why. In their stony crofts, Åthors stopped peeling the bacon from their cats and listened in awed silence as the situation was outlined. And then they fired up their aetherotransmitters and began to spread the word. By the time I stumbled into the SF Café on Saturday afternoon, the Twitter Gazette was on fire with the news. Tobias Buckell, Jay Lake, Scott Westerfield, Charles Stross, John Scalzi — all these Åthors and more spoke out, many at length and all in more hard-nosed detail than this… um… freeform perspective of mine. If you want the full skinny on the ins and outs of it all, I highly recommend you go read them. But it wasn’t just those directly affected by the blockade who sprang into action. Even many Åthors who had nothing at all to do with Macmilland made it all too clear that they had utter contempt for Amazonia’s action here.

(Strangely all these Åthors seem to have adopted a fanciful conceit that this is to do with ebooks rather than tapestries, perhaps in some misguided attempt to create a sort of… metaphoric illustration, to storyise the blockade and thereby side-step some of the knee-jerk assumptions of loyal Kerspindle users and Amazonia customers as regards the Evil Corporate Weaving Industry, its mercenary exploitation of both artists and consumers, and its obstinate adherence to obsolete media. I can only say I think this ill-judged. Everyone knows, after all, that ebooks cost nothing to produce, that the writer simply hands their manuscript into some corporate lackey called an “editor,” who chucks it into an OCR scanner, presses a button and laughs as InstaPublisher 3.0 automatically transforms it into an ebook that can be marked up by infinity percent! Laughs all the way to the bank! Everyone knows that, don’t they?)

And so the blogosphere lit up, the aetherotransmitters glowing like beacon fires on the islands of Åthorland, heated by the friction of furious typing. Down in the SF Café, those wild-eyed anchorites were far from alone. Rug afficionados with no professional stake in the blockade, not even on a possibly-maybe-one-day-I’ll-sell-my-own-rug level, rallied round to support the artisans they admired. People who, as long-standing customers of the Amazonian ornithopters, had every reason to value the revolution they’d wrought, people who’d bought rugs and tapestries by the fuckload from those InstantStuff4U stalls, threw down the whistles they’d had hanging from their front doors (as part of this rather neat credits-for-referrals scheme,) and smashed them underfoot. The resounding message of the community as a whole? Fuck you, Amazonia! Fuck you!

*

Spitting the Dummy

Here and there, it must be said, a few voices snarled contemptuous dissent. Fuck Macmilland! they growled. They just want to screw me for as much as they can. They want to stop me from getting what I want when I want it. A tapestry costs fuck all to make, and they want to charge the price of a high-end rug? It’s just like the mosaic industry, with its fucking crazy-ass evil attitude to craftsmen and consumers alike!

I asked Old Mac what he thought of those voices. They’re customers, after all, and isn’t the customer always right.

– Man, I work in a café, said Mac. Sometimes the customer is a jumped-up obnoxious prick who thinks the world revolves around them. You can spot them a mile away, the kind of arrogant arsewipe who thinks they’re owed table-service just for deigning to bless you with their half-groat custom, the kind of fucker who wouldn’t tip if you fed them with a spork and wiped their mean and mealy mouth for them after. Sometimes the customer doesn’t know shit about the work that goes into the service they get. Sometimes they care even less.

Now Mac may be something of a curmudgeon, but…

One word that I’ve seen pop up time and time again over the weekend and the days since — wherever Åthors tried to convince Kerspindle users that Macmilland wasn’t just out to ream them for every plinkle they can, wherever those who habitually buy rugs and/or tapestries supported Amazonia’s unilateral pre-emptive strike as some sort of underdog’s sucker punch aimed to bring down a no-good racketeer, wherever those customers basically refused to listen to detailed breakdowns of the realities of the weaving industry — is entitlement. However the facts and figures fall out, in terms of how much it costs to produce a tapestry versus how much it costs to produce a rug, Old Mac is right about the attitude of some, I think.

You can tell them about the winter spent gathering shells and pounding them into dust, mixing up dyes and spinning kitten fur into yarn, designing and redesigning, trying to come up with… something wonderful. They don’t give a fuck. You can tell them about the actual advance most Åthors get of about six months worth of cat-food and cabbages, how really, honestly it’s far from caviar-and-cocaine. They don’t give a fuck. You can tell them about the weaving company’s consultant designers, how they’re in the business first and foremost because they love rugs, because they love to discover a new and exciting one, love to work with Åthors — even at the miserable wage most earn — to make it better, the best it can be. They don’t give a fuck. You can tell them about those who have to pore over every square millimetre of the revised (and revised and revised) prototype, looking for knots and loose threads that shouldn’t be there. They don’t give a fuck. You can tell them that even tapestries must go through a whole long process that makes them not actually that much cheaper to produce than rugs, that dropping the little extra step that makes it something you can walk on doesn’t save much, not when most of the cost lies in making your woven artifact flame-retardant. They don’t give a fuck. You can tell them that the true value of a mass-produced craftswork that functions essentially as a leisure service, providing entertainment, is not a matter of the per unit cost marked up, that a solid ten hours of diversion, maybe more, is surely worth as much in rug form as it is in the form of ale, that a pint an hour at two groats per pint is really quite a good deal. They don’t give a fuck. You can tell them that getting an even lower price than that, getting a high-end rug hot off the loom for fifteen groats, is a mark of how customers already benefit from prices bound to demand and open to haggling. They don’t give a fuck. You can tell them that their rejection of your pricing strategy is entirely within their rights, that they can just walk away and spend their money elsewhere if they really think that paying more than ten groats for a tapestry is being rooked, that if they do so that very act will contribute to driving down prices by lowering demand. They don’t give a fuck.

Wait a minute.  Back up there. Simply not being able to agree on a fair price is not an option?  They’re outraged at the thought of someone not caving to their demands?

It takes a monumental sense of entitlement to desire something so intensely that not being able to have it now renders one furious, and yet to bristle with even greater wrath when asked to stump up a price in line with that desire. This is just spitting the dummy.

There’s a little echo of that attitude in the statement that was broadcast over the airwaves from Amazonia the other day. At the time of writing, the blockade is still in place, the kitten hair rugs of every Macmilland-contracted Åthor still unavailable through their service; but posted on a forum, from the desk of some unnamed minion on the “Kerspindle Task Force” — in distinct contrast with the radiovision broadcast from the King of Macmilland himself — a communique was sent out to loyal customers, admitting that eventually they’d have to give in. As others have put it most succinctly: Amazonia blinked. But it was a source of no little amusement in the SF Café that included in this memo was a little rhetorical turn of phrase characterising Macmilland as having “a monopoly” over their own products.

Oh, how we laughed. Some began a campaign against Amazonia’s monopoly on the Kerspindle. Some expressed shock that — ye Gods! — Nabisco has a monopoly on Oreos!

– Oh noes! said Elizabeth Bear. I have a monopoly on Elizabeth Bear works too.

Amusing as it is though, it’s a telling little sign of one of two things: A) a risible idiocy on the part of the scribe who penned it, some sort of infantile worldview in which it’s scurrilously mercenary for someone to…um… have control of their own fucking products, because diddums not getting what diddums wants is just so unfair; or B) a cynical attempt to push that sort of button in the reader, to cast the legally contracted producer of an Åthor’s kitten hair rug designs as a ruthless controller preventing the free use of those craftworks (by “monopolising” them) rather than facilitating the free use of those craftworks by fucking making them.

Bear’s joke is pointed, skewering the craven elicitation that lurks under that word, the way it panders to — seeks to exploit — an ugly selfishness that might just as easily dismiss the claim of any Åthor to their own work. Go on, it urges. Spit on all the time and toil they put into it. Surrender to that sense of entitlement. Resent that bastard who says they have a right to control what they made themselves, if it’s something that you want. They’re just a venal miscreant seeking to monopolise it.

Oh noes! The Åthor has a monopoly on their rug!

I have a message for the People’s Republic of Amazonia. I have a monopoly on my fingers too; I can do exactly what I want with them. I can offer you my forefinger, on the understanding that you’ll sell it for ten groats, or I can walk away from that as a bad deal for me. I can offer you my thumb to sell at fifteen groats now, and my pinkie finger six months down the line, to sell at five. Or not. I can offer you my ring finger to sell at fifteen if it sells right away, but on the understanding that we drop the price in stages as the months go on. You can refuse these offers, of course, but I can make them as I will and be as intransigent as I want in the haggling because, yes, I have a monopoly on my fingers.

Tell you what though, Amazonia: I’ll give you one of those fingers right now. I’m keeping all the others to myself at the moment, but giving you one of them right now.

Can you guess which one?

“Nine tenths of science fiction is crud. Of course, nine tenths of everything is crud.”
Theodore Sturgeon

In the uptown district of Literature and the midtown district of Mainstream, so the story goes, the high-brow and the mid-brow all turn their noses up when they glance downtown, in the direction of Genre. Fairy tales for children, they sneer. On the door of the Bistro de Critique there was for a good many years a sign that read, “No Genre allowed.” The nearest they ever got to a genre label is General Fiction — a term with an empty definition if ever there was one, catch-all for a host of idioms and idiosyncracies. No, genre fiction just isn’t de rigeur there, so the story goes. So, fuck em, we say. Fuck the mundanes of Mainstream, the elitists of Literature. We’re Genre and proud of it.

We have plenty to be proud of. Even during the Golden Age, the boundaries were blurred as to what exactly constituted science fiction, and in the SF Café that made for a dynamic melting pot. Claiming the core of the field, those tables right in the centre of the SF Café, was that Science Fiction characterised by its futurological fantasias of space travel, robots, contact with aliens, off-world colonies. They owned the place, and with just cause. For all that this mode was born from the pulps and inherited the callow, shallow Rocket Age Romanticism, Old Man Campbell had brought something new to the table, a Rationalist bent that called for writers to level up their intellectual game. And they had, turning an idiom of Boy’s Own Adventures to more gnarly purposes — like the social commentary and critique of Pohl & Kornbluth’s 1952 satire THE SPACE MERCHANTS. Edging into this meanwhile were the visions of writers with even subtler agendas, outsiders like Orwell or insiders like Bester who saw even greater potential in this science fiction. In their disregard for, or subversive approach to, the pulp formulae, these writers sowed the seeds of at least one revolution that was to come in the shape of the New Wave. And the feminist sf of the 70s? And Cyberpunk?

Damn straight, we’re Genre. And we know that means Delany, Butler, Gibson, and a thousand other things.

It’s a dangerous game though, that pride, because when we turn this noun into an adjective or a genre label in its own right — saying this is genre fiction, or simply this is Genre — we’re buying into the very rhetoric of abjection that built the ghetto walls around us. It is a term that functions in the same way coloured does. Skin colour is a quality all people have, all of us literally of some specific colour just as every work is of some specific genre — my pale pinky-biege no less a colour than your deep brown, my contemporary realism no less a genre than your science fiction. But the term coloured people twists language itself to establish an abjected Other, posit people of certain specific skin-colours as on the flip-side of a default “white people,” posits those privileged people as lacking that quality of being Coloured. So too the term genre fiction twists language to establish its own abject Other, to posit fictions of certain specific genres as on the flip-side of a default “general fiction,” posits those privileged fictions as lacking that quality of being Genre.

Of course, the reality is those works of general fiction are of genres, idioms with their own conventions and cliches, and it doesn’t take much for them to become genres, definitions closed, works formulated to the factory-line level of product. Sometimes they’ll be named — like the Chick-Lit of Fielding-style BRIDGET DRONE’S DIARY — and exiled to the ghetto with the rest of us genre scum. Sometimes they manage to… pass, you might say, despite the giveaway packaging. One glance at that sepia-tinted photograph cover, say, fading to white at the edge, that picture of a 1930s child in hobnail boots on a tenemented street, and you recognise that Kitchen Sink Realist Family Memoir Melodrama a la ANGELA’S GRIMY, GRITTY, GRIM, GRIEF-STRICKEN AND TEAR-SODDEN ASHES.

But that’s not fiction of a genre. Well, it’s not genre fiction. Well, it’s not Genre.

There is of course a political purpose in taking a term coded with abjection and reclaiming it. Everyone has some strange quality, some idiosyncratic foible, some quirk of queerness. Where some of those idiosyncracies have become the focus of abjection with the label “queer,” some of us who find ourselves so-labeled choose to make that term our own. (Some even adopt the same capitalisation by which Blacks assert ethnic identity, the capitalisation I’m using here to signal labels of political identity versus descriptors, Science Fiction versus science fiction.) The accusation becomes an assertion. Yeah, we’re queer… noticeably unusual in our sexual tastes, non-average. So fucking what? If you have an issue with that, baby, as Old Bill Burroughs used to say: I am not innarested in your condition.

Yeah, we’re Genre… our fiction noticeably idiomatic in our aesthetic tastes, employing distinct strategies and styles. If you have an issue with that, let me introduce you to my friend, the sonnet. I could carve those fourteen lines into your skin with a scalpel. I’ll even write it backwards so you can read it in the mirror every day until you appreciate the rigour of formal restraint and the capacities of poetry not limited by genre but unleashed by it, loosed through it.

But still, back in the SF Café, even in the Heyday of the Hard, with Old Man Campbell calling the shots, it’s not hard to see where the sneers and jeers found their source. Sturgeon’s Law doesn’t say that ninety percent is of no consequence.

Down in the SF Café back then, the menu was varied but the place still carried a legacy of its origins as a junk food joint. If the market encompassed literature geeks with tastes for more mature fare, it was focused, as it always had been, on a continuing — indeed burgeoning — audience of adolescent pulp geeks who wanted romantic adventure stories with exciting trimmings. Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, John Carter — the heart of this genre lay with heroes who lived next door to Doc Savage and The Shadow (both published, with Astounding, by Street & Smith.) For every writer who saw the literary utility of this new mode of writing with its contemporary language of ideas encoded in concrete metaphors, there were nine for whom those sleek and shiny phallic symbols of the Rocket Age weren’t exactly subtle and to whom the ideas they expressed weren’t exactly complicated. The lurid covers and exclamatory titles of the magazines promised cheap thrills, food pills, women with gills, heroes with skills, and aliens to kill.

Science Fiction or science fiction, it was ten percent Orwell and ninety percent ordure, ten percent Bester and ninety percent bullshit.

*

The Symbol That Ate the Text

We talk of science fiction as the literature of ideas, but all literature uses ideas; what distinguishes this particular mode is that those ideas are made flesh. Where a writer using mimesis expresses the dynamism of youth in a metaphor such as ‘the boy rocketed through the room’, a science fiction writer uses semiosis — signifying rather than representing — gives us an AI rocket with an adolescent joy in its own destructive force. This technique of conceit is extended metaphor taken to its ultimate, the symbol that ate the text, the vehicle of the metaphor often even unmoored from any tenor; the AI rocket with an adolescent joy in its own destructive force is just that, a figurative vehicle that carries into the reader’s imagination a whole host of tenors.

At a base level, plausibility and possibility are… relevant to this conceit, but their relevance is more complex than we’re given to believe. Yes, plausibility is brought into play down the line with futorological rationalisations, and critics of no less acumen than Clute and Delany have distinguished science fiction and fantasy on the basis of the subjunctivity levels of their very sentences, whether an event described “could happen” or “could not happen”. Both have assigned science fiction a subjunctivity level of “could happen,” fantasy a subjunctivity level of “could not happen.” At first glance, this seems so simple and obvious only a fool would deny it, science fiction limiting its conceits to the possibilities of the future, fantasy throwing off those shackles and running amok. But in a past or present tense narrative — and future tense narratives are few and far between — we are dealing with what “could have happened” and, like it or not, those technical impossibilities are still impossibilities. They do not, like metaphysical or logical impossibilities, have the harder-edged subjunctivity of “could not happen ever,” but they do fall into the domain of temporal impossibilities — things that “could not happen now.” This is what makes them incredible. Forget the plausibility for now; it’s that sense of incredibility that powers them.

I believe the term is “sense-of-wonder.”

If the potential of the mode lies in equipping a writer with a whole toolkit of such charged conceits, the downside of that toolkit is that it also allows a writer to pander to the most infantile wish-fulfilment or the most paranoid neuroses, to represent basic (and base) desires and fears in wholly superficial terms, to simply push the buttons for the sake of it. It always has been true and always will be. Walk into the SF Café twenty minutes into the future, slide into a booth with your iRobot mate, and if you look around you’ll see the genreheads wiring into the wonder. You’ll see those who happily accept the cheapest, crappiest junk as long as the price is low, the portions big, and the food comes fast and hot, smothered in ketchup, with crack cocaine for salt.

There’s a killer buzz to the games those Microself X-Books immerse you in. You too can save the world… from those evil, bug-eyed commies from space!

The influence of the juvenile market was not wholly malign, leading to a focus on clarity and simplicity, and thematic concerns beyond those of the middle-brow and middle-aged. So we had Ray Bradbury writing stories such as “All Summer In A Day” (published in F&SF in 1954), where a kid at school on Venus gets shoved in a closet by other children, misses a brief glimpse of the sun… which comes only once every seven years. This, along with many other stories are quite clearly aimed at adult sensibilities as much as at those of children. Bradbury may be sentimental about youth, nostalgia rather than angst powering much of his fiction, but his work is hardly shallow sensationalism; even those stories most imbued with wonder and creepiness display the thematic maturity of an adult writer using the worldviews of children as alterior perspectives on reality rather than simply seeking to capitalise on the crudity of their tastes.

We can contrast this however with works directly targeted at younger readers. Around the same time we have Robert A. Heinlein writing novels such as HAVE SPACESUIT WILL TRAVEL (serialised in F&SF in 1958), where a kid with his own spacesuit has a romantic adventure in space — enacting the desire of the reader in his escape from mundane Middle-America to the Great Beyond, being kidnapped by malevolent aliens, saving the human race from destruction; there’s even a female child genius for the clever tomboys. ROCKET SHIP GALILEO with its Nazis on the moon, the frontier adventures of RED PLANET and FARMER IN THE SKY — it’s stating the obvious to say that these stories are aimed at adolescent sensibilities, but we tend to be disingenuous within the field about the extent to which these juveniles are at the root of a purportedly adult-oriented Science Fiction‘s genre cooties. Those uptight asswipes at the Bistro de Critique thinks it’s all fairy stories for children? No shit, Sherlock.

Sometimes when the symbol eats the text, the first thing it devours is any hint of fiction as something other than a means to an immersive end.

*

Nipples That Go Spung

But I don’t want to suggest that juvenile fiction is inherently lower quality, nor even that escapism and wish-fulfilment are bad things per se. Young Adult fiction may well be the freest category out there right now, openly defined by demographic rather than formal conventions. If you’ve got your snoot ready to cock at it, go read OCTAVIAN NOTHING. And if some kid — or adult — out in the world beyond the city of Writing wants to take a weekend city break in Genre, sit in the SF Café and — shock, horror — read a book I don’t rate, a book that offers nothing other than a temporary reprieve from the dreary nine-to-five, a retreat into immersive adventure… well, power to them. It might be me in there, you know, re-reading Edgar Rice because today I’m just not in the mood for Bill.

Still, there’s something about the truth of Sturgeon’s Law that we elide, about the particular nature of our particular crud. The commercial pressures on fiction aimed at juveniles in a conservative culture were formative in the field, having wide-ranging and long-lasting effects, not least in Heinlein’s work; we need only look at PODKAYNE OF MARS, bowdlerised by the publisher, Heinlein forced to revise the ending against his judgement, in order to see how these story-patterns limit the capacity of fiction to challenge a reader with, say, a tragic outcome for a beloved hero. This is how formulation works, how genre works. In Romance the expectation and demand is for the heroine to get together with the hero in the end. In Mystery the expectation and demand is for that mystery to be solved. In the Action-Adventure of the Hollywood schlockbuster the expectation and demand is for the hero(ine) to save the day at the end and be lauded for it. In every such genre there’s an audience that wants “more of the same” and writers out to supply that desire, not thwart it.

Romantic adventures bound to a narrative grammar where the hero cannot lose, loaded with wonder and wish-fulfilment, aimed at credulous adolescents who’re far more interested in the thrills and spills of the spectacle than what Richard Feynman has to say about the physics of a twirling, mutating dish moving through the air… here at the very core of the field of science fiction — Science Fiction even — in the work of one of its cardinal influences, one of the Big Three, we have much that the churlish intellectual might reject as fantasy. For all that those juveniles are generally well-crafted bildungsroman, with philosophical subtleties and social pertinence to their moral messages, they signify a return to the narrative logic of pulp where moral fibre and fortitude are written into the hero as champion, and instant karma awaits him/her in her/his inevitable victory.

If Heinlein initially published works which were clearly juvenile or adult, the distinction between these works quickly became muddled in a field catering to precocious adolescents and immature adults. STARSHIP TROOPERS may not be considered juvenile fiction now but it’s the classic example of the Science Fiction bildungsroman and was aimed for Scribner’s with the rest of them. Heinlein’s juveniles begin to bleed into his later works. THE ROLLING STONES, with its precocious child heroes, is linked into the same universe as THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS through the character of Hazel Stone, while the twins, Castor and Pollux reappear in THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST. As his novels degenerate into rambling exercises in hot air and cloying cuteness, they become increasingly emotionally retarded; they may offer a spur towards post-conventional morality for a questioning fourteen year old (for all that his manner is didactic and his message dubious, the individualist message invites the very dialogue that may destroy it,) but they hardly demonstrate the most mature approach to their themes, the quirky flavourings of the idiosyncratic ideologue ultimately drowned in the ketchup of redheaded twins and nipples that go spung.

The late Heinlein works gain an originality from his eccentric libertarian character, and before the slow slide into bloat and blather there’s some peachy stuff if you can get past the politics. But where Bradbury’s weird wonders, for all the nostalgia, lead via The Twilight Zone to Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” and Disch’s “Descending,” in Heinlein’s overgrown Tom Swift, Juan “Johnnie” Rico, we might well trace one root of a grand oak of tosh and piffle that dominates the field. As that adult/adolescent market grew over time, and the work aimed at that market replicated and codified itself — its audience requiring consistency of effect more than novelty, seeking the stability and security of conventions, demanding “more of the same” — derivative, formulaic power fantasies of Space Opera and Military SF built on the foundations laid by the pulps, around the statue of The Boy/Man Hero erected by Heinlein, constructing a genre within science fiction that is neither juvenile nor adult but kind of just puerile.

I likes me some “Shit Blows Up” fiction, but this derring-do form, with its boys’ own tales of hardy heroes, grizzled old-timers, evil aliens and so on, is Science Fiction‘s version of the tales of orphan-princes permeating Fantasy. Both are ultimately defined by the strictures of genre — epic or heroic romantic adventures — and populist enough to have impressed a stereotype on the minds of the uninitiated. Down in the ghetto, in the SF Café, there are those who blame it all on cinema and television, mutter darkly about STAR WARS, how this and that movie or show is not really science fiction. Forget Flash Gordon. Forget Tom Swift. Forget the “fans are slans” nonsense. Forget Heinlein’s juveniles. Forget that the whole structure of a pulp genre is predisposed to produce pandering pabulum. It’s Hollywood to blame if the vast majority of the public think of science fiction as that puerile dross of formulaic genre … though as often as not they call it by another name.

Down in the ghetto, in the SF Café, there are those who grit their teeth and clench their fists whenever that dread name is spoken: Sci-Fi.

*

Spandex and Mullets

The distinction between science fiction and Sci-Fi is by no means universal within the community but for those who hold to it that term is loaded. For some sci-fi is just a shorthand for science fiction, sf, you know, that stuff we like, but for some that label signifies the pernicious influence of Fantasy, because that’s what they blame for corrupting the form with tosh and piffle. For some it signifies the pernicious influence of Hollywood, because that’s what they blame for diluting the form into tosh and piffle. For some it signifies the pernicious influence of the media, because that’s what they blame for presenting the form as tosh and piffle. For some it rather seems to signify the pernicious influence of fandom, because that’s who they blame for demanding the form be tosh and piffle.

Wherever Sci-Fi is reserved for the visual media or the pabulum in print, wherever the blame is placed, the distinction serves to segregate out “real” science fiction from formulation. Coined by uberfan Forrest Ackerman, the term has been reviled by science fiction writers from its origins. As a diminutive and a pun, it’s rather too cute and clever. It hints, perhaps, at a sort of baby-talk whereby Samuel R. Delany could be referred to as Sammy-Wammy, while Harlan Ellison would find himself saddled with Harley-Warley as his moniker. When I first started hanging out with other would-be writers at the SF Café, back in the early nineties, as a member of the GSFWC, I quickly realised how that term raised hackles. After a while, it became obvious it wasn’t just writers who hated it; it rubs readers up the wrong way too when Worldcon winding up in your home town leads to headlines like “Sci-Fi Freaks Beam Down to Glasgow.”

The irony is that many down in the SF Café have forgotten its origins; every so often you’ll hear grumbling about how literary fiction doesn’t suffer the indignity of a similarly demeaning sobriquet. Apart from disregarding the fairly common Pomo abbreviation for postmodernism and the coinage of Lit-Fic (which appears to also have its roots in the ghetto creole of Genre), this illusion of victimhood is disingenuous. It would be nice to imagine the label as an act of semantic marginalisation perpetrated by the elitists of Literature and mundanes of Mainstream, a deliberate dismissal with its roots — like the term “genre” — in the Culture Wars; but this is simply not the case. The label was created by us, taken up as a membership badge, printed on black T-shirts to be sold over the counter at the SF Café, worn with pride. We brought it on ourselves.

Still, there’s an undeniable irk invoked when we hear it in the mouths of idiots and ignorants who don’t know their Asimov from their Ellison, and this is not without good reason. In its uptake by the public at large it has become an index of ignorance. Their perceptions shaped by mass-market eye-candy, and by the stereotypes of subculture that impinge on their consciousness — media tie-ins, spin-offs, derivatives; the costumes and cranks of the convention scene — for the majority of the public that label means genre crap. It means the clunk-click plots and cardboard characters, power-fantasies and happy endings of the pulp idiom. It means sub-literate shit served up to sweaty-palmed geek-boys with a hard-on for gadgetry. It means adults playing dress-up when it’s not even Halloween.

When your aged Aunt Agnes sees Delany’s DHALGREN on your shelf and asks, Is that Sci-Fi? you know exactly what she’s thinking.

The term Sci-Fi signifies the sort of vacuum of critical nous that this same aged Aunt Agnes displays when she hears you playing your Sonic Youth album and complains that “all of that Heavy Metal stuff is just noise”. Her perception of rock music formed by fragmentary horrifying glimpses of Motley Crue, Whitesnake and Slayer on MTV back in the 80s, she hears those loud guitars and has no idea that there’s a difference between Heavy Metal and rock, that there’s punk rock, prog rock, post rock and more. It’s all just Heavy Metal to her, the shriek of guitars evoking an image in her mind’s eye — crude self-caricatures of posturing adolescent moppets in spandex and mullets. To that aged Aunt Agnes, similarly, Sci-Fi is a strange unfathomable spectre shaped from prejudice and preconceptions: the literary equivalent of spandex and mullets.

So we cringe at her question. It’s not Sci-Fi, we wince. It’s science fiction. What we are trying to articulate here is that their image of science fiction as genre is erroneous, that their image of genre is erroneous, that science fiction is unbound by the constraints they imagine. The science fiction we assert in opposition to Sci-Fi is its antithesis. It is not even Science Fiction; it is not a genre but a genre, with all the undefineable diversity that entails. It is the equal of Literature, if not better because it is not constrained by the dictates of mundane realism.

It fucking rocks. Don’t box it in with a cutesy little monicker. It’s not Sci-Fi, we say. It’s science fiction.

And we strop off down to the SF Café where everyone’s calling it skiffy.

*

Because It’s There

That discomfort has still deeper roots though. The trivialising diminutive is abhorred not just as a token of the outsider’s disregard for actual literary achievements, but as the ultimate emblem of uncritical devotion, of the insider’s disregard for quality, of the indiscriminate appetite for any old shite with a spaceship. Applied commonly to the most schlocky written, cinematic or televisual crud, the term is now inextricably bound to the image of the adolescent fan with little-to-no critical faculties and an obsessive-compulsive urge to buy every book in a series, every book by a certain author, any book about X, Y or Z, regardless of quality. It reminds us of those grown men or women who continue consuming formulaic drivel most 14-year-olds would scoff at, and of the hacks ready to supply the demands of that juvenile market, not for a little escapism, but for a wholesale retreat from adulthood.

Which is to say, it reminds us of ourselves, a part of us that relished and still relishes the schlock. We are the market that bought that schlock as kids. We are the market that still buys that schlock when we feel the urge for a little brain-out, sponge-in, sit-back-and-enjoy-it, eyeball-kicks. We are the market that buys the latest novel in a series long since degenerated into drivel. We are the market that watches Andromeda, Babylon 5, Carnivale, Dark Skies, Enterprise, Farscape, Genesis II, Heroes, Invasion, Jericho, Lost, Millenium, Night Stalker, The Outer Limits, Planet of the Apes, Quantum Leap, Red Dwarf, Space: Above & Beyond, Total Recall 2070, UFO, V, War of the Worlds, The X-Files, you name it, zzzzzzzzzz… Sometimes we do it because the series is good. Sometimes we do it simply because it’s there.

We insist that science fiction is not Sci-Fi. For some in the ghetto of Genre this is axiomatic. We genreheads think we know the secret truth, that there is real science fiction and there’s that Sci-Fi shit. That crud is not the real deal, we tell ourselves, just the factory-line commercial product, extruded according to a formula, shat out in a turd of a movie or a TV show, a media tie-in or an Nth generation copy of a hack-job of a rip-off of an insult to the word novel. It’s the high-profile, low-quality dreck that gives the genre its bad rep. But it’s what the genrephobes are thinking of when they dismiss science fiction because that’s what we, the fans, God bless us, have saddled ourselves with in lapping up every hokey, cheesy, cliched pukeball of a B-movie with a spaceship in it, spewed out by the Ed Woods of the world. It is our desire for “more of the same” that transforms genre into genre.

The term Sci-Fi signifies all the uncritical ardour we seek to distance ourselves from in our quest for acceptance, in a deep desire to be taken seriously. We can hardly deny the actuality of the puerile, formulaic tosh that gets sold as Science Fiction; so we abject it as Sci-Fi and distinguish the “real” science fiction out from it on the basis of quality. It is a different abjection to that carried out on Fantasy (at once more direct in its targeting of genre rather than the scapegoat symbols of the fantastic, and more deluded in its denial of our own desires), but it is still an abjection, a recoiling in repulsion from that which is essentially a part of ourselves. Here’s the logic of that abjection:

If it’s sci-fi, it must be bad. If it’s good, it can’t be sci-fi.

Sound familiar?

*

Dogfight at the SF Café

It was a merry day in the SF Café, sometime around the middle of the last century, when the newspaper reporter and the moviemaker arrived, hearing about this crazy joint so full of stories… so full of Story. There were kids running around with little toy rocket ships, teenagers talking astronomy in the booths, adults speaking Esperanto at each other cause it was the language of the future. There were atheists and madmen. There was futurology and fantasia. And there was a big bold sign above the door that had once read The Science Fiction Café… only some of those letters had been taken down now, stuck up in the window to spell out: “cenection.” See, it’s cause we’re all connected , someone explained to the reporter as he looked up at the sign that now read The Sci Fi Café. Connection, cenection. You see? Ain’t that cute? If there was a writer at the bar, slamming his head repeatedly into the counter, no one paid any attention to his mutterings about a pun on “hi-fi” sounding lame now, never mind in fifty-something years. Except for the stranger who was there to spectate, who said something about “wi-fi” being all cool and stuff by then… but it still sounding lame.

The name does suck, I say, it surely does. But I don’t buy it as a label for the Enemy Within, see that whole ruction as just another discourse of abjection like that between Science Fiction and Fantasy, a wedge of subjectivity and inconsistency driven deep into the definitional integrity of the field. A fantastic genre that is neither fantasy (according to the Science Fiction genreheads) nor generic (according to the science fiction scribblemonkeys)? In this diverse field bound by a loose affiliation of reader tastes under the catch-all term of science fiction, these definitions by negation found our ideas of what does or does not constitute the family in little more than personal whim, in exclusions (that is, abjections) based on individual preference and value judgements.

If it’s good, it must be science fiction. If it’s bad, it must be sci-fi.

Old Man Campbell’s rules were never set in stone and we recognise this nowadays in marking out the Science Fiction which has solid futurology at its core as Hard Science Fiction. We recognise it when we acknowledge as science fiction that mass of stuff sold in the same magazines, on the same bookshelves, which never really gave a flying fuck about futurology, but which simply used the tropes and techniques to its own ends, whether the aim was to tickle the cerebral cortex or the sense-of-wonder gland. Or we deny it, write Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers and John Carter out of the picture, pretend Gernsback didn’t talk of “charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision,” pretend Astounding didn’t share its crib with Doc Savage and The Shadow, pretend Star Wars isn’t more like E.E. “Doc” Smith than Primer is. There’s plenty of pulpy powerhousing that barely glances off science in its search for scenery and props, conventions or conceits, symbols to be exploited by a writer more concerned with telling a ripping yarn or exploring the human condition (or better still both) than with science per se. It’s still science fiction.

Or maybe it isn’t.

It seems to me the fractious factions in the SF Café tore the whole notion of science fiction apart a ways back. The latent conflict between aesthetics of the logical and the sublime, that old Rationalist/Romanticist dichotomy, became overt in the abjection of Fantasy. Once that other battle-line was drawn between science fiction and Sci-Fi, a battle-line that is, in essence, a recapitulation of the Literature/Genre turf war, the SF Café became a rumble zone of rival gangs, each marginalising themselves by staking out their own special territories defined by overlapping and orthogonal agendas — futurological, fantastic, literary, commercial. It’s a wild show, sitting at the counter, watching the killzone of crossfire between these forces. It’s a spectacle alright, watching this many-headed mongrel warhound mode of pulp modernism trying to rip its own throats out cause it smelled the scent of its own piss and didn’t recognise it. It’s bloodsport night, at the SF Café, Cerberus versus Cerberus — the new evolved Mark Three hellhound too, with an extra head or two as biomods. Bugger of it is, I can’t decide whether I’ve got a dog in this fight or all of them.

Hey, wait! That new head there is trying to play pack leader, assert its taxonomic dominance as an umbrella term for the entire discourse of idioms. Which one’s that? Princess Rexatroyd Speculative Frou-Frou Fiction the Third?

Oh, man, Sci-Fi and Science Fiction are both going for it big time.

Ooh, that’s nasty.

“The question of whether a certain story of imagination is a fantasy or a science fiction work would depend upon the device the author uses to explain his projected or unreal world. If he uses the gimmick or device of saying: ‘This is a logical or probable assumption based upon known science, which is going to develop from known science or from investigations of areas not yet quite explored but suspected,’ then one could call it science fiction. But if he asks the reader to suspend his disbelief simply because of the fun of it, in other words, just to say: ‘Here is a fairy tale I’m going to tell you,’ then it is fantasy. It could actually be the same story.”
Sam J. Lundwall

Down in the ghetto of Genre, in the SF Café that is our literary salon, in this scene of zines and forums, conventions and clubs, there’s a Great Debate that kicks off every so often. The diversity of the clientele maps to a diversity of opinions — convictions, even — and few of these are as contentious as those addressing the differences or lack thereof between science fiction and fantasy. To be fair, the taxonomy of literary genres is a game that appeals to the geek in me as much as anyone, but the diversity we’re dealing with in the SF Café is obscured by the very word genre, its meaning muddled by a conflation of openly-defined aesthetic idioms with conventional forms that are closely-defined and marketing categories that are all but empty of definition.

There’s genre and there’s genre.

Across the city of Writing — and in the SF Café most of all perhaps — we’ve forgotten that the word genre derives from the Latin generis, meaning family, that if a genre is a family of fiction, then a work can be a member of that family by marriage or adoption as much as by birth. Aesthetic idioms are constantly reshaped by writers marrying one technique with another, adopting unfamiliar aims, methods born in other idioms entirely. This is genre as one big open clan. I’ve joked that being a “Celt” is actually fuck-all to do with birth; all you have to do is drink with a Celt, and that’s you initiated into the clan whether you like it or not. It’s like Richard Harris becoming Sioux in A Man Called Horse, only less painful than hanging by your nipples. (Although the hangover the next day…)

But then there’s genre. Buying into a bullshit of blood-lines, many are proud of the traits inherited with the tartan — so proud of their clan name they’ve forgotten that family can be openly defined, that the in-laws with different names are still family if we accept them as such. For certain feuding factions indeed that very notion is anathema. The clan name is everything, and a pox on any cur who slights it. Any pure-bred work of Science Fiction (or as they will call it, science fiction) is entirely unrelated, they’ll insist, to that damnable Fantasy (or as they will call it, fantasy). There’s Campbells and MacDonalds, and ne’er the twain shall meet.

But all we really have, others will say, is a tartan of a marketing category with an empty definition. The presentation of this stuff as a genre of Science Fiction is just bagpipes-and-haggis branding. In truth, it’s an open idiom, a genre of works which may be in various genres, an extended family of fictions better described as Hard SF, Space Opera, Cyberpunk, Technothriller, and so on. Fantasy is in the same position, a tartan label slapped on a box containing the closely-defined forms of Epic Fantasy, Swords & Sorcery, Urban Fantasy, Paranormal Romance, etc..

These are not subgenres, but genres in their own right, and the tartan labels that adorn these works are simply branding, their purpose to position a book in front of this audience or that. And, you know, they’ll say, that latter brand was only schismed off from Science Fiction in the 1970s, when Ballantine established their Adult Fantasy line to target the growing market for Tolkien, his direct ancestors and descendants. Look at all the works branded as either which ignore the constraints of genre altogether. Forget the clan names and tartan; the only sensible way to talk about science fiction or fantasy is as aesthetic idioms . If genre is a matter of familial relationships, what we have here is not two distinct clans with a feud going back longer than living memory. Science fiction is not Clan Campbell, fantasy is not Clan Macdonald, and the ghetto of Genre is not the blood-stained battleground of Glen Coe. The feud begins in 1971; before then science fiction and fantasy were happily married and raising kids together.

And hell, someone else will say, when you look at them as idioms, science fiction is really just a branch on the family tree of fantasy.

This is when the Great Debate inevitably kicks off.

*

A Shit Sandwich and a Diet Coke, Thanks.

“I write, not for children, but for the child-like, whether they be of five, or fifty, or seventy-five.”
George MacDonald

Across the city of Writing, there are a lot of cafés and bistros, each with its own menu but all serving sandwiches and soda. Downtown in the ghetto of Genre or uptown in the chi-chi neighbourhood known as Literature, there are joints where the food is bought in ready-made from The Shit Sandwich Company, and behind the counter is a squirt-gun dispensing Coca Cola, Fanta or Sprite. Dr Pepper? Irn Bru? Maybe, maybe not. But you can guarantee the most populist tastes are catered for in these joints, that the most generic product is on offer. And many are happy with that; all they want is their local greasy spoon with the juke box they know off by heart, or the franchise with free Wi-Fi and coffee that’s the same in every outlet. The sign outside is the genre label, the promise of what you want, how you want it, every time, in the same way and in the same place — and for many that doesn’t mean a wholemeal bagel and a fruit smoothy or any such frou-frou crap; it means a Shit Sandwich and a Diet Coke, thanks.

And yet… the SF Café has Shit Sandwiches and Diet Coke on tap like all the rest, but it also (again like all the rest) has its own menu of hamburgers and hot dogs, fresh off the hot plate from the fry cook in back. And a fridge stocked full of all those weird soft drinks you’ve never heard of. We got Shinola Cola that you won’t get anywhere else. (It tastes a little strange at first, but a few cans and you’re hooked.) That’s because a marketing category offers more than is promised by the label, those red and white signs for Coca-Cola and the Shit Sandwich Company that adorn the front. As a marketing category it’ll stock whatever the fuck it can sell to its punters. And even if most punters want a genre, “more of the same,” there’s always some who want “something different,” want the wider menu of a genre as an openly-defined idiom rather than a closely-defined form.

The menu in the SF Café tells an interesting tale. See, regardless of what some punters might maintain, the SF Café was always under joint ownership. Old Man Campbell never ran the place on his own. Those who remember far enough back can still recall an old guy you’d see pottering around, name of George MacDonald. Some would say he was the senior partner, others that he was just hired help, but whatever his role in things he stamped his mark on the menu, made sure that the SF Café was serving the chicken nuggets of fantasy right from the start, as well as the hamburgers of science fiction. A nasty rumour surfaces from time to time, that he’s that McDonald, the clown who ripped the soul out of soul food, made it junk-food, fast-food, a factory-line product of sugar, salt and fat, identical in every franchise around the world. Pabulum for those with the taste-buds of a child. The quote from him above may go some way to explaining the source of this rumour and the subsequent attempt by one faction of patrons at the SF Café to assert their superiority of taste.

Science Fiction is not Fantasy, they say. It’s not for the child-like, never mind for children. No, Science Fiction is for the adolescent at least.

Welcome to the clan gathering at the SF Café. The feuds are great fun.

The Campbells and MacDonalds of science fiction and fantasy have been intermarried and interbred from the get-go, fucking and fighting, coming together at the SF Café’s drunken wakes and weddings, bickering over who belongs where and who doesn’t. Resentments bubble. Alliances are made and broken. Curmudgeons insult their second cousins. Black sheep flirt across the barricades. But for all the broadsides and backstabbing, the talk of this side of the family and that, the gene pool is too mixed to talk about different genres on any level other than loyalty. Genres? We can talk about Space Opera, Technothriller, Epic Fantasy, Swords & Sorcery, the Campbells of the West Side, the MacDonalds of the Left Bank, and vice versa. There are the Three Sisters over here: Aunties Asimov, Heinlein and Clarke. There are the Twins over there: Cousins Lieber and Howard. And there’s Crazy Uncle Lovecraft in the corner (the corner that doesn’t look… quite right). But many of us these days are bastards and step-kids, our lineages too mixed-up for us to give a fuck about some old fart’s obdurate insistence on a dichotomy that just doesn’t exist:

Science Fiction is not Fantasy?

Yeah, whatever. I’m more interested in the naked lunch that is the buffet.

*

A Really Big House

“‘The Carrick,’ ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,’ and ‘The Metamorphosis’: all three are commonly called fantasies. From my point of view, any outstanding work of art is a fantasy insofar as it reflects the unique world of a unique individual. But when people call these three stories fantasies, they merely imply that the stories depart in their subject matter from what is commonly called reality.”
Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures

Definitions of fantasy, like those of science fiction, come in three flavours — empty, open and closed. The quote from Nabokov above is misleading as regards his own contrast of fantasy and reality, but it’ll serve as a pointer to the first two. In the empty definition, fantasy is just imagination, story as extended fancy; all fiction is fantasy. This is not a terribly useful definition though, not when we use the term fantastic to mean that which is strange, bizarre in form or appearance. Where we say something is fantastic we mean that it is unrealistic, based on or existing only in extravagant fancy. We may even mean that it is wondrously so, to be marveled at. Since not all fiction is fantastic in this sense, an open definition seems more apt: fantasy is fiction which uses the fantastic. It departs from “what is commonly called reality.”

This open definition slides towards closure though, as the bounds of reality mark out a limit of fancy’s extravagance between based on and existing only in, where the unrealistic fractures into the improbable and the impossible. The nature of the fantastic, some will insist, is that it transgresses the laws of nature, is impossible, magical in the sense of metaphysical. The notion of the marvelous closes the definition further, specifying a distinctly positive tinge to our incredulity, not just awe but a wonder that implies desire, magical in the sense of delightful. While many of those in the SF Café shrug this off, drinking Kafka as their coffee, taking their fantasy bitter and black, there are those for whom the definition is and must be closed. There is no such fantasy. Either because they revere it or revile it, they acknowledge only Fantasy, that genre where the conventions of metaphysical agency and wondrous wish-fulfilment are essential, the conventional form with all its stereotypes of secondary worlds and heroic quests.

All too often there’s a scent of abjection when it’s a Science Fiction loyalist asserting a closed definition of fantasy, a sense that by defining these generic elements as Fantasy it is easier to banish them from Science Fiction. Because it’s not like science fiction was ever… you know… born from the frickin pulps.

Fuck that shit. Don’t be pissing on my Flash Gordon roots, motherfucker.

There is a neatness to the pairing of Fantasy and Horror as literatures of desire and fear. And the notion that science fiction deals with hypothetical improbabilities while fantasy deals with metaphysical impossibilities is one you’ll hear from many corners of the SF Café. But it’s not so easy as that; it never is with a genre. No, many works in the openly-defined aesthetic idiom of fantasy have zero interest in wish-fulfillment or the iconography of magic, scoff at the constraints of Fantasy. Meanwhile, delightful wonder abounds within Science Fiction, a direct inheritance of Gernsback’s “charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision.” Even the blithe assertion that science fiction deals with science while fantasy deals with magic is called into question by a glance at the shelves, where we see Herbert’s DUNE labelled as Science Fiction and Peake’s TITUS GROAN labelled as Fantasy. Isn’t the former chock full of magic — priests and prophecies, monsters and messiahs, a drug that lets you warp reality, gives you visions of the future. And what is the most fantastical idea in the latter? What magic does it contain?

A really big house.

*

That Tasty Tang of Boot Polish

The glib differentiations don’t hold up to scrutiny. If we contrast the extremes of Hard SF and Epic Fantasy, obviously there’s a polarity between these two aged maiden aunts of the family, these grande dames who think everything revolves around them; but to try and apply this science/magic divide as a basis for taxonomy across the board is futile. Science fiction long since assimilated the notion that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, while fantasy long since assimilated the notion that any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology. Writers on this side of the schismed family or that write the stories they want to, quite often treating the two as entirely interchangeable.

Even the Science Fiction of a Campbellian closed definition is deeply complexified by sense-of-wonder and futureshock so that the most rigorous futurology can be at once fantastic and/or horrific. Which is to say that the work itself may be, functionally speaking, both science fiction and fantasy, or both science fiction and horror, or all three. Ray Bradbury’s entire ouvre exemplifies the crumbling of Science Fiction into the open interplay of science fiction, fantasy and horror. With stories like “The Veldt”, for example, one is forced to ask: Is this science fiction, fantasy, horror… or all of the above?

And do we actually give a shit, given that it’s a fucking immense story?

No. The buffet at this clan gathering is a crawling chaos of pilfered tropes and techniques, shared plot structures and character types. Cowboys in space or knights fighting dragons! Dragons in space or cowboys fighting knights! The Shit Sandwiches munched down on both sides of the family have more in common than they have to distinguish them, heroic wankfests filled with Objects of Power, Grand Devices of technological magics, every FTL drive a mass-produced metaphysical causation engine, every wormhole a Clutean portal. The Shinola Cola passed out on both sides also has much in common too — using those Grand Devices as metaphors rather than just MacGuffins, extrapolating that Big Idea into novel narratives of worldscape, plot and themes, drawing 3D characters who interact with that worldscape and with each other on a deeper level than The Boy Hero’s Never-Ending Journey. If the glamour of incredibility can be seductive, if the formulae of plot offer easy options, and if these lead to different levels of aesthetic and ethical engagement, the difference is not between Science Fiction and Fantasy but between genre and genre.

You get different flavours of ice cream in your Shinola Cola Floats, but it’s that tasty tang of boot polish that makes them all so moreish.

Still, we do like our feuds. So we obscure this in every assertion of the science/magic dichotomy, each assertion fuelling the eternal argument partly because it carries or is percieved to carry an implicit judgement: that fiction utilising the former is intrinsically rational (intellectualist and critical) while fiction utilising the latter is intrinsically romantic (sensationalist and uncritical).

Cause, you know, magic is for children.

*

A Model of Magic

Let’s define magic. In essence, magic is metaphysical causality, a circumvention of the laws of nature; it’s cause-and-effect working outwith the temporal protocols of the cosmos. It is the activity and it is the capacity for that activity invested in any of the following: a system of forces; a location or state through which that system of forces can be accessed; an object (agent or artifact) charged with or tapping into that system of forces. By this simple definition time-travel and FTL are magical.

But Ted Chiang has pointed to a key distinction between science and magic: the former is reproducable industrially, on a mass scale, while the latter is not. Generally, in fact, magic is the preserve of a select elite of exceptional individuals, so much so that it’s often a signifier of their selection by the ultimate magic of the divine, a signifier of their destiny. Unpacking this and looking across the field of fiction though, we can say that human application of magic is located on a spectrum of methods of production that runs thus:

facility (gift) | art (talent)| craft (skill) | technique (process)

In any given work, the rarity of magic is largely a product of where it is placed on this spectrum. Magic may be presented as a facility, a gift that only the exceptional have; it may be presented as an art that only the exceptional will have a talent for, but that is learned almost as much as it is innate; it may be presented as a craft, a skill that comes naturally to some, but that’s more learned than innate and therefore open to use by anyone; it may be presented as a technique, a process which can be reproduced industrially because it is abstracted to mechanistic procedures.

The last presentation of magic is rare, used largely as a deliberate subversion of conventions., so Chiang’s distinction seems fair at first sight. What is science, after all, but the system of abstraction by which craft is transformed to technique, process identified in skill and therefore rendered reproducable, open to industrialisation? But if so, DUNE is utilising magic rather than science: the Guild navigators circumvent the temporal protocols of the cosmos; they travel through large distances of space in shorter periods of time than are allowable by those protocols; their manipulation of time and space is a craft, signified as such by the term guild (a pre-industrial organisation of skilled tradesmen); all of this is achieved only by means of a mental state bought on by melange; the procedure cannot be mechanised, reproduced industrially.

Similarly, note that in the TV series ANDROMEDA for a ship to travel through the slipstream (FTL) it requires a human pilot, because even machines with a fully-sentient AI are not capable of navigating this (magical) location/state. Note that jaunting, in Bester’s THE STARS MY DESTINATION is a skill (craft) that pretty much everyone can learn but that jaunting through space is a talent (art) that only Gully Foyle has achieved. Note that at the end of the book he considers teaching this ability to humanity (transforming the talent to a skill, distributing it as he does PyrE) but has not yet begun this task. Note that either way jaunting is an essentially human capacity, not open to mechanisation.

All of this invites a simple question: What if the non-reproducable nature of magic is a ramification of it being a semiotic phenomenon, the skill an emergent feature of language and consciousness, not mechanised because it is a matter of agency?

An agent dealing with a world of signs has four key abilities: reception; perception; conception; inception. To be a semiotic agent one must be able to receive stimuli, perceive those stimuli as signifiers, conceive what is signified (i.e. process sensation into thought), and initiate action (i.e. act on thought rather automatic response). Magic is almost invariably presented in these terms, as a semiotic interaction with reality, a reading of its language and a (re)writing of its text through the application of that language. Words and gestures. Symbolic rituals. Magic is a hacking of reality, and that’s why it’s a craft, a skill. To mechanically reproduce it would mean building machines that replicate semiotic agency — AIs. In Asimov’s “Let There Be Light” this is exactly what happens. The end-product of AI technological development achieves the ultimate magic of godhood. It cracks the code of reality, and starts everything running again by calling the function that is the title of the story.

If such semiotic agency is considered limited to humans or similarly living entities, is this a fanciful worldview, or just a healthy skepticism about hard AI? Isn’t ANDROMEDA saying precisely that the ship’s AI is lacking the requisite semiotic flexibility? Certainly, magic often goes hand-in-hand with talk of spirits and souls, but is this religion or is it fiction? Does using magic in a story make one a priest, painting semiotic agency as the product of some metaphysical enspiriting that only humans have? Or might a writer simply be using magic and soul as conceits, tools for talking about semiotic agency itself? Trust me, when I describe someone as having “spirit,” this does not mean I believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Magic is characterised as a semiotic skill because it is symbolic of semiotic skill itself — a metaphor of the power of language, of consciousness. The use of “spirit” as a metaphor for semiotic agency that goes with it is so profoundly resonant if we take it figuratively and so profoundly religous if we take it literally, it’s no wonder that magic pervades Science Fiction even as it’s abjected as Fantasy. It’s no wonder that the magic of Bester’s jaunting goes hand-in-hand with the Promethean fire of PyrE, an enervated and explosive substance triggered by thought, a blatant concretion of the metaphor of semiosis-as-power. It’s no wonder that some will insist, till they’re blue in the face, that DUNE is not “proper” Science Fiction, no, not with all that metaphysical mumbo-jumbo, all that magic.

Some get that it’s a metaphor, doofus; but some just ain’t got no poetry in their soul.

*

The Aesthetics of Old Maids

“SF is about confronting the strange in order to understand it and push the boundaries back but fantasy is either about enjoying the experience of strangeness (as in M John Harrison’s Virconium books) or bludgeoning it into submission in favour of a frequently politically dubious status quo (in the case of epic fantasy).”
Johnathan MacCalmont, Notes from the Geek Show

These sort of assertions as to what the two genres of science fiction and fantasy are “about” are unsustainable even as broad generalisations. Countless works of science fiction are deeply reactionary in their response to the strange, heroic adventures in which the aliens serve exactly the same purpose as Tolkien’s orcs. Countless works of fantasy, conversely, use the strange precisely to conceptualise what lies beyond our understanding. It is deeply problematic to view the Viriconium books as ultimately sensationalist pleasures when Harrison’s fiction is so clearly designed to disrupt and defy any attempt at passive immersion, to refuse the comfort of givens, to continually force the reader to face the unknown in the text and deal with it.) Hell, it is quite simply complacent to privilege science fiction in this way, as the more serious and committed form, boldly pushing forward to challenge the unknown and find answers (as opposed to, say, consciously or unconsciously manifesting knee-jerk right-wing American paranoia over enemies within and/or without — c.f. THE PUPPET MASTERS), while presenting fantasy as a reactionary enforcer of the social order (as opposed to, say, a cutting critique of the early 20th century class system and the impact upon it of populist but essentially totalitarian ideologies — c.f. TITUS GROAN).

But, OK. Suppose we strip away the shit and the shinola. Suppose we strip away all the clunk-click assemblage of cliches, the adolescent fantasies based on technomagical MacGuffins. Suppose we put to one side all that slippery stream of stuff that runs from Ray Bradbury through the writers of the New Wave and right up to Kelly Link. Suppose we forget for a second that the vast majority of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror shit is, to all intents and purposes, simply product, while the shinola is, to all intents and purposes, simply fiction. Suppose we forget that for a moment.

There are two oppositional aesthetics in the field, both products of the Enlightenment and each associated with one side or the other in its most specialised form — the rationalism associated with Science Fiction and the romanticism associated with Fantasy — indexed by the words hard and high (or epic). Hard SF and Epic Fantasy — both of these forms have been conventionalised, proscribed and prescribed, such that they constitute valid genres in a way that science fiction and fantasy do not.

Those two grande dames do make a lot of noise, and people do listen to them. If they don’t and can’t circumscribe science fiction and fantasy, readers and writers do perceive them as the centres of their respective genres, in a sort of “fuzzy set” model where both science fiction and fantasy lack clear boundaries but each congregates around a different centre. Within that big ongoing drunken wedding party of this great divided clan, the two of them sit there, Old Granny Campbell and Great Aunt MacDonald, holding court at separate tables, their arms folded, their gazes severe, each with quite distinct notions of how things should be done. Use your head, m’boy! says one. No, says the other, it’s the heart that matters! Even if most of the field is intermarried, interbred, even if many of us don’t really give a damn about those dotty old maids with their outmoded ideas on science and magic, they that us young’uns must pick sides.

Bollocks to that.

The division is there, yes. And the aesthetics those old maids have aligned themselves with are written deep enough in our culture that the field can’t help but be affected by the real centuries-old rift — that between rationalism and romanticism. But that dichotomy is artificial and obsolete, has been from the start. So one group sit at the booths in the SF Café and the other sits at the tables, one comes and leaves through the Nth Street door while the other enters and exits through the door onto Avenue X. Who gives a fuck? That sign that used to read the The Science Fiction Café and Bar? You know, they tried out a few variants before they settled on that: The Fantasy and Science Fiction Diner; The Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Bistro; The Weird Fiction Greasy Spoon; The Café Fantastique; The Science Fiction / Fantasy Snack Shack.

*

A Thoroughly Modern Molly

The real division is that between the Romantic and the Neo-Classical movements in painting, that schism in post-Renaissance art, that sifting of the aesthetic techniques of broad-brushed Rembrandts and tight-lined Raphaels, of airy Titians and earthy Brueghels, these techniques born from a new world of new technologies and new politics — oil-based paints, burgermeister patrons, a world where even if the subjects weren’t new — Vermeer painting a cleaning lady — the approaches were. This schism resulted in Jacques-Louis David on the one hand and Eugène Delacroix on the other, in Neo-Classicism with its emphasis on the ordered and Romanticism with its emphasis on the sublime. It is this same division that, in Science Fiction / Fantasy gives us the conflicting emphases on futurology and fantasia, the aesthetic of the logical and aesthetic of the sublime.

In writing, that Romantic idealisation of the sublime gives us the archetypal flights of fancy, rakish wanderers, rebel poets and all the epic wildernesses we will eventually see in (High) Fantasy, while the Neo-Classical idealisation of order gives us the novel as social study, as empirical observation, and all the rationalist restraint we will eventually see in (Hard) Science Fiction. Passion and Reason — the prevailing themes of the Enlightenment, the Age of Revolution. Both Delacroix and David painted scenes from the French Revolution — Liberty Leading The Troops, and The Death of Marat. These paintings illustrate the difference of the two aesthetics rather neatly.

There was a third aesthetic however that developed in the dialogue between these — the modernism or modernity of Caravaggio, who was fusing Romantic chiaroscuro and Neo-Classical formality long before these terms were even in use, who painted sublimely ordered scenes, who used a dead whore dragged from the river as his Magdalene, thieves and peasants for his saints. His work is fiercely passionate and and coldly reasoned all at once. A pretty boy Bacchus, in a Caravaggio painting, is at once the Greek god himself and an urban hustler from the streets. Caravaggio plays the sublime and the logical off against each other. He renders the wild passion of a decapitation in the most coolly ordered composition.

A thoroughly modern molly, Caravaggio in his work embodies the rescaling that was going on, the re-evaluation of God and Nature and Humanity’s relationship to them both. He is the first modern(ist) painter, quite distinct from his Renaissance forebears in the sheer humanism of his work, and never surrendering to the idealisations that set the Romantics and the Neo-Classicists at each others’ throats. He leaves it to the Romantics to blather on about the importance of bold colour over clean line, leaves it to the Neo-Classicists to witter on about the value of clean line over bold colour. Passion versus Reason — the world of Western Art spends centuries bickering over which is better, centuries of Royal Academies and revolutionary outsiders, of worthy high art and vulgar low art, of intellectualist Literature and sensationalist Genre… and somewhere along the way that hoary old argument of Reason / Passion ends up in Science Fiction / Fantasy. As if that’s all there is. As if there’s scientifically rigorous rationalism or weirdly wild romanticism. And ne’er the twain shall meet.

Fuck that shit, says Caravaggio.

*

The Fantasy of Genre, The Science of Fiction

There is a shared methodology in much strange fiction, whatever name it goes by, an approach shaped by a shared aesthetic, neither romanticism nor rationalism but something more akin to the modernism of Caravaggio, reacting to the modern world, portraying humanity’s relationship with “God” and “Nature” in a way that, when it works, plays the sublime grandeur of one off against the logical restraint of the other, and in doing so results in something neither could achieve alone. Neither science fiction nor fantasy — no matter what those old maids would have you believe — has ever been so pure in its devotion to those antithetical aesthetics. The rationalism of Wells is counterpointed by the romanticism of Verne. In the Gernsback-Campbell era when Science Fiction was born, those two aesthetics were always as much in collaboration as they were in conflict, romantic adventures fleshed with rationalist science, futurology as the source of fantasia. The dynamic power of the fiction resides in the interaction.

The distinction that drives the Great Debate is an illusion, an artificial dichotomy based more on claims of allegiance than on actual practice. Two subsets of the field live by their grande dame’s rhetoric, creating works that do exemplify the warring aesthetics of rationalism and romanticism. But if you look around the drunken wedding party, ignore the two old maids sitting in their corners, that dusty old duality looks largely irrelevant. Perhaps it is only in that shattering crack of lightning which splits the genre that the true nature of the hideous creation is revealed. And it is not Science Fiction. Science Fiction is dead. This is the Frankenstein’s monster of science fiction / fantasy, a patchwork of dead genres, of the cannibalised cadavers of Romanticism and Rationalism, torn apart and stitched back together, a glorious, monstrous marriage of meat machines. It’s a riven thing — we could hardly expect two or three hundred years of division between Romanticism and Rationalism to be healed in a few decades — but it is a thing.

That thing is, in essense, modernism. We might brand it Pulp Modernism — cheap, populist, balls-to-the-wall modernism, out to entertain more than an elite of aesthetes and intellectuals, but still modernism. It uses mimesis on the one hand, semiosis on the other, rationalising magic and romanticising science, combining the strange and the mundane, constantly experimenting with literary elements. The integrity we project on it, the unity we impose upon it with our so-well-formed definitions, is only that of a family which, in truth, extends as far as we decide it does. There is no genre of Fantasy, only the fantasy of genre. This isn’t the fiction of science; it’s the science of fiction. What we have is one confused clusterfuck of conventional forms ripped apart and rebuilt as an aesthetic idiom, a mode of fiction in which we take conceits, fantastic ideas, and put them to the test with literature as the laboratory.

When the results are good, right enough, we do have a tendency to go into mass production mode, churning out low-quality copies from the cheapest of materials, for a market of consumers who’ll love our new toys for a day or two before abandoning them in favour of the next shiny gadget. There’s an upside to that: that Big Corporate Structure keeps the R & D department going, so to speak, the vast market for commercial product supporting the smaller market for high-end fiction in this pulp modernist mode. But there’s a down-side: the commercialisation results in one key drawback, in the depth to which such works become bound to, sold as, and ultimately misunderstood as genre, as this schismed, schizoid Science Fiction / Fantasy, at odds with itself. And arguing in the ghetto creole of Genre, where aesthetic idiom is conflated with conventional form and marketing category, we buy into that, swallow it hook, line and sinker.

And the Great Debate rages on, food fights becoming flame wars, immolating meaning in a holocaust of definitions.

I’ve got a theory, one that’s been brewing for a while really, ever since I first read Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire and Poppy Z. Brite’s Lost Souls. It’s one that’s been partly informed by my… exposure to the Twilight phenomenon, to the general prevalence of the vampire trope these days. And after coming across one of those internet kerfuffles over a recent article in Esquire by Stephen Marche that made a rough stab at advancing a similar idea (and largely got shot down in flames) I thought it might be a good time to get my teeth into it, so to speak.

I can’t say it’s an entirely objective theory, can’t say it’s the sort of theory one develops from a serious study of the relevant texts — literary, cinematic, televisual. No, it’s the sort of theory one develops from throwing books across the room, shouting “Oh, for fuck’s sake!” at the television set, feeling one’s flesh crawl at the mere thought of the flick that’s now showing at the picture house. Smiling politely when people tell you how much they love this or that take on a trope that brings you out in hives. It’s not a theory that can really be summarised in a single sentence, because it’s still really in the process of formation; but I’m going to chuck out a simple statement and then see if I can sketch out some lines of thought around it. It’s really quite straightforward:

Vampires are ex-gay.

See, I’ve tried to like vampires. I really have. I did even go through a phase of thinking there was something cool about the whole idea way back when I was going through my angsty teen phase. Who can’t love The Lost Boys, after all? And if a lot of the cool there is kind of cute and comic and kitschy, well, when you’re dressing all in black and daydreaming of butchering your entire peer group, it’s natural to see Vlad the Impaler as a role model; so while I’d managed to miss out on that first phase of the goth subculture back in the 1980s — being too young for punk, too nerdy for metal, ultimately too fucked-up to latch onto any style of music and fashion as a focus for my alienated identity — plenty of my high school fantasies of murdermayhemkillkillcrazy sprees did extend to slaughter in a more up close and personal mode. With a Bowie knife rather than a Kalashnikov, you know? Or, yes, with fangs.

Clearly there’s a timeless appeal to the power fantasy of being the psychokiller in the long black coat (or cloak) — blood cold as a reptile’s, movements graceful as a cat’s, calm and in control. And to kill with a kiss is the perfection of that fantasy, that fantasy which is, in the end, to become the Jungian Shadow made flesh, to unleash the inner archetype that is pressing its hand, stained in red blood or gloved in black leather, against the all too thin tissue of the ego, stretching the tenous veil between conscious restraints and urges born somewhere in the snake-brain. We all have that inner inhumanity, and we all access it now and then, all recognise the characters that give our narcissistic rage flesh forms to prowl in.

It is, of course, kind of easy to snort derisively at that power-fantasy as adolescent angst, as the compensatory wank of the weak, to say: man, vampires are so gay. But that’s not really the issue now, I think. The trope has moved on from there.

Dead Souls, Damned Souls

Besides, I dont do that sort of cocksnooting. I understand the Columbine killers cause I had my own plans (even my own trenchcoat), understand that psychology well enough to be wary of scorning it. If adulthood will come as a healing haven for most of the self-mythologising adolescents who idealise this inner inhumanity — the demonic will-to-power that makes, say, Rutger Hauer in The Hitcher such a resonant horror — if most of them will make it to college and beyond, and find that being a freaky individualist can actually make you kind of cooler than the clones, if most of them will either abandon their emo angst in cringing embarassment or simply find a healthy emotional balance as a fine upstanding fans of movies or music the squares call “Satanic,” if the majority of them will, at most, limit their moral transgressions to a little kinky rubberbound BDSM — still, there are those who won’t just peek over the edge of the abyss to get a little thrill but will jump right into it and take as many with them as they can.

Nietszche said that when you stare into the abyss, it stares right back. As much as we might like to dismiss some self-styled “creature of the night” as a pathetic Walter Mitty, they might well be the one who’s recognised the face gazing at them as the one they see in the mirror every day. They might be the one who’s been broken by that. Stepped through the looking glass and into the abyss. Look at the language of those who’re headed for it, or who’ve lived through the comparable shattering of schizophrenia, and you find the dissociation and destruction of identity articulated in a vocabulary of ecstasy and death. In actual schizophrenia, you find acute and chronic stages, the first associated with apophenia and apotheosis, with an ecstatic rapture where everything is numinous, the latter associated with an utter loss of affect. These are the realities that seethe beneath the skin of the fantasy, in the flesh of archetypal images used to represent what it is to become a vampire: rebirth as a dark angel, a dread demon, man become god even, Christ and/or Antichrist; and a living death as a corpse that walks, that can have no relationship to those it sees as only meat because empathy dies with all the other emotions. The imagery of perdition articulates an all too real psychology as much as it play-acts an adolescent angst:

“Fiery the angels fell. Deep thunder rolled around their shores, burning with the fires of Orc.”

A Rutger Hauer line, needless to say.

So, yes, while one might “grow out” of that power-fantasy and come to find the whole Damned Soul trope frankly more than a little absurd in its Romantic self-idealising, me, I reserve my cynical disparagement for the most overblown examples, where the leavening kitsch quality of Hammer’s Dracula becomes risible retardedness in Coppola’s, for example, because the Byronic / Miltonic theme of tortured sensitivity is all so cack-handedly overwrought. Yes, vampire fiction suffers, as much pulp fiction does, when the power-fantasy is written without an ounce of self-awareness, when it seems like you’re reading the therapeutic journal scribblings of a fifteen-year-old’s compensatory daydreams. Then it’s just plain lame. Or gay, as the kids say.

But it’s not that kind of gayness that irks me. If vampire fiction is ex-gay in that sense, it’s because the writers have moved past that thematically, gone through the glamour and into the rotting flesh of it. It’s because the writers have been moving past that for as long as they’ve been using the trope — or at least those with anything that remotely resembles skill have. Lucius Shepard’s The Golden, to take one example, could hardly be accused of that fault. No, it’s the proper kind of gay I’m talking about — vampires as fags.

Semites, Sex and Sin, Sin, Sin

If the power-fantasy is a core part of the vampire trope, so too is the repressed sexuality. Stoker’s Dracula has it in spades, as does much of what comes after, so much so that I really don’t need to regurgitate a million essays on how bloodsucking functions as a cipher for the sexual act, right? Of course, when I say “functions as a cipher for the sexual act,” I mean “stands as a twenty-foot sign with flashing arrows, air raid sirens, and the Voice of God repeating the words ‘SIN! SIN! SIN!’” Cause, you know, where the dance of down-and-dirty desire is represented by a hypnotic power that puts rohypnol to shame, a slow leeching of will-to-live never mind will-to-power, and a feeding action as sensually seductive as a snake sucking the insides from an egg, this is sex as the action of a predator and parasite, sex as a pernicious temptation of the flesh, sex as a Bad Thing.

I’ve never really gotten how Stoker’s book is any more “transgressive” than a slasher movie with the subtext that “teenagers who fuck must die”. I’ve never really gotten how it’s any more “transgressive” than a Victorian freak show where the hoi polloi and hoity toity rub shouders as they’re thrilled by their revulsion at caged monstrosities — which is pretty much what vampirism sets sex up as. Stoker isn’t raunchy; he’s square as a Bible Belt church elder with a stick up his ass, preaching a gospel of sinful appetites to be denied. There’s all the prurience of a peep show in his novel but its message is born of prudishness, nurtured with perdition and, at the end of the day, as fucked-up as a self-flagellating penitent. If you want a Gothic horror that subverts Victorian mores, go read Frankenstein where it’s the creature’s abjection as a monster that sets it on a path of destruction. No, the conservative moral worldview of Christianity is written into the vampire trope, in its crucifixes and holy water. God is in his Heaven, Satan roams the Earth at night, and good clean Christian folks sometimes have to band together against the abominations who want to rape and/or eat their children.

It’s an undercurrent that persists to the present day. I’m given to understand that when Twilight’s Bella finally unlocks her chastity belt, the sex with Edward has good old-fashioned Terrible Consequences. Fuck, the whole series is a twisted Mormon chastity allegory, with some profoundly unsavoury nastiness presented as righteous and good in that typically neurotic inversion of rational ethics — e.g. having an adult werewolf “imprint” romantically on a newborn baby, which is simply creepy as fuck. But if we can expect sex to lead to death-by-childbirth with Meyer, even Whedon couldn’t get away from those Terrible Consequences at points, with Angel transformed into the monstrous Angelus by his consummation with Buffy, and with Buffy moving on to a dysfunctional dalliance with Spike that’s clearly royally fucked-up. The dread of desire is part of the mythos now to the extent that even a leftie liberal feminist couldn’t write it out of his series, even as he rewired the morality of his metaphysics to undercut the easy Good/Evil duality. Ultimately, Anne Rice’s (re)conversion to Catholicism is perfectly in line with works that revel in the demonic; the works depend on that Catholicism.

It’s not just about sex, of course. The simpler superstitions of stakes in the heart, heads cut off, mouths stuffed with garlic and sewn shut — these speak of more folkloric fears, belong in the medieval mists when vampires were basically just graveyard ghouls seeping from the corpses of the cursed, miasmas more likely to sicken cattle than seduce chaste maidens. The distinctly non-sexy creatures of that tradition carry on in the ugly-ass vampires of Nosferatu or Salem’s Lot, but with their bald heads, rat-like fangs and postures hunched in greed, even these trade on some less than palatable Christian neuroses. Dracula himself conforms to that type actually, despite the sexual subtext and the Byronic spin the trope has subsequently developed. His appearance in the book is in fact quite… illuminating. A swarthy foreigner from Eastern Europe with the distinctly “criminal” physiognomy of bushy eyebrows and hooked nose, speaking in a guttural accent that switches ‘v’s and ‘w’s. One who is seen early on in the book carrying a child in a sack to be fed on with his vampire mistresses, in an image straight out of anti-Semitic blood libels. One who, late on in the book, in a scene where Harker slashes his cloak with a knife, makes sure to “grasp” the “bundle of banknotes” and “stream of gold” that falls out before fleeing.

Vampires were Fagins long before they were fags, I guess.

Of course, as the trope becomes unbound from the text, seeps into the culture-at-large, the return of the repressed ultimately undermines the dubious message(s) of Dracula. Maybe it’s the appeal of that sexual undercurrent in the novel, regardless of the explicit meaning. Maybe it’s just that Lugosi made more ripples in the popular media than Schreck. Either way, those “criminal” features become unfocused, blur and blend into those of Romantic anti-heroes, factual and fictive, those Byronic aristos and Heathcliffian lovers. The allure of his darkness and deviance overriding the avarice and ugliness, figuratively speaking Dracula transforms from Jew to Gypsy, and the vampire begins the transition from the reviled Other to the fetishised Other.

Cause, yeah, that’s a big improvement.

Dark Demons and White Knights

Now, since the trope is reshaped in works made both by and for straight men, the subtext that develops between Stoker and Rice is not exactly a great step forward from the Victorian neuroses underpinning the former’s work; but it does have to be said that any moral squick over sex as “SIN! SIN! SIN!” is about as potent in Hammer movies and Italian lesbian vampire flicks as it is in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Which is to say, not very. For all that the pulp fiction which picks up on the image of vampire as sexy beast and runs with it remains underpinned by a Christian mythos in which crosses repel the corrupting seducer, there’s too much of the exploitation movie in a whole lot of Hammer movies for anyone to take that reading of the vampire trope very seriously at all. No, the low-cut bodices revealing heaving bosoms, the blood trickling down soft-skinned necks, the harems of female vampires charged with titillating lesbianism, the magnetic gaze of the dark demon himself — these are all in the service of sensationalism now. Sexiness is on the surface, the wickedness only a way to make it all the more thrilling through a flirtation with the notion that one is doing wrong. Sex isn’t a Bad Thing; it’s a Naughty Thing. And another message is hammered home between the iterations, with each return — Dracula rising from the grave again and again and again — that you can’t keep a good fiend down. Repression is futile.

The vampire here isn’t gay in the slightest, of course. Christopher Lee may look swish in his silk cape, but he’s a ladies’ man through and through. Nor is it even unconventional. If his sexual predation is a fantasy of date-rape as seduction, it’s a male fantasy of empowerment in which the villain is the identification figure, rather than a female fantasy of disempowerment as a threatened but protected victim; we’re not quite dealing with the fetishised Other here, not yet. Rather this fantasy binds with that will-to-power daydream outlined above, but in doing so dilutes the murderous psychokiller into a hypnotising philanderer, panders to the Id rather than the Shadow. Arguably, it binds also to a white knight fantasy where the anodyne Harker (or Harker surrogate) in those Hammer movies gets the girl by playing the good guy and saving her from the rapist. These two fantasies create a mixed message in the zone of tension created between them perhaps, the former serving as the absolutely unacceptable mechanism for getting the girl-flesh, set against the “acceptable” heroic strategy of riding to the rescue — “acceptable” being in inverted commas cause this is hardly the most enlightened feminism.

The thing is, it’s still all about straight male dominance, straight male libido, up to and including, I’d say, Sarandon and Deneuve getting it on in The Hunger. There’s a hint of something new in the flipping of the dynamic between Deneuve and Bowie, in Bowie’s degeneration and ultimate disposal, and in the centrality of Sarandon as both victim and hero; but the lesbian relationship here is all just a little… soft-focus softcore, no? It’s not like two foxy mamas getting steamy is designed to alienate an audience of libidinous men. And in the great tradition of Victorian fiction those two women with the temerity to assume centrality and strive for independence come to a sticky end. The woman can’t save herself, you know; she needs her white knight to do that. And if a woman thinks she gets to be the dark demon with her conquests in thrall, well, it’s interesting how that reversal of the dynamic is undone in the end.

Which brings us to the more recent iterations of the trope wherein the male vampires have become way sexier than Stoker ever imagined them, as much Bowie as Byron, and where a far more radical reshaping of the trope has taken place, the dark demon and white knight fused into one, both threatening and protective towards the female protagonist who is now front and centre in a mode of vampire fiction that seems largely written by women for women. A protagonist I hereby dub Mary Sookie.

Girls Can Be Bottoms Too

See, where in the past vampires were pretty much just the Big Bad Wolf, objects of fear because they represented the threat of male lust — male desire as a predatorial, parasitical, penetrating menace — more and more these days they seem to have become objects of desire in and of themselves, representing the dark side of masculinity as yearned for by women. These aren’t stories about some crotchety eccentric and his dashing young crusaders smiting Satan in the shape of a man. These are stories about the swooning maiden all too thrilled to be courted by a brooding poet-cum-warrior who has to do his damnedest not to rip her fucking throat open. These are stories told from inside the glamour, wet dreams of the dangerous outsider who’ll sweep a girl off her feet, who’ll follow her everywhere in case he needs to rescue her from peril, who’ll claim her as his own, his possession. And if a girl has to cover up those marks he leaves on her neck, well, he doesn’t mean to hurt her; he’s just so passionate.

Date-rape, stalking and domestic violence. Isn’t he just the Best Boyfriend EVAR?

Clearly girls can be bottoms too, methinks. You know about the whole top/bottom dynamic in (some) gay relationships, yes? That while a lot of gays are as happy as pitchers as they are as catchers, sometimes there’s a whole manly-man active partner versus girly-boy passive partner thing going on? Well, I won’t go into the mechanics, but that is a fairly common dynamic even if it’s not as obvious as some daddy bear with a trophy twink glittering on his arm. It might not go as far as S&M, as outright domination, but sex and power aren’t exactly strangers in the steam rooms of the psyche, you know, and for many there’s nothing hotter than that strong, silent type who’ll throw you on your back, shove your legs up over your shoulders and own you. (Oh, I said I wouldn’t go into the mechanics, didn’t I? OK, I lied.)

My own attitude to this? Whatever floats your boat, baby. When you look at it in heterosexual terms, from a feminist perspective, there’s something deeply disquieting about the obeisant reverence of all these undead Heathcliffs, these Rebels Without a Pulse; there’s a whiff of submission to abuse. And yet that sort of passivity in gay relationships can, truth be told, go hand-in-hand with a pretty controlling personality; equalise the genders and you can start to see where all the gruff, rough manliness says little of who wears the pants in the relationship. True Blood‘s Vampire Bill fits the mold so well that I’d lay odds on Alan Ball being an unashamed power bottom, with Sookie as his Mary Sue, quivering at the bite of her noble savage vampire lover, but feisty as a faggot on daytime TV, arms on hips, dressing down her sheepish ex-serial killer of a boyfriend with the sass of a drag queen who’s been dissed. (And a similar power dynamic might well be detected in the relationship between Arlene and Terry, I’d say.) Is there a weird subversion of the power dynamic at play in this fantasy of the vampire as a top then? If Edward’s creepy stalker behaviour in Twilight is dodgy as fuck, is there a point where the sexual politics of vampire and victim is less about men and women than it is about tops and bottoms? If girls can be bottoms too, is the whole vampire trope these days reflecting a desire no less valid for them than it is for gay men?

I don’t know. All I know is I watched Twilight to see if I could ever seriously consider dating any of the countless hot emo boys who list it as their favourite movie on Gaydar, and the answer was, “Fuck no! That movie stinks!”

Fops, Fangs and Fags

It’s somewhere in the development of this permutation of the trope, I think, in the fusion of dark demon and white knight, the transformation of the Other from an object of dread to an object of desire, that vampires became kinda gay. See, I have to say I think that Esquire article has a point. Along with all the AIDS metaphor stories in the 80s, Anne Rice and Poppy Z. Brite cemented a link with homosexuality that was already coded into the image of vampire-as-sophisticate. All those frilly-shirted, flouncing pretty-boys in one, pouting at each other across the room. All those proto-emo, moping pretty-boys in the other, drinking Chartreuse and making out. Rice and Brite were only, I’d say, picking up on the age-old association of sensitivity and sexuality. Byrons or Bowies, poets and pop idols, all those glamourous and glamouring Romantics tend to accrete rumours of gender-bending exploits, even before they start actively courting them. All fops are fags, as far as your homophobic hick is concerned. Stepping out of the bounds of heteronormative masculinity even by — shock horror! — reading a book automatically renders one something less than a true red-blooded male, renders one effete, renders one queer. All Rice did was see how James Dean might play Dracula instead of Christopher Lee. With Sal Mineo as Louis, of course.

But when I say vampires became kinda gay the qualifier is there for a reason. If the under-current of sexuality to vampirism lends a homoerotic aspect to any male-male vampire-victim or vampire-sire relationship, it seems there’s a tendency to avoid full-on dedicated faggotry. Lestat and Louis in Interview With the Vampire, Erik and Godric in True Blood — these might be intense relationships with homosexuality rippling under the surface or right there on top of it, but the characters are as likely to end up with a girl as a guy in their centuries of bed-hopping. Bisexuality is the order of the day here — as it was with Byron and Bowie, of course — not bona fide bumboy buggery that wouldn’t give a passing glance at Buffy, Bella or any other human being who just… well… has the wrong set of genitalia, sorry.

No, for all the male-male pairings you get in vampire fiction, I don’t think vampires have ever really been properly gay; to be gay they’d actually have to fuck, you see, not just gaze at each other longingly across the room. No, there’s an insipid, anodyne, even sexless quality to the gender-bending androgyny of these pouting, posturing immortals. In all the slash fiction style couplings, there seems little understanding of how gay guys actually get it on, how much it’s about the stereotypically male obsession with body-parts rather than the stereotypically female emotional communion. The buckets of blood and passion wrought to the histrionic level still, for me, seem utterly divorced from any, yanno, actual sweaty physicality. It should be meat and bukkake, baby, not Mills and Boon. The fact that vampires in Ball’s TV version of the Harris novels weep blood is not insignificant, though it is ironic given that Ball’s take on the trope is pretty unashamedly flesh-worshipping (and I can’t help wondering if his sexuality is entirely coincidental here); blood, it seems, is the surrogate substance that replaces all other bodily fluids, all sweat and piss and spit and spunk. Do vampires need to drink blood because they’re basically in and of themselves bloodless?

Really, is it at all surprising that Rice is now touting angels as “the new vampires”? Is there much difference when it comes down to it? The tropes of vampires and angels both seem to… mark out the edges of a profound neurosis as regards the corruptible body in all its icky squicky salty wonder, a response of “eeewww, cooties!” to the gloriously sordid realities of life itself. They share key features, resonate with each other. They even intermingle here and there; ageless and beautiful, more than human, Nephelim and vampires rub shoulders in the Goth subculture, swap clothes and pseudo-historical legacies. In Tim Powers’ novel, The Stress of Her Regard, they’re pretty much equated, and Powers is not alone in making this connection — though if Powers is way too good a writer to let his Catholicism render his work a subtextual religious polemic, I can’t say I hold out the same hope for Rice as she turns from the tortured tick of a guilt-ridden vamp feeding on rats — like Angel in Buffy, Bill in True Blood, Edward in Twilight, Stephen in The Vampire Diaries, all those ticks trying so hard to undo their Fallen state — to a contract killer working for a dark angel, aiming for Redemption. The point is, the trope of the Fall is writ large in the mythos, and that ain’t a terribly healthy metaphor for the human condition to my mind.

And if you do try and read vampires as gay, that whole Damned Soul schtick and the male-object-of-female-desire malarky sort of combine into something altogether more ugly.

I should be clear about one thing here though: I’m talking about the power of the trope as shaped in popular culture — not the field of vampire fiction in general, which like any such field can only be insulted by gross generalisations, just the aspects of the motif made most dominant in recent years, in the zeitgeist, by the most influential works. These are thoughts shaped by my sense of the shifts in that zeitgeist, a lot of them biased, I’m sure, by my responses to particular works, and an experience limited to the big movers and shakers — Dracula, Interview With the Vampire, Lost Souls, Lost Boys, Queen of the Damned, Buffy, Angel, Twilight, True Blood, to which my responses range from outright contempt to bona fide fandom. I’m claiming no expert knowledge of the field in all its capacities and nothing I say should be taken as a grand proclamation on What Vampires Are And Must Be All About. As the anti-Semitic aspects of Dracula demonstrate, this shifts with time. Even a tired trope that seems set in one form can be twisted, made fresh in skillful hands. Probably already has somewhere off my radar. It’s just… if there’s a queer subtext to the trope as it stands now, in the shadow cast by those versions that have claimed primacy, well, it’s… kinda fucked-up.

And the trope is accessible to a queer reading. This isn’t just a matter of stereotypical notions of gay men being better groomed. It’s not just that the girls are going for those metrosexual boy band types these days. It’s not just that sparkling in sunlight is the paragon of fabulous, darling. In the modern exemplars of the vampire-as-boyfriend, that bloodsucker is a secretive motherfucker. He has cover stories and performative stratagems — mocking squeamishness and repulsion in place of desire when tempted by blood, like a closet case homophobe dissing “homos” in the locker room. He’s the Other who can’t be sure of a welcome in that nice family home, bastion of heteronormativity, who stands on the threshold waiting to be invited in, knowing that he might not be invited in if his true nature was known. In The Vampire Diaries, he’s the guy who wouldn’t dream of reading the heroine’s private journal because he couldn’t stand someone reading his. He’s the guy who’s “sensitive” enough to actually keep a private journal of his own. (Fag!) He’s the guy who lies about the familial relationships he doesn’t have any more because of what he is, who lives with an older man that isn’t really his “uncle”. He’s the guy who asserts his normality by trying out for the football team — just as the gay character in Williamson’s previous series, Dawson’s Creek does. Man, he’s the guy who gets a Kate Bush song covered by Placebo as a soundtrack to his big “I’m a tortured soul” brooding scene.

And if feeding equals sex in the subtext of the trope, such that all those self-denying martyrs to morality — Angel, Bill, Edward, Stephen — are essentially being celibate when they snack on animals rather than humans, how are we meant to read it when the latest in that line has his brother turn up to taunt him about this abstinence, urging him to admit his true nature, to feed. “Let’s do it together,” he says.

O-kay.

If you think that’s stretching it a bit, by the way, well, it’s later revealed that both brothers were turned by a female vamp who pretty much wanted an immortal threesome.

Like yaoi and slash, there is something here that’s tapping into a female interest in gay men, I think. Sometimes that interest may be healthy and harmless, not so much a creepy crush on Teh Gayz as an identification with their experience, the sort of mutual sympathies from which faghags are born, bless them. Hell, even if straight girls get off on gay guys getting it on, I’m hardly going to complain if it means more homo action in my fiction. I might occasionally baulk at the exoticism, a little too redolent of those women you meet now and then who want you to be their Gay Best Friend (cause Teh Gayz are so Kewl,), but hey, if I don’t do the dance music and feather boas they find so wonderful, I’m gay enough to court attention with the shallowness of Jack from Will & Grace, so who am I to judge? I just think, if you’re going to write Teh Gayz and not have it read as the female equivalent of lesbian porn by and for straight men… well, you need a little less romance and little more rimming, dig? Really, you’d be better working with werewolves; you can imagine them with their noses at each other’s arse.

No, the problem for me is where the trope seems to have moved on from the slashy homoeroticism of Rice and Brite into a new permutation where, it seems, faghaggery has gone really quite wrong — where there’s a flip-side to the “taming the bad boy” subtext in a “turning the gay boy” subtext. With the two latest twinktastic takes on the trope — Twilight’s Edward and The Vampire Diaries’ Stephen, the way I see it is these vampires have more than a hint of the castrato homo to them. They read as the high school homosexual — not the flighty, flouncy girly-boy bottom who everyone knows (and just adores) as gay, but the closet case top whose masculinity offers no easy out(ing). They read as that queer kid in the depth of denial, telling himself that straight equals butch and butch equals straight, fixating on a girl but in a hyper-Romantic rather than raunchy way because it’s a profoundly neurotic pseudo-attraction. One-girl guys, they seem immune to the base lust of male adolescence, but weave in that thwarted hunger for blood and it becomes a story of repression rather than indifference.

But hey, wouldn’t it be wonderful to be the object of such false, compensatory desires? Wouldn’t it be awesome if your Gay Best Friend was only so repressed that the gayness was really little more than a bit of metrosexual preening and emo moodiness? Wouldn’t it be sweet if he was all tortured and mysterious, weirdly distanced and circumspect at times, guilt-wracked by some terrible secret he can’t ever have people know? Wouldn’t it be ace if he wasn’t even remotely interested in other girls but devoted to you as if his very sense of self depended upon it? Wouldn’t it be killer if his repressed sexuality surfaced as another kind of “dark appetite” or “private vice” but he could somehow — strangely — manage to restrain himself from unleashing it on you — the power of true love presumably — pull himself away when the necking gets too hot, in an endearingly panic-stricken sort of way?

Baby, these vampires aren’t gay. These are fetishised homos-in-denial who’ve been sent off to get the cure at some Christian Ex-Gay Boot Camp. These are mollys scared straight by Mormonism, by the power of the perdition written into the mythos. These are journal-writing jocks who’ve flirted with bi-curiosity but ultimately foresworn it, buried their abominable appetites in the coffin they crawled out of, dumped six foot of soil over their diabolic desires. If Angel got his soul back, Edward and Stephen have had theirs purified, redeemed, hallelujah, by however many decades of denial. Happily walking about in the daylight, protected by a silver ring or a Silver Ring Thing, there’s barely a hint of the demonic to them now, just those dread desires they’ve got boxed away nicely. No, it’s the wholesome life for them now — family baseball matches and try-outs for the football team, find a nice girl and settle down. If they did Bad Things in the past they can make up for it by being the Best Boyfriend Evar! They’ll love her like no-one’s ever loved before, cause after all they’re actually trying. Really fucking hard. Though if they ever stop trying… well, there would be Terrible Consequences for their beard — sorry, beloved.

Man, you know that old phrase, “so far in the closet, he’s in Narnia”?

If you go further back it seems you end up in Forks, Washington.

     
I can’t tell you what age I was when I first read Samuel R. Delany’s “Aye, And Gomorrah,” in a tattered second-hand copy of his collection, Driftglass. I have only the most random snippets of memories associated with my teen reading — a vague awareness that the first SF book I read was I, ROBOT, that I caught the bug with more Asimov, became a hardened fan with Heinlein and PKD, and an avid collector with the series of Gollancz Classics released in the 1980s. I’m pretty sure that it was picking up Babel-17 and Nova as part of that series that turned me on to Delany. Well, OK. I say I’m pretty sure; I might just as easily have read one of his short stories first in one of the umpteen anthologies I took out of the local library. Truth be told, I have a shit memory, so I’m pretty sketchy on the details, have a tendency to answer any question that begins “Do you remember…?” with, “Was it more than a minute ago?”

(Sometimes I’ll claim that I had to blank out the 80s entirely because it was the only way my sanity could survive an upbringing in the small town of Kilwinning, Scotland, overshadowed by Mutual Assured Destruction, AIDS and Clause 28, governed by Margaret Thatcher and soundtracked by Pete fucking Waterman; that if the memories ever did resurface most likely there’d be a pointy reckoning that ended up with buildings razed, ground sown with salt, and me in some asylum for the criminally insane. Sometimes, on the other hand, I’ll claim that my absent-mindedness is because most of the ROM in my brain is in use as virtual RAM — because it’s all processing power, you see, and I’m not actually just bone-idle about learning those things you other geeks call “facts.” A thirtieth birthday spent in Amsterdam, attempting to escape any pursuing sandmen a la Logan’s Run in a haze of cannabis smoke, may possibly have had some small contributory effect, but I’m sure it’s more than just too much weed and early onset senility. Really, there’s got to be more to it than that. I think I’m just not set-up for a linear existence.)

Anyway, what I do remember is being thrilled by the queer qualities of those two Delany novels, being raptured in an insistent sense of recognition. Here was sf that spoke to me not just as a geek looking for romance and logic, wild adventure and wilder philosophy; this was fiction that spoke to me as a gay geek. And it wasn’t even the blatant representation of polyamorous relationships in Babel-17 that I picked up on. No, it was an inarticulable something to the character of Mouse in Nova that I found utterly compelling. Maybe it was the way his syrinx-playing hinted of all those tasty young poets of Greek myth and history, the gays and strays of ancient days. Maybe it was the echoes of a more modern trope, the street-punk hustler with the face of an angel belied by his gutter-talk. Hell, maybe it’s just the sensuality with which Delany writes about men’s hands. Whatever it was that set my gaydar tingling, even before I came to DriftGlass and the story “Aye, And Gomorrah,” I already knew that however much of an outcast I felt in reality, the fictive future(s) of sf had a home for me — not in the escapist sense of a daydreamed refuge, but aesthetically, ideologically. I read my own queerness in Delany’s work, and knew that meant there was a place for it, for me, in this field.

That epigraph in DriftGlass just gave it a name. That’s where the whole “Notes from New Sodom” comes from, you see. As far as I’m concerned, there’s a simple answer to the questions that close it, “What city can I found? Where must I go now to make a home?”

That city is New Sodom, and we’re building it right fucking here.

     
How I Became a Sodomite

I’m a bit of a rubbish gay, I have to confess, more retrosexual than metrosexual. If you say, “Burroughs,” I think William rather than Augustin. I think Wilde was witty, but if it’s scathing ripostes you want, I go with slaughtering your enemy and dragging their carcass ten times round the walls of Troy. It’s the music on the gay scene that alienates me most of all, I suspect, the insufferably anodyne pop and crappy club remixes that give, “Hey ho, let’s go” a whole nother meaning to what The Ramones intended. The nearest I get to Madonna is the statue of the Virgin Mary on my mantelpiece (repainted with black skin and robes of scarlet and purple, natch). Sure, I may have a soft spot for musical theatre, but I blame that on early exposure to (and identification with) Parson Nathaniel from Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds and Judas Iscariot from Jesus Christ Superstar as role models in their rabid rantifying. Personal grooming? I’d rather smell like wet dog fur than flowers. (Honestly, I would.  Wet dog fur has a bad rep.)  Fashion? OK, so I can appreciate a bit of Dior Homme, but Hedi Slimane is rock’n'roll, man, and you gotta look good for the hot young hipsters. And, really, I’ve never been convinced by the whole Queer Eye thing anyway. If it were true… well, as flags go, red or black is classy, but rainbow colours? Baby, how the fuck do you co-ordinate with the whole visible spectrum?

So, no, the whole gay culture thing is a train that left me on the platform waving goodbye. I hear the words “gay village” and I see myself running down a beach pursued by an enormous white weather balloon, shouting, “I am not a disco number! I am a free man!” And yet…

And yet, as much as I’m inclined to be a feral mutt, skulking round the outskirts of the gay community at the best of times, over the last month or so I’ve somehow found myself a fully integrated member of a bona fide pack. There are badges and banners for blogs and LiveJournals. There’s talk of t-shirts and suchlike malarkey. We even had a frickin Pride Day on September 1st, which I was proud to participate in — and this coming from the man whose last Pride March ended with him trying really really hard to get shit-faced on vodka jellies while a dodgy Freddy Mercury impersonator did an extended set because Atomic Kitten had failed to turn up (thank fuck).

When the fuck, I ask myself, did I become a joiner?

A mere day or two, it seems, after the Outer Alliance was set up towards the end of August, to bring together a group of writers and their associates within the strange fiction communities, all of them (all of us) committed to the advocacy of queer issues, both in fiction and outside of it, their (our) aim to support, celebrate and educate. Sadly, but unsurprisingly, there was a damn good reason for what was — and is — loosely envisioned as a queer analogue of The Carl Brandon Society; in the preceding weeks a fairly successful — if not Big Name — sf writer had posted a vitriolic rant on his LiveJournal, using words like “homosex” and “abomination,” and explicitly comparing homosexuality to paedophilia, necrophilia, incest and bestiality. (You can find it if you go looking; I’ve said quite enough about it myself already.) Happily — and actually quite suprisingly, given the pattern of recent blogospheric blow-ups over similar issues — while that post did set the interwebs ablaze, a defiant positivity was born amid all the outrage, a refusal to be merely reactive, a determination to fucking well build something from it.

Some people focused on the support might call that something a “safe space,” while others focused on the education might call it a “base of operations.” Some people might think of it as a clubhouse for a community, while others might think of it as an office for a political organisation. Some people might think of it as a home.

I think of it as a landmark in New Sodom.  Something anyone might see the benefit of.  A place folks might hang out, but not closed-off, hidden away.  No, out in the open.  Like a water-fountain, say.

The Elders of Sodom had to have a representative in the Outer Alliance, of course. And being “THE…. Sodomite Hal Duncan!!” (yes, that’s with four ellipsis points and two exclamation marks,) I knew I was pretty much signed up even before it started.

I guess I was signed up when I offered my own response to aforesaid vitriolic rant, in the form of an open letter from the Elders of Sodom. No, scratch that. I was signed up maybe a year or so before, when I gladly accepted the label “THE…. Sodomite Hal Duncan!!” in a response to the hatemail that addressed me as such. (Cause, you know, all those capitals, the superfluous ellipses and exclamations… that’s a handle with cojones, mi amigos. Even the Outlaw Josie Wales wasn’t “THE…. Outlaw Josie Wales!!”) Or maybe I was signed up before that, when I posted an earlier open letter from the Elders of Sodom, in response to a fly-by blog commenter’s screed titled “Opposing the Homosexual Agenda”; when I figured why the fuck not just reveal the truth of our Protocols, fess up to the great international conspiracy of queers aimed at nothing less than the total reconstruction of society. Or maybe I was signed up when I posted the “Homosexual Agenda” blog entry that drew that fly-by comment in the first place, an attack on an Alabama Senator who was trying to get Section-28 style legislation passed to exclude queer writers and their works from school libraries.

Fuck it, truth is, I was probably signed up when — most likely very near the time Section-28 came into force in the UK, prohibiting the “promotion of homosexuality” by local authorities, banishing all works that might be deemed supportive of my sexuality from all school libraries, decreeing that my queerness had no place, no home, even in fiction — I read that epigraph that opens Driftglass. And I understood that my city had been destroyed, that I lived in exile. When I understood that the last question was the most important: “Where now must I go to make a home?”

That, I guess, is when I became a joiner — cutting paragraphs into shape, sanding rough edges off sentences, hammering words together to build, if nothing else, a caravan to travel in, in my search for the answer.

     
Shitstorms and Spring-Cleaning

There’s probably some of you reading this who’re thinking that I’ve gotten a tad grandiose with the whole “rebuilding Sodom” thing, that I’m bringing out some over-stated bolshie rhetoric over some unimportant people who said some ultimately unimportant things. So a writer of moderate renown spewed some blather that probably lost him a shitload of readers? So a handful of loons send emails or post blog comments that reveal their own idiocies more than anything else? People on the interwebs say fucktarded things. This is hardly the Spanish Inquisition burning the sexual deviants at the stake.

Hell, there’s probably some of you reading this who despise the fucktards as much as me, who absolutely support the idea of organisations like the Outer Alliance, who know that even in our community of freaks and geeks there’s prejudice to be tackled, but for whom the field seems… well… a relatively progressive place, inclusive and welcoming. Intolerance is a bad thing, you quite agree, but generally speaking acceptance is the rule, and the exceptions are… well… nutjobs to be dismissed.

Now, it’s not that I reckon you’re wrong per se about the extent of the problem. It’s just that I’m not sure terms like “tolerance” and “intolerance” are sufficient, not sure the issue packs the same emotional punch when you’re not a member of an abjected social group; intolerance isn’t nice, but it’s not bastinado.

For me though, when I found out about the Outer Alliance, it seemed to me an idea whose time had come. For sure, there’s already the Lambda Literary Foundation, Gaylaxicon and the Gaylactic Spectrum Awards, the Tiptree Award, Lethe Press, even magazines like Icarus that are wholly focused on gay speculative fiction or magazines like Strange Horizons that explicitly invite it. These are some of the structures of this New Sodom we’re building, some with their foundations dating back a good way, others with the paint still fresh on the walls. So it’s not that the sf community is a harsh and unwelcoming territory in which all us queers are foreigners in exile. But within the first month of its existence the Outer Alliance has proven its value, shown the need for such an organisation, and made an audacious start, I’d say, in fulfilling that need. Because within the first month, it’s been put to the test.

Coming right on the heels of the blogospheric explosion over that vitriolic LiveJournal rant, while the first few hundred members of the Outer Alliance were still making their introductions, Bart Leib, editor of Crossed Genres, with no small amount of reticence, opened a discussion on an ethical dilemma he was faced with. With a special LGBTQ issue of the magazine in the pipeline, Leib had been placing adverts with various sites, trying to rustle up a good whack of submissions. Unfortunately one site, which he wasn’t yet sure he wanted to make public, had refused the ad as “sexually-themed.” The advert itself being far from explicit, it had seemed to him the presence of the acronym “LGBTQ” was the nub of the problem for the editor, and in a few emails back and forth the editor had pretty much confirmed this. In those emails, he’d outlined a conservative moral stance that rejected some fairly fundamental queer rights on the basis of the usual religious beliefs, a stance that, more importantly, extended to an unspoken editorial policy against “message” stories that sought to justify homosexuality. As polite and open as the communication was, and as loathe as Leib was to make such private correspondence public, where an editor was averse to queer content it seemed highly arguable that the writers who might be submitting to that market had a right to know upfront. So should he or shouldn’t he go public?

In many ways, the Outer Alliance didn’t offer much more than a platform for discussion, and support for Leib regardless of his eventual decision. In other ways, the existence of the network, the foreknowledge of what was coming when Leib decided to reveal the market as Flash Fiction Online, the whole discussion running up to it, may well have played an important part in preventing yet another demoralising shitstorm. This is not to say the word didn’t spread quickly and widely, that there were no harsh words of condemnation, entries on blogs and LiveJournals that angrily challenged, for example, the casual — if caveated — linking of homosexuality and paedophilia in Jake Freivald’s last email to Leib. But in place of another fucking FailFail, what we ended up with was not just a host of impassioned but level-headed criticism and statements of support, but tangible positive outcomes, with the rejected ad being displayed on scores of blogs and journals and free advertising space being offered by at least one major site. No shitstorm. No FailFail. This was a Win.

You might well agree; I sincerely hope you do. Or if you disagree, I hope it’s because you’re a bolshie motherfucker yourself, and think that shitstorms are exactly what’s called for in the face of prejudice. That’s fair enough. Still, even amongst those who agree, I’m kind of curious, to be honest, as to how much these sort of issues hit others in the gut and how much this sort of result just gives… a warm glow of affirmation that, yes, we can all be nice to each other and make the world a nicer place. How much of the struggle is, for many, about a gradual quantitative improvement in tolerance and not a radical overhaul, a comprehensive dismantling and rebuilding? Not so much rebuilding Sodom as spring-cleaning all the houses of the present-day city of the soul?

What I mean is, to put it into perspective, an editorial policy opposed to queer content isn’t just a matter of a lack of tolerance, of homophobia wired deeply into religious dogma such that even basically decent folks can end up with the most fucked-up prejudicial mores. The word intolerance is inadequate. Even words like homophobia and prejudice are easy outs in some ways, allowing the right-thinking (or rather left-thinking) ally of all who are abjected to see the problem as a matter of mentalities, the intolerant mindsets of individuals who just have this… poison of nastiness within them. And of course that’s wrong. Of course we need to stand up to that sort of nastiness. Of course we should be against intolerance.

But for me that sort of editorial policy has a label less insipid than intolerance: I call it segregation.

     
How We Build New Sodom

The psychological process of abjection — recoiling in revulsion at that which is/was a part of oneself (i.e. blood, shit) — is a core component of prejudice, I think. For all that we might have green eyes, an ability to roll our tongues, a dislike of bananas, for all that we are different from each other in so many ways, it’s only certain markers of difference that lead to some being classed as deviant in contrast to the default, “abnormal” in contrast to the “normal”. The default is not white, straight, able-bodied, and so on because anything else is just plain weird, but because skin colour, sexuality and disability are the markers of difference we base abjection on. These are the markers that lead to an exclusion of that which is a part of society as being Other, with associated irrational revulsion. This is why “green-eye content” in fiction is not an issue, why “queer content” in fiction is.

Discomfort at that which is abjected leads to its absence; it leads to the twin pillars of segregationism: on the one hand there is the insistence that “I don’t mind queer content as long as it’s important to the story,” while on the other there is the insistence that “I don’t mind queer content as long as it’s not shoved down your throat.” It’s OK as long as it matters in plot-terms. It’s OK as long as it’s not a “message” story. Where does this leave us when the story is a plot-driven adventure and it doesn’t matter a jot to all the high-jinks and shenanigans that the love-interest is the same gender as the hero? Where does this leave us when sadly, as Section-28 and suchlike rhetoric — from legislative policies to LiveJournal rantings — have so eminently demonstrated, simply presenting queerness as not essentially problematic will be construed by some as promoting homosexuality, as a “message” that it is no big deal?

Between these two an exclusion is enforced, the first asserting that queerness isn’t just a quirk to be thrown in as part of a fully-rounded character — that you can’t just make your Kojak a sucker of cocks rather than lollipops, say — the second asserting that queerness is allowed in only on condition that it remains discreet — that your queer content doesn’t start getting all uppity, in people’s faces (even where “uppity” simply means “open”.) God forbid we present gay cowboys as kick-ass (and fuck-ass) gunslingers saving the poor villagers from the evil bandits… rather than furtive lovers doomed to misery because their (true, inner) lives revolve around a sexuality deemed unacceptable in 1960s Wyoming. God forbid we present Achilles and Patroclus as lovers in a Hollywood blockbuster just to make the point that faggots can be fucking fearsome rather than flouncy… rather than stripping away any such “message” with a constant stressing of their “cousin” relationship.

Of course, segregationism doesn’t say that fiction breaching these strictures shouldn’t exist — simply that there’s no place for it here, in this venue. There’s other places you can go if that’s what you’re looking for, right?

Sorry, that just ain’t good enough.

In the city of the soul, the city that is our culture, a television channel, a movie studio, a publishing imprint or an online magazine is a neighbourhood, and segregationism is the system whereby in certain neighbourhoods we simply don’t belong. No, better yet, in the city of the soul, every venue of fiction is a water-fountain. We all thirst for stories that speak to us, you see, thirst for the fiction that replenishes the soul, whether it’s solemn or silly, the “elitism” of “High Art” or the “populism” of “Low Art.” Whether it aims to entertain or enlighten, fiction is always aiming to quench our thirst. And those of us who belong to a group abjected on the basis of some marker of deviance from the default, we thirst for stories in which we are represented. It’s all very well if we have our own water-fountains — queer television, queer cinema, queer fiction — venues we can go to for stories that deal with our lives, our issues. But as long as we’re excluded from certain water-fountains, this is segregation. As long as we’re allowed into certain neighbourhoods only when it is “important to the story,” as long as we’re required to remain silent when it comes to the inequities in those neighbourhoods, this is segregation.

It’s not simply that this city would be a much nicer place if we all just get past the homophobia, the prejudice, the intolerance of those few backwards individuals who don’t get it. It’s not simply that the mindset of those who don’t get it is nasty, a Bad Thing to be condemned. It’s that the practical reality of the system they support is one in which the abject, the deviant, is considered essentially Other. It does not belong unless it conforms to certain criteria. At worst, it is allowed in only to carry out set roles in service of the white, straight, able-bodied heroes and heroines — as Magic Negroes or as Gay Best Friends, say.

The Magic Negro in a work of fiction is a house-maid, coming in from the ghetto to clean a house that is not theirs, in an all-white neighbourhood where all too many houses have such servants. So too is the Gay Best Friend. We do not live in these movies and shows, novels and stories; our homes are elsewhere. We are not the masters and mistresses of the households, the story revolving around us and our lives, because that would be a “message” story, even if the “message” is only that we live the same stories as everyone else, that our skin-colour or sexuality not the defining essence of our existence. No, we are strangers in these neighbourhoods, allowed in only to fulfill our appointed task, as and when it is “important to the story” — when the hero must be given counsel by some latter-day medicine man, or when the heroine must be given consolation by some gossipy confidante. These are the day-jobs we work in the neighbourhoods of the privileged before we go home, at the end of the day, to the ghetto.

That’s the system that emerges between those twin reticences as regards representation, where the inclusion of characters in some abjected social group — based on skin colour, sexuality or whatever — is seen as something to be done only in certain circumstances and only in certain ways. That’s the system perpetuated wherever those fitting the default — white, straight, able-bodied, etc. — fold their arms and frown at the idea of such inclusion taking place when it’s “not important to the story” or when it ruins the nice safe story with a political “message”. That’s the system supported by those who complain about Straw Liberals pressuring for “political correctness” and “quotas.” And the reality of what we want instead of that system? The level of inclusion we want to see when it comes to queer characters (and characters of colour, and so on)? What we actually want rather than some paranoid conservative’s fantasy of queer characters crowbarred into fiction on some proportional quota system?

It’s called integration.

This is why I see the work towards that aim as rebuilding. Not just a superficial improvement in terms of tolerance, but a restructuring radical enough that it calls for the metaphor of New Sodom. Those venues of fiction aren’t just the houses of this or that individual where some poor faggot might walk in and meet a frosty welcome from a home-owner poisoned with prejudice, a nasty person who… well… makes us all feel kinda righteous in comparison and kinda cosy when we all gather to agree that, yes, they really oughtn’t to be like that. No, those venues are fucking water-fountains out on the streets, and if they don’t have signs up saying “Straights Only,” they do have signs that say “Queers Only If…”

“No Negroes unless Magic and accompanied by a white hero.”

“No Gays without female protagonist supervision.”

Stripping those signs from the water-fountains isn’t just giving the city a face-lift.  It’s changing the entire fucking system, building a little corner of New Sodom here, a wide boulevard there. It matters to me as much as it mattered back in the 80s, reading Delany and seeing my first glimpses of that city of the future.  And it should matter to us all, I think, just as much, with all the weight of history that the word segregation carries.  The city of the past, the Sodom we’re rebuilding, it’s not just a symbol of queerness.  This isn’t just about sexuality.

Read between the lines of the Bible and you find the city of Sodom as one of those bastions of pagan polytheism so reviled by their monotheist neighbours. You find the neolithic culture of temple prostitutes and homosexual priests, whores and faggots, scorned for their fornication. You find the crass commerce of the Phoenician city-states — Sidon, Tyre, Byblos — the culture of merchants who don’t give a fuck about who or what is abjected by the moralistic monomaniacs for some random difference; because everyone is a customer. You find Canaan and Babylon as painted women in fine linens and silks dyed scarlet and purple (one possible derivation of Canaan is, I believe, from a word for the purple dye obtained from the porphyr shell, the same dye used to colour the robes of Roman Emperors.) You find the soft “decadence” of settled civilisation so despised by herders. You find the heterogeneous diversity of the cosmopolitan metropolis, the melting-pot of humanity. You find the Sohos of London and New York. You find the neighbourhoods that do have a strong ethnic focus, but you also find those that are entirely mixed-up. You find the gay villages in every city that has one, not as ghettos where all of a certain type are sealed up, but as open markets where anyone from any district can come.

Or at least I do. Granted, the true crime of the Sodomites if you take the traditional interpretation — because as I understand it, the Jewish reading is sod all to do with buggery and everything to do with lack of hospitality to strangers — is pretty much the exact opposite of the integrated heterodoxy I’m representing with New Sodom. (One feature of abjection as applied to social groups is, you know, the projection of one’s own faults onto that Other — c.f. the brutality projected onto black men by whip-wielding slave-owners.)  So the metaphor ain’t perfect.  No metaphor is.

But being an inveterate subverter of myths and legends, I like to imagine that it wasn’t just Lot and his household who survived, that there were Sodomites left to lament their fate, to cry out, “What city can I found? Where now must I go to make a home?” I like to imagine that those survivors, the Elders of Sodom, spread out around the world in their search for a new home, having learned their lesson the hard way. I like to imagine that as strangers themselves now wherever they might go, those wandering Sodomites swore that wherever they might settle, in whatever city they might found, all would be welcome in their home. That they would treat no-one as a stranger, as Other, no matter how they might differ. That they would speak up wherever they saw such strangers being abjected on whatever basis — skin colour, sexuality, disability, anything — defend the rights of those strangers against all who would deny them, against all attempts to segregate them out and make them subject to discrimination. That they would lead such strangers to the water-fountains and say, “Drink…”

“You’re welcome here.”

Because that’s how we build New Sodom.

“Don’t tell anybody, but science fiction no longer exists.”
Matthew Cheney, The Old Equations, Strange Horizons

Welcome to the SF Café, in the ghetto of Genre, in the city of Writing, in the Republic of Art.  We call it the SF Café because only the letters S and F survive, but you can still see the full name today, The Science Fiction Café and Bar, traced in the grime, outlined in the negative shadow of those clean spaces left where the letters have fallen away.  It may look a bit shabby from the outside and there’s surely some weird shit in the window that makes you wonder what the fuck is going on inside.  But let’s step through the door right now, and step through the decades too, to see it as it once was, the shining formica of the counter-top, the sleek silvery steel of the coffee machine and soda fountain, the bakelite and plastic of the trappings, the decor all bright white and brilliant red, shining, gleaming, with the Fifties promise of futurity.  This is the SF Café as it was in the Golden Age, when Old Man Campbell owned it.

Emphasis on the was.

Don’t misunderstand me.  It’s not that I’m parking my arse in a booth in the SF Café, opening up my laptop and tapping out a grandiose proclamation on the “death of science fiction” as a start-point.  It’s just that the SF Café is a whole other scene to what it once was, and from where I’m sitting I’d be a fool to say that what I’m talking about is science fiction, when that S, it seems to me, as often as not, simply stands for “strange.”

There are three flavours of definition for science fiction, you see — empty, open and closed.  The first two are flavours I’m OK with, the latter… not so much.  Where all that’s left is the two figurae of the label sf, the definition is empty.  What is sf?  It is, as they say, whatever I point to when I say, sf.  Nuff said.

In the open definition, we take a laissez-faire approach.  We might characterise science fiction as a family of works which do this or that, but we’re happy to admit that those features (whatever they might be) are neither essential nor unique to the genre; there are works which might be science fiction and might not.  Hell, when we call it a genre, what we really mean is just… a field of fiction.  Like indie music, right?  Which could be anything from Arcade Fire to Adam Green, Zero 7 to the Zutons.

In the closed definitions of Science Fiction, that thumbnail descriptor becomes a stamp of commercial or literary identity, carved with clean edges — hence bold and in capitals.  If the openly defined science fiction is a genre like indie music, Science Fiction is a Genre like the good old-fashioned Rock’n'Roll of the 50s and 60s.  This is a family of fiction marked out by conventions that are largely unique and essential to it; clear boundaries are set over what is or isn’t Science Fiction.

Down in the ghetto at the SF Café, we do like to argue over what is or isn’t Science Fiction.  The jukebox here has all those bands on it — because the clientele is pretty mixed these days — but there are a fair few customers who furrow their brows and frown sullenly when Adam Green comes on.  Cause that just ain’t Rock’n'Roll.  Old Man Campbell really wouldn’t have approved.

     
A Basic Definition of Science Fiction

The first problem with the closed definition?  There’s more than one.  There are many definitions of Science Fiction.  They are all right… for someone.  They are all wrong… for someone.  Here’s a rather basic one as an example:

Science Fiction is a pulp genre which combines Romantic character types, plot structures and settings with a Rationalist focus on scientific theories and conjectures, requiring a degree of rigour in the extrapolation of its hypothetical conceits.  Science Fiction is scientific romance or Hugo Gernsback’s scientifiction, taken to its logical conclusion:

“By ‘scientifiction’… I mean the Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story — a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision.”
Hugo Gernsback

This is science fiction as fantasia (fabrication, necessarily strange and necessarily affecting) bound firmly to futurology (speculation, necessarily scientific and necessarily plausible).  Old Man Campbell was pretty strict about what was on the menu at the SF Café.

“To be science fiction, not fantasy, an honest effort at prophetic extrapolation of the known must be made. Ghosts can enter science fiction, if they’re logically explained, but not if they are simply the ghosts of fantasy. Prophetic extrapolation can derive from a number of different sources, and apply in a number of fields. Sociology, psychology, and para-psychology are, today, not true sciences; therefore, instead of forecasting future results of application of sociological science of today, we must forecast the development of a science of sociology. From there the story can take off.”
John W. Campbell

Note the use of the term prophetic by both, with its complex of connotations quite at odds with the grounding in science — religion and rapture, voices and visions, the conjuring otherwise known as fantasy (defined, for the moment, not in terms of literature but in terms of psychology: the sustained fancy; the ludic or oneiric imagining; from the Greek phantasia; a making visible).  The relationship of sf and fantasy will be a theme here.  More than a few readers will doubtless bristle at my use of the f-word.  (To be fair, I’m not that fond of it myself, its meaning similarly confused by a mixture of empty, open and closed definitions.)  But until we can get stuck into it, we are unfortunately stuck with it.

Anyway, the point is this:  up to and during the Golden Age, born of the simple fact that futurology resulted in arguable fantasias, there was a tight-knit relationship between Rationalism and Romanticism which kept the form aesthetically coherent and commercially viable.  Atom bombs and satellites, microwaves and mechanisation — the future looked exciting, rich with the all-important sense-of-wonder.  So this new Genre emerged for the Rocket Age, a popular form which, like the other pulp forms, had its own set of rules, its clear boundaries, a form which was delineated in steel and formica, bakelite and plastic, in Old Man Campbell’s Science Fiction Café and Bar, in the world of nuclear power and space flight just around the corner.

That bold new Science Fiction didn’t come from nowhere, of course, but as long as we’re talking in closed definitions, let’s not pretend that it’s existed from the dawn of time.

     
The Birth of Science Fiction

Here’s a rather more contentious honing of that definition, situating the aesthetic form in its historical context:

Originally coined as a substitute for the more unwieldy labels of scientific romance or scientifiction, the term Science Fiction properly applies to a short-lived pulp genre of the early to mid 20th Century utilising Romantic character types, plot structures and settings but sourcing its fantasia in Rationalist futurology.  This pulp genre existed for a few decades at most before its practitioners exploded the rigid proscriptions and prescriptions of the original form.

Trust me, I know this definition invites irate challenges.  Just how short-lived is short-lived?  If we are defining this form as pulp are we excluding works published outside this commercial environment?  Where do Jules Verne and H.G. Wells sit in relationship to this Science Fiction?  What of George Orwell or Aldous Huxley?  Don’t these writers fit the open definitions of science fiction that have accreted to the coinage?  And if so are we denying them a seat in the SF Café if we say they’re not Science Fiction?  Isn’t this too narrowly limiting our scope?

It’s certainly a narrower view than that of Brian Aldiss who, in his TRILLION YEAR SPREE, positions science fiction as an outgrowth of the Gothic, tracing it back to Mary Shelley’s FRANKENSTEIN as point of origin.  Which is a fair argument, just one I disagree with.  Aldiss is not simply co-opting a classic in a grasp for literary credibility, the common accusation of science fiction’s detractors whenever this sort of case is made — his analysis is a valid attempt to trace the roots of this mode of writing — but there’s a substantial disjunct between the creepy aesthetic of this novel and the sense-of-wonder permeating Campbellian Science Fiction.  FRANKENSTEIN might be science fiction, but it is not Science Fiction.

No, the Gottischromanzen Kaffeehaus sat on a different block entirely from where the SF Café now stands, so to speak.  Its blasted shell still sits there, in fact, haunted by vampires and nihilists, the first casualty in the Culture Wars that created the ghetto of Genre; but the SF Café is a different scene with a different vibe, with a few goths but a damn sight more geeks in the host of freaks that frequent it.

The Culture Wars? you say.

Let’s jump back a few centuries, to the period when the Enlightenment was radically reshaping our notions of literature.  In the Republic of Art, in those days, coming out of the Renaissance, you had two rival aesthetics, one attaching itself to this new scientific outlook called Rationalism, idealising reason, and the other grounded in the flip-side world-view of Romanticism, idealising passion, each defined partly in relation to the past (Classical Greece on the one hand and Dark Ages Europe on the other) but largely in relation to each other.  One day, into this worldscape, into the city of Writing, a strange figure rides.  He dismounts, strides into the Tall Tale Tavern, where poets and storytellers sit recounting grandiose nonsenses, endless episodes of Chivalric Romance like AMADIS DE GAUL.  With a bitter biting grin, Cervantes slams his DON QUIXOTE down upon a wooden table and begins, his savage satire crafting a Rationalist endeavour quite distinct from the Romances of his peers — an endeavour that will come to be known as the novel.

In the centuries that follow, that novel takes a curious course.  The Romantic aesthetic is brought back into play, as writers attempt to fuse the two aesthetics, to create a Rationalist Romance; the Gothic Romance and the Victorian Social Realist novel make fuckee-fuckee in the minds of unashamed synthesists.  In the dialectic between the two aesthetics then, in the interzones where they collide and collude through the medium of individual texts — where the author isn’t purely allied one way or the other but playing out the conflict in their writing — there emerges this synthesis of Rationalist thesis and Romanticist antithesis that we might call “protomodern.”  In that long period up to 1900 or just beyond we get the roots of every contemporary Genre.  We get Samuel Richardson, Ann Radcliffe, Emily Brontë, Jane Austin (roots of Romance).  We get Sara Coleridge, George Macdonald, Lewis Carroll, E. Nesbitt, Kenneth Grahame (roots of Fantasy).  We get Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, John Buchan, H. Rider Haggard (roots of Adventure).  We get Edgar Allan Poe, Rudyard Kipling, M.R. James (roots of Horror).  We get Ernest William Hornung, Arthur Conan Doyle (roots of Crime & Mystery & Thriller).  We get Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells (roots of Science Fiction).

None of these writers are Genre in the modern sense because Genre in the modern sense doesn’t yet exist — the walls of the ghetto have not yet been built — but a slow drift of writers uptown or downtown does begin to gradually reshape the city of Writing, a distinction emerging between Gothic (romantic) “Popular Fiction” and Realist (rationalist) “Literature”.  Some of these writers find themselves on one or other side of that boundary, drawn to the Gottischromanzen Kaffeehaus downtown or the Social Realist Tea Room uptown, but many of them live and work in that dynamic interzone between the two.  They become formative of multiple Genres, these writers, because they work in multiple modes, but remain acknowledged as part of the canon of “literary” classics.  The class divide and notions of “commercialism” haven’t yet wholly degraded the debate.  The Culture Wars are only just beginning.

The literary “variety” journals in the UK, most notably the Strand, capture the last days of this protomodern period perfectly, publishing many of the writers named above alongside poets and short story writers of any and every mode.  Ghost stories, detective stories, all sorts of strange fiction pervades the protomodern periodicals.  Much of it is noteable for its sensationalism, the way it exploits a sense of the incredible, and the sense of desire and dread that attaches to it, with events that breach the laws of nature.  Even in Dickens the importance of melodrama and the aesthetic of the grotesque cannot be understated.  If these works don’t sit in Genre they are clearly using the techniques of Genre, the effects derived from stepping outside the mimetic strictures of Social Realism.

It is in these journals, among the tales of mystery and adventure that the embryo that will become Science Fiction gestates, resembling Sherlock Holmes and Allan Quatermain as much as Victor Frankenstein.

Then the steam train of modernity hits and leads to mass-production and mass-marketing, greater literacy and a corresponding shift in class demographics.  Through the last half of the 19th century we see the penny dreadfuls and dime novels burgeoning.  With the turn of the new century, suddenly we start to see magazines and imprints dedicated to specific forms.  From the early 1900s through to the 30s or 40s, there’s a boom that utterly reshapes the territory.  It’s a totally evolutionary process — expansion, diffusion, isolation, specialisation — that leads to the pulp Genres we have today (and a few that are now all but defunct).  A process of formulation sets in within all of those Genres, of course.  Marketing to readers on the basis that there’s a discrete audience for “more of the same” means codifying “the same”, defining what each Genre is, or should be, in terms of conventional tropes of character, background and plot structure.  That’s a big part of the distinction between genre and Genre, actually.

The fallout of this is the Culture Wars.  Because all of these fictions are based on the reactions invoked in the reader when confronted with the incredible, anything which uses the same underlying techniques, which invokes the same reactions, is suddenly perceived as being not simply a work of this or that Genre (Gothic, Mystery, Adventure, etc.) but as having a certain quality which identifies it as Genre (that quality being, to all intents and purposes, sensationalism), a quality which also intrinsically allies it with “Popular Fiction” rather than “Literature” (since “Literature” is that fiction careful to mediate its sensationalism with intellectualism, the distanced narrative of the observer, commentator, critic).

For a middle-class and middle-brow readership to whom intellectual status is important (and for whom the observation and commentary is equated with relevance and insight) those associations bring on a crisis of faith — should they really be reading this sensationalist pulp?  Should they really be reading this… Genre?  That negative reaction plays out in writing and publishing as writers and editors, readers too, fall victim to the same crisis of faith or simply to the market forces born of it.  The battle-lines are drawn, tastes divided into Good and Bad.  Soon there’s no fucking way you could publish a journal like the Strand and there’s no fucking way you could run a publishing imprint which had a similar diversity; before you know it that dialectic is reified in an uncrossable divide between high-brow Literature and low-brow Genre.  The first great battle in the Culture Wars is this act of expulsion, of abjection, that outcasts sensationalism and creates Genre as an aesthetic territory in its own right, the walls of the ghetto raised around it.

Just at the point when Science Fiction is being born.

     
The Spirit of ’76

In the SF Café there are a fair few arguments over the music on the jukebox.  There are those who hate punk rock (because they are idiots) and those who love it (because they are not idiots); even among the latter there’s a disagreement not unlike those arguments over the roots of science fiction.  To wit: there’s no doubt that both The Velvet Underground and The Stooges were heavily influential to punk rock, but does this mean we should class them both as punk bands?

Put it this way: With The Velvet Underground, we have the far more complex sound of art rock and an attitude more that of the bohemian auteur than the suburban anarchist.  Associating this band with the genre of punk at any deeper level than that of influence seems a pretty spurious claim.  But The Stooges are a different matter.  While they’re more generally considered a garage band, and a seminal one at that, the distinction between early 70s garage and mid 70s punk is largely a matter of labelling.  Somewhere between The Sonics (Chuck Berry on strychnine) and The Ramones (The Beach Boys on speed), garage rock seamlessly morphs into punk.  The Clash song, “Garageland” makes that lineage explicit, in fact, acknowledges the origins of punk in garage.  So at what point does garage become punk?

We could just draw a line at the New York Dolls or the Sex Pistols, and say: punk starts here, and nothing before that, nothing outside the historical context of the New York or London punk scene circa 1976, can truly be considered punk. We could carry on from this and argue that Television were a punk band, regardless of their twenty minute instrumental tracks, regardless of the music’s stylistic intricacy, rich with syncopated guitars and complex rhythms, simply because they, unlike The Stooges, were part of this historical context, in the right place at the right time, playing CBGB’s in 1976.

But there’s a problem.  If we examine the actual characteristics of the music — what it’s doing, how it works — and the attitude of insolent aggression that went along with it, The Stooges are way more punk than Television ever were.  Listen to the confrontational shambles which is The Stooges last concert, recorded on the album Metallic KO.  Listen to the fuck-you lyrics of “Cock In My Pocket”, Iggy’s hectoring of the audience, the stripped-down, ramped-up sound of a classic guitar, bass and drums combo playing (when they are actually playing) with energy in inverse proportion to their skill.  Look at the cover where Scott Asheton in full Nazi regalia can be seen cradling an unconscious and bloody Iggy Pop.  Not punk?  If that isn’t in the spirit of ’76, fuck knows what is.

If we could dismiss these similarities with a claim that The Stooges were simply a formative influence upon punk, we could say the same of The New York Dolls, maybe even The Ramones.  Malcolm Maclaren would have us believe, after all, that punk only truly came into existence with the Sex Pistols.  Given that Metallic KO was recorded only a few years before the punk label became common currency, however, on the basis of shared characteristics alone, a simple widening of historical perspective could surely lead us to argue that The Stooges are not simply proto-punk but in fact embryonic punk, aesthetically every bit as punk as the bands that followed in the chaos of their wake but historically situated in a period of gestation, before punk proper was born and named.

This works for me.  Hey, what’s the point in having your cake if you can’t eat it too?

     
A Flash of Lightning

There’s a point to this: Does FRANKENSTEIN sit in the same relationship to Science Fiction as The Stooges do to punk, or is that relationship more analogous to that of The Velvet Underground and punk?  The answer, it seems to me, is the latter.  For all that it extrapolates from the scientific theories and experiments of its period, positing the monster as a patchwork of body-parts reanimated by scientific craft rather than magical skill, the novel is as commitedly Gothic as WUTHERING HEIGHTS or NORTHANGER ABBEY, infused with a tremulous fear of the uncanny, and informed by that horrorific mode of romanticism to such a degree that the rationalist attitude of Campbellian Science Fiction stands in stark contrast.  The world that Shelley’s aesthetic inhabits is not the exotic alien planet of the pulps but the desolate wilderness of Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare or Caspar David Freidrich’s  Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, a world of storms and nightmares, mountains and icy wastes.

The reason I do not, with Aldiss, class FRANKENSTEIN as the birth of Science Fiction is that in its ultimately romantic stance it is far better understood as the death of Science Fiction.  There is no lightning bolt in the novel bringing life to the monster with the electric vitality of science; that is a spurious invention of the movies.  Rather the lightning in FRANKENSTEIN is there to paint the creature in sudden stark relief as a grotesque figure of utter horror:

“A flash of lightning illuminated the object, and discovered its shape plainly to me; its gigantic stature, and the deformity of its aspect, more hideous than belongs to humanity, instantly informed me that it was the wretch, the filthy daemon, to whom I had given life.”
Mary Shelley, FRANKENSTEIN, Chapter 7

This is a lightning bolt that shatters any pretence of rationalism, that murders Reason, revealing the wilderness of Gothic nightmare and the monstrous form that stalks it.  It is a lightning bolt that will one day sear right through the genre of science fiction, a shattering crack of irrationalism that will split it right in two.  You can still see the crack in the wall of the SF Café where that seismic shock ran through it on the day the beatniks moved in with their garb as black as their European espresso.

But we’ll come to that.

Would Verne or Wells stand as better origin points?  Is it not at least fair to talk of TWENTY THOUSAND LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA or THE WAR OF THE WORLDS as SCIENCE FICTION?  Again, these are understandable as science fiction, but are they Science Fiction?  At the end of the day, these are both works which, like The Stooges with punk, fit the aesthetic criteria but sit outside the historical context; they are protomodern works, written in that distant time before the walls went up around the ghetto of Genre.  They are clearly formative influences, taproots of Science Fiction, but they exist as experiments within their own genres, at a point when the term Science Fiction had not even been coined, and it’s inevitable that they will be widely viewed as such, just as The Stooges are most commonly viewed as a garage band, and for good reason.  Ultimately if we want to understand the processes that shaped the field a narrower view of that historical context establishes a stronger foundation for our argument.  So we’ll treat Verne and Wells as embryonic, situated in that period of gestation before Science Fiction proper was born and named.

That birth and naming begins with the pulps, with Gernsback’s scientifiction.  In those early decades before the SF Café was even built there was not one Genre but a whole host of them, where the protomodern adventure story was gradually being transformed into the modern mass-market pulp narrative.  One Nick Carter dime novel in 1886 begets Nick Carter Weekly which becomes Detective Story Magazine in 1915; that same magazine publishes Arthur Conan Doyle but it does so alongside the Shadow.  The publisher, Street & Smith Publications (who bought Astounding in 1933, funny enough) also gave us comics like Doc Savage and Air Ace, Western magazines like Buffalo Bill Stories and True Western Stories.  Edgar Rice Burroughs gives us Tarzan of the Apes in 1912 and John Carter in 1917, both via All-Story Magazine, which was to merge eventually with Argosy.  Amazing Stories gives us Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon only being created derivatively as a rival.

This is our lineage.  This is the history of the ghetto of Genre, into which Science Fiction was born, not in a flash of lightning but in the clatter of a printing press, a bastard of the pulps.

     
A Crack in the Wall

“The one theme that is really new is the scientific one. Death-rays, Martians, invisible men, robots, helicopters and interplanetary rockets figure largely: here and there.  There are even far-off rumours of psychotherapy and ductless glands. Whereas the Gem and Magnet derive from Dickens and Kipling, the Wizard, Champion, Modern Boy, etc., owe a great deal to H. G. Wells, who, rather than Jules Verne, is the father of ‘Scientifiction’.”
George Orwell

If we’re excluding work published before Science Fiction was born, however, this doesn’t mean excluding work published beyond its cradle.  George Orwell’s NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR, for example, sits outside the narrow context we are taking as our start point, outside the pulp magazines which were to Science Fiction as CBGB’s in 1976 was to punk rock.  But to exclude a contemporaneous work like this from science fiction would be as foolish as to say a band could be considered punk if and only if they played CBGB’s.  Embodying a convergance of the romantic tradition of (dark) fantasia and the rationalist tradition of (dystopic) futurology, Orwell’s novel shares so many of the features which identify the genre that to deny that it is not simply science fiction but Science Fiction seems… a bit obtuse.

Are we in danger here of opening ourselves up to that old accusation, that we are merely co-opting Orwell to a tradition in the hopes of gaining literary credibility for the field?  If so, we have a fairly solid defence.  Orwell was taught by Aldous Huxley at Eton, he was friends with Olaf Stapledon later on in life, he wrote of his admiration for and influence by Wells, and, in his 1939 essay “Boy’s Weeklies”, he reveals enough familiarity with the pulps to act as a well-informed genre critic, as the quote above demonstrates.  Orwell was no stranger to the SF Café.

So what we have is someone who identified his own work as in the tradition of Wells, who recognised that same heritage in the pulps, who was able to distinguish Wellsian rationalism from Vernean romance, and whose novel features world governments, artificial language and other such hypotheticals.  All things considered, to exclude NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR from the canon would just be thrawn, akin to a claim that ANIMAL FARM is not a fable because, well, it was published as a serious novel for adult readers.  Such a distinction is no more than a spurious assertion that the two forms are mutually exclusive.  ANIMAL FARM, as an allegorical animal story, fits a simple standard definition of the fable as an aesthetic form, and by its nature it demonstrates that, in the hands of a skilled writer, this aesthetic form is more than capable of achieving the depth of a serious novel for adult readers.  NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR is equally a demonstration that Science Fiction is not necessarily a romantic piece of fluff or a rationalist intellectual exercise, that a work of Science Fiction can, like an allegorical animal story, also be a serious novel for adult readers.

Still, the first crack in the wall of the SF Café appears at this point, as the closed definition of Science Fiction is opened up just a little to render the romance dispensible, in a step towards the rationalism of mimetic Social Realism.  It is a step towards science fiction, towards the utopias and dystopias of literary history and the sociological thought-experiments still to come.

If we are taking our lower boundary after Verne and Wells then, but expanding our outer boundaries beyond the pulp environment to encompass, for example, Orwell, what then of the upper boundary?  If our definition of Science Fiction situates it in a historical context as a short-lived genre, at what point are we claiming that it ceased to exist?  And how so?  And why?

The why and how are easier to answer than the when.  As much as Science Fiction was born of a fusion of romantic and rationalist aesthetics, the conflict between the romantic ideal of the sublime and the rationalist ideal of the logical quickly fractured the Genre into, on the one hand, romantic “let’s pretend” stories where the futurology was merely a means to an end — a visionary technique for developing wild fantasias of exotic creatures and weird technology — and, on the other hand, rationalist “what if” stories where the futurology was an end in itself — where the drive of the narrative involves a logical working-through of the ramifications.  Complementary exemplars of these two forms are Frank Herbert’s DUNE series on the one hand and Isaac Asimov’s FOUNDATION series on the other.

It was this fracturing of the genre into an artificial dichotomy of opposed forms that was to lead eventually to the self-destruction of Science Fiction as a clearly-defined genre.  It is this clearly-defined Science Fiction that we can dismiss as no longer truly extant, Science Fiction as a class of fiction unified by dictates of form and composition rather than by the mere act of categorisation or approximate characterisation.  For me it’s not a problem to say that this Science Fiction is dead; it doesn’t mean science fiction is anything of the sort.

Of course, that dichotomy between rationalism and romanticism is also at the heart of why I’m no great fan of even the open definition of science fiction — because this is what fuels the perennial argument within the field over the differentiation of that science fiction and the dreaded fantasy.  Or Fantasy rather.

But that’s a topic for another day, another column.

    
What is style?

To me, the easiest definition of style is pragmatic. It’s not from the viewpoint of the writer but from the viewpoint of the copyist: style as the recognisable-because-recurrent linguistic features that we’d copy if we were trying to pastiche or parody another’s writing. It’s the features of another writer’s prose you would use if you were trying to do something ‘in the style of X’. These could be techniques of paragraph construction like bathos (One long, convoluted, intricately articulated, perhaps pompous, sentence. Another long, convoluted, more intricately articulated, and perhaps pompous sentence. And yet another long and convoluted, even more intricately – indeed pointlessly – articulated and quite definitely pompous sentence. And then the fuckin punchline.). It could be a matter of sentence construction, where the writer consciously or unconsciously favours particular grammatical forms. It might just be individual words like ‘gibbous’.

I think this is where the idea of style as a patina comes from. The most notable stylistic features are technical – to do with syntax and lexicon – and so self-evident in the text; and that means a copyist can produce a fair simulation of another writer’s style by copying only these most obvious features of their writing. Because the similarities may be only “on the surface”, because the copyist’s prose style may achieve a purely formal sophistication by mimicking the original, while the corresponding thematic intricacy may be lacking because the complexity of the prose is… decorative rather than architectural… because of this, we often see style as purely composed of a sort of technical ‘finish’ to the prose. This sort of second-hand facsimile of another’s style can be, at its worst, like the difference between a Gothic cathedral and a Victorian Mock-Gothic folly. Style, to many, is mere ornamentation, a glossy polish or a crusty patina put on the story.

I think to some extent this type of copying may be part of the learning-to-write process. Writers starting out will often be heavily, *ahem*, influenced by a favourite author’s style. In other words, they (*ahem*, we) copy it. A healthy multiplicity of influences might give us a distinctive style in the pick’n’mix of tricks we’ve picked up from a wide range of reading; but we can still be using these devices more because we like them, because we see them working well in others, than because we actually understand the how and why of them. When we talk of writers having “found their own voice” I think this is just an attempt to distinguish a level of stylistic competency. Learning why the author(s) that influenced us actually used those features, understanding what functions the various tricks, tropes and techniques serve, we only then gradually start to use them consciously and deliberately (or maybe not-quite-consciously but at least purposefully) rather than as simple mannerisms that make our prose sophisticated.

Part of this maturity comes I think when we start to recognise deeper stylistic features of writing – character types, plot structures, recurrent themes. These may be less obvious than textual markers but they are often as much a part of an author’s idiosyncratic voice as anything else. These are stylistic features, I’d maintain. Certain characters are so identifiably Phildickian that Dick himself wrote A Maze Of Death as a deliberate attempt to kill them off, to widen his range. Peake’s use of the grotesque in characterisation is stylistic. Indeed, that type of characterisation is so deeply associated with another writer’s style that we call it ‘Dickensian’. Likewise we associate certain story forms with this or that writer. Asimov’s interest in crime fiction leads to his use of a particular plot structure with a mystery at its heart and a reveal at the end. Yes, we might prefer to differentiate low-level syntactic and lexical features from these higher-level constructions, to call the one ‘style’ and find some other term for the latter, but if paragraph structure can be stylistic then so can scene structure, I’d argue, so can plot structure, so can character structure.

I suspect that recognising those sort of macroscopic features goes hand-in-hand with understanding how language can be used best at the microscopic level. From seeing the mere surface details of gargoyles, rose windows and other Mock-Gothic fripperies we come to understand the layout of naves and chapels, the use of vaulted ceilings, the real core features of the Gothic architectural style. That’s when we actually begin to understand architecture in general. That’s when we begin to understand how stories work. That’s when, as I see it, the author is usually said to have ‘found their voice’.

But what is voice?

Voice in that sense strikes me more as a judgment of virtuosity than anything else, of stylistic individuality. A consistency and competency of style across the levels, skill in structuring the text at all levels. Of course, that voice changes between works and over time, adapting to suit different stories, different aesthetics. Some writers have vast range in their voice, will vary their style considerably from story to story, novel to novel. Others maintain a consistent style throughout their career. We could make a comparison with painters. Picasso’s work falls into different periods, the Blue Period being quite distinct from the archetypally Cubist works. Caravaggio’s distinctive use of chiaroscuro, on the other hand, is consistent throughout his work.

Actually, come to think of it, this painter example also helps illustrate my view of ‘style’ as more than just the low-level technicalities of how words are put together. With an artist like Van Gogh the brushtrokes are the key identifier of style. Thick, swirly, bold and broad, there’s a wildness to them that’s distinctly Van Gogh. But with Picasso’s Blue Period it is the tonal pallette that marks the style. With his Cubist work it is the structural technique. With Caravaggio it is the interplay of light and dark across the canvass. With these painters, the uniqueness of their style, their voice, is not simply a matter of brushstrokes. Similarly, I think literary style is not solely about the nitty-gritty of syntax and lexicon.

But back to voice.

Just to complicate things we use the term voice to relate to a number of different features of writing. The stylistic ‘voice’ of the writer is quite another thing, I’d argue, from ‘voice’ as we use it to denote the sense of a particular character-based viewpoint expressed in narrative. Joyce’s personal stylistic ‘voice’ permeates Ulysses. The narrative ‘voice’ of Molly Bloom that comes through in the closing pages of that book is a different type of voice entirely. It’s not a matter of ‘voice’ being one or the other; we just use the same term for two quite different things.

Voice in that latter sense, narrative voice rather than authorial voice, is an effect, I’d say, created by associating particular low-level stylistic features with particular viewpoints. For a cliched example, we only need to look at the clipped, staccato narrative of the stereotypical noir detective, the pastiche of pastiches of Chandler you get in a movie like Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid or in countless sub-Gibson cyberpunk novels. Rhythm of prose, lexical choices, syntactic structure and so on – all these stylistic features are used to create an attitude within the text itself to the events being narrated. It’s a sneaky surreptitious way to build character in the background rather than in the foreground, through descriptions of motivations and / or actions. In the interests of elucidation (and self-promotion) here’s two examples of my own attempts at narrative voice as a technique for building character, both from Vellum:

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1.

Thick With Trees And Thunderstorms

North Carolina, where the old 70 that runs from Hickory to Asheville cuts across the 225 running up from the South, from Spartanburg and beyond, up through the Blue Ridge Mountains and a land that’s thick with trees and thunderstorms. It’s on the map, but it’s a small town, or at least it looks it, hidden from the freeway, until you cut down past the sign that says Welcome To Marion, A Progressive Town, and gun your bike slow through the streets of the town centre with its thrift stores and pharmacy, fire department, town hall, the odd music store or specialist shop that’s yet to lose its market to the Wal-Mart just a short drive down the road.

She rides past the calm, brick-fronted architecture that’s still somewhere in the 1950′s, sleeping, waiting for a future that’s never going to happen, dreaming of a past that never really went away, out of the small town centre and onto a commercial strip of fast food restaurants and diners, a steak house and a Japanese, a derelict cinema sitting lonely in the middle of its own car park – all of these buildings just strung along the road like cheap plastic beads on a ragged necklace. She pulls off the road into a Hardee’s, switches off the engine and kicks down the bike-stand.

    
The burger tastes good – real meat in a thick, rough-shapen hunk, not some thin bland patty of processed gristle and fat – and she washes it down with deep sucking slurps of Mountain Dew, and twirls the straw in the cardboard bucket of a cup to rattle the ice as she looks out the window at the road, hot in the summer sun, humid and heavy. The sky is a brilliant blue, the blue of a Madonna’s robes, stretching up into forever, stretching -

- and she stands in front of the mirror in the washroom, leaning on the sink a second, dizzy with a sudden buzz, a hum, a song that ripples through her body like the air over a hot road shimmers in the sun. The Cant. Shit, she thinks. She must be getting close. She looks at the watch sitting up on top of the hand-dryer. The second hand flicks back and forth, random, sporadic, like one of those aeroplane instruments in a movie where the plane is going down in an electrical storm.

    
It’s August 4th, 2017. Sort of.

Steady again, she studies her eyes, black with mascara and with lack of sleep, and pushes her dark red hair back from her forehead. Even splashing more water on her face she still feels like a fucking zombie. Fucking zombie retro biker chick, she thinks. Beads in her hair, a beaded choker round her neck, a chicken-bone charm necklace over a gold circuit-patterned t-shirt. Shit, she looks like her fucking techno-hippy mother.

She picks up her watch and slips it over her wrist, reels out the earphones from the stick clipped to her belt and puts them in, clipping them into the booster sockets in her earrings so her lenses can pick up the video signals. The Sony VR5 logo flickers briefly across her vision as she shoulders her way out through the door, tapping at the datastick to switch it onto audio-only.

She doesn’t need a heads-up weather forecast with ghost images of clouds or sunbursts, or a Routefinder sprite floating at every turn-off to point her this way or that. Not today.

She grabs her helmet from the handlebar of the bike and puts it on as she swings her leg up over the seat, flicks up the stand, zips up her leather biker jacket, kicks the engine into life.
The antique creature of steel and chrome growls between her legs, and another antique creature – one of leather and vinyl – screams in her ears.

- Looooooooooooooord! howls Iggy Pop, and the murderous guitar of the Stooges’ TV Eye kicks in, as Phreedom Messenger opens up the throttle on the bike and roars out of her pit-stop on the way to hell.

    
And 2:

    
Yellow Paper And Brown Pencil Lines

- Tommy boy, sometimes ye talk as much rot as I’ve got between me toes here. Sure and I don’t know what ye’re on about half the time.

Seamus looks at the small sketchbook that the boy treasures more than anything, more than any of them treasure anything, he thinks sometimes, more even than all the tattered, battered photographs of sweethearts and mothers, and the lockets, and the father’s watches, and all the decks of playing cards with the nudie women on them and all; and he thinks the boy’s daft, so he does, but, in a way, he understands. Seamus looks at the drawings that the boy spent so much time on, so much care, last month on leave in Lascaux when he could have been whoring it with all the rest of them, whooping it up, sure, the way a boy his age stuck in this shite to fight for someone else’s King and Country should be; and all that Seamus sees when he looks at the little sketchbook is yellow paper and brown pencil lines. But Tommy now…

    
Tommy reaches over and takes the book out of his hands, shaking his head.

- Ah, you’ve got no soul, Seamus, no soul.

But the boy is blushing shame even as he tries to play the old game of young lads, sure, they way they bandy abuse about but with a twinkle in the eye and a nudge of the elbow, because, aye now, ye know I don’t really mean it. The boy can’t really carry it off – too shy, he is, and too much of a young gent even if he wasn’t quite born with a silver spoon in his gob, not that he comes on all Lord Muck-a-Muck, like. He’s just… ach, he’s just a good lad what misses his mother and his home like the rest of them, only he shows it more. O, but he gets a right roasting from the other lads of the pal’s battalion sometimes, he does, just like he got back home, and where would he be without Seamus sticking up for him, as ever?

    
Seamus wanders over towards the door of the dug-out where, apart from the mud and the mud and the fookin more mud, ye can just see a wee blue hint of sky up there, if ye’re hunkered down a bit so ye’re looking up at the right angle, sure, which ye are anyways on account of the fookin low ceilings. He reaches into the inside pocket of his jacket to pull out a cigarette from the crumpled packet of Gauloise in there – fookin nasty shite that they are, but what’s a man to do when he’s smoked all of his and the quartermaster’s as crooked as a British politician, sure, and he’s just putting it to his mouth-

DOOM!

    
- Jesus Fookin Christ!

Tommy’s howling like a fookin wean and it’s fookin dark but Seamus can feel the fookin dirt raining down on him.

- Jesus Fookin Mary and Fookin Joseph! Fooken shite! Fookin Hun fookin bastards! Seamus is down on the ground, hands over his head – Christ, and he wasn’t even wearing his helmet – and he doesn’t even fookin remember diving down there, but he’s sure as fook happy to be there and he’ll just stay right where he is for the time be, thank you very much, ma’am, and…

- Jesus. Tommy are ye alright there? Ye’re not hit or nothing, are ye?
The boy’s panting like a dog, gasping for air like he’s fookin drowning, sitting there, just right there at Seamus’s elbow, with his arms wrapped round his knees and his teeth biting into his trousers, panting and kind of whining like a sick animal; and as Seamus touches his knee, he flinches.

He looks at Seamus like he’s looking right through him, eyes wide, nostrils flared, seeing and scenting his own golden, pouncing death.

#

    
So, anyhoo…

Some writers are big on this type of voice. Others maintain a distance from their characters, investing an omniscient narrator with a distinct voice – like humourists, for example, suffusing their narrative with the arch attitude of an after-dinner spinner of anecdotes and tall tales – or simply keeping the prose impersonal, devoid of attitude. It should be fairly obvious from the above excerpts where my sympathies lie. It’s not the only way of building character by any means, but it’s a technique I like on the “show don’t tell” principle. It short-circuits the need for any explication of motivations and does not depend on the reader decrypting the underlying psychology of a character’s actions. Instead the narrative becomes a sort of running commentary on itself, told as the viewpoint character might phrase it were they actually telling the story… communicating their attitude to the situation implicitly – ‘mud and mud and fookin more mud’.

But we do have to distinguish the stylistic voice from the narrative voice. There are other features in those excerpts that are entirely to do with my own stylistic voice rather than the narrative voices. The punch paragraph – “It’s August 4th, 2017. Sort of.” – which ends the third section of the first excerpt, for example, is a stylistic technique I probably overuse because I like the kick it gives. I’ve no idea if there’s a technical term for it but it’s quite definitely a syntactic technique. As I say, it’s probably one I’m rather too fond of but because of that it’s an identifiable feature of my ‘style’. Which brings us back to stylistic voice and style in general. Style as patina.

Having developed an individual voice as a writer – our own set of recognisable-because-recurrent linguistic features – of course, it’s then entirely possible for a reader, a copyist, or a critic to superficially recognise the individuality of that voice, picking out these characteristic features but entirely failing to see the how and why of those features, the way they are integral to the articulation of the plots and themes and characters. The way this is often expressed involves a separation of style from content or ‘substance’… that substance being seen as a distinct (or even absent) thing in its own right. The suspicion that stylistic tricks and techniques are being used as mere mannerisms leads to the use of words like ‘stylist’ as derogatory terms, the implication being that while the writer has a compelling voice they actually have nothing to say, or that what they have to say is basically uninteresting.

I can understand that attitude to some extent because I think it’s possible to develop the technical craftsmanship to fluently articulate character, plot and theme through a distinctly individual and quite accomplished stylistic voice, but have huge intellectual and imaginative blind spots when it comes to human beings and how they interact. Characters do not ring true, plots feel contrived and artificial, themes obvious and banal. The writer is ‘a mere stylist’. There is no substance to their work, no meat to get one’s teeth into, merely the puff pastry of fancy prose. But this is not really a matter of ‘style over substance’, I feel; that exterior packaging / interior content is an inappropriate metaphor.

I’m wary of talking about ‘style over substance’, you see, of assuming that the fault lies in a misguided concentration on achieving surface sheen at the expense of ‘substance’. Language is the substance of a story. If anything is substantive in a text it is the language. And whether copied en masse from another’s style, cobbled together in an amalgam of influences, or articulated consistently in a personal voice, the linguistic tricks, tropes and techniques which make up the prose are not just some pretty skin; these are the very cells which constitute the bones and the muscles of the writing. As I say, the macroscopic structures of plot, theme and character are as much stylistic features as any more low-level linguistic construct. If these are weak, badly constructed, artificial, it’s not a lack of substance; it’s a lack, I’d say, of shape. What is missing, really, is a sort of… representational pay-off. When we talk of a lack of substance, of content, we seem to mean that there’s no observation or insight offered, no emotional or intellectual picture of sorts. Whether we’re looking for information or entertainment in the interplay of interesting characters in interesting situations, we feel that we haven’t got it, so we talk about there being nothing inside or underneath the surface of the text.

In fact, if anything is an illusory surface, a mere matter of appearances, I’d argue, it is those very things we tend to differentiate as substance. Plots, themes and characters are tricks of smoke and mirrors produced by the real substance of text, the language in its nuts-and-bolts technicality. When we reduce a story’s complex structure to shallow, sketchy generalities and thumbnail overviews aren’t we putting a superficial gloss on it? It’s a heist story. It’s about grief. She’s a feisty young tomboy with a biker’s attitude. When we talk about a lack of content in terms of plot, character or theme, aren’t we actually just saying that the writing doesn’t pay off for us by producing the required epiphenomena of the reading experience, the ups and downs, thrills and chills, intellectual and sensational, the whole structure of tension and resolutions? But those epiphenomena are not content but projections, not the substance of the text but products of it. Ghosts in the machine.

Of course, the more linguistically complex the prose, the more opaque it can become for many readers who prefer their prose pared-down for a pacier narrative, and the less likely they then are to find that pay-off. This seems to be when you get the label stylist applied, an accusation of ponciness and pointlessness, I think, underlying that label. Sometimes this is fair, I suspect. When we dismiss writers as stylists, implicitly dismissing style as a superficial (and therefore perhaps superfluous) quality – a surface sheen – it can be down to a failure on the writer’s part to cater to those expectations, an inability to do the job. But it might also be a deliberate choice, a rejection of conventional aesthetics, conventional approaches to representation. Fantastic fiction has been, I think, for maybe fifty years or so, the hide-out of latter-day Modernists, writers concerned with surrealism and abstraction, alternative aesthetics which may well seek to directly challenge realist preconceptions of what art is supposed to do, how it is supposed to work. Fucking with character and plot, frustrating expectations of closure, they end up producing works which defy easy interpretation and which simply make no sense to many readers, just as Picasso and Kandinsky and Mondrian leave many viewers asking themselves but what’s it meant to be?

Modernism is not everyone’s cup of tea, to put it mildly. Some react to it with absolute vitriol, despising it as pretentious, pointless, meaningless garbage, an empty artifice, mistaking its unconventional approach to representation as an actual absence of subject matter, an absence of this figmentary substance. I think at times though, this can be a failure or a refusal on the reader’s part to recognise what’s on offer; we might blithely miss the point that’s as clear as glass to someone else, or we might just be so irritated by what we consider gratuitous complexity and artifice that we cannot see past that damned style… and so we refuse to accept that there could be anything underneath that damned style.

But Picasso’s Guernica, to take one example, is anything but an empty artifice. To me, Guernica is a perfect illustration of the power of Modernism. There’s no empathic photorealist portrait of the victims of war here, no conventional perspective of foreground, middle-ground and background used to show the destruction of a whole town. The Cubist approach, the Cubist style adopted here involves a deliberate fragmentation of perspective, an approach to figurative representation which owes more to cave-painting than to realism. And that fragmentation and primitivism could not be more sympatico with the subject matter; that style, that approach, is the very substance of the painting. And it’s a fucking powerful painting as far as I’m concerned. I can understand, I guess, why many get their hackles up when they stand in front of a late Mondrian and, seeing only black lines and coloured squares on a white background, think What the fuck is this? But most Modernist fiction is more akin to Guernica, strange and unconventional perhaps, fragmenting character and plot as Picasso fragments space, but doing so for aesthetically valid reasons and doing so in ways that are not that obscure and opaque, not that inscrutable if we give it half a chance.

In the end, I think I’m wary of the whole idea of style as surface sheen because, I have to admit, I’m a Modernist myself, out to fuck with exactly those things we artificially, I feel, label as ‘substance’. I’m suspicious of those ghosts in the machine; implicitly preferenced by that idea of packaging and content, the idea seems to be that these aethereal products are what really matters, and I’m not convinced that people are like characters, that our lives have plots, that it’s the writer’s job to offer Aha! moments for the intellect or Wow! moments for the imagination. While I want the reader to get their kicks from my work in fairly conventional terms, to get that intellectual and sensational satisfaction, I’m suspicious of any suggestion that the purpose of writing is to inform and entertain, that the linguistic craftsmanship is just wrapping paper for an exciting package of insight and excitement. Insights are ten-a-penny and excitement can be bread-and-circuses. Writing is not about playing the preacher or the performing seal, as far as I’m concerned. The blow-hards and the hacks are just as phony as the ‘stylist’, seeming trustworthy in their humble, no-frills style, but selling platitudes and banalities as wisdom or tits and ass as entertainment. Smoke and mirrors, I say. We can call it content but it’s just cotton candy.

No. I think style gets an unjustly bad ride when we try to justify writing as a sort of infotainment. I think the process of representation and abstraction has its own value. The actual words-on-page writing are the key product, not just a slick packaging around some inner meaning, some essentialist content, some insubstantial substance. Style isn’t just some snake-oil salesman revivalist barker standing outside a circus tent, trying to smooth-talk us in to a sermon-cum-sideshow where we might learn Important Truths or see Astounding Sights… or where we might just be rooked, having followed the sign to the Egress and ended up outside with nothing to show for it (damn that slippery-tongued style!). There is no tent of hidden mysteries, no snake-oil substance on sale, just the barker himself as showman, selling his routine. The craftsmanship of that routine, how well constructed it is on both macroscopic and microscopic level, is what matters most to me. To separate the surface features of a writer’s style out from deeper, more embedded structures which are also integral aspects of that writer’s style, to call only those most low-level syntactic and lexical features ‘style’ and see that as a sort of finish – something perhaps not really necessary to the story – is, I think, a mistake, an artificial differentiation of the whole aesthetic product.

But then I am a Modernist. I would say that, wouldn’t I?

———————————————————————————————————————
_{What is Style? was originally published at Notes From the Geek Show in 2005 and is being represented at BookSpot Central with the author permission. All rights remain with Hal Duncan.}

Hal Duncan is the author of Vellum and Ink, the former being nominated for the World Fantasy, Locus, and British Fantasy Society Awards. His novella Escape From Hell was published by Monkeybrain Books in December 2008.

    
Elitism, escapism, world-building, blah blah blah. I’ve had my head down in terms of forums and blog-brouhahs. There’s a lot of, um, passion being thrown about, which is a good thing — it’s nice to know people give a fuck — but to be honest, I think a lot of the argument involves people talking at cross-purposes, people defending something that they think others are attacking, attacking something that they think others are defending, people saying that they’re not attacking / defending something in the way that other people think they are, but actually attacking / defending something else entirely, something which is worth attacking / defending… as opposed to what other people “seem to be” defending / attacking and so on, and on, and on, and on, and ever on, like the last one million pages of climbing up a fucking mountain at the end of Tolkien’s Lordy-Lordy-Massuh-Ah’s-Ah-Gonna-Carry-You-Massuh-Frodo of the Rings.

What?

Oh, right. Where was I?

Yeah, so in all this teacup tempest, with people attacking / defending, in particular, elitism, escapism and worldbuilding, what comes through loud and clear is that we have a lot of different ideas of what those terms mean. So, in the interest of laying out me own way of thinking about such things, I thought I’d just throw a definition in and follow through the ramifications to see where it takes us.

So:

Elitism

    
From the word elite. Question: what’s an elite? Answer: a small group of the select few in a certain field, segregated out from their fellows on the basis of superiority and accorded a privileged status. That’s pretty straightforward, right? But it begs another set of questions: what kind of an elite do you get in writing? How small is the group? How is the selection made? How is the segregation established? On what basis is superiority judged? What kind of privileged status does membership of that elite confer?

The reality is that there’s at least two existing elites in genre — the “writer’s writers” (e.g. M. John Harrison) and the “publisher’s writers” (e.g. Anne Rice) — where superiority is measured in terms of kudos or cash.

Note: Critics and readers, of course, play a large part in defining those elites by distributing kudos and cash respectively; to the extent that we might even talk about “critic’s writers” and “reader’s writers”, but I think to do so would just confuse matters. Here’s why:

First off, critics are just a subset of writers, really, and the kudos distribution system of the strange fiction community makes the system more of a network of peers than the hierarchy of the classic literary establishment where kudos is bestowed by academic / journalistic authorities. (Fandom’s greatest gift to strange fiction writers, perhaps, is the foundation it provides for a level of contact unknown, I would suggest, in any other art form. SF writers form a global community in a way that, historically, only handfuls of closely located artists in particular movements can match — the Impressionists, the Beats, groups lke that.) So we’re still essentially talking about “writer’s writers” when it comes to the “elite” of writers who have generated a high enough level of kudos to be considered the great rather than the good.

Meanwhile “reader’s writers” and “publisher’s writers” are pretty much identical by definition, since the publisher and the reader are just the two sides of the exchange mechanism whereby the status of a writer is measured in cash. It may seem prejudical to talk of “publisher’s writers” rather than “reader’s writers”, unfairly suggesting hackdom by association with Business versus Art, but since we’re talking about a system of selection, segregation and allocation of privileged status, it’s the publishing industry that’s of more importance here than the fan community, because this is where the actual mechanisms of the systems are. So “publisher’s writers” is a better term, I’d say, when it comes to the “elite” of writers who have generated a high enough level of cash to be considered the great rather than the good.

Note finished. Point is, we have a critical elite and a commercial elite, the most respected writers (as signified in kudos) and the most popular (as signified in cash). A writer can, of course, be in both elites but we’ll consider them as functionally separate; they work differently.

    
Yay or Nay?

    
So, is the existence of these elites a good thing or a bad thing?

That question really breaks down into a number of different questions: Is the limitation (to a small group) fair or unfair? Is the selection just or unjust? Is the segregation legitimate or illegitimate? Is the judgement of superiority founded or unfounded? What privileges come with the higher status? And for all of these, what benefits and what harms accrue?

Most of these have the same answers: any such system of selection and privileging can be unfair because any such system can be played; we see alliances and compromises — compromises of integrity; favouritism and nepotism are inevitable; cliques and coteries evolve; struggles for status lead to back-stabbing; the deserving can be wrongly excluded for invalid reasons; elevating a few lowers the many in relation to them; it may even lead to the marginalisation of a “negative elite”; and so on.

Sometimes it’s fair, however, because the kudos and cash is deserved. In fact, because those are measures of “deservingness”, of worth, it’s probably fair to a large degree. The process of selection and segregation, the limitation of this to a small group, the judgement of their superiority — all of that is founded largely on the recognition that there are some who are just on a whole other level when it comes to generating kudos or cash. And there’s only so far that system can be played before the unworthy demonstrate they just can’t cut it.

The idea that many members of the “elite” don’t actually deserve to be there is pretty much unsupportable with the commercial elite. When the bottom line is popularity measured in cash, the proof is in the pudding at the publisher’s Christmas party. The same idea persists though in the opinions of many with regard to the critical elite. Where you can’t argue with Anne Rice’s commercial status, you can easily argue with the critical status of any number of respected writers, and this is quite common with readers who “can’t see what the fuss is about”.

The kudos distribution system (KDS) is, time and again, accused of corruption on all levels, with writer’s blurbs, reviewer’s criticisms, every possible avenue of kudos distribution, being interrogated for its integrity. The “intellectual” form of this is a suspicion that there’s “a man behind the curtain”, that the KDS has been infiltrated by commercial pressures; the kudos is being conferred falsely because a publisher is pulling strings. The “anti-intellectual” form is a suspicion that “the emperor has no clothes”, that the KDS has been usurped by social aspirations; the kudos is being conferred falsely because a writer or critic wants to be seen to be conferring kudos on the flavour of the month. Either way, the suspicion is that the kudos conferred on a writer — or rather on their work — is largely or even wholly unwarranted hype.

    
Bribes and Bandwagons

    
Both suspicions have more than a hint of the conspiracy theory — which is not to say that they are intrinsically baseless, just that they require conspiracy within the system. It would be naive to imagine that publishers don’t do their damnedest to garner kudos for a book — a feature review, a blurb from a major author, front-of-store placement. And it would be naive to imagine that writers and critics are entirely unmoved by social pressures — catching the buzz, jumping on the bandwagon, pimping books by friends. However, the idea that the kudos distribution system can be corrupted such that all or even the majority of a work’s kudos is actually unwarranted hype born of bribes and bandwagons is just as naive. Publishers are gamblers and they won’t put good money on a lame nag. Writers (critics included) are after-dinner speakers and their career rests on having something individual to say.

Let’s get real here. For the most part, if that publisher is pulling any strings to get kudos, it’s because an editor got a book they thought was fucking good. It’s because that editor thought it was good enough to put their ass on the line for. It’s because they fought tooth and nail to persuade their superiors it was saleable even though it’s not using a shoo-in formula. It’s because they got the money men and marketing department on side by persuading them who it could be sold to, maybe even how. Remember, we’re talking about kudos here, not cash, critical rather than commercial success. That’s not just the usual PR push for the next would-be, could-be blockbuster bestseller. That’s the high-risk investment of trying to get the word out about a potential cult classic. That’s where PR can get you nowhere at all or, worse still, backfire completely either because it creates a misperception of the book as commercial (i.e. populist) fiction (which leads to disappointed expectations) or because it generates that exact suspicion of the kudos all actually being unwarranted hype (which leads to hostility and high expectations). The sheer risk of that kind of investment says a hell of a lot more for the editor and the publisher than it says against the KDS.

As for the literati, the cognoscenti, the reality is that any blurb on a book that someone, somewhere, deems bad is a notch off your reputation with that reader. Any insult aimed at a writer you consider awful is one less sale of your own book to some avid fan of that writer. Writers share aims and interests, theories on how it should be done and how it shouldn’t be done, and, whether it’s through magazines or movements, you do get factions emerging where groups of writers, loose or cohesive, advocate this form of story, berate another. But that’s the dynamics of passions, where writers are dumb enough to risk pissing off the world because they honestly believe in what they’re saying. We know that the deeper we are into the KDS, the more we rant and rave, throwing kudos like blathering fools or throwing shit like screeching monkeys, the more likely we are to make fools of ourselves and enemies as well as friends. And the strange fiction scene is so hostile to the notion of a literary establishment, so devoted to the ghetto guerilla mentality of genre, that to do so in the hope of gaining entry to some elite of SF cogniscenti, well, you’d have to be a fucking loon.

So if the conspiracy theories are unrealistic, where do they come from? Well, what exactly is the conspiracy theory here?

    
A Conspiracy of Charlatans

    
When we point at an acclaimed work and say that it’s not worthy of acclaim, maybe even that it’s worthy of disdain, that’s not a conspiracy theory. When we say it’s over-rated, hyped even, again that’s not a conspiracy theory. But when we start to get into the “man behind the curtain” and the “emperor has no clothes” arguments, we enter into a conspiracy theory in which the KDS is a grand sham we have so cunningly seen through, a theory of how all those publishers and/or writers must be conspiring behind the scenes or in plain view to pull the wool over our eyes.

There is often, I think, a sort of insecure arrogance at the heart of these conspiracy theories, where the integrity of kudos is being challenged largely because one’s own judgment of a writer’s worth is so at odds with their status that simply not conferring kudos oneself is insufficient. Even conferring negative kudos is insufficient. Rather, the disparity is such that one feels the need to challenge the very motivations of those who, by conferring kudos, have elevated a certain writer’s work to an unacceptable level of acclaim. The kudos is just hype. There’s a man behind the curtain. The emperor has no clothes. The arrogance lies in an assumption that one’s own negative opinion is of such obvious and unquestionable validity that no contrary, which is to say positive, opinion could be honest. The insecurity rests in the notion that those contrary opinions are ascribable to a concerted force which constitutes a threat.

Which brings us back to the notion of the elite.

The intellectual projects their conspiracy theory into the Evil Forces of the “publishing industry”. The anti-intellectual projects their conspiracy theory into the Evil Forces of the “literary establishment”. We’ll come back to the intellectuals later, because the anti-intellectual argument is more pertinent here as regards the critical elite. The accusation of elitism goes hand in hand with — is, in fact, often a way of expressing — the idea that writers and critics with the highest level of kudos are actually a conspiracy of charlatans, maintaining their status by mutual sycophancy and deceit. The elite that’s being referred to here is an unworthy one, one where the process of selection and segregation has been perverted, where the limitation to a small group is for base motives, where the judgement of superiority is invalid.

Leaving aside the unrealistic notion that writers and critics risk careers to hype shit books, leaving aside the insecure arrogance of thinking that any kudos given to a book you thought was shit is really just unwarranted hype, leaving aside reality, and looking at the end results of simply having a critical elite, worthy or unworthy, the obvious question is: what good does it do one to be a member? Which is to say, forget the mechanisms of selection and so on, what great privileges come with the status that would lead one to play the game that way?

    
Privilege and Power

    
Actually this opens us up again to discussing the commercial elite too. The privileged status of being a “writer’s writer” doesn’t mean much more than being listened to when you hold forth about How It Is, on a panel or on the interwebs. The privileged status of being a “publisher’s writer” means fuckloads of money and not getting pulled up over turgid prose, rambling plots and just plain bad writing. The former can lead to a lot of hot air while the latter can lead to a lot of crap fiction, but a critical elite can become the hothouse of new approaches while a commercial elite keeps the publishers afloat.

One thing that, I think, feeds into the notion of elitism in terms of SF cogniscenti is an erroneous equation with the cogniscenti of High Art, where the critical and commercial elite rather seem to be, often as not, one and the same. Success in High Art is both kudos and cash, the system of distribution for both — the gallery — pretty much ensuring that the most esteemed artists are also the one’s earning the most money. It may be unfair of me, after my argument against the accusation of elitism in SF, to damn the art world as elitist in exactly that sense, but I do think the system is one in which hype works. In the high-end market of “connosseurs”, Saatchi is an emperor, his every purchase bestowing as much kudos as cash, and with conceptual art his taste in clothing — a field explicitly predicated on explication rather than execution — the slick-talking tailor who can sell him his own birthday suit is just an artist who can justify his work at the champagne-soaked opening, with references, perhaps, from other cogniscenti — creative, critical or commercial — also deeply embedded in the social circuit of the invited great and good. But I may just be showing my own prejudice here. The point is really that even if this is true with High Art, it’s a mistake to think that set-up transfers to the world of strange fiction, where the most acclaimed writer may well be on the midlist (if they have a publisher at all), and where the real power and privilige comes from selling like Dan Brown.

The privileged status of a writer in the critical elite amounts to little more than a right to be obstreporous and opinionated in and of itself. This seems to be generally frowned upon by opponents of “elitism” who are inevitably talking about the critical elite and who, equally inevitably, have little to say on the matter of the commercial elite. Funny enough, this tends to come out when members of the critical elite are obstreporous and opinionated about the works of members of the commercial elite particularly favoured by the opponents of elitism. Writer X refers to writer Y as a derivative hack churning out puerile drivel for the lowest common denominator. Reader Z calls writer X elitist. And probably jealous. Both may well be right. Writer Y is, in all likelihood, a derivative hack churning out puerile drivel for the lowest common denominator. Writer X is, in all likelihood, aware of his place in a critical elite and using the privileged status that gives him to freely express his aesthetic as an implicit (or even explicit) universal imperative (to not be a derivative hack who churns out puerile drivel for the lowest common denominator since this is not the “proper” way to write), to be, in short, elitist. Writer X is probably also, yes, a little irked at writer Y earning vastly more while writing shit.

What reader Z is failing to realise, though, is that they are happily supporting elitism (of the commercial variety) every time they buy a book by writer Y. Thankfully, while many reader Zs don’t see this as elitism, they’re quite capable of recognising its pernicous effects and posting scathing forum comments or Amazon reviews of writer Y’s latest piece of shit when Y’s privileged status as member of the commercial elite means their books aren’t edited worth a damn and come out as unreadable dreck. Writer X finds this highly amusing. Writer X finds it even more amusing when writer Y replies to those reviews with wild ranting screeds proclaiming that reader Z is a moron who can’t handle the cutting edge challenge — nay, the sheer genius — of Y’s softcore vampire porn, which no editer would DARE to sully with the red pencil.

Sadly though, it seems, there are reader Zs who either continue buying Y’s work in the hope of improvement or still inexplicably enjoy its unedited and unmitigated bastardisation of the novelistic art form. Sadly, it seems, there’s enough of them to keep the Ys of the world not just in business but right up there in their position of power and privilege, a ruling member of the commercial elite.

One should point out here that where writer X’s privileged status gives him the right to express his aesthetic as an imperative, writer X has no power whatsoever to enforce that imperative. Writer Y’s privileged status, on the other hand, renders their aesthetic a very real influence on the publishing industry. Writer X’s kudos-creation capacity might make an editor pay attention when X is talking on a panel. Writer Y’s cash-creation capacity will affect that editor’s purchasing decisions, not just with Y but throughout the slush pile — because if Y sells big time, and A, B and C are doing exactly the same thing, in exactly the same way, to exactly the same ends, then A, B and C might also sell big time. D might be a damn sight better writer but if they’re doing something utterly different then that editor may well have no chance persuading the money men that it’s D they should go after, not A, B or C. Play this across three publishers and you might have A, B and C all with contracts, all of them derivative hacks churning out puerile drivel for the lowest common denominator, and D, the only decent writer among them, unpublished. Maybe neither A nor B nor C will actually sell at the same level as Y, but that’s OK. We can’t all be at the top. We can’t all be in the select few, can we? That’s what elitism is all about.

And who’s to blame? Who’s keeping that elitism running? Who’s ensuring that every publisher is looking for their very own writer Y to churn out the derivative hackwork that sells by the bucketload? Who’s giving the realest, most solid and measurable support to the commercial elite?

I’ll give you a clue. It comes after Y in the alphabet. Y as in “Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? ” And it rhymes with “Please put a bullet in my head.”

So, yes, it’s fair to say that elites can be pernicious things, things we shouldn’t support. But in strange fiction, the critical elite is relatively harmless, while that commerical elite is just plain Bad News.

    
Populism and Elitism

    
Is elitism just a matter of supporting an elite though? The question of power in the examples of writer X’s imperative and writer Y’s influence opens up a new question. Is it fair to call someone elitist just for their belief in the actuality of an elite and the legitimacy of according its members a privileged status? Or is elitism all that, but with an added belief that the privileges of the elite rightly include a higher level of power — whether it’s authority in the field of writers and critics or influence in the publishing industry? When we’re talking about (critical or commercial) elitism, I’d say, we’re actually often talking about more than the recognition of an elite. We’re talking about the system of rule by elite.

At this point, I’m going to redefine my terms. The term “populism” is the more common label for commercial elitism, while “elitism” is almost always reserved for critical elitism, so from here on in those are the terms I’ll use. Make no mistake however; populism is a form of elitism in its own right, every bit as much as that critical elitism the term is inextricably linked with, invariably narrowed down to.

Populism and elitism have two levels, I’d say, one where being “populist” or “elitist” simply means according higher status to writers who garner more cash or kudos, another where being “populist” or “elitist” means accepting those writers as authorities — leaders in the field, arbitors of taste. In privileging the techniques and approaches of writers in those elites as How Writing Is Done populism and elitism can and often do become prescriptive, ideological. For the sake of clarity, I’m going to capitalise the prescriptive variants, like all good ideologies, as Populism and Elitism. Even at the lower level, the higher status becomes an aesthetic judgement of how writing can be done. It’s not hard to see how populism and elitism become aesthetic judgements on accessability and difficulty, on the delivery of sensational and intellectual satisfaction as an aim in writing. At the lower level populism is about trying to communicate as widely as possible while elitism is about trying to communicate as deeply as possible. We can defend both populism and elitism on that basis. Both are principled approaches, aesthetic judgements of what you can do with writing, where there might be a conflict (when communicating deeply narrows the audience and communicating widely simplifies the writing), and which approach this writer or that wants to implement in this work or that. We need to distinguish this, however, from the prescriptivisms of Populism and Elitism, where wide communication and deep communication respectively are absolute imperatives.

An almost certain marker of this pescriptivism in action is the use of these terms as insults, the dismissal of an opponent’s aesthetic as “populist” or “elitist” implicitly asserting the illegitimacy of that aesthetic, which is to say the exclusive legitimacy of one’s own contrary Elitist or Populist ideology.

This is another factor, I think, in those accusations that there’s a “man behind the curtain” or that the “emperor has no clothes”. What is surfacing in both cases may be, I think, a certain anti-populism on the one hand, anti-elitism on the other, resulting from the ideological antagonism of Elitism and Populism. Maybe we need to review that off-hand dismissal of these conspiracy theories. While those theories are unrealistic, maybe it’s not simply insecure arrogance at play but rather the factionalism of Elitists and Populists each deeply suspicious of the other faction’s aesthetic and projecting their conflict into the domain of writing.

Which is to say, what Elitists are really worried about is that the arbitration of taste on pure grounds of quality might be sullied by Populism (or even just populism). People might actually be fooled into thinking that something which doesn’t fit those standards is good just because a lot of plebs like it. People might think that How Writing Is Done is open to debate. What Populists are really worried about is that the arbitration of taste on obvious grounds of common sense might be sullied by Elitism (or even just elitism). People might actually be fooled into thinking that something which doesn’t fit those standards is good just because a few ponces like it. People might think that How Writing Is Done is open to debate.

    
How Writing Is Done

    
For the prescriptivist in both camps How Writing Is Done is definitely not open to debate. What we have here, I think, are philosophers and philistines, each suspecting the evil influence, the pernicious powers, of the other, viewing them as ponce or pleb. What we have here, I think, is in fact the philosophers and philistines each attempting to assert their own personal aesthetic ideology of How Writing Is Done, justifying it with appeals to the authority of kudos or cash. Each becomes, at worst, the very thing their opponent is criticising.

The Elitist who cries out about the “man behind the curtain” is essentially asserting a valid hierarchy of right and wrong kudos distribution with them implicitly positioned in the upper tier. They are seeking to claim the legitimacy of the Elitists to dispense kudos “properly” in asserting the illegitimacy of kudos dispensed by others. The opinions of those plebs is deeply suspect, such that their hype must be validated by those in the upper tier, those who know How Writing Is Done.

The Populist who cries that “the emperor has no clothes” is essentially asserting an invalid hierarchy of right and wrong kudos distribution with them implicitly positioned in the lower tier but with values reversed. They are seeking to claim the legitimacy of the Populists to dispense kudos “properly” in asserting the illegitimacy of kudos dispensed by the critical elite. The opinion of those ponces is deeply suspect, such that their hype must be validated by those in the lower tier, those who know How Writing Is Done.

Populists and Elitists are both, here, claiming the objectivity of the judgement of superiority which selects and segregates the great from the good. In writing, craft is the basis of any judgment of superiority, craft being simply a matter of achieving an effect with one’s writing,of being able to write a piece of text which carries out its function successfully. Where success or failure are not arbitrary judgments on the part of an illogically forgiving or demanding reader, there is, arguably, a level of objectivity to this judgment. A bad sentence is a bad sentence whether we forgive it or not. A tight plot is a tight plot whether it bores us or not. Sloppiness is sloppiness.

Since different writers often approach the same form of writing aiming to achieve different effects, and different readers often approach the same forms looking to find different effects, however, there is often disagreement between writers and writers, readers and readers, and writers and readers, with one person seeing another’s judgement as arbitrary and illogical, and vice versa. Contrary judgements must then be argued with theories of function as justfification, theories of what effects are valid or invalid as identifiers of a particular form, of what effects are valid or invalid as aims for writers, valid or invalid as expectations of readers. In strange fiction this results in endless tired arguments over what an “SF” story should and shouldn’t do.

These could be resolved simply by recognising and accepting different sets of standards as different forms, with the writers who want to do X writing for the readers who want to see X, and the writers who want to do Y writing for the readers who want to see Y. It’s hardly difficult. But loyalty to and dependence on the genre label seems to lead to a pont blank refusal to recognise strange fiction as a diverse collection of aesthetic forms, and an adversarial attitude to all forms that do not fit one’s own standards. Which is to say, this is an incursion of politics into aesthetics, an attempt to assert one’s own standards as authoritative.

This assertion of authority is usually based on an argument from authority, referencing one of two recognisable features — commercial success or critical success. With the first, you get the argument that X sells, so X is what readers really want to see, so X is what “good” writers really ought to be writing. With the latter, you get the argument that Y is acclaimed, so Y is what “good” writers want to write, so Y is what readers really ought to want. The ideologies of Populism and Elitism are rife with such arguments from authority.

    
Complexity and Immediacy

    
In the teacup tempests of most debates about populism versus elitism, the general assumption is that one cannot be both populist and elitist. The truth is that one can be both populist and elitist; it’s just that one cannot be both Populist and Elitist. If accessibility and complexity are different aims, if communicating widely and communicating deeply are different imperatives, this does not mean one must simply choose one or the other. One can compromise, seeking a balance between the two. Better still, one can be audacious as fuck and try and pull them both off. Not, however, if one is a Populist or an Elitist.

With Populists this is because their aesthetic is fundamentally anti-intellectual, rejecting complexity for the “inaccessibility” it generates. With Elitists this is because their aesthetic is fundamentally anti-sensationalist, rejecting immediacy for the “superficiality” it generates. For one complex equals impenetrable equals bad. For the other immediate equals shallow equals bad. This places the philistine and the philosopher in direct opposition to each other’s aesthetic.

It also makes them both quite tedious.

The whole debate has pretty much degenerated to the point where populism and elitism are so widely assumed to be prescriptive and oppositional that to defend them as non-imperative aesthetics is largely futile. Any argument for more populist or elitist values in writing will inevitably be (mis)read as an argument for the most extreme positions of Populism and Elitism and against the mildest of contrary positions. An argument for more complexity will be read as a dismissal of immediacy as “shallow”, while an argument for more immediacy will be read as a dismissal of complexity as “impenetrable”. The philistines and the philosophers seem to have taken over the debate.

This may be, in part, simply down to the fact that complexity and immediacy do often work against each other. The complexity of the reading experience must be developed through complexity of plot, character and theme, in the complexity of the symbolic and structural construction of these, from the level of story down through acts, chapters, scenes and paragraphs to the level of sentences. Such complexity requires attention on the reader’s part. Immediacy of theme must be developed through immediacy of plot, character and theme, in the immediacy of the symbolic and structural construction of these, from the level of story down through acts, chapters, scenes and paragraphs to the level of sentences. Such immediacy requires immersion on the reader’s part.

Note: This is where escapism and worldbuilding become points of contention. The latter is interesting because it involves a sort of complexity that is viewed as false by many (c.f. M John Harrison’s “clomping foot of nerdism”) because it’s often in the service of immersion, of immediacy rather than complexity in terms of the reading experience — the complexity of affective and intellectual engagement. It’s window-dressing. Escapism, meanwhile, is used as a derogatory term because it sets up the immediacy of the text, the reader’s immersion in it, as a disengagement with reality. It characterises reality as something we can and should disengage from, something we are imprisoned within. This is to deny that level of complexity in the reading experience where the reader is being asked to extend that affective and intellectual engagement beyond the text, to reality itself. Again, the conflict is really between immediacy and complexity.

With worldbuilding I personally tend to side with Harrison but would use the term “window-dressing” to distinguish the fussy obsession with detail he’s berating as opposed to the rich layering of verisimilitude as an aesthetic effect. This is largely however because I’m more interested in the eploitative approach to strange fiction than the explicatory or excusatory approach. (For an explanation of that distinction, I’m afraid you’ll have to go read my previous entries on strange fiction and the three different techniques of dealing with conceits.)

With escapism I simply can’t disassociate this from its implicit opposition to reality. While I can happily accept immersion as an end in its own right, books as temporary suspensions of reality, as diversions, I baulk at the idea of them as rejection of reality. It’s one thing to step to one side for a moment, another thing to turn one’s back entirely. Even seeing books as escapes is not so bad; it’s the -ism that renders this a systematic approach and, perhaps, another aesthetic ideology — Escapism rather than escapism, so to speak.

The point is, it’s all about the conflict between complexity and immediacy, active engagement and passive immersion.

    
The Best of Both Worlds

    
It is a difficult task to write a book that achieves both. Personally though, as I’ve said many times before, I take CATCH-22 as evidence that it can be done, that complexity and immediacy are not completely incompatible. I would argue that it’s not just possible to find an optimum compromise between the two, sacrificing a little of each in order to gain a little of the other. Actually I think a work can be open to both approaches by a reader, sacrificing neither. Ramp up both and what you can end up with is a book that can be enjoyed both as a roller-coaster ride, with complete passive immersion, and as a personal walking tour, with complete active engagement. Do it really well and you can satisfy readers who are only looking for one or the other. Do it really really well and I wonder if a reader who has developed hostility to one or the other from past experiences might be persuaded to re-evaluate their assumptions about certain types of books being “not for them”.

As long as we persist in reducing any debate about immediacy and complexity to an argument over populism and elitism, though, that debate will continue to degenerate from a discussion of aesthetics to a political struggle between Populists and Elitists, each seeking to impose their view on How Writing Is Done. The philistines and philosophers will continue to call each other plebs and ponces. The teacup tempests will rage on, with exactly the same things being said over and over again.

But the glory of strange fiction, the very power of it, rests precisely in its capacity to fuse complexity and immediacy. It may even be the tension between populism and elitism that generates this power. Our peculiar brand of fiction is a sort of Pulp Modernism, as far as I’m concerned. It is innately populist in its focus on commerciality and innately elitist in its focus on conceptuality. It is a fiction which, at its best, is both unashamedly sensational and unashamedly intellectual. If the extremists are tiresome they may at least serve a function as counter-forces to each other, a tension of aesthetics which, in union, push writers to attempt the seemingly impossible, to achieve the best of both worlds.

I want both complexity and immediacy in my own work. I want readers who don’t have a clue what’s going on to be swept along by the visceral gut-punches. I want readers who don’t give a fuck about exploding airships to be up to their elbows in the machinery of meaning. I want readers like the fourteen year old girl in New Hampshire who wrote me a fan letter about Vellum, gushing with praise, admitting she didn’t understand it all but telling how she’d go back and re-read, and figure it out, and go on. I want readers like the guy who emailed to say he read it in a single sitting. I want it all, goddamnit. I want kudos and cash, cause I’m greedy that way. I want my cake and I damn well want to eat it too. Because I want my writing to be all it can be, regardless of what any Populist or Elitist says about How Writing Is Done. Bollocks to that. This is strange fiction, motherfucker. We don’t need no steenking aesthetic ideology. We gots our own.

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_{The Latest Teacup Tempest was originally published at Notes From the Geek Show in 2007 and is being represented at BookSpot Central with the author permission. All rights remain with Hal Duncan.}

Hal Duncan is the author of Vellum and Ink, the former being nominated for the World Fantasy, Locus, and British Fantasy Society Awards. His novella Escape From Hell was published by Monkeybrain Books in December 2008.

Escape From Hell! is like a John Carpenter/Walter Hill late 70′s-early 80′s movie in book form. If you understand the references then you get it right off. I mean if the bridge scene doesn’t take you back to Escape from New York then nothing will. The action is ramped up to insane levels, and it just keeps pumping forward at a relentless pace.

If you like stripped down narritives then the length of the book becomes a strength because there isn’t space for long expository passages that explain the mechanics of Duncan‘s version of hell. We become immersed in the various levels of Hell at a break neck speed as our four main characters do. It’s a tricky thing to do, describing a world while keeping the reader on the run, but this as good an example as I’ve seen.

The characters are a little over the top but they are supposed to be, I think it’s to Duncan‘s credit that he didn’t make all 4 characters bad-asses. This allows for richer interactions between them and the book is stronger for it.

But underneath all of this action there is also a satire brewing here. A satire of religion and society, fundamentalism and rigidity. While the action is par excellence the satirical elements are maybe a little less so. For example what does it mean that the gay kid actually DID get sent to hell for being gay? It would also appear that another character actually WAS cured of his homosexuality. One could also argue that the gay kid doesn’t belong there; also the prostitute and suicide probably don’t belong there. But doesn’t the hit-man belong there? These are just a couple of things on my mind after reading it.

In an interesting perspective twist near the end Duncan has portions of the book in the second person. This, by its nature, directly address and involves us, the reader. Then it turns out that Satan’s portions of the book are the ones in second person so Duncan directly involves us in the story in a sly and inventive ways. If Satan isn’t us then we certainly are incriminated right along with him. Duncan presents us with a Miltonian-type Satan who isn’t necessarily evil, just free and in the Encyclopedia of Fantasy John Clute used the phrase literary satanism, though I had been aware of certain works this was the first time I had encountered this phrase, it certainly applies here.

My favorite moment by far in the book was Lucifer telling the gay character that the best way to use the flaming sword is to use jazz hands.

The Knights of the Cornerstone by James P Blaylock

30 pages in I couldn’t shake the feeling of deja-vu; that I had read this story before. A few pages later it struck me that I felt like I was firmly in Last Call/Expiration Date/Earthquake Weather era Tim Powers here. This wasn’t a bad thing given that Last Call is one of my favorite novels but over the course of my reading it became more and more apparent that The Knights of the Cornerstone was Last Call-lite.

There was also an undercurrent of status quo ante that didn’t sit right with me; this idea that small town life is better and protection of a more basic way of life is essential to move forward struck a false chord with me.

Ultimately it was my love of Blaylock’s previous work that led to me finishing The Knights of the Cornerstone but I came away more then a little underwhelmed by it. There wasn’t anything wrong with it but nothing was extraordinary about it also. I look forward to the next great Blaylock novel since this wasn’t it.

Valley of Day-Glo by Nick DiChario

I can’t say that I had heard of DiCharo or his work before but I really liked Valley of Day-Glo and once I started reading it I couldn’t stop, and that has to be just about the highest compliment one can pay a book.

On one level it was a thoughtful and multi-faceted far future satire that engages in a lot of different ways. Some of the satirical targets include consumerism and our general disdain for the environment. These elements aren’t rammed down your throat but are subtly integrated into the narrative.

Another element of the story is how the narrative bounces from the zany to the tender in a thoroughly messy voice that could be any of us if we were only that honest.

With a talking corpse; movie titles that will never be looked at the same way again; a giant talking coffee pot, and a shaman who speaks in limericks there is more then a touch of the weird here that adds yet another dimension to this tale that already mixes fantasy and science-fiction.

Bottom line is that Valley of Day-Glo is a great book not appearing on a lot of radar screens but deserves a wider audience.

This was published by MonkeyBrain Books this month! Remember, we have the prologue for you to read!

Synopsis:

A hitman, a hooker, a homosexual kid, and a hobo suicide make the ultimate prison break…escape from Hell itself! But when news of their attempted escape gets out, the souls of the damned are transformed into a rioting mob, and all Hell truly does break loose. It’s Escape from New York meets Jacob’s Ladder, by one of fantasy’s rising stars.

BookSpot Central would like to thank MonkeyBrain Books and Hal Duncan for allowing us to present this to our readers!

This contest is open to all BookSpot Central members. Just PM (private message) me at our forums and you’re entered. Please include address/shipping information with your entry so we can get the prizes out to you as quickly as possible. Winners will be announced on December 26rd.

Please be sure to visit our contest page to be up to date with all current contests hosted at BookSpot Central. We currently are running six active contests and are always adding more from all of the best publishers in the world!

Good luck to all!

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Back with another edition of the BookSpot Beat, the BookSpot Central 10-question, topic specific interview! Today we join forces with Hal Duncan to give you Hell! Duncan is the author of two novels: Vellum and Ink. Vellum was nominated for the World Fantasy Award and BFS Award for Best Novel honors as well as getting nominated for the Locus and and Crawford awards for Best Debut Novel/Author.

Next month, his latest, Escape from Hell! is set to be published by Monkeybrain books as the next part of their line of original novellas. BookSpot Central has the exclusive on the prologue from it.

Hal and I chat Samuel L, Hell, Neil Gaiman and more!

Jay Tomio – Do you even believe in hell?

Hal Duncan – As a metaphysical realm? Not even remotely. As a state of mind, on the other hand? I think a lot of us find ourselves in Hell at some point in our lives.

Jay Tomio – Your novella, Escape From Hell! is set to be published by MonkeyBrain Books next month. Can you give the BookSpot Central readers the low down?

Hal Duncan – It’s a hitman, a hooker, a homo and a hobo in the ultimate prison break… escape from Hell itself. It’s about these four people damned for their sins – murder, fornication, sodomy and suicide – deciding, “fuck this shit,” and trying to blast their way to freedom. Think if you took a Neil Gaiman story but turned it into an early John Carpenter movie. We’re talking fast-paced, balls-out pulp fiction, an action/adventure story with angels, lost souls and a whole lot of gunfire.

Jay Tomio – What was the impetus for this project. Why Hell, why now?

Hal Duncan – It all kicked off as a discussion with a mate of mine called Mags who works in television. We tend to throw ideas at each other for movies we’d like to see, brainstorming characters and plots just for the fun of it. With this one we were thinking, OK, what’s the ultimate prison? And obviously, it’s got to be Hell, right? So we started riffing, and I got really excited about it, ended up going away and developing the whole story in synopsis, virtually scene-by-scene. Cut to a year or so later, when I’d gotten bogged down in trying to write a novella for Chris Roberson at MonkeyBrain. I’d passed the deadline and was totally blocked on the idea I’d originally pitched to him, then it struck me that I already had this story that was the perfect length for telling as a novella – more meat than a short story, but more boiled-down than a novel. There’s an old idea that novellas are easier to convert to film than novels, so I figured the whole process should work just as well in reverse. So I touted the idea to Chris and he loved it.

Coming after the 400,000 word, non-linear mindfuck monster that was The Book of All Hours, it also offered a radical departure that appealed to me, something that was all about pace and plot, pure narrative drive. I suppose a part of that appeal comes from my contrarian nature; I like the idea of doing the exact opposite of the huge, sprawling, experimentalist tomes that readers of Vellum and Ink may have come to associate with me. Mostly though, it’s just that I grew up on all those old SF novels that were 150 pages max. I love that stuff, but it’s hard to find a book these days that’s not at least twice that length. That’s OK if you’re in the mood for something that might take you a week to read, but I have a range of tastes as a reader and I want to keep stretching my range as a writer. So the MonkeyBrain novella line seemed like a great way to get back to that old pulp spirit.

Jay Tomio – So, you escape Hell – what’s the first thing Hal Duncan does?

Hal Duncan – I’d take my tobacco and papers out of my pocket, roll up a cigarette, and light it on the fires I’ve just walked out of, take a long slow draw and blow the smoke out through my evil grin. Then I’d do pretty much what the characters do. But I can’t tell you what that is without blowing the ending.

Jay Tomio – Over at Notes From the Geek Show in your blog post pointing to our excerpt of Escape From Hell! you mentioned Samuel L. Jackson in passing regarding casting the roles in the novella. Jackson is known for one liners – you are writing the screenplay to the Escape from Hell! You have Jackson in your cast – what’s the one liner you give him?

Hal Duncan – An answer to the question, “How can you kill someone if they’re already dead?”:

“Motherfucker, if you got the mouth to annoy me with questions, you got a head I can blow off your motherfucking shoulders.”

Or words to that effect.

Jay Tomio – A hitman, hooker, a homosexual kid, a hobo, hell. Hal, that’s a cast of alliteration. If you had room for one more who would it be and why?

Hal Duncan – Maybe a hunchback. Thing is, the characters are all “othered” in some way or other – cast as “outsiders” in terms of race, gender, sexuality, social status. To some extent, they’re all where they are because their paths in life have been shaped by the perceptions of society. Way I see it, there’s really only one of them whose “sin” is even a real crime – the hitman. The rest are there because of bullshit religious mores that scapegoat anyone outside the norm, anyone who bucks some bogus “natural order”. A woman who fucks for money, a kid who wants to suck cock, a man who takes his own life – in the infantile “morality” that condemns those, it’s deviance from “the way of things” that’s the real issue, and that difference is equated with wrongness. Abnormal equals unnatural and unnatural equals bad. This is the same sort of bullshit that invents the idea of “miscegenation” as a crime, says that it’s not how things are “meant to be”.

A lot of fantasy buys into that bullshit, reinforces it even, by playing on prejudicial programming, gut reactions of revulsion in the face of physical deformity. Nine times out of ten in fantasy, a “warped” physical form is a signal for a “warped” spiritual form, and more often than not the features that mark out the monstrous have analogues in the real-world – a hunched back, a hooked nose, obesity or withered flesh, any disability or disease, any deviance at all. So if I’d had room for an extra character in EfH! maybe it would have been nice to take a swing at that bollocks by throwing that type of “otherness” into the mix as well – except that it might well have smacked of tokenism.

Jay Tomio – The cover to Escape From Hell is sweet as well. . .hell. Did you have any input or is that just Chris Roberson handling business?

Hal Duncan – Chris put the artist, Erik Gist, in touch with me, and we threw a couple of ideas back and forth based on the synopsis – because the novella wasn’t quite finished at that point. There’s a scene later on that we both thought would have looked really cool — you’d have had the heroes all standing there, tooled-up and facing out at the reader; it would have had a nice “bring it on, motherfuckers” vibe – but one feature would have been a bit of a spoiler. In the end we both preferred the option Erik ran with, which is taken straight from the prologue with just a tiny bit of artistic license used to bring Lady Justice into shot. If I remember right, Erik suggested it in a really early email, and described it almost exactly the way that I’d always visualised the scene. So I was totally over-the-moon that we were on the same wavelength.

Really my input came down to “yes, that sounds fucking awesome,” and “oh, but yeah, this Hell is cold and grey rather than fiery and red”. I mean, the traditional imagery of Hell-as-inferno _almost_ got in the way for a whole millisecond – most images of Hell are all black and red after all, thick crimson skies, darkness and flames – but Erik had actually picked up on the ashen wasteland feel I was going for, so it was just a matter of confirming that his first instinct was correct. The colour palette he used for it is perfect, I think, and I love the little touches of red on the key characters – Seven’s shades, Belle’s rosary and so on.

Jay Tomio – I’m big fan of books like Letters From Hades by Jeffrey Thomas and To Reign in Hell by Steven Brust or Di Filippo’s A Year in the Linear City and obviously you have the Divine Comedy. What are your favorite get out of hell or novels taking place in the inferno and why?

Hal Duncan – Paradise Lost is way cool, of course, and Gaiman’s riffing on that in the Sandman comics is great. There’s the anti-heroic streak to Milton’s Lucifer that appeals to me immensely. He’s still painted as a villain – it’s not an anti-Christian work by any means — but I think it’s one of those cases where the imagery undermines the message, subverts it. Where the the rebel angel’s fall is presented as such wilful defiance, it hints, I think, at a reversal of the ethical polarities; it resonates with the defiance of every underdog who ever stood up to a tyrant. And the Sandman storyline is the nearest we’ve got, in anything I’ve read except maybe Pullman’s His Dark Materials, to my own… anarchist metaphysics. Ultimately, the resignation of Gaiman’s Lucifer isn’t about the illegitimacy of the whole set-up, but it’s still a deliciously subversive notion.

Jay Tomio – Speaking of Dante, his guide for much of the time was a poet, Virgil. If having a choice and unluckily finding yourself ending up in the wrong direction – who would you choose to be your guide?

Hal Duncan – I reckon I’d keep with tradition and choose a poet too: Rimbaud. He wrote Une saison en enfer, after all — A Season in Hell – so we’re talking about someone who’s mapped the territory. He gave up writing at the age of 21 and went off to become a gun-runner in Africa, so I reckon we’re talking about someone who could handle himself in a tricky situation.

Also, with his hotness, his devotion to “a systematic derangement of the senses” and his taste for absinthe, hashish and sodomy, he was exactly the sort of bipolar bad boy I’m drawn to like a moth to a flame. I probably _would_ follow someone like that into Hell just because I have zero sense of self-preservation. We could be great together, in a fucked-up, wild-sex, wild-parties, drive-each-other-totally-psychotic sorta way. Hey, if you shatter any distinction whatsoever between “a good time” and “a bad time”, there’s no real difference between Hell and Heaven, is there?

Jay Tomio – You are – as of now – the first 3-time interviewee of Fantasybookspot.com/BookSpot Central and even worse, having to speak to on each and every occasion. A fate worse than hell?

Hal Duncan – Heh. Not at all. It’s always a pleasure talking to you, Jay. A third term with the Republicans in the White House – now that would have been a fate worse than hell.

Jay Tomio – I want to thank Hal for joining us at the BSC beat!

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Night in the City

It’s night in the city, clouds overhead painted crimson by the streetlights, roof underfoot mirroring the same light in the sleek of water shattered by splash-patterns of ripples and raindrops, constant but arrhythmic, out of synch with the slow onward trudge of bootsteps—left, right—through the puddles of liquid night—left, right—stepping up to a low wall’s edge—left, right—and onto it. Left. Right.

     Look down. Pull back. The alley below is a thin chasm of darkness patched by windows to the left, a neon sign at the corner, sliced for a second as a sword of light sweeps the rain. The beam of a police copter’s searchlight picks out a shamble of ragged coats which was once a man named Eli, standing now on the edge of nameless death, a vagrant suicide in the city morgue. His arms are spread as he testifies to the copter, St John Doe the Divine.

     – And I looked, he shouts, and behold, the heavens opened. And I saw a great white throne, and He who sat upon it, from whose face even the earth and the heaven fled away.

     Loudspeaker noise urges him back from the edge, but he doesn’t listen to the words, just looks over his shoulder back the way he came. The wind that’s been batting the open fire exit door against concrete finally lets it go. The door swings slowly shut as Eli turns back to his little back-alley abyss.

#

In the emptiness of the warehouse, the sound of the bullet being chambered in the Desert Eagle echoes loud and clear. Israeli gun designed to scare the shit out of a man before it’s even fired, to tell you: Listen up, fucker; that’s the sound of your death coming down upon you. Seven raises his head, angles it back until he feels it touch the gun-barrel.

    – Go ahead, motherfucker, he says. If T-Bone wanted me dead, you wouldn’t be wasting your time with this bullshit.

    Too-Loose and Hound Dogg are Desert Eagles in the shape of men, heavy pressure rather than precision hitters. So their contract won’t be for a quick disposal; they’ll have something slower and more painful lined up for Seven. Too-Loose circles round to stand in front of him, gun aimed at Seven’s face, then lowering to his chest, his gut, his balls.

     – You blew a contract, Seven, says Hound Dogg at his ear. T-Bone got to make an example of you. We’re gonna do a lot more than just kill you, nigger.

     His arms behind his back, Seven’s fingers test the handcuffs as the man talks: two pairs, police-issue, one cuff on each wrist, the other looping a back leg and corner of the chair he’s sat on. He curls his hand up, reaching with index and forefinger, almost manages to tease the pin from the cuff of his right sleeve—almost but not quite. It slips from his fingers, falls to the ground. He looks up to meet Too-Loose’s gaze without blinking, even smiling a little, just enough to make the thug twitch a tiny sign of contempt, somewhere between a narrowing of an eye and a curl of an upper lip. The man switches the gun to his other hand and reaches into the pocket of his leather jacket, brings his fist out brass-knuckled.

    – You’re not gonna be smiling long, Seven, he says.

    He puts his whole body behind the punch.

#

The backhand knocks Belle to one side, against the wall; she slaps a hand against it to keep from falling, but he’s grabbing her hair and pulling her back for another slap.

    – Where you going, bitch?

    – Nowhere, she says. Nowhere, Johnny.

    The half-packed suitcase on the bed says otherwise. The open drawers and closets say otherwise. So did the fear on her face when he walked in through the door of the apartment.

    – You fucking running out on me, Belle?

    He hits her backhand again, contemptuous, casual, like he’s kicking a cowed dog. And why not? That’s what she is, after all, a fucking cowed dog, a pimp’s bitch. She wants to stand up for herself, but she backs away, hands up to shield her face. There’s no smell of drink on him, but his eyes are bullet holes, his shoulders stuck in a shrug, his hands matching his verbal anger with their own wild rhythms.

    – Fucking no one fucking runs out on me, he says, fucking bitch.

    She ducks back from his swing, dodging, hears his curse as the punch connects with wall. She dodges past him for the open door, but he hauls her back, swings her hard into the dresser. Bottles of cheap perfume and cologne scatter and roll as it judders.

    – You’re going fucking nowhere, he says.

    Another backhand, angled down and hard enough to knock her to the floor. She looks up and, through the hair over her eyes, sees him walk over to the apartment door, close it with a quiet menace.

#

The double-doors bounce open into the ER, orderlies wheeling in the gurney, paramedics to this side, doctors to that, talking across the bloodied mess, rattling a litany of injuries and assessments. Matthew doesn’t hear, doesn’t know that he has:

    – primary hypothermia, stage three—temperature eighty-eight degrees Fahrenheit—blunt cranial trauma in the left occipital region—lacerations—abrasions—contusions—noticeable ecchymoses on the right and left rib cage—hematoma on the abdomen, feels like internal hemorrhage on the spleen—a fracture to the left femur—numerous small third degree burns in right scapular region, probably from a cigarette…

    Matthew doesn’t know that he’s in critical condition, naked and blue with the cold from being stripped and left in winter snow, that he’s been cut and kicked and pistol-whipped, that he’s bleeding and burned and broken-boned, not now.

    – Rapid infusion of 250 mils lactated Ringer’s solution, stat.

    He doesn’t know that his blond hair is matted, that his face is smeared with blood, his square jaw broken, features swollen and cracked from a pounding he doesn’t remember, not now.

    Being beaten to death can have that effect.

    The gurney bangs through another set of double doors.

#

The Sound of Many Rivers

Eli digs into his pocket for a bottle—bourbon, nearly done. He slugs back what’s left and raises the empty to the searchlit rain, the copter, the sound of rotor blades and loudspeaker.

    – And I heard a great thunder from heaven, he shouts, like the sound of many rivers, like the sound of harpists playing on their harps. And I heard a loud voice out of heaven saying, behold, God’s house has come unto his people, and he will dwell with them, and God himself will be their king.

    He hurls the bottle out into the chasm of the alley.

#

– I own you, get it?

    – I get it. I do. I’m sorry.

But even as she tries to calm him, he’s feeling the bulge in her jacket pocket, pulling out the roll of bills she’s been gathering for the last few months. He pulls her head back by the hair.

     – You holding out on me, Belle?

    – No, Johnny, I’ve just been saving.

Then the punch crumples her legs and she’s on the floor, trying to push herself away, finding a wall behind her.

#

– Look at this nigger trying to crawl away, Hound Dogg laughs. You don’t know you’re a dead man already, Seven?

    Seven, on the floor and on his side, still cuffed to the chair, pushes with his feet. Just another inch and he feels the pick with his fingertips, another inch and—Too-Loose and Hound Dogg grab him by the shoulders, haul him up, kick the chair back into place beneath him. Hound Dogg’s pistol cracks across his face, but Seven has the pick in his fingers, working at the cuff holding his right wrist to the chair. Too-Loose clamps his hands on his shoulders, holds him down as Hound Dogg, puts his gun into its shoulder holster, brings a flick-knife out of his inside pocket. Clicks it open.

    – Dead man, he says. We just gotta cut you open to find the cause.

#

They wheel Matthew into the O.R.—three, two, one—and heave him onto the table. There’s a tube being pushed into his throat, a needle into his arm, lights overhead, wires everywhere hooking him up to monitors, a doctor scanning his paperwork, handing it to a nurse.

    – Blood pressure falling to eighty over forty.

    Matthew knows none of this.

     We’ve got cardiac arrhythmia, ventricular fibrillation.

    He’s not really here right now.

    – AED.

    Not that he’s anywhere else.

    – Charge to two hundred joules.

    Not yet.

    – All clear.

#

A Small White Light

– And the sea gave up the dead that were in it, Eli preaches to the rain and light. Death and Hell gave up the dead that were in them. I saw the dead, the great and the small, standing before the throne, each with a book held in their hand. And they were judged, each one, out of the things which were written in the books.

    He reaches, brings a battered Bible out of his jacket, fumbles through its pages to find a photograph of the man he once was, standing there with his arm around Sarah, Sarah’s hand on the shoulder of their little girl, Lucy, smiling there between them. The Bible slips from his hand and he staggers a little as he tries to catch it, fails. He’s drunk, he knows, too drunk to hold onto a book or to care about picking it up. And just about drunk enough for this.

#

Left hand still cuffed, as he rises Seven swings the chair out from beneath him, cracks Hound Dogg with it, full in the face. With his right hand, at the same time, he grabs Too-Loose by the throat. He hauls, curling his back and using the other man’s own mass to lever him over his shoulder, bring him down, back-first, upon the edge of the chair’s steel seat. He drops to wrap his arm around the man’s neck, snap it with a quick twist, rips Too-Loose’s Desert Eagle from his waistband, and rolls the body away. Hound Dogg has his own gun out now, but Seven is already spinning, bringing the chair around to smack it aside, bringing the Desert Eagle up and firing point-blank into Hound Dogg’s face.

#

Johnny kicks the words into her.

    – This. Is what. You get. For fucking. Trying to. Fucking. Leave me.

    At first she feels each blow, curled in a ball, his boot beating his message into her body, legs, and forearms; she tries to make herself as small as possible, to plead when she’s not crying out from the pain. Then his boot hits her head and it’s just light and dark and pain, broken and blurred glimpses of carpet, ceiling, bed, or boot, Johnny standing over her, a jumble of disconnected violence, senseless. She’s crawling, falling, grabbing at his legs. If she could just—

#

– No change. He’s still arrhythmic.

    Somewhere inside Matthew, in the dark, there is a small white light.

    – Charge to three hundred.

    The light is getting dimmer.

    – All clear.

#

Death Will Be No More

– The light of the lamp will shine no more, sobs Eli, for the fruits which your soul lusted after have all perished, and all things that were delicate and beautiful have been lost to you.

    Seven walks through the warehouse, down the central aisle, alleys of crates to left and right, the exit a bright blur of daylight straight ahead—the loading bay. Brown leather jacket, gun in each hand, handcuffs dangling from his wrists, he knows there’s no point trying to make a quiet exit, knows the only way out now is to be a motherfucking dreadnaught. A worker steps into his path, sees him and turns to run; Seven drops him with a bullet in the back. A man with an Uzi skids into sight at the far end of the aisle, lets off an aimless burst of staccato gunfire as Seven puts two bullets in his chest.

#

– The voices of harpists and singers, flute players and trumpeters will be heard no more. The sound of the craftsmen working will be heard no more.

    Down an aisle to his right, Seven spots another foot soldier, hears the crack of his gun, the whine of a bullet flying past his head. Even as he fires and the man drops, Seven keeps on walking.

    Belle crawls across the floor, away from the pain, but there’s no escaping it. The palm of her hand comes down upon the rosary she wears around her neck, torn off in the beating. She clutches it tight even as Johnny kicks her again, in the ribs, hard enough to send her rolling.

#

– The noise of the mill will be heard no more. The laughter of the bridegroom and of the bride will be heard no more.

    Two more, three, four foot soldiers appear ahead, take cover. Seven strides on towards them, both guns firing as he pulls the triggers over and over again.

    Belle feels her hair ripped out at the roots as Johnny pulls her to her feet. She tries to stand but she can’t. She just can’t. A hand clamps round her throat, not to strangle her but to hold her up, to spit in her face.

    – Charge to three sixty.

    In a darkness empty even of pain, Matthew is dying.

    – All clear.

#

– But he will wipe away from them every tear from their eyes. Neither will there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain. For Death will be no more.

    And Eli spreads his arms out to the rain and the light, to the copter circling him, to God, to the world, to his own pitiful end; and, turning to the darkness of the alley below, he lets himself fall forward—

    And Seven strides into a thud in his chest he doesn’t quite feel until his legs suddenly weaken, and the next step brings him down onto one knee; the guns are just too heavy to keep raised now, shit, it’s all he can do to look up at the heavy walking towards him, pistol pointed at his forehead, grinning as he pulls the trigger—

    And Belle’s legs are rubber as Johnny pushes her away from him; she tries to hold herself up, she does, but she just stumbles over her own feet, falls, head cracking hard against the radiator, all her weight behind it, twisting, snapping bone, and as she slumps to the floor, a length of rosary slides from her open hand—

    And the noise of a flatline on a monitor just carries on as the doctor pumps, palm-over-palm on Matthew’s chest, trying to restart his silent heart, trying again, and again, and again, until finally he steps back and calls the time of death—

    And Eli lies on the ground, the old family photo crumpled in his fist, in a puddle of rainwater darkening with his blood.

#

The Ferry Across the Styx

The sound of a distant foghorn, clang of footsteps on the swaying steel underfoot. Eli opens his eyes. He’s on the car deck of a ferry, he realises, rust-stained paint on metal walls cutting off his view to either side, the great dark slab of the door at his back, chains running down each side from pulleys to spindles, to unwind and lower the door into a ramp. Overhead, the sky is heavy, the formless smudge of a charcoal and chalk sketch left out in the rain.

    There are no vehicles on the car deck, just a scattering of strange passengers, an assemblage of men, women, and children of all ages and races, in all manner of clothes—suits or pyjamas, evening wear or combat gear. Most stand awkwardly, gazing around with the unease of the lost, too overawed to ask what the fuck is going on, how they got here. Only here or there, as a few begin to sob or pray, others start to murmur questions to those nearest: Is this a dream?

    Eli touches his ragged brown overcoat, just the outer layer of strata of clothing; it’s still soaked from the rain, still dripping. He doesn’t remember the moment of impact, sudden as it was, too fast to feel, but he knows what’s happened to him, what he imagines has happened to them all. He doesn’t need anyone to tell him, No, this isn’t a dream. This is death.

#

Seven pushes his way through the crowd. This is fucked-up, he thinks. This is some fucked-up amnesia shit. He doesn’t know how many days or weeks or months he’s lost since somehow he got out of the warehouse, but he can feel that he’s not packing, and whatever this… freak show is, it’s not anywhere he wants to stay. He pushes past an old man dressed in nothing but his boxers, steps round a little girl in an ice-skating costume, boots dangled round her neck, and makes his way to a set of grilled steps leading to the upper decks. He glances back at the other passengers as he climbs, scouring his mind for an answer. What the fuck are they all doing here dressed like… refugees from some fucking disaster, whatever the fuck here is?

    There are more passengers on the walkway that overlooks the lower deck, all dressed as crazily as those below, more visible through the windows of an enclosed seating area. It’s the sight to starboard that holds his eye now, though. Over the rail, across the chop of a river in winter, through low clouds and mist, is a skyline that looks not unlike Manhattan, but ragged and hollow like every window in the city of skyscrapers was smashed, every building shelled and shot up, every surface painted with dust and ash.

    – Holy fuck, says Seven.

#

Belle lets the door into the passenger area swing shut behind her and steps out onto the starboard walkway. Given the muttered oath, it doesn’t seem like the brick shithouse with the Black Panther look is any more clued-up than her, but he’s the first passenger she’s seen not just gaping dumbly at their strange surroundings.

    – Where are we? says Belle. You know what’s going on?

    He barely acknowledges her existence with a glance, something that might just be a shake of his head, before he’s walking away from her, towards the front of the ferry.

    – Fuck you too, she says under her breath.

    She heads the other way, sidestepping an old woman in a ball gown, glancing down at the other weirdoes on the car deck, at the shambling hulk of a hobo climbing the port stairs to the upper deck, at the sight over the port rail. She stops. On a small island off the port side stands a grey-green statue, grand in her flowing Grecian robes and spiked crown, sword in her right hand, scales in her left. A blindfold covers her eyes.

    – Lady Justice, says a voice at her back, the old woman.

    – Where the fuck are we? says Belle.

    The old woman cackles, a crazy leer on her face.

    – Oh, you know where we are, sweetie. Don’t pretend you don’t.

    Belle backs away from the hag, along the port walkway.

    – You know where we’re going. You know.

    She points past Belle, ahead, and Belle can’t help but turn, eyes caught by the Statue of Justice again for just a second, before catching the sight now coming clear through the mists ahead.

    – No, she says. No.

#

Matthew shivers on his wooden bench, naked under the thin green cloth of the surgical sheet stained with what he knows is his own blood. He pays no mind to the other passengers, sitting on benches round the open-air seating area or standing at the rails, looking out at the statue to one side, the city to the other. He stares straight ahead, his fingers flat on the wood as if to support himself, like without his hands on something solid he might just… fall off the world. He’s not sure he hasn’t already; even the grey river under them seems ethereal, a surface of mist as much as water.

    It can’t be real. This can’t be happening.

    In front of him the island is close now, close enough that he can see the guards in grey outside the red brick building grand as a palace, close enough that he can see the Gothic intricacy of the lettering on the iron gates across the dock, swinging open now to admit the ferry, close enough that there’s no mistaking the words spelled out. He’d had a moment of panic when he first tried to read them in the distance, certain for a second that the motto was “Arbeit Macht Frei.” But now, as the ferry slips in through the gateway, as gears crank and rattle into reverse, as the iron gates swing slowly back together, slowly closing, slowly creaking into place with a low doom, now he knows those letters spell a message just as chilling.

     Abandon Hope.

————————————————————————————————–
_{Escape From Hell! is scheduled to be released in December of 2008 by MonkeyBrain Books. It is the second in their series of tradepaperback original novellas, following last year’s Cenotaxis by Sean Williams. Next up is 2009′s Death of a Starship by Jay Lake. Hal Duncan is the author of two novels, Vellum and Ink. Vellum was nominated for the World Fantasy award and by the The British Fantasy Society for Best Novel and the Locus and Crawford Awards for Best First Novel.}

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I have interviewed Hal on two occasions, most recently here, and when Vellum debuted here.

Synopsis:

Once, in the depths of prehistory, they were human. But in a moment of brutal transfiguration, they became unkin, beings who possessed the power to alter reality by accessing the Vellum: a realm of eternity containing every possibility, every paradox, every heaven . . . and every hell. The Vellum became a battleground where forces of order and chaos fought across time and space. The ultimate weapon in that bloody war spanning through history and myth, dreams and memory, was The Book of All Hours, a legendary tome within which the blueprint for all reality is inscribed, a volume long lost amid the infinite folds of the Vellum.

Until, in 2017, it was found by Reynard Carter, a young man with the blood of unkin in his veins.

Until Phreedom Messenger and her brother, Thomas, were swept up in an archetypal dance of death and rebirth.

Until a hermit named Seamus Finnan found the courage to re-forge his broken soul, and a self-proclaimed angel called Metatron unleashed a plague of AI bitmites.

Now, in the aftermath of the apocalypse, several survivors search desperately for the remnants of themselves scattered across the Vellum like torn pages, determined to use the blood of the unkin to rewrite The Book of All Hours, and to forge a new destiny for themselves and all humanity. Reality will never be the same.

Publishers Weekly says:

em>”This stimulating and bruising sequel to Scottish author Duncan’s neo-Joycean Vellum (2006) projects the endless battle between good and evil onto a kaleidoscopic multitude of parallel alternative realities. Duncan’s debut introduced bionanotech-enhanced humans, who clashed with ordinary humans in a 2017 apocalypse. The Carter family of Glasgow guarded the God-commissioned titular Book, but now the scribe and angel Metatron has hidden the Book somewhere in the infinite folds of a realm called the Vellum and is preparing to die. Meanwhile, a host of eerie characters, including foul-mouthed Jack “Flash” Carter, Puck-figure Thomas Messenger and Jack’s shrink, Guy Renard Carter, search for the Book. Full of riffs on myths from throughout human history as well as allusions to Euripides’Bacchae, this enormous, stinging, poignant hymn engenders a terrible beauty all its own”

Who Can Win?

Open to all FBS Members.

How do you Win?

PM me and you are entered.

When is the deadline to enter?

Let’s say April 1

Good luck to all who participate, and a special thanks to Del Rey.

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The author featured in this installment of On The Spot is our first returning guest. We last spoke to him last year when his debut, Vellum was released in the UK. This time – our interview feature extended since then – we speak to him shortly after its U.S. release. Vellum is on the Locus shortlist in the Best First Novel category, as well as being nominated for the Crawford Award.

I want to thank Hal Duncan for joining us once again On The Spot:

Jay Tomio- Vellum was just released in the U.S., published by Del-Rey. I made you do this last year, but can you tell our friends across the Atlantic what you’re dealing with Vellum ?

Hal Duncan- Ok, Vellum is underpinned by this sort of grand theory of mythic history: there’s the Vellum itself, a sort of Moorcockian which can be reprogrammed — graved — using a language called the Cant; if you can speak this tongue you can change reality, you can change yourself, and that’s what the gods and monsters of myth — the unkin, as I call them — have done. In the distant past, one group of unkin set up the Covenant; they see themselves as angels, a Heavenly Host, out to stop all these ousted gods of yore who want their glory days back, and now they’re gearing up for one last great war.

The problem is, those Covenant angels are willing to use rape and torture, any means necessary, to achieve their aims, so they’re really no better than the power-hungry maniacs they’re fighting. The heroes are a few newblood unkin who decide they don’t want any part in this war: Seamus Finnan, an Irish angel hiding out in the desert; Phreedom Messenger, a trailer-park biker chick trying to scheme her way out of conscription; Thomas Messenger, her gay brother who’s trying to disappear into the Vellum where he’ll never be found; Jack Carter, a Covenant spear-carrier sent to kill Thomas but in love with him. Vellum is largely about how these four characters get locked into a transtemporal story of love and betrayal, revenge and redemption, and the way that changes the whole balance of power.

Those personal stories are framed within the larger story arc of the Book of All Hours, an ancient tome in which the Covenant scribe, Metatron, graved the destiny of the Vellum itself, set it down for all time. At the start of the novel the Book has been stolen by a thief, Reynard Carter, who then sets off into the Vellum, using the Book as a guide. That framing narrative is mostly limited to little “eratta” sections between chapters, though. Vellum focuses on Finnan and Phreedom, with Thomas and Jack sort of bubbling away under the surface.

Jay Tomio- When asked about your work, I tell people to think Moorcockian Multiverse and hints of Gaiman’s Dreaming to give a general idea, thinking that the Multiverse is a cornerstone SF quantity, and a universally known and understood analogy. However, I have been shocked how many alleged fan are not aware of the Multiverse. With that in mind – what is the vellum?

Hal Duncan- Think of reality as having three temporal dimensions. There’s frontal time — the way we live our lives, with future and past as forward and back. There’s lateral time — the parallel worlds to the “left” and “right” of ours, alternate histories where events took other paths. And there’s residual time — where if you dig “down” beneath our world you find archeological strata of more primitive realms with cruder metaphysics in placeof our logical and consistent universe of scientific priniciples.

If you want a comparison, think of it as how shared stories like myths work. You have a story like that of the Greek god, Dionysus and his run-in with King Pentheus. Euripedes gives us one version of this in his play The Bacchae. It has a beginning, a middle and an end — one temporal dimension, the frontal. But another playwright might tell the story slightly differently, because in the city-state he’s from, this character did something else here, that character did something else there. Most Greek myths have multiple versions like this, as you can see if you read, say, Robert Graves. Is any one of them right? No. You have to look at the story as a whole and say, OK, it has another temporal dimension — the lateral dimension. But there’s also the fact that Euripedes’s telling was a retelling of the story as he heard it from a storyteller who heard it from someone else who heard it from someone else and so on, down and down through the third dimension — I call it residual because the story sort of builds up in layer upon layer, the original palimpsested by the versions laid down on top of it.

So what is the story of Dionysus and Pentheus? Is it the straight line of The Bacchae? The wide field of alternative versions? Or this solid shape which has not just length, but breadth and depth as well. If you can see that as a metaphor for time, then you understand the Vellum. Your story, your personal history, isn’t just this short thin line from cradle to grave. It’s also all the other versions, the ones to this side or that who did things slightly differently, and the ones before or beneath, who did the same thing, whose story you’re replaying, building upon. The Vellum is the media the 3D timespace in which that wider, deeper story takes place.

Jay Tomio- You have stated this novel started as a series of short stories, and Vellum being a novel of several POV characters who themselves have several threads throughout time and the Vellum itself. What was your favorite character and/or manifestation to write and why?

Hal Duncan- It’s a hard call. I loved writing Seamus for his voice, as I said above, but it’s so much fun writing Jack Flash, just letting him rip free and blow shit up, trying to see just how absurd you can make it and still pull it back at the last minute. The only problem with Jack is that, to get at the other side of him, the uptight soldier-boy, Jack Carter, it’s a real strain. He’s sort of on or off, a total loose cannon or completely buttoned-up — and when it’s the latter it can be very difficult to actually make a connection with what’s going on under the surface, which you need to do for the sake of the story. He’s much harder to write in that respect than someone like Seamus who just opens up completely. Seamus, on the other hand, just undergoes so much shit in his life that, while the moments of fire and fury give you a pay-off of excitement in the writing, while some of the moments of highest drama in the book were solidly his, there’s not the same sense of playfulness in writing his sections.

So I think the character that probably gives the best balance of those two is Thomas. As Puck he’s just a hoot to write, a flighty fairy in all senses of the word who’s just a great vehicle for comedy. He’s a mischief-maker like Jack, but where Jack is a rampage, Puck is a romp, the kind of person who’d take your ancient mystical artefact and make paper aeroplanes from its pages. You can have a great time chucking Puck together with a character who has a Very Important Task to perform. And at the same time, as Thomas, you can take that same character and turn comedy into tragedy. Under the sexy sprite is the shy sensitive poet. Put him in the trenches of WW1, or in a reality of prejudice and bigotry, and you’ve got an door into the horrors of the 20th Century, a young soldier cowering in a dug-out, a Matthew Shepard crucified on a split-rail fence.

Jay Tomio- When we communicated last year, your first novel Vellum was about to be released in the UK. It’s a book that has garnered strong opinions and I was wondering as the author what kind of reaction have you received from fans and peers, and did it equal your expectations?

Hal Duncan- I always thought it would be a “love it or loathe it” book, and that’s generally how readers have reacted — at one of those two extremes. The Amazon UK reviews illustrate that at its best: one star reviews by people who didn’t make it past page 100, side-by-side with five star reviews praising it to the high heavens. Much of the negative reaction seems to have been the animosity of people who read for plot, for an immersive narrative that goes from A to B to C; the whole non-linear approach makes it quite simply “not a story”. That’s a fair enough reaction, to be honest; I’m trying to do to narrative what Cubism did to representation, and a lot of folks aren’t going to like it any more than they like, you know, those funny paintings where the woman has both eyes on the same side of the head. They’re going to look at it and think, that doesn’t make sense. Much of the positive reaction has been from other writers who get what I’m doing, and readers who get off on that very fragmented structure; some people enjoy the process of putting the pieces together, building that multi-dimensional picture in their heads.

What’s been interesting is that it hasn’t simply mapped to any high-brow / low-brow divide though. I mean, there’s this artificial battleground you often see drawn in the genre scene between literary and pulp tastes, a division of readers into two opposing camps, and I was a bit worried that, because Vellum had so much buzz pre-publication, well, you’d get folks buying it expecting your standard Big Fat Fantasy and thinking, what the fuck is this poncy shite? But I’ve had emails from readers who got hooked by the action, drawn along through the shifts and switches, and who’ve relished the “difficulty”. On the other hand some of the most critical reviews have been from well-respected critics who’ve found it completely chaotic, formless… which surprised me because the discontinuity is only skin-deep as far as I’m concerned; there’s a solid architecture underneath and I’d expected that to be picked up on by those critics.

Jay Tomio- Something odd that always crops up is the difference between U.S. and U.K. (or maybe even European in general) tastes in Science fiction, or perhaps reading in general. Vellum seems to be a novel that draws this type of discussion. Recognizing that broad statements don’t neglect the existence of exceptions, what are the differences, if any?

Hal Duncan- I’m not really sure I’m the best person to ask here, as my market knowledge is pretty limited; I just write the stuff and hope someone will buy it. What I will say is that while there might be a perception that US tastes tend to be more conventional than UK or European tastes, I’m not sure that this is actually true. What you do have in the States is a more dynamic indie press scene, such that the less conventional, more slipstreamy (or infernokrusher, I should say, because slipstream is a wussy word) work is coming out from people like Night Shade, Golden Gryphon, Small Beer, Wheatland, Monkeybrain — the list goes on. There’s a huge community of writers and readers built around writing that’s no more commercial or formulaic than the most avant-garde European experimentalism. It may be segregated off a little from the bigger genre scene, but when you have Kelly Link’s Magic for Beginners in Time Magazine’s Top Five Books of 2005, well, I think that puts the lie to any idea that UK or European tastes are more sophisticated. The hunger for quality SF (which I parse as “strange fiction” rather than “science fiction”) is there in the US just as much as anywhere else.

The only difference, as I see it, is that the smaller UK market maybe can’t sustain such a large indie field, while at the same time there are editors with larger publisher houses — like Peter Lavery at Pan Macmillan — who’re willing to go out on a limb with weird-ass writers like myself,