“This concern with given traditions seems like genre fiction concerns with inherited tropes etc.”

Though the operative word is “seems” to my mind. It’s not the same thing, doesn’t work the same way, as an actual concern with inherited tropes. (Which is also present in the diverse field, but not, as some seem to think, an over-riding force that pressures everything towards derivative product.)

There is no marketing field that combines SF, fantasy and modernist/pomo/absurdist/etc… Yours is the extreme claim that should be justified.

On my book shelf, at a glance, labeled as science fiction:

Kim Newman, THE NIGHT MAYOR
Mark Jacobson, GOJIRO
Robert Silverberg, THE BOOK OF SKULLS
Samuel R. Delany, DHALGREN
Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Barsoom books.
Philip K. Dick, too many to name.
Philip Jose Farmer, RIVERWORLD AND OTHER STORIES (containing, for example, “The Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod”)

I don’t really accept that there’s a literary value system. There are many, including those which you yourself would apply as critical standards to SF. That’s a literary value system by definition. One of these has laid claim to the label “literary” and I don’t really dispute your characterisation of it. I think that claim is utterly illegitimate though. Actually I’d say the co-opting of “literary” in that way goes hand-in-hand with the abjection of “genre,” and has a lot to do with the sniffiness you mention regarding Poe, Twain, London, etc.. That “literary literature” (as tautological as “male men” but as loaded as “masculine men”) is what’s left after you abject out all those adventure stories and thrillers and love stories as “genre”. I’m with you in rejecting it, but we clearly differ on what sort of daydreams we consider pernicious. You don’t have to fudge science to make your villain a predatory faggot kiddy-fiddler like the Baron Harkonnen. I think there’s something *profoundly* adolescent and dangerously so in adventure stories that pander to desires and fears in certain ways having nothing to do with science.

As for Oulipo, which had nothing to do with sly and mean anyhow, the constraints on the futurologist are external, not self-chosen. That is the opposite of Oulipo. Further, expostion in futurology should take into account common knowledge, including in previous works of futurology. As in, you don’t keep explaining how rockets work because people mostly have read SF, even if they don’t read engineering. This concern with given traditions seems like genre fiction concerns with inherited tropes etc. Mainstream writers who insist on reinventing the wheel themselves usually can’t do it all very well.

There is no marketing field that combines SF, fantasy and modernist/pomo/absurdist/etc. As for literary criticism, there are authors whose works of fantasy are acceptable and even analyzed, such as Henry James or John Collier or Roald Dahl, even figures such as Thorne Smith or Robert Nathan. There are no SF works acceptable as literary beside 1984. The only one that even comes remotely close is Brave New World. Even such figures as Poe, Twain, Jack London, H.G. Wells and Gore Vidal are downgraded for writing SF. No, I haven’t made an extensive argument for denying such a field exists somewhere (a Platoic realm of Forms?) Yours is the extreme claim that should be justified. So I think, anyhow.

We don’t need to imagine a scientifically sound Jurassic Park. The works of Jules Verne are quite sufficient. Frankly, I think Verne fudged the science in Journey to the Center of the Earth every bit as much as Wells ever did. And I think he fudged it in Twenty Thousand Leagues Beneath the Sea and the Robur stories. Even if you disagree, I am unrepentant because Nemo and Robur at their fruitiest are still not the stuff of such dreams as provoked Norman Spinrad to write The Iron Dream. Those guys were in E.E. “Doc” Smith and Edmond Hamilton and A.E. Van Vogt and such.
I still think fudging the science is a necessary step in really unleashing your inner adolescent. The literary value system rejects all adventure stories, not just adolescent ones, but I reject the literary value as ideological.

The Card definition is unworkable. Kurt Vonnegut and Gore Vidal and Margaret Atwood and Cormac McCarthy can swear they’re not writing SF, but the critical standards specific to SF still apply to their SF works. (Those of us who reject the literay value system still have standards.) The Spinrad definition turns everything into marketing, which is great when I go to the bookstore, except when stuff like Dhalgren and Transmigration of Timothy Archer turn up. As it happened, I found Dhalgren an absorbing work that constituted my first big experience of modernist/postmodernist/absurdist fiction. But fictionalizing real people and blending jargon from a private SF mythology was uncomfortable. It was a mixture of apologetics, slander, fraud, the point was uncertain.

If things go according to plan, I’m done here.

“Do you feel more important being deliberately obfuscatory while running on in sentences that are too long but what the fuck let’s see how long we can make them anyway?” is kind of a “Have you stopped beating your wife?” question. “Do you feel more important beating your wife while swaggering about and shouting at the kids so much they shit themself?” I can answer, no, it does not make me feel more important; none of what I write is about such wankery — it’s performative, sure, but done for an audience of whoever clicks with it. But really, that accepts the implicit assumptions that I’m being deliberately obfuscatory in sentences that are way too long. Like, to answer, “No, beating my wife does *not* make me feel more important,” is to accept the latent accusation of wife-beating.

So, OK, the thing is, I don’t see the sentences as that long or the column as that opaque, but then maybe I’m just comfortable with articulation that takes quite a few turns as it goes: if, and, then, but, while, so. And admittedly some of the key terms (e.g. “abjection”) are probably not in everyone’s everyday vocabulary. See my comments to S. Johnson about why I use terms like “futurology” or “fantasia” though. If I use a word that looks poncy it’s a safe bet I’m using it for a reason, likely because a more familiar word wouldn’t carry the precise meaning I want. Hell, it might be wholly ambiguous. A word that might seem clearer to you could unfortunately mean something quite different to another reader. I mean, a large part of the thrust of this column is about how the word “genre” means “formula fiction” to one set of readers, while another set of readers entirely know fine well that that’s a bogus judgement. But even they/we tend to use the term in a way that conflates conventional forms of fiction (written to standardised aesthetic criteria) with marketing categories. And actually those conflations make the subject a pretty fucking gnarly one to try and make sense of. It’s hard not to be confusing when you’re trying to show how the “simple” way of thinking about the field is actually a lid on a whole can of wriggly, wriggly worms.

Still, could I or should I try and explain a notion like abjection every time I use it in a column, so’s I’m not alienating someone who reads that word and thinks WTF?! because they’re not familiar with it? That’d be pretty much every other column. Hell, as this series goes on, since the columns follow on from one another in certain respects, I’d end up not having space to say anything new. So sometimes I’m banking on the reader being caught up on the groundwork I’ve laid in previous columns or, in the age of Wikipedia simply looking up a concept like “abjection”. That’s what I’d do, after all. Yeah, it’s asking the reader to engage a bit, be a little more active, but I prefer to assume the best rather than the worst. I take it as read that they’re either up to speed with the ideas I’m kicking about or willing to catch up. The alternative would be, I think, patronising them, holding their hands and leading them along like children, saying “mind the step,” and “wait at the crossing” and so on.

And, hey, there’s a comments section right here. Anything that’s unclear, I’m happy to clarify to the best of my abilities. I don’t respond well if my motives are impugned, cause flat insults don’t merit real consideration, but it’s as easy to type “What the fuck do you mean by [X]?” as it is to type “Who the fuck do you think you are?”

No, wait. I don’t.

Your first post does criticise me for my “uncritical insistence that science fiction, fantasy and modern absurdism in its various incarnations can all be lumped together.” This is a misunderstanding of my key premise. Actually I’m saying they are all lumped together, practically speaking, under the label of SF. While this is not entirely useful on a critical level, it’s something we have to deal with, and it does have the happy result of putting the lie to the Form=Formulation Syllogism.

If we want to break that amorphous amalgam apart again, rather than fall back on the discourse of conventional forms, I think it’s preferable to identify the discrete forces at play. In doing so, I do think we can arrive at a model which grounds all these disparate works in a shared literary technique — shifting subjunctivity — but the details of this allow for a high degree of variation and specialisation, for quite distinct modes.

Way back in the comments thread of a previous column (in which you were heavily engaged) I made this clear:

Down the line, I want to get into the nuts and bolts of how I do see all those “sub”genres allying with each other, or opposing each other, because of very real differences, the way we end up with a sort of phase-space of multiple dimensions of potential literary strategies that different readers automatically (and decisively) parse into zones of sf and fantasy, to actually tackle that “I know it when I see it” spidey-sense.

Given this, your reiterated rejection of any model which doesn’t recognise the essential and absolute opposition of science fiction and fantasy as forms is simply an argument that it’s wrong to clear the deck and start again from first principles, in an attempt to build an alternative model. This where I see you as really criticising the positioning rather than the premise, making an ideological argument that I simply must not take a starting position outside the conventional taxonomy. Hence the comment about mammalian anatomy versus equine and bovine.

You’ve yet to produce a substantive argument to back up this criticism of my approach that doesn’t come down to religion versus science, and indeed, in your accusation of disdain and a covert agenda to “expunge” the futurology, you pretty much cut to the chase and make it about the enemy ideology you project onto me. Since your characterisation of this is based on a gross misunderstanding of how I’m using the terms “futurology” and “fantasia” this is what I’ve been endeavouring to explain. I’m happy to do so, to clarify that I have no interest in expunging science fiction as you see it, and am rather simply striving to rearticulate and recontextualise it.

We end up at tediously detailed explication of a single Oulipo comparison because you simply will not accept a simple clarification that this is not intended as a “sly” and “mean” attack on a particular mode of writing.

I tell you explicitly that I think of futurology as “a coherent system of thought, an attempt to develop consistent and comprehensive views of scientific developments and their impact on the future as a whole, as opposed to the potential focus, in a term like “plausible scientific speculation” on individual and specifically technological innovations” and you insist that the Oulipo comparison reveals my “true” feelings.

I tell you explicitly that the comparison is with “profoundly intellectual and ambitious enterprises, utilising the sort of cerebral dexterity you find in Italo Calvino; where much creative writing employs craft skills and methods of abstraction so habitual that the whole process of creation often feels intuitive, this approach basically rules out disengaging that part of the intellect that plays Sudoku or works through mathematical proofs in a highly conscious way,” and you insist that “really” I’m saying the science is arbitrary.

I’ve now given you the chess analogy, in the vain hope that this will get it through to you, but I seriously doubt that this will be of any more use. Feel free to prove me wrong.

Nonsense. However perfectly rigorous the science underlying a MacGuffin, by using it as a pure plot device, one can indulge in the most blatant acts of wish-fulfillment, the brave hero carrying out awesome feats of daring and ingenuity in order to defeat the villain, save the day and win the foxy lady. Michael Crichton probably does fudge the science (don’t know; never read him) but assuming one could rework Jurassic Park so the recreation of dinosaurs was scientifically sound, that conceit can still be used as the MacGuffin in the exact same tale of derring-do, pandering to our daydreams of adventure.

I’m not characterising it as “all the same”. I’m characterising it as “a field so diverse that you can throw a hundred different definitions at it and none of them will stick.” The simple fact is that we’re stuck dealing with a field of works all grouped together under the same label but so radically different in nature that writers like Card, Spinrad and Knight all basically just point the label at itself in circular definitions that leave it up to the writer, the publisher or the reader to decide. Talking of which:

But citing Knight’s definition when you don’t actually condescend to point takes some gall.

I point at THE TRANSMIGRATION OF TIMOTHY ARCHER and DHALGREN. These are works that stretch any closed definition near to breaking point if not beyond, I’d say — though the former more so than the latter. Result?

“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 accommodate 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.”

But the real argument is about how this reality contradicts the assumption that works published as category fiction will most likely be formulated product.

Technically, the strange, as I’m using the term, can be characterised quite precisely in terms of the subjunctivity level of a sentence. The theory is not really suited to expounding in an informal column, but see Delany’s “About Five Thousand Seven Hundred and Fifty Words” for the basic root of it, then factor in the philosophical distinctions between levels of possibility. According to the most rigorous levels of possibility, even Delany’s characterisation of s-f (which he expands to “speculative fiction”) actually takes on a subjunctivity level of “could not happen”. What I mean by “strange fiction” is any fiction which does that.

Fiction marketed under genre labels other than “general fiction”. This gets lumped together as category fiction. I’m interested in the way the terms “genre fiction” or simply “genre” have become signifiers of this grouping, and the way this mass noun, “genre,” is set in opposition to the mass noun, “literature.”

“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.”

Note: “works,” “more like” and “than”.

I’m talking about how three different types of limitations set upon a text play out in the writing. Conventions of form (like those found in romance — the 18th century type, not Harlequin Romance) are basically a standardisation of aesthetic criteria which allows for a level of formulation. The end result? Formula product. I’m saying that in Science Fiction the stricture of futurology does not have that effect. Rather it has an effect like arbitrarily setting an Oulipo constraint. I’m not saying that the particular futurological conceits are arbitrarily selected. I’m definitely not saying that the process of extrapolation into a worldscape and plot — the futorology as a process — is arbitrary. Just that the process of working the futurological conceit gives us a non-generic artifact each time.

A better example than excising ‘e’ might be basing the narrative on a chess match. There’s a whole underlying set of rules to chess. The Oulipo writer would have to work at all times within the rules of the game. They couldn’t just have a bishop make a knight’s move, couldn’t just stick a piece back on the board after it was taken. This would be a breach of the rules of the game. While the constraint is arbitrary, that doesn’t mean the work itself is a surrender to caprice in which anything goes, in which anything can be done on sheer whim. I don’t think that’s too bad a comparison for fiction taking its potential moves from the domain of science rather than chess, playing by that set of rules.

Even on the level of selection, there’s a whole history of particular games involving named strategies and maneouvres that might have inspired that Oulipo writer. They might be fascinated by the great games, by the style of some new player with a whole new set of strategies. They might take some novel opening gambit from a recent match between Grand Masters as a start-point and build their game — and the novel — around that. So even though the constraint is arbitrary, at its very core the work may be a deeply considered response to what’s going on in the field of chess. Likewise, the Science Fiction writer may be far from arbitrary in their selection of the specific conceit(s) they extrapolate from.

The point of the “arbitrary” is simply that the challenge is self-chosen by the writer. By choosing that challenge they may be limiting themself to a process of writing that in no uncertain terms *rules out* the sort of… fanciful invention you seem to think I’m dismissing futurology as. But they are not coming into a pre-existing tradition of tropes and plot-structures that they have to conform to.

Talking about “the wider territories of category fiction as a whole”—What could that possibly mean? Your bolds and caps are not helping keep track as you switch meanings for genre, from basic form like novel or short story; type of story like war novel or rags to riches; synonym for generic or formulaic; esthetic idiom. About the only meaning I can guess at is that you’re wanting to uphold literary value standards against formula fiction. That take us right back to my original comment.

Also, while you can write “the vast field of fiction which is marked out simply by the fact that it utilizes the strange,” but you can’t make it mean anything. I can talk about the vast field of cars marked out simply by the fact they use blue in their color scheme and make as much sense. You have assumed a conclusion, that there is a meaningful sense in which use of the strange marks a “field.” That’s so general there’s not much to say that some people enjoy the strange for itself and others reject it as nonsense. When you remember that notions of strange depend so strongly on the individual readers knowledge and experience, that says very little indeed.

The vague notion that it’s all the same, except some is formula and some upholds literary value systems, does not actually make an argument. It’s just an extended bleat that marketing categories are useful for making a sale to the publisher but limiting sales to customers.

Trying to bring the discussion down to a real subject, like SF, is not bringing up a straw man. It would be much easier to keep discussion on your chosen ground if you actually had ground to stand on. Anybody can change the subject if you don’t actually have one. Card’s definition of SF relies on reading the mind of the author, or sworn testimony. Spinrad’s definition reduces SF to a marketing category, which is fine for going into a book store to buy books but isn’t for critical discussion. Or worse, factoids, like deciding Year of the Flood was discreetly marketed to SF buffs as well as general audiences. But citing Knight’s definition when you don’t actually condescend to point takes some gall.

The claim that dismissal of science is not a necessary step in reducing SF to adolescent fantasy is wrong. It is not a sufficient step, nor unique to adolescent fantasy, but there are no works of SF that are attentive to the science that don’t have to fudge it to support day dreams. Besides, isn’t thinking reality is irrelevant pretty much the difference between day dreams and hopes or plans?

My first post was very much about the article, and quite upfront about rejecting a key premise. Why you would want to go off into what you think I think of what you think about the virtuosity of Oulipo poets, and what you think of my form instead of answering the arguments, I’m not quite certain. But if you reject criticism of the premises as valid arguments, why not be upfront and say so?

Yes, it makes it very clear that I think a high level of technical skill and mental agility is required for such a writer to meet the challenge they set for themself, comparable to that required to, for example, write an entire novel without using the letter ‘e’. It makes it very clear that I think the use of futurology as a formal constraint is comparable to other such profoundly intellectual and ambitious enterprises, utilising the sort of cerebral dexterity you find in Italo Calvino; where much creative writing employs craft skills and methods of abstraction so habitual that the whole process of creation often feels intuitive, this approach basically rules out disengaging that part of the intellect that plays Sudoku or works through mathematical proofs in a highly conscious way. It makes it very clear that I consider this type of formal constraint qualitatively different from those which bind a work into a genre in the “conventional form” sense, predisposed to formulation. It makes it very clear that I consider this approach to have no negative impact whatsoever in terms of pressuring for generic/formulaic product, because we’re not dealing with standardised aesthetic criteria here (in terms of plot-structure, character, etc.,) but with a different set of formal constraints for each work — i.e. futurological conceits are, like constraints in Oulipo works, selected entirely at the discretion of the writer rather than imposed by tradition, and working them results in a unique construction (both process and product) in each text.

The “real viewpoint” you are projecting into that comparison is a spurious fabrication on your part.

On the other hand, capitalization and/or bolding (or neither,) of words like genre does nothing to make things clear.

Of course, I’ve explicitly acknowledged the impracticality of such strategies outwith this column, their usage here as simply my personal mark-up, as pointers to the reader indicating how exactly I’m employing these terms. But maybe I’m overestimating the average reader’s capacity to recognise basic semantic signals. Are they really that opaque?

There is a clear semantic distinction, for example, between proper nouns and noun phrases: the difference between a nominal label and a descriptor. In English, this is conventionally signaled by capitalisation. This principle leads to the application of capitalisation as signifier of essentialist discourse, of the treatment of entity as identity. Again, this is conventional; you’ll find the import of this articulated quite cogently wherever group identity is a crucial factor in the discourse — c.f. “Black” versus “black” or “Queer” versus “queer” — or in critiques of the sort of historical rhetorics that gave us “Man” versus “men” (and the use of “Man” for a humanity which includes women is a key consideration in such essentialising labels). It seems to me the average reader will get this given the informal usage of such a convention in talking about “Very Important Things” or “Sekrit Projekts,” etc., that they’ll pick up on the conventional signal.

While bolding plays with the convention of emphasising keywords in a text, it is admittedly adopted here for other, more idiosyncratic reasons, used in place of the small caps or alternative font I’d prefer as marker of the brand name function the nominal label is performing. With this, then, there’s an attempt to signal the sort of semantic difference that exists between “apple” and “Apple,” the way a term may work as a stamp rather than… a signpost, so to speak. This may be a less transparent strategy, but again I don’t think it’s that difficult for the average reader to follow.

Similarly, a critic who insists that the science in science fiction (which is no more a science textbook than historical fiction is a historical text!) is irrelevant…

But this is a straw man because I’m not talking about science fiction. I’m talking about SF and speculative fiction here, and at most touching upon Science Fiction, which I’ve said from the first column is a distinct thing. With futurology as a definitive characteristic. Which is to say science. But apparently even to talk about the wider territories of category fiction as a whole or the vast field of fiction which is marked out simply by the fact that it utilises the strange, well, in your book that…

…obscures the way that dismissal of science is a key step in admitting adolescent daydreams, a problem that has dogged science fiction.

And we come again to your personal bete noire. Really, you’ve made your views on this abundantly clear. I think for my part, I’ve made it equally clear that I trace this problem to the romance idiom, a basic feature of Gernsbackian scientifiction carried through into Campbellian Science Fiction. But if you understood the Oulipo comparison above, you’d understand that this refutes a whole mass of critics who characterise the field as a mode of romance with escapism essentially wired-in. And if you understood why I use “fantasia” you’d understand exactly how I think that formative influence was counteracted.

You are instead, however, locking in on a point that is not even touched on in this particular column: that such counteractive strategies could not and did not wholly succeed even where science was not dismissed. Which is to say, the approach that entails working a futurological conceit, while it does not bind the work into conventional romance strictures, does not create a magical barrier that keeps escapism out; the dismissal of science is not a necessary step in facilitating escapism. Indeed, I’ve argued elsewhere that futurology can and does collude with that which you revile, legitimising those adolescent daydreams, while the working of other types of conceits may — but equally well may not — actively invite escapism, dependent on entirely other factors than the dismissal of science. But there is a key word in that sentence: elsewhere.

You are (yet again) responding to an argument as to particular forces at play within the field — in this case, conventionality, the standardisation and formulation of aesthetic criteria, versus the integrative paradigm exemplified in the Card quote, or in the Knight and Spinrad comments referenced — with an argument on a completely different subject:

The criticism of escapism in literature is part and parcel of the criticism of religion.

I am not interested in pandering to your zealous desire to expound (yet again) on religion versus science, escapism versus rationalism. That is not the topic of this column. If you are not going to address the actual substance of the argument, you are merely proselytising for your own agenda. You do so explicitly:

Genuine criticism has a lot more to do than promote a modernism/post-modernism emptied of any cultural meaning.

This is an assertion of your belief as to the foundations of legitimate critique. You are entitled to this opinion. I am entitled to disagree and to approach these columns from my own position. (Or rather to agree but see it as entirely misunderstanding my approach to imagine this is my aim.) If you disagree so fundamentally and so vehemently with the very positioning of the text, (or rather, the positioning you project onto it,) such that you have no regard for the substance of the text, do feel free to not read the columns. Objections on the basis of projected ideology, crowbarring the debate round to you pontificating on the way “genuine criticism” should be conducted… this is simply bad form.

If you simply cannot resist the urge to read critique that is anathema to you and to make this ideological disagreement known, by all means stake your own position out elsewhere and preach it to your heart’s content, brother. If you cannot resist the impulse to make it known here a simple statement upfront will suffice, something along the lines of “You are not addressing the key issue of religious self-delusion versus scientific rationalism, which renders your entire system of thought spurious and pernicious to me.” This would be vastly preferable to the persistent attempts to redirect discussion to that point via responses to assertions and assumptions you are simply projecting onto me. I’m more than happy to engage in debate, civilised or heated, but I’d ask you to respect Grice’s Maxims of relevance as a bare minimum and address the subject of the column.

That subject is not the role of science fiction and/or science fiction critique in defending the culture against religious self-delusion.

On the other hand, capitalization and/or bolding (or neither,) of words like genre does nothing to make things clear. Science fiction, like historical fiction, is not a genre in the same way as a mystery story or a spy story or a romance or a Western. A so called critic who vehemently insists that considerations of fidelity to historical fact are childishly irrelevant to understanding the esthetics of historical fiction is an obscurantist. Historical fiction that falsifies the history projects an ideology, in the pejorative sense of the term. Or the transparency of the historical trappings asks the question of, why pretend it’s the past in the first place?

Similarly, a critic who insists that the science in science fiction (which is no more a science textbook than historical fiction is a historical text!) is irrelevant obscures the way that dismissal of science is a key step in admitting adolescent daydreams, a problem that has dogged science fiction.It’s true that many will rant about said daydreams. That’s like telling kids they can do whatever they want, then laughing at them for wanting to be rock stars before they’ve learned to play guitar. There is a sly kind of meanness at work here. Or, as in lots of historical fictions, promoting an ideology by presenting it untested by commonsense or simple reality. (Military SF or the absurd libertarian futures should come to mind here.)

Criticism, including criticism of genres, is inseparable from criticism of society. The criticism of escapism in litereature is part and parcel of the criticism of religion. Historically, art has been one of the greatest exponents of religion, giving it an illusion of depth. Genuine criticism has a lot more to do than promote a modernism/post-modernism emptied of any cultural meaning. That too is obscurantism.

Please to read again my explicit contention that SF’s uber-Rationalist strains are not somehow “less valid” than the “literary” SF that takes a more (post)Modernist approach: “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.”

I’ll happily acknowledge my own stance — that both uber-Rationalist and uber-Romanticist aesthetics are now reactionary forces in the discourse, 19th century ideologies entrenched against the 20th century synthesis of the two that constitutes modernity and (post)Modernism. In asserting this perspective, exploring it, describing the transformation of aesthetics within the field as I see it, this is not flogging a dead horse, but rather attempting to carry out an autopsy on it.

The point being, of course, to try and develop an understanding of mammalian anatomy in general, rather than simply insisting that there’s Equine and there’s Bovine and never the twain shall meet.

These commitments express themselves in masked form as disdain for history; disinterest in the future; distaste for nature as anything other than a visceral experience or symbolic expression of human emotion; commitment to absurdist views of nature and society; the insistence that only depth of character is relevant, the insistence that only prose displaying the proper commitment to itself as an esthetic experience can constitute successful imposition of meaning on a meaningless world.

Of course we all live in a world where the past still has effects; where the future will be different; where nature and society actually do make sense; where we deal everyday with people whose characters we don’t know a thing about because what matters is their social role; where the content of what is said and written is just as important as how it is written, because prose can’t make untrue things real, no matter how pretty it is.

In other words, literary value systems are ideological. The dismissive categorization of one element of science fiction as futurology expresses the total adherence to the basic reactionary viewpoint disguised as a literary value system. The uncritical insistence that science fiction, fantasy and modern absurdism in its various incarnations can all be lumped together merely expresses a wish to expunge the “futurology.” Need I add that the “fantasia” is a dismissive way of berating the masses for their lowerclass hopes and fears?

There is the insistence that only the retrograde are still chewing over the obsolete distinctions. Simultaneously there is the insistence the true artists have found the true faith and have transcended the tiresome futurology. If the victory is already won, why beat a dead horse? Because ideological indoctrination demands repetition, an enemy and self-congratulation.

Or, to make it really simple, think of Alan Moore’s Watchmen. Mr. Moore congratulates himself (and those sensitive and smart and with it enough to follow,) for deconstructing fantasia. He doesn’t notice that elementary physics will deconstruct comic books far more effectively than his story does. His acceptance of nonsense physics is also acceptance of fantasia, despite himself and undercuts his intended aim. Following the literary value system, disdaining “futurology” misled him.